the landlord next door

the man drives a late model 4x4 jeep; the wife, a merc. the man thinks only of money. the man works all the time. the work starts with a chain saw and continues with power tools for everything. the man is devoted to neatness. the man has shorn my trees along his fenceline, just about killing them and certainly depriving small birds of their corridor from my front yard to the back. i love trees. so much. i am passionate about trees. they keep the indian minahs at bay. my trees are natives to this soil. there are fungi, mistletoe, spiders and lizards and frogs and you name it. he is between tenants. the man has no sense of aesthetic except tidiness. the man has no other value than profit. the man has put two miserable dwellings on the house block. the newer one, a jimcrack construction, has two solar panels over the tiny bathroom. he has been working 15 hours every day for a month and i hate him deeply. he has cleaned the roof and the yellow fibro of the outside walls. he must be so proud. his work has given him such a feeling of moral entitlement he spoke in response to my grumpy nod of acknowledgement of his existence. what he said was, i wanted to talk to you about the shade on my solar panels. i think that's what he said. i put out my hand in a gesture of 'don't argue' as soon as i heard solar panels. then he said, you won't talk to me. no, i firmly replied. well, that's a bit selfish, he called, because i was just about inside my house. why would i talk to you when i want you to die? the scribbly gum is about 10 metres high and growing: does he expect me to cut it down? it's the middle of winter you moron, the sun is low, the shadows are long. i am revolted by his awful, murderous righteousness. his ubiquioustness renders me powerless, except for silence and refusal.

morality of the library

The morality of the library interests me & where  it  falls between the puffed covers of the Romantic poetry and the eBook. This might take me somewhere if I journey in my poverty from the wastes of the cradle of civilisation into its luxurious past and all over the globe running into the accidents of tourism (maybe coming across something real), reading ... I know now the dreadful censure of the past, the dead, and the unrealised freedom of the future, while being amazed at the present which seems to have honoured all that was wrong. Lucky I reckon I didn't have a good education; I so resent not having the tools of education. Fuck education; it teaches them how to steal, not how to think.

Everything we could have wished for happened, and were we pleased, no we were not, because then we couldn't choose, and when we chose, we said to ourselves we are doing the wrong thing, we are wasting our time, when in fact we were catching up on things not yet done but wished to be done in the past some time; the mind is crazy with the choices of the present times and they are leaving us oldie writers behind unless you want to be wrinkly old and irrelevant and you would be irrelevant because too many of us have heard it all before and groan, boring! So this morning I have nearly finished Dawn French's Memoir/autobiog/letters to alive and dead intimates of hers and felt very much that she deserves the fame and love from strangers that she gets, in fact, I went straight to youtube to revive enjoyments of French & Saunders skits, OMG we were lucky they were there; now of course just go to youtube; but it is not exactly the same as waiting all week for a half hour episode to laugh. So much of our living now is in other times, as it were, or places as in Facebook, through the imagination and things that happen in your secret mind while like the now is going on outside [how I love just typing fast, anything, probably why I became a writer in the first place]. There are so many blog posts who would read this one, who would want to, and why, anyway, here they have given me this forum to blather on:- it has been in my mind lately that I was on a Greek Island and one had Mummamia moment, and parody of Momma Mia, at the same time as living one myself with a couple of Robert's friends, she loving Dawn, me Jennifer, she Julie and me Meryl etc; because it was a single day for her and Robert's friend it was like stepping into a movie, and tv., and I laughed and loved it alongside, having the Greek Is food and swim in the blue Mediterranean and into a sea-grotto-smugglers' cave tourist thing, while this what I lived was as much as sham as living second hand movie dream or tv parody, because the underbelly truth was lurking like a deep water shark ready to bite my bum with its actuality. So I contributed to the ongoing novel that is facebook this morning when someone posted a joke saying to Dickens, well tell me was it the best of times or the worst of times? It can hardly have been both. I wrote, well they weren't boring times. Hence my head a little bit in the French revolution, a little bit in Victorian England and a little bit with Byron whom I am also reading Childe Harold of, a little bit here and now, and a little bit there where the next youtube clip of Jennifer and Dawn is catching up to itself on slow broadband for me to enjoy, but really I should be somewhere else doing something else, and I haven't had breakfast yet and I have been up 5 hours, awake for 6. I tell you I am a scattered piece of work who'd better stop this pointlessness, except I wanted to say, Neptune into Pisces, my sign, for the next 14 years, I hope in this time to achieve spiritual awareness of whatever spirit there is, sou-ego notwithstanding.

july in the year of the me(n)tal rabbit

Recipe for Irish Cream

i bottle of cheapest scotch

1 x 600 thickened cream

2 x 400g condensed mulk

i tablespoon of chocolate topping

i teaspoon of vanilla

4 eggs room temp

Whip eggs & vanilla, add cream & choc, cond. milk and scotch slowly =

2 litres

Glass bottles

23/7/11

I want to go where my heart is warm

but neither spaceship nor feet can take me,

not a fleet of sailing ships,

yet a glimpse of such might be enough

like picture of Keats;

for no apparent reason

it rises on a breeze

where no wind can blow

but tides of blood ebb and flow

beat a shore with waves of passion

on its circular passage in and out of the heart

within the climate within the veins and arteries

of living and giving it

a moment of attention.

How can I embark on this journey?

28/7/11

In this rocky desert I am surrounded by bums,

heads buried up to the shoulders in the sands of detail,

the shifting sands of daily life,

each grain examined for evidence of strife --

sometimes I stroll among them &

wonder if these boulders are human beings

or rocks in socks (frocks, jocks ...)

Myself I sit in a mess of things around me spreading a chaos of thinking outwards towards the lizards' nests and let the natural burroowers make holes in the ground and watch the Foxy bolt the foxes from their wicked privacy and perhaps chance a glance of pure passion in the pearl of a vixen's eye as she protects her pups from the predators in their hides

I dunno. I dinnae ken...

on the way somewhere, Oxley Highway

You must be, I will say to Sarah, or Carmel, or Sally, without ambition,

yet somehow completely sure of yourself, if you want happiness over success,

for the latter is never ever itself: it is in the eye of the beholder,

totally...

as if you were a dancer without the practice mirrors,

without the lovely barrs

of doubt & hunger, holding your spine straight

and your entire weight on one toe.

You give your guts but you cannot be certain

there will be claps, curtain calls or rousing applause,

success!

Make your cause a happiness you can give away

as you keep it like the fabled cake,

or magic pudding.

The trouble with "know-alls", I will say to Bec, Brooke or Billy,

[know-it-alls for my US readers]

is it is impossible,

unconscionable.

Best work out what you don't know

and keep doing that for the rest of your life,

Then choose either to inform yourself or not.

Some knowledge is opinion

some knowledge is faith

some knowledge is subjective

Thus you can choose to express it out loud or not.

Out there, somewhere, is the scientific method of reaching unassailable conclusions,

facts,

then they argue about them. Go figure.

Now tell me the difference between the god particle and god

for most people.

screens

I lived in the time of cinema, I will say.

Wordsworth didn't.

It changed our eyes:

how could i imagine the dawn view from Westminster Bridge

without having seen in a fair few movies

tall ships crowding the Thames, the atmospherics

of sails and slaves, trading beneath the mean light

of whale oil lanterns, pre-Pasteur dirt et cetera,

characters presented in large for us to care about,

actors reacting to the wrenching rigging?

How?

Consider the size of screens.

A little history knowledge has informed my view of movies:

St Paul's a mere hundred years old glistening

in young Wordsworth's dawn along with the other architecture 

of the reconstructed city following

The Great Fire of London.

A little history

has sharpened my critical enjoyment of film,

but what i'm trying to get at is

i really cannot see the non-present world without a 35mm camera frame.

The accident of birth in a certain age.

Gen X with the television eyes,

gen Y with their little screens

and buttons and interactive graphics:

what do I know about how they will see the world

in their imaginations.

Since we have had magic windows looking out on definite unreality,

how do we see looking in? How do you, my little Joey boy,

understand my childhood of the Saturday matinee,

the joy of Jaffas bouncing down the thin-rugged wooden stairs in the dark

of the old Matthew Flinders theatre in their clinking orange glory, the thrill of interval

coming between the cliff-hanging serial and the one movie of the week?

It is part of the DNA of my adulthood, the cinematic stories priming us for the brilliant burst of Moral, Philosophical dilemmas, amazing European, post-Nazi war and American guilt over its Vietnam engagement , which we, Generation Open Mouth, drew in like breaths of fine fresh air, the politics of discussion, fed by the visual appreciation of the world around us,

 which my mother didn't have as she roamed the hills reading the Romantic poets.

How do you see

the wind-dance of leaves in the breeze?

casual thoughts

now is the end of civilisation

or is it the end of its enemy, the earth/ or

have folks always though this way?

somehow it feels as if it's all falling apart

as if dread has entered like cracks in the glaciers

through cracks in complacency

shifting sands are revealing heads murky with the dirt of faiths,

ugly and angry with conservatism as against conservation;

faces askew with ignorance and defiance as the seas rise

and the dunes expand exposing rocks of dry ground

multiplying like skulls in the killing fields

please let me be beautiful,

they cry, as they buy and buy

and the rubbish of their purchasing creeps closer and closer &

floats on wider and wider portions of ocean

swamping their mean needs with the putrid reality of excrement

eat more, eat less:

only the rich can afford to eat less and burn off excess

on shiny machines with magnificent self-obsession

heads in the sand, you could say