so much joy it hurts

I climbed the stairs
to your apartment and
met your old lover and
his friend on the way
out laughing.

I brought you a book
of poems that I love;
you have cooked
a simplified coq con vin.

The evening I decided to love you
you told me you loved me.

Passion declared.
Steak burned.

There is no future for us.
You have discovered the secret
that will bind me to you for life.

I returned.
You laughed.
When I answer my telephone
you are crying.

When I lived with you,
you spend your evenings
memorizing irregular
German verbs; now
that I spend my nights
investigating bamboo taxonomy,
you write that
I have ruined your life.

(via poetry365)

joshdivision: “Brisbane is like a row boat time machine set to prohibition.”

Police want pubs to close earlier to combat violence

I have an entirely romanticised view of prohibition in my head, Brisbane. I want unlicensed clubs that play jazz and punk. I want to drink out of cracked mugs. I want to drink straight out of the bottle. I would welcome secret passwords that keep out the punters in the CBD and The Valley who intimidate and scare me by marking their territory with invective or violence (or piss and vomit). Prohibition in Brisbane might bring us one step closer to the dystopian fantasises I always harbour… I know I’d have more fun.

I know I live in a fantasy world half the time but I think it’d be cool to live in a city full of the underground where there are less rules, and art and culture and music vomit out everything that is beautiful and unsafe - without the infection of thuggish violence I encounter in CBD and The Valley now. I want to take risks again. I want my heart and ears to be on fire with music in a room full of my friends.

My youth was dangerous and illegal and spontaneous and my alcohol and drug fuelled days have taught me to consume (a little) more responsibly now. I see adults who think it’s normal to king hit someone in the middle of The Valley Mall or walk into four lanes of traffic while on an ice binge or piss against the bar of a club they lined up and paid $20 to enter. I see drunkenness and violence as normalised in Australian society. I don’t think prohibition or shutting pubs at midnight is the answer though - why can’t we come up with a healthy social policy regarding alcohol and violence? Alcohol is our reason for socialising, not just part of our social experience.

I really don’t think alcohol and late night trading hours are to blame for “Otherwise, sensible young men and women … committing acts of brutality and callousness whilst blind drunk that destroys their future and that of their victims and families.” Really, otherwise sensible? I wouldn’t socialise with them when they were sober either.

I don’t go “out” in CBD or The Valley much because I don’t have as much fun as I used to (though I did have a great night at Ric’s dancing until 5am last weekend, proving that it is possible to have a great night at Ric’s once in a blue moon). My friends and I moved on from spending every weekend in The Valley when it became over run by the kind of people that used to have a big night out at City Rowers.

The Valley used to feel safer, when it was just us crust/hippy/indie/punk (insert label) kids and the homeless and old barflys. You could drink cheaply and go dancing or drop acid in the dance club where The Troubadour is now (before it caught fire in the middle of an old friend’s DJ set). When the pubs did shut we’d go to the strip clubs because they didn’t check ID (and we were well underage), girls got in for free and the beer was cheap and cold. I stumbled up dank, dark stairs of a strip club into the light on many a Sunday morning, reaching for my sunglasses.

I had fun when I was younger at crust punk house parties or shows at St. Albans Hall in Auchenflower. The community was self regulating: fights were broken up, if someone got too drunk and passed out friends would check on them throughout the night. You could run outside naked in the rain. Your friends could dance and sing along with you because your band was playing on the floor, not an on an elevated stage with a barrier and an aggressive security guard. You could wear thongs to a show and not paint your face.

I feel alone now in a crowd dressed in the same fluro, popped collar, cheap Supre dress uniform. I want the “cool” back and cool and danger (not explicit violence from ugly drunks) are in every prohibition era movie.

I felt safe and welcome in my unlicensed youth. I don’t think the danger that our Lord Mayor is so concerned over now, was the same. I’m living in a dreamy past… until prohibition becomes Brisbane’s future.

Let me be in your service
like the others
mumbling predictions,
moth dry with jealousy.
Parched tongue
thirsting, not ever for a word—
for me the dry air is empty
again without you.

I’m not jealous any more
but I want you.
I carry myself like a victim
to the hangman.
I will not call you
either joy or love.
All my own blood is gone.
Something strange paces there now.

Another moment
and I will tell you:
it’s not joy but torture
you give me.
I’m drawn to you
as to a crime—
to your ragged mouth,
to the soft bitten cherry.

Come back to me,
I’m frightened without you.
Never had you such power
over me as now.
Everything I desire
appears to me.
I’m not jealous any more.
I’m calling you.

(via poetry365)

“…except you ravish me.”

In the beginning I couldn’t speak to you.
Not because the words wouldn’t come;
it was because they might. Not words like love,
blooming where they fall; words like come here.
When once you turned to look straight at me
out of a crowd, I thought I must have let

the sounds inside my head come out, like “let
us all go home.” I wouldn’t say to you
the wet, small words that moved inside of me.
I have thought that faith and patience would come
to no good end, that you would say, “See here!”
and never say, “Well yes, I think I’d love

to follow you home; to tell the truth, I’d love
to have some wine, then talk awhile, then let
you pleasure me.” Expelled to suffer here,
John Milton wrote of us. I look at you
and in my mind your awful kinsmen come
around every corner, looking for me.

You once talking about the weather with me
and that was something, but it was not love,
did not resemble love. Love ought to come
in recognizable clothes. One day I let
my plain and earthy self talk to you
most gently, saying plainly, “Please come here,”

but everything went wrong, a bah-bah here,
a bah-bah there. You have bumped into me
by accident, I have bumped into you
on purpose on the street where talk of love
was inappropriate, then I have let
my heart hide in the cold and watched you come

laughing and blind. No matter what may come,
give me this: that all this time I stood here
ignored to death and loved you while you let
every chance go; say your glances at me
suggested almost anything but love;
say I know you cry in bed, poor you.

Believe in love. You know that I am here
to let you loose. Here is my flesh for you
who ay abide with me till kingdom come.

(via poetry365)

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The New Rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of the gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.” —David Foster Wallace in ‘E Unibus Pluram:  Television and U.S. Fiction’ (via Mer)

See also: Dave Hickey distrusts the very idea of high art in a democracy

(via claytoncubitt)

Stand in the evening light until you

become transparent or until you fall

asleep.

Grapefruit, Yoko Ono

(via fuckyeahyokoono) (via wavethesails)

1
efflorescent

body
suspended
in the air

held
in a net
of blood

the white of the eye
moon blinks into sight
genesis of liquid bone

flow
&
counterflow
flood
of emptiness

clouds web
ghost of rainfall

2
a hole
right through me
where the wind
passes its hand
welcomes the tide
the names of the dead
on her lips

drowned voices
corpses of foam
thrown up by the sea

the gasp for breath
in an ocean of silents

3
dawn

the skin of night
breaks the thread

the duel lips
of sky and sea

part

the eye alone
is vocal

4
to come
out of nothing

or

to touch myself
in your reflection

30-10-97

(via shitgaze)

She’s reading your minds
as you pass by, the

dipsomane déguisée en rose

While she waits
for her date
to turn up, the moon
in the man…

She know exactly what is going to happen

she’ll be guided
upstairs
to a bedroom, and turning around
he will show her his
gun

He’ll ask if she would like to
hold it,
which she will

amazed
at its lightness
and beauty
this thing

it must have taken 4 million years to make

squeezing it she will feel cold
and invisible light flowing
into her spine

So there is a door out of here after all

And to visit a new place creates one
in the brain

How do you say no

How do you say anything
to throw up in

Can I use this room to cry

Radiant fuel
body
of water

along which she walks, she is
walked

Why
did we leave, and how
are we ever getting back—

(via poetry365)

for Donald Hall

1.
From the house of death there is rain.
From rain is flood and flowers.
And flowers emerge through the ruins
of those who left behind
stores of corn and dishes,
turquoise and bruises
from the passion
of fierce love.

2.
I run my tongue over the skeleton
jutting from my jaw. I taste
the grit of heartbreak.

3.
The procession of spirits
who walk out of their bodies
is ongoing. Just as the procession
of those who have loved us
will go about their business
of making a new house
with someone else who smells
like the dust of a strange country.

4.
The weight of rain is unbearable to the sky
eventually. Just as desire will
burn a hole through the sky
and fall to earth.

5.
I was surprised by the sweet embrace
of the perfume of desert flowers after the rain
though after all these seasons
I shouldn’t be surprised.

6.
All cities will be built and then destroyed.
We built too near the house of the gods of lightning,
too close to the edge of a century.
What could I expect,
my bittersweet.

7.
Even death who is the chief of everything
on this earth (all undertakings, all matters of human
form) will wash his hands, stop to rest under
the cottonwood before taking you from me
on the back of his horse.

8.
Nothing I can sing
will bring you back.
Not the songs of a hundred horses running
until they become wind
Not the personal song of the rain
who makes love to the earth.

9.
I will never forget you. Your nakedness
haunts me in the dawn when I cannot distinguish your
flushed brown skin from the burning horizon, or my hands.
The smell of chaos lingers in the clothes
you left behind. I hold you
there.

(via poetry365)