Broke, sitting with half plate
Pasta, butter, spice
Shuffle through my old clothes
I used to look nice

What is nice, but smaller?
Smaller, smaller, still
String bean and potatoes
Go fine together

The grocer tries to tell me,
"Divide, conquer, divide."
"What is nice, but smaller?"

I guess the grocer's right

the planning office is up the road, by the old hospital

that was once a work house for the poor & suffering

to suffer more.



boils.



pass by regular on the way to somewhere else.



it is listed so any changes are scrutinised.



boils.



there have been a few.



changes.

i do apologise

did you say planet?



sbm.

flat as a tack
nailed firmly
into ironbark

thats me
after marking
over 120 essays

the words blurred
near the end
and now the world is blurry
so takeaway tea
a large g&t times two
and bed for as long as i can

then i may just be userfriendly again
but i am not promising anything

I can't get him to shut up.
The voice in my head

He tells me things
About other people
About myself
About the future

He talks
About other people

He knows everything
About myself

He makes plans
About my future

I can't get him to stop.
The voice in my head

after Ohran Pamuk

Everything just rushes by  me now.
There are no longer the ritual pauses:
when I held a cigarette between *******,
I could hold Time itself.

I could pluck two stills
from the hurried film of my day –
one of what had just happened,
and the other of what might come next –

and I could stand, quietly alone
between those two frames,
holding time still in my hand,
and just look, and think, and smoke.

She hates the children because they are not her own.
Her smile forced, her hands crooked with some secret defeat,
and the children pay for it.
From the back of the classroom, she looks beautiful,
but it is an illusion.
She has a mane of red hair framing her face like a lion’s mane.
But that is the most remarkable thing about her.
She is gaunt. She is very tall. She is unmistakable.

She is awkward when she relaxes. She fidgets and trembles.

In the playground, she has Yard Duty.
She resents the students in grades 2, 3, 4, …
because they have outgrown her, they no longer need her.
She must be in her thirties, you can tell by her hands.
And there is no ring there.
That might be the thing. There is no ring.

Her bed sheets are white.
She curls her long body up into a ball at night.
She works hard. She can’t help herself.
Yet she knows there is no reason to admire people
for working hard if they can’t do otherwise.

She’s absent from school today.
She is never absent.
The words that blow through the air in the playground
and hallways are: She is getting married today.
She decided to get married today.

She already hates her husband, though she hardly knows him.
She hates him because a person, a man,
needs to be attached to the ring that she wears
and the baby she will have. And why should there be?

He calls her name from the other side of the bed.
She curls herself up into a ball.
Perhaps she will hate her baby, too.
She might not be able to help it.
But can you blame someone for feeling
something she can’t help but feel?

Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity?
Curse God, and die.”
— Job 2:9

Job was a rich man
who, in a trial of divine justice,
was dismantled of all he owned
by a fire that fell from heaven.
Sick and God-blinded, he repented.

But who speaks of his wife’s suffering?
Perhaps she was a woman who took great joy
in things and possessions and luxuries.
Perhaps she sat on heaps of soot,
itemizing the absolute sum of her loss,
calling out to God in argument, crying:

“In whom can I have faith
when the Giver takes that which is given?
And when the love of that
which is loved, and given, and taken,
is instilled in me by the Lover,
the Giver, the Taker?

“Now, I live for nothing.
I long for death, but it does not come.
And yet You have ensured
I survived to tell You this.”