the mobius strip

The Devonshire St tunnel has its own climate, warm and humid from the daily mass of breathing bodies.

Pushing against the morning crowd of students and office workers, you get an overwhelming urge to bleat. The faces, the fashion, and the endless tramping feet blur into each other like a colour wheel spinning into white.

By afternoon the pace slows, the colours return, and buskers begin to fill the empty space with music. The song of a woman dressed in black echoes in the air, accompanied by the occasional tinkle of coins tossed into a bronze bowl.

Behind her, the walls are haunted by the ghosts of bad high-school murals, covered in graffiti and grime. It seems unlikely they will ever be replaced. The unfortunate artists, now in their thirties, probably walk the long way to the bus stop just to avoid looking at their handiwork.

People avoid looking at everything here. The walk from Broadway to Chalmers St is full of gazes to avert, offers to refuse, advertising to ignore. By the time you emerge into natural light its a miracle if you can see beyond your own fingertips.

Pete Fitsimmons has the hands of a construction worker, the beard of a Sadhu, and a spot selling the Big Issue at the top of the tunnel.

As the sun dips low over Central Station, he rolls a cigarette and tells adventure stories. “I took the boat to sea in a hurricane, and once I tried to climb a mountain without any equipment in the middle of the night.”

Pete wanted to sail to Athens to watch the Olympics. Instead his boat was impounded, leaving him without a home. After a month on the streets, the housing commission helped him into a place on Pitt St. “I’m really glad that I’ve stabilised, and that I’m not carrying a sleeping bag and dirty clothes around”.

“It’s like the front in Gallipoli - the enemy’s out there and they’re just going to keep firing at you so you never stick your head up over the top. You just try and live however you can on the stuff that comes into the trenches.”

“As long as I’ve got a packet of cigarettes I’m okay, ’cos all I’m going to do is sit down, deconstruct everything, have a smoke, and it’ll be alright.”

originally published on Nomadology

Reasons for not joining the real world
Number 1:

“You will be a proactive and organised individual with a proven interest in events management, have excellent experience in all microsoft packages and be corporately presented.”

I’m trying to remember a time when I sent Christmas cards. My half-arsed holiday email went out a little late this year (i.e. yesterday). If I had been made responsible for Town Hall’s Christmas decorations the Daily Telegraph would have called for general strikes & bloody revolution by now. At the rate I’m going, several species of bacteria may have developed written language & pocket-watches by the time I crawl into 2005.

Don’t know about the rest of you, but for me this new year is starting like a slow Sunday morning. I would dearly love to press the snooze button on the next few months. Not because I won’t enjoy them, but because it seems to me that they have a very impolite sense of timing. I feel it might do January & February some good to be snored at.

As the first fake Christmas trees appear in shop windows, people everywhere start having conversations about time. To some extent this is caused by ‘calendar creep’. Calender creep is a little like ‘bracket creep’ in taxes, only more expensive. Coined on (ahem) the 5th January 2005, ‘calendar creep’ describes the compulsion of department stores everywhere to start putting up decorations at least two months before you could reasonably be expected to think about shopping for Christmas (or Easter, or Mothers, Fathers, or significant others day). Don’t think it doesn’t work - just the sight of tinsel is enough to make my mother buy enough mixed nuts to start a squirrel farm. Thanks to calendar creep, she starts stockpiling for Christmas in August. By December she’s forgotten where she hid all her presents, puddings, & Assorted Nuts, and is forced to purchase everything again in a mad dash on the 24th. It’s the stuff that record sales figures are made of.

But not all the “it comes earlier every year” comments can be ascribed to the aggressively premature hanging of baubles. It’s true - the perception of time does speed up as you get older. I wonder if anyone has ever studied the psychology of this properly? I take it for granted that life will get faster every year, but never stop to ask if this is inevitable. If I were one of those nutty Californians who are obsessed with life-extension, I’d forget the gingko thickshakes & yaks-teeth extract & hire an expensive hypnotist to persuade me that time was meandering along as slowly as it used to at the beginning of a primary school summer holiday.

I recently got offered a cushy 9-5 job doing something I don’t really care about for six months. It feels very impractical to turn it down. But I just can’t stop myself from thinking that, to do what really makes me happy, I need time far more than I need money. It’s amusing to be in this position so soon after running a session called ‘For love and money’ at SOOB. In that session one of the panellists (a perpetual volunteer) said something like this: “My attitude to most paid work is that I am being compensated for having hours shaved off my life.”

2004 has been the year of thinking about what a career might look like, if I ever decided that having one was a good idea. Until now, I’d always assumed that I would just do what seemed important, & eventually the money thing would take care of itself. The further you get away from a campus, the harder it is to maintain that assumption. But that assumption seems to be what saves me from submitting to ‘having hours shaved off my life’. So instead of giving it up, I thought I might head back to uni for a while & see if I can get an extension on the terms of my socially condoned period of financial irresponsibility.

Which means that I’ll be heading back to Sydney, land of of the time-poor, to do a Master of Arts in not becoming a Journalist at UTS. Yeehah! Before that I’ll be scooting off to Timor for 7 weeks. And sometime this year I’ll probably do an internship with Article19. And if you’re looking for something fun to do with the next twenty years, talk to me (& James A) about 2024…a happy hunting ground for social changlings that enjoy sexy words like ‘long-term’, ’strategic’, ‘practical’, and ‘planning’.

My New Years Resolution: to avoid using ’spend’ & ‘time’ in the same sentence.

This article is worth a read:

we’ve sinned more against time than it has against us. The evidence would indicate that our innate sense of time actually serves us pretty well—after all, our run as a species has lasted a good long while, most of it spent in far more relaxed attitudes than we now can manage. We’ve removed our mysterious inner clocks and replaced them with something cruder. Right now—at this time—it’s becoming clear we may need to change again

You think you are the first to own your body. But before you were born someone else borrowed your blood-vessels, shared your flesh, and made themselves comfortably at home with your skin.

…Standing by the highway, looking for a place to rest my eyes, I noticed the shadow of a streetlight waving in the wind. Streetlights bend like nervous men with back injuries. Trees sway like interpretive dancers waiting for inspiration. When my mother bends over to pick something up it looks like an action requiring much thought. I think I have inherited this. Less like grace, more like concentration. I’d prefer it like carelessness, but you can only demand so much of second-hand bodies.

“Just bought a silver Mack - she carries 150 tonne”
“Have you given her a name?”
“How do know it’s a her?”
“You said ’she’”
“I guess they’re all female aren’t they - trucks, ships, planes”
“It’s a womb thing - our brains are wired so that anything that carries us around feels like a return to the foetal position”

But she did not carry you, she was you. Every fruit is tree, right up until the final seperation of stem & stalk.

We are born wearing hand-me-downs. If you look you can see the signs of Borrowing - a hunch around the shoulders, something uncertain about the hips.

“Got to have a shower now. That alright?”
“I grew you in my body & pushed you out into the world through my vagina. I
don’t think seeing you naked is going to bother me.”
“Right. I forgot.”

Christmas is like that. Sudden proximity & the renewed sharing of bathrooms. Nothing like being plunged head-first into an ice-cold bucket of biology to make you feel festive. Itchy feet? Maybe you’re still wearing them in.

save time
invest time
spend time
waste time

living on
borrowed time

time-poor

please do not use me for a postcard.
the small hand scripted
carefully and thin
slips insidious like a mailbox hand

but i would not be like this i
would be undatable if possible
no trace of origin especially
not stamped upon by a mailbox
hand neatly over
to polite destinations
and more honest
- i dont want extracts of myself returned to sender
struggling again into real: fat labradors
through cat-flaps, and in case this should occur:
I have stopped answering my own questions.

‘The question is, who is to be master? That’s all’
Humpty Dumpty on how to make words behave themselves,

Alice through the Looking Glass

I have decided that writing poetry is a great indulgence, like eating almonds, sleeping in on weekdays, reading the paper over vienna coffee, or seeing Spanish movies by myself.

Poetry is quite useless after all. Surely everything beautiful is quite useless, until it has been coronated by capital, chewed over by critics, endowed with Orders of Australia and other blessings that sound like the prizes one might receive at a boarding-school assembly.

Every now and then when I am tired of the real world, I revel in collections of words. I pick them up and put them down & squint at them sideways like a magpie playing with so many shiny toys. It does no harm, but it’s probably a pastime best left unspoken - like eating an entire packet of TimTams in bed, or trying on your flatmate’s clothes in front of the mirror.

Secretly I would of course love to be Neruda – the guerrilla poet, the exile. I would like to stand on rooftops and shout ‘come and see the blood in the streets’. I would like my pen to invent endless spoonfuls of sugar to help the medicine slide into the mouths of hungry readers. But maybe that kind of artificial sweetening was the taste of another era. An age when words were wild and dangerous and exciting and needed to be tamed by serious men in bowler hats. Words on a page are no longer enough – we need images, production values, or at least the patina of age & reputation. I have been addicted to words for as long as I can remember, but I have no real interest in new Australian poets, and often feel a bit uncomfortable around other people who write – as though we share in some Turetts-like compulsion to inflict the messiness of our unconscious on unsuspecting readers.

I sometimes think that blogging appeals to the emotional flasher in me. That I like the idea of walking naked into the darkness of cyberspace and exposing the freakish underbelly of my brain to the next passer-by. Maybe I just like that it saves me from confessing in person to being hooked on the high of cooking up a really hot metaphor. Or perhaps it’s the illusion of being Published [insert sound of angel choir here] – which is obviously the dream of every closet word addict with an itch for scribbling.

i am avoiding clocks and mirrors.
i am peeling off long fingers of time to feed rats with
what right have you to look like someone i dont know?
why, in this place
that is not my home this place is not
this bed this chair not home at all
even at 4 o’clock when all is yawning, bar
the rat whose nose even
does not belong and must always
twitch out welcome

if i should sight myself
twitching i’ll bash my head in
with blunt reason while
all the time apologising

i would be a cat, who sleeps
anywhere and owns everything.

Today, while watching the sea from S____’s lavish resort, I had my first friendly feeling towards a rat. Peeking out into the tasteful uplighting with a timid expression, si tikus could perhaps have been the reincarnated spirit of one of those people who always turns up underdressed at parties. A role I’ve been playing quite a lot recently. My big achievement of the month was keeping my luggage down to my daypack - which has made me feel footloose & fancy free, & also cut down on the three-stooges factor when I try to move through dense crowds. Unfortunately the odour emanating from my thrice-worn t-shirt is reminding me that that travelling light doesn’t come without consequences.

I have an unusual devotion to my room. It is mine as nothing else is, not even my reflection, which always seems to belong to the mirror, and could at any moment be stolen by a thieving camera.

In my room I make offerings. Incense to the air, images to the walls. I pay my obeisance to the world through the window.

My room recently gave birth to a plant, and I care for it as a small thing in need of much protection. Right now my life is as simple as this – a mat on a floor, a bed, some shells, some photographs, and a plant that honours me by not dying.

I know it will soon change – will grow complexities of books, cds, to-do lists and blue tack – will be desecrated by dirty laundry and insulted by three-day-old apple cores. But for now I am a monk, an acolyte, following vows of silence and of empty floors.

fields shiver into froze
your leaf-cut angles blazing
liquefy like showering
thaw and shower you dew-curdled leaves melt and here
me swaying away like buttercuppery
way into will-or-wontshe gold-or-yellowme
and all in sepia light slants she shall-or-shant she
can-or-cant we butteryellowmilk me with sulken sepia,
spouting lips like buttercups, all empty

27.06.03 - Victims hearing in Cailaco. serious crimes:

“This is what they did to my hands. They put stones between my fingers, and then they took two hands, and crushed them, like this. They broke my fingers. I still can’t use them properly.” His hands were shaking so much he could no longer hold the microphone. One of the women from the local truth & reconciliation branch brought a glass of water, and held the mic for him. The other victims had started their stories with context, ‘I was at my house and the TNI (Indonesian army) came at midnight…’, ‘It was 1999 and the militia came to Cailaco, so my family and I hid in the forest.’ Not this one though. There was something about the way he went straight to the most traumatic part of his story, and then had to stop, that made even the hardened staff of the Serious Crimes Unit sit up & pay attention.

The victims hearing in Cailaco was the first time I had seen any Timorese person express emotion about their experiences. On my first day at the Timor Post I met a fiery district reporter from Ermera who told me, briefly, that before becoming a journalist he was a member of the resistance, & had been arrested and beaten by the Indonesians. At a party in a beachside restaurant, I was in the middle of a fascinating discussion about the perils of dating feminists when the conversation suddenly turned, and my friend began to tell me, calmly, about the time militia members shot his brother in the throat in 1999. He jabbed his finger at his throat to illustrate the point, and his face was unreadable.

Given that around half of Timor’s intellectuals were tortured by the Indonesians at some point, I probably shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of story. But no amount of abstract knowledge can prepare you for the moment when you look at someone and think, f*ck, how the hell did you manage to stay sane? How do you go to work, and look after children, and work on your masters thesis, and sit around laughing and playing bad guitar (often all in the one day)? When does history tap you on the shoulder and say, okay mate, that’s enough – its time for your breakdown now – feel free to fall apart?

Timor moment…I hear the sound of laughing in the corridor & wander out to find the head of the Circulation Department giving a slapstick rendition of the time the Indonesian police threatened him when he worked at the former national newspaper, Suara Timor Timur. “Hey you – you’re pro Independence!” he says, in gutteral tones, holding an imaginary gun under his chin…to roars of laughter from the journos, hanging out in the foyer on plastic chairs. Raucous.

For my first three weeks in Timor I stayed in Santa Cruz - I only realised at the end of the second week that the cemetery up the road was the site of the Dili massacre in 91. Now I pass it every day on the way to work. Its strange - Dili feels so normal somehow, I’m almost disturbed by how comfortable I feel here. And yet on every block there’s a burned-out building, and everyone has a story of survival. People play guitars on the rooftops of ruins, hang out chatting on charcoaled verandas in the evenings. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to it, how easy it is to forget how all that happened. And then out comes the history, bubbling to the surface like the methane in the drains.

You will say - history is tall, has whiskers,
And stoops when he wheezes ‘good day, young lady’
I’ll turn: History has a face like an old man & the sea
His tears are yellow, his eyes red,
staring into nothing when the storm comes.
History holds a microphone with shaking fingers, says
‘this is what they did to my hands’
he receives a ceremonial sash, and history is buried
alive, under frangipanis in a ceremony of remembrance

History is alive and waves by the wayside as we sashay
by in trucks stocked chock-full of reconstructed lives
to be delivered, in instalments, to his waiting children.
History swallows dust along with the best
of intentions
which have a mild diuretic effect.

i am no place and no time i am no
particular time or place no labels
define me with date, vintage
Bordeaux or Barossa me
i’m not likely
to be served in tastable glasses
although i may be fruity, hard
with a touch of oak im untraceable
by the senses you will have to wait
for this bottle to age
and with the first sign
of corkage you will perhaps know

this Monday stretch into forever
like a yoga instructor forever
saluting the sun, a personal trainer
who will not let your byes be gone
or give up and have done
with it always coming on this Monday
must be forevering come on aussie
on trooper old cobber old pal
when i were a lad we’d dream
of seeing days
like luxury this and on
and on
this day and surely if i shot Monday
i’d get off on justifiable?

i am always sure that if
i just get the weekend right
i will be let out of Mondays
on a good behaviour bond.

Im tethered and chafing at the bittering
Roped, able, steadily unstabling
Kite-stringed straggling wind-snapped
Unravelling
And strike lightning nevers the same kite twice
You know that I would if I could if I could but I cant,
Dodging and chasing that l-word catlike
More like a kite than a kitten with string
More of an us than a they or between
I’ll have a serving of us on a plate
With a large bowl of together served around eight
I will swallow us down I will not clean my teeth
I want sugar on top I want salt underneath.

They say that I look predatory
When you look at me
You know that I want to burn you like a CD
No slick-tee top or a teetering heel
I’m a vixen killing kittens a libido of steel

Well my box is full of voice
and my clutch is full of claws
When you dive into my ocean
I’m a little like Jaws

So many fish little fish tiny fish in the sea

Are you big enough to eat or just to kiss & set free?

I’m tethered, & chafing at the bittering
Roped, able, steadily unstabling
kite string straggling wind-snapped
Unravelling
And strike lightning nevers the same kite twice
You know that I would if I could if I could but I wont
They said girls can do anything they never said “dont”

Cause my sleeves are full of heart
And my heart is full of theives
I can pop it in my mouth
I can swallow in my sleep

I’m chasing that l-word cat-like
More like a kite than a kitten with string
More of an us than a they or between
I will swallow us down
I will not clean my teeth
I want sugar on top
I want salt underneath…

I really want to record this, but who has the time?

success comes free with americanexpress
the wages of freedom, sloganed tshirts
and i am poor to buy that emblemed tee
but will at least fly sign of nike progress

there is nothing so small it cannot buy africa,
usually packed in Styrofoam now
for ease of transportation

explorers of hinterlands, exporters all

the wages of sin are currently on the rise
due to an increase in headhunting, still
the wages of life, death - surprisingly death
(due to inflation and whatnot)
is not selling well, the market is flooded and death
has dropped six points under
unrefined coffee beans,
peanuts, and new religions

I am seduced by microcosms
I’m dipping my toes in the space-time continuum, and watching it ripple
I think I may have submerged a small galaxy,
Distracted by this thought:
Perhaps the 90% of matter in the universe
So dark it cant be seen
Is hiding in the same place
with the 90% of our brains that are never used

I have a vortex, whirling, just below my third rib.
As if Adam got jealous and decided to steal something back.

I am turning like a molecule, with much space.

When I wake up I want warmth at the tips of my fingers
would you like to be cat
to my morning stretch
nuzzle my foetal
hollow yawn

You’ll say words like clear, quiet, clean
cut-glass murmer
i’ll claw my flex on frantic,
whined-out, frenzy

Then we’ll debate
possible pronouns
verb ourselves sounding
into a snarl

You can be the post-storm glee
in my teacup
smell that rinsed air
freshly electric
spark between fingers
slightly apart
not touching.

i saw you falling from the sky
and could not tell
if you were leaf or bird
think of me as something fully formed, but blinking
balance me on your hand like a seastone
i will be still
lithe and trembling as a new-born seal