if I told you I was an alien… that would make more sense

probably

to you & me both

I am almost dead now

flowers, children…

If this is indeed a simulation I’d like to ask my programmers for something significantly less shithouse.

Zoe & Ari: Left of Centre

“There are lots of spaces where bullets are not flying. Try and occupy those. “

Ari Nakamura scratched her head as she read the last 4 diary entries, the last 4 days of her father’s life, and she reflected, because of his incapability of speech at the time, that these were very likely the last real communications he had with this world. The mute, final missives of a dying man. An excerpt from the lengthy entry on day 1 of 4 read: “I have filled great stories with experience and the intersectionality of life and what I’m pretty sure is madness till I am now stuck in this flabby corporeal flight -- a building that has no elevator to either its top floor or basement -- like some sort of dry blizzard of middle ground, and all I can do is lie here in this hospital bed with wind-chapped wit, spruiking false serenity, awaiting…

I love the notion that every artist can stand proud on a moment, a moment when they were simply trying to triangulate the time the comet would hit. Trying to work out the best way to maximise the time left. Not for them alone but for everyone else as well. Everyone else ever mo…

It is a night of wild wonder. The chords rings true, the descending strum of life.

Hammer on. Ireland, dear love, let me leave it there. Nights of returning vinyl albums to their covers, too cold to brace the fishing seas. A sort of jalapeno lining around the beer glass rim. Pea & Ham Chorizo soup. Combustion engine relief, escape. Tracky dak roadside fantasy. So much sings to that accord, wild loving man pushed ever west. Sun just splitting stones.

2417. Fade in on a transparent scene of two airport service robots on their break.

Orange Bot: [reading aloud from a history book] The Human Race in 4 steps…

1. Failed Attempt To Assert Understanding - Religion

2. Failed Attempt to Ponder Understanding - Philosophy

3. Failed Attempt to Prove…

It would be something of portent for anyone who encounters me to know that time is always in a state of distortion for me. Stretched. Elastic ridiculousness. I feel like I’ve been alive for centuries. Yet I also feel like a 48-year-old baby. Act like it most of the time, too.

You know, they say Cleese was superb in those early days, easy to see his star appeal standing out above all. I wish, at times, I could harness, manifest that knowledge into something… useful. Well…

It’s only memory I cherish now. Pity it’s the thing that tortures me most. It’s so very hard to know when to announce a new moment to the world. And I always seem…

The curse and blessing of Romeo & Juliet, for us all, is the arpeggio nature of the writing… so nylon string romantic it finds an egress when cornered no matter what. The hummingbird escape from a maximum security penitentiary. My gift is observation. Probably. And probably I would have made a great trial lawyer. Albeit a slightly inconsistent one, prone to wild brilliancies and tremendous troughs in form… so probably not that great, really. Awful, to be honest. But on a generous hourly rate. So… Listen, darlings, I’m…

Famous Blue Raincoat is playing in the confessional. The priest coughs and I’m suddenly anchored to his presence. The music in my head is a counterpoint to the sins of my past. There is a terrible sense to the shoplifting of a small item or to that of a premeditated murder. The margin is razor-thin. The wood creaks energetically as I kneel, as if it finally had something to say. The smell is an odd concoction of oranges, death, sunlight, and the pages of Montaigne. I make some note in my brain about…

Fast now. Feverish to the bell of that mandolin curve. A samurai tattoo across the left shoulder--she burns moments of love like a waxing candle. You know, I don’t see flowers that much anymore; maniacal birds alight on the end of my war flute. But I very much like the dirty Pablo Escobar look of my son’s school photos. Feel the film negative, son! Reverse it out only when the martyrs demand to know what…

Will you love me forever?

Emilia seemed to be effusing that question by doing everything to the contrary. Cosmic glibness on her part. A shrewd move, thought Darwin. Looking back now, he could best remember only the highway, looking out the passenger window a lot, while she drove in her ever-conscientious manner. He would occasionally put his hand on her leg. An idyllic gesture to that of the most secure relationship.

--Look, he finally said, I don’t know about all this reusable rockets to Mars stuff but what they can do with frozen mashed potato these days is mind blowing.

His thinking had always been a little crooked. But something was worrying him a great deal more than the apparently miraculous advancements in frozen mashed potato technology. However…

If you ever had a beer-battered love, she was it. As far as compliments go I don’t think this thought has ever been surpassed. I’m driving in the dark night rain. Pitch black. Memories awash. The wipers are largely ineffective against the downpour. I should probably pull over, wait for more favourable conditions. The wet-dog-smell of my past, my upbringing, is riding in the back, like a rabid old mutt, kennelled and slavering lasciviously, occasionally grinding its teeth on an old bone. Which is another way of saying my father would never have pulled over in this situation – plough on, son, make good time! I wind down the window and the stink of these images swirl out, evaporate swiftly. My hand surfs the cool breeze, getting stung by needles of light rain. The backdrop is some sort of irreligious delicacy, seeming to speak of something…

The room is poorly lit. Feels like a grungy bar in here. Daphne is interviewing herself again. Sitting in the corner. Draped in shadow and cigarette smoke. Talking into a dictaphone. “A sneeze of a marriage. A romantic reflex…” I once discovered a whole folder of these auto-interview clips on her computer. Her just talking to herself. A lot like Jimmy Rabbitte on The Commitments except rather more weird and not at all funny. I have the distinct suspicion that she does this quite a bit when alone, these days. Practicing for some talkshow or another, the host’s particular style. Right now she’s using me as fodder. “I had always desired of that perfect boy meets girl narrative for my life. After all, what else is there? Girl meets boy who will suffice? That’s probably quite common actually. Ok. What about…

After we moved on from the dinner party, Morrison and I wandered down Melbourne St in our full table-service regalia, heading into the city. Garnering courtesy nods to our appearance from most passers-by. The place we were heading to was a daily exercise in laundering the cesspool of humanity, often sending it out dirtier than it came in. In our tie & tails we’d stick out like dog’s balls. We arrived and checked in via the photo ID bouncer. Morrison opted to have a rolly outside before he went in. Among some of the loitering thugs outside began some high-octane machismo-fuelled chatter around his attire that sounded like a flock of flamingos being put through a woodchipper. Real danger. But…

My father did time for armed robbery. A couple of years. That’s probably hard to sidestep. But I prefer the thought that my identity, if such a thing exists, is tied up in the remnants of a lightning strike, the skidmark of an exploding star in my undies, of Lorca’s pulled-high socks, Whitman’s sweaty balls. That sort of thing. An irreverent stain on fashion. I can be Piscean if you wish. I am, after all, nothing more than what you demand of me. Your friends talked politics, current affairs, capital gains on their suburban dwellings, and I felt an overwhelming desire to drill a hole in my head. “That would’ve worked if you hadn’t stopped me,” said Spengler. And what do you think about the future, Jack? One of them asked. Well, I said, and cleared my throat a little too loudly. There are many things ahead of us, I said, many things to look forward to, of course… and the little crowd leant forward into my uncertain definitiveness. A deeply uncomfortable silence ensued, like Jesus’s final curtain call after…

We dropped the pickle early. Maybe at 4:52pm. And then another follow-up pickle way too soon on the heels of the first. That rotten new fuel now burning away in some secret, long-forgotten drawer of the brain. Incandescent! Dimmed only by the slimy grace of neurotic congestion. Knock-off time traffic. You can’t understand the severity of its congeniality; the massacre of time levered through an into an envelope width of thought. Like an excess of clean socks, folded neatly and overflowing the shelf. Unused. Yes. An eternal sunrise of clean laundry: signed, sealed, and delivered. Impossible bliss. Only with this caveat: a searing acid of regret, of brilliantly plumed chickens on their…

California is not where we are. That’s our exact position. We need a new toaster. I mangled the inside of the current one when I got a piece of Turkish bread stuck in it. I dug about in there with a chopstick in a very unadvised fashion. Caution to the wind! I treat every accident the same, I give it life with no chance of parole. There is the smell of an idle tape measure in the air, a mechanic out of work, cheap…

Out on the street in the cold winter air when I was looking up at the stars and thinking about bicycles I accidentally married a girl. She was struggling to get the words out. The potato masher caught in a drawer of her brain, she can’t get it open. I swoop in with magnificent calm and aplomb to apply a deft solution. I see what you’re getting at, my dear, I say. You do? Of course, I do. She now looks at me with the holiest rewinding conviviality of an expression—as if Jesus had a collection of holiday polaroids. There he is…

Formation is paramount, he said, as he drifted up and out into rhythmic totalitarianism. I looked down at the book in my hands, my journal, the entry under yesterday’s date read: there are three ways to poison the body—too much salt, too much sugar, and too much discipline. That reminds me, I need to buy a washing basket. The greatcoat I bought in Boston lies…

There is never any truth beyond the moment. Which is a backward way of saying there is truth all the time. If one can be bothered to pay attention, of course. As she reached up to get something from an overhead cupboard I fell backward into love again. After that, we called a truce. And far from where the Easter parade was scheduled to take place was to be found a man with ill-fitting brown…

There was something I’d put down for a minute, mislaid forever or thereabouts. Probably down a pant leg of this winter plumage. I guess it’ll eventually come out in the wash. It seems a weighty loss though. Like an unfinished journey in Ireland or a 6th Armoured Division. Trading warmth with one another. Of course, I said, we should own real estate as a measure of our value. Sure. But…

Wren. The small bird of the world falling in love with itself again. Wait. Just wait. The human race will gather itself again to beauty. The grapes and the horseflesh pressed gently underfoot. Steaming and woozy, lost in poetry. Lifting up the poor, a hand held out, a dollar shed, a supplicant embrace. The ashen tree lines embarrassed with the victims of…