I sit under the pear tree with my closest kin, and I ponder a great deal of nothing. I pick up fallen pears and feed them to the small pony grazing nearby. Each of us trades on another’s fading reality. Moment to moment. We only truly exist in that consumption—in a very new sense of the term, eaten alive. For the further we…

She says to me: wait for that moment. In the torpid dust, ramshackle and holster-full. Hold. My nerves, I say to her, are razed by this neurotic accelerant at approximately 1:57 am every day. I don’t care about the darkness or the regression of the world, warned but on fire. This silence, however, is terrifying. In a bottleshop, the other day, quite congenially to my mood, I realised that regression was a perfectly natural state. In fact, it may be the high water-mark of health. Not regression into…

Go. If the story begins here, then there is no loss of art. The obscured sun breaks kindly to a smile. The soft green traffic light molests the wet white road paint. I look down, my socks are dry. I take an inordinate amount of comfort in that, like having just won the lottery. I move on. I walk towards a sky slowly divorcing from itself; a heart thrown at a dirty window of a cheap hotel; sliding down. I go under it as one would a bridge. There is an old piano in…

I created this blog for the very purpose of housing infrequent and irregular tidbits. I guess the best way to describe the content here would be to call it the spillover of my creative endeavours. Not trash bin candidates but things that don’t really have another home or designated purpose.

And even though that was a very distinct intention at the outset and therefore something I should be very comfortable with, I’m not.

Douglas Adams once…

Yorkshire tea. Proper strength contentment. Except. Something’s off in the fridge. The chicken necks I bought for the cat have gone bad. I give the situation my best poker face, retire to the study with neural mud in my gears. Lennon is singing of friends and lovers past. I look at my pants. Three sizes of clothes are not helping me stick to any particular weight range or wife. This morning I was…

46. Still with a couple of dogs left in me, if I’m lucky. The trouble with putting titles on things. Smiles. The striking of a match. Of late, I have been able to luxuriate in an ability lost to me for some years. I’m once again finding unbounded joy in the infinite, and not a moment too soon. On my walk back from the shops, this morning, I stopped at the Boundary Hotel to get a coffee. Fell into a wonderful little conversation with Kara—the barista. Covid19 restrictions are still in place, of course, so it’s just a takeaway. But more than ever it’s nice to give back to the…

There’s a half-eaten piece of vegemite toast stuck to my chest. I roll over to check my phone to see what time it is. It’s …a.m. There’s an empty Hydralyte sachet sitting on it that must have been necessary to someone. It’s important to stay hydrated while drowning your sorrows. And so we come to our last night together. Or rather its morning after. As I remember it, my loves, we’ve had some sort of simpleton train-ride through orange orchards and graveyards, much in between. I have had you, you and all your…

Our second to last night is the only way to preamble our last night. For that’s on its way. It’s in the post. Nothing surer. And so I’m just pulsing away here. Waiting. A man naked, simmering in his own heartsoup. I can hear cockroaches scurrying among the dirty dishes in the kitchen. The floor comes up to meet me ever so lovingly. The night is cold against my back, like a beautiful French actress’s voice as an amplified church whisper, a muffled hymn. She tries ever so hard to hold her voice to a whisper; I try to keep my will to create as quiet. And we go together like that…

The walls are a classic off-white. The oblong mirror stares at the ceiling. I’ve seen nakedness hold its gaze. But who knows what it has really seen over the course of its life. Not me. Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is hung on the wall next to it. That piece is something of a master to me. When I dwell on it, I’m always driven to the cliffs off Big Sur, the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. That old boar plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain. How wonderful! There exists some incongruous, strangely tyrannical connection between the two. I don’t know why. I do know it’s getting cold in here. Shifting seasons. The attention I now have to pay to the regulating of the temperature of my feet is a serious amount. My operating status is almost purely…

The mistake is thought coupled with time. She sat directly across from me over a plain white table. Stirring her coffee. There was some form of light source above us, maybe a skylight. I don’t remember much else from that room except its antiseptic smell. When she accidentally dropped her pen to the floor, I saw that her grey cotton pants were frayed at the hem. Her white blouse ballooned at the cleavage revealing a glimpse of her ample breast, a white lacy bra. She reiterated, the mistake is thought coupled with time. Or our idea of time, anyway. Before I robbed that bank, she said…

It creaked with newness. I have another copy of Steppenwolf somewhere, I said. It’s battered beyond belief. Scratching and scrawling in the margins, in the line-spacing. What else would you expect of a novel, a holdall, that is the guide for a young girl to teach an old man to dance again?—to start dancing, in fact! To live and laugh and cry among the little corners of life. Those corners that can expand in genuine diametric enormity to themselves. Forget the ideas that present as big. You know, both my ex-wives, nothing against them, God bless their cotton socks, were married to…

She wants this: time to unmask the politician in me. The epic poem writer. Easy Riders Raging Bulls. Put all that aside. If I were attracted to money I should wonder why that dollar was made out of silver and not something I could eat, I say. She speaks to me lengthily in dulcet tones. The beauty of her voice is so very, very persuasive, but I tell her I’m not made that way. Nor do I believe any poetry should be. The long scribe seems to me to have an axe to grind, and only one string to his bow. So often is the bass-line repeated, so interminably, that you end up…

The night flourished as a mistake does. Rich with dirty boots, always a smile affixed. Upon this stage everything I will tell you will only be forgotten in part or in whole. That is the one thing I can promise. So let me tell you about Aurelia. Or rather I’ll let Aurelia tell you of herself. That street corner. I was standing, looking skyward, pondering whether I should return to the bar I had just passed, minding my own business in a kind of John Berryman way, when she arrived, put her arm around me, plundered my gaze, and…

The sun was still sleeping when I was not. It’s a terrible, swampy thing to be woken by alarm. My mind is that of a Fargo Sierra coming out of the ruinous blizzard on the back of a car trailer. Ghosts sway in and out. Don’t stick your neck out for anyone, she resolved. And then was to be heard no more. It is interesting to me, said the Flamingo, that if…

God First.

I awake. And the dreamsleep takes me. The star of the show is strutting her lines like some maniac trumpeter, machine-gun amphetamine whore. She’s got something to say, but I can’t make it out through the dusky din, cymbal calamity of my blurry morning eyes. It’ll keep. Hold it in for a while, honey, I say. I’m concerned now with this warm piano-board floor before me. When the sunlight comes in…

Where to begin? Say nothing of these times. Nothing of the present situation we find ourselves in. That’s for certain. This will not be a diary. Nothing like Nausea, except perhaps for how bad my writing is. But then again, no, why not make it something of that ilk, something of Sartre’s blues and his encouragement for them to turn purple? It appears to me as though…

Fill your glass. Paper is fast becoming a sin. I’m culpable. My iron levers ache and groan, my springs scream with a forced guilt, a liability owed somewhere into the future. Dust becomes me, almost as well as the mystery of what I might do next, what commitment awaits the page. I’m a dirty eavesdropper…

I had a crossover a point. We all do. A veritable weakness. Somewhere between a somnambulistic spiritual bliss and a sometimes trading reality. And if you’re shot through at this point, cannonballed if you wi…

Writing is an invention of the spirit. I flatly refuse to believe it has anything to do with a base need to communicate. As an invention of the spirit, it has a purpose to serve which transcends logistical co…

I love to be in a bookshop. It’s one of my highest states of mobile happiness. But conditions have to be right. I must have no one with me, have nowhere to be, be looking for nothing in particular, and not be…