I was at JH's place in Sydney, and KA was there. It seemed like the two of them were reversed in their affections for me, with JH distant and dismissive, and KA warm and friendly. We were swimming in J's indoor swimming pool. She noted I had helped with the design, the decision to have a waterfall flow from the centre of the house to the centre of the pool. Otherwise I was, and they were, aware of my uselessness, lots of errors I had made on things that should have been simple.

Swimming in the pool there was talk of babies, I think K introduced me to one of hers in her arms, and asked encouragingly about our attempts. I said we'd only been trying for a few months, I wasn't worried.

As I swam bits of detritus stuck to me. A large glob of bloody mucus was stuck hard to my right big toenail, and I spent a long time trying to rub it away. 

"Great isosceles wasps flew up from below. The pretty dawn of evening preceded me, its eyes on the heaven of my eyes, without turning round. Thus do ships lie down in the silver storm."

Andre Breton, from "Soluble Fish". 

"She lifted the cup to her lips; her fingers ached, the water smelled of metal polish. She felt a thin hard form comb through her hair pricking her scalp and coming down towards her spine pushing her belly out more. She could feel him looking at her again."

Romesh Gunesekera, from "Batik", Monkfish Moon.

"Sunset is a good time to arrive in this part of the world..."

Romesh Gunesekera, from "Captives", Monkfish Moon. 

A softer bed, that my mother has a softer bed, that she walks beside a river with the sound of purposeful water on hard round stones, water running hard and stones pale grey, her feet secure around the stones' curves, jandals, round stones spread across the full open valley, current strong and there's so much room for water. 

"Syllables:
                    they ripen in the mind,
flower in the mouth.
                                     Their roots
drink night, eat light.
                                     Languages:
trees incandescent
with leaves of rain.

Lightning vegetation,
geometries of echoes:
on a sheet of paper
the poem builds itself
                                     as the day
on the palm of space."


Octavio Paz, from "The Daily Fire"

I'm getting N's sister to teach a workshop on my behalf. I've done this before. She's barely literate. I ask her if she's up to rewriting the details on the promotional material and she's not, so I do it.

I'm in class, one of the last classes of the semester and I've forgotten all my students' names. I ask them to say their names so I can take the roll and they start being really disruptive and rude. I consult with a colleague who's in the class and he says it's because I forgot their names.

I'm driving with N's family down into a valley. It used to be so quiet and secluded here but since they put the new road in there's heavy traffic, even though it's still green, with many large trees. The van is full of students, large boys, kind of hostile to me. At some point I realise no one is driving the van - I'm in the passenger seat. I want one of them to climb over from the back as I'm blocked by luggage - we're still in motion - but they won't so I start to climb over myself. There are a couple of very tall young men walking out of the woods towards the van - they are bullies and I have to turn the van around and get out of there. I seem to pull off this quite extreme driving manoeuvre. There are bullies in the van too though.  

spare me the niggling pain, the tension the distractions, the tension, the rigidity the misery, the lame puns the frozen titles, spare me the hours going round and round the same words without moving anything, without breaking into clean water and new ground. if I were someone else I'd say throw it away, write it from memory, from a different place, give yourself peace and rest somehow, let it go then start again. but I'm not and I want to finish it here and now. want it to be different and exactly the same. 

"Granted that we have gradually started on the reverse movement, there is no little probability in th deduction, based on the continuous decay in the belief in the Christian god, to the effect that there also already exists a considerable decay in the human consciousness of owing (ought); in fact, we cannot shut our eyes to the prospect of the complete and eventual triumph of atheism freeing mankind from all this feeling of obligation to their origin, their causa prima. Atheism and a kind of second innocence complement and supplement each other.
   So much for my rough and preliminary sketch of the interrelation of the ideas "ought" (owe) and "duty" with the postulates of religion. I have intentionally shelved up to the present the actual moralisation of these ideas (their being pushed back into the conscience, or more precisely the interweaving of the bad conscience with the idea of God), and at the end of the last paragraph used language to the effect that this moralisation did not exist, and that consequently these ideas had necessarily come to an end, by reason of what had happened to  their hypothesis, the credence in our "creditor," in God. The actual facts differ terribly from this theory. It is with the moralisation of the ideas "ought" and "duty," and with their being pushed back into the bad conscience, that comes the first actual attempt to reverse the direction of the development we have just described, or at any rate to arrest its evolution; it is just at this juncture that the very hope of an eventual redemption has to put itself once for all into the prison of pessimism, it is at this juncture that the eye likes to recoil and rebound in despair from off an adamantine impossibility, it is at this juncture that the ideas "guilt" and "duty" have to turn backwards - turn backwards against whom? There is no doubt about it; primarily against the "debtor," in whom the bad conscience now establishes itself, eats, extends and grows like a polypus throughout its length and breadth, all with such virulence, that at last, with the impossibility of paying the debt, there becomes conceived the idea of the impossibility of paying the penalty, the thought of its inexpiability (the idea of "eternal punishment") - finally, too, it turns against the "creditor," whether found in the causa prima of man, the origin of the human race, its sire, who henceforth becomes burdened with a curse ("Adam," "original sin," "determination of the will"), or in Nature from whose womb man springs, and on whom the responsibility for the principle of evil is now cast ("Diabolisation of Nature"), or in existence generally, on this logic an absolute white elephant, with which mankind is landed (the Nihilistic flight from life, the demand for Nothingness, or the opposite of existence, for some other existence, Buddhism and the like) - till suddenly we stand before that paradoxical and awful expedient, through which a tortured humanity has found a temporary alleviation, that stroke of genius called Christianity: - God personally immolating himself for the debt of man, God paying himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh, God as the one being who can deliver man from what man had become unable to deliver himself - the creditor playing scapegoat for his debtor, from love (can you believe it?), from love of his debtor!..."
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

dream without sequence. charlie's dead, charlie's head - double sized, next to his head. he's sick, he's getting sick, you've got that illness too. mum. in a car in wellington rolling backwards towards the bank. scrambling for the handbrake. we're going over the edge, going to tumble down the bank. mum's head in my hands, i love you, i miss you so much, i love you. i have time to say this. simone come for a swim with me. in the beautiful sea. it's too big. in the swimming pool. fishing dead leaves out of the centre of the pool. dead leaf in my throat. this one folded up like origami, dried leaf unfolding. did it really come out of my throat? yes, it feels warm. 

Two dreams last night. In one I was getting off the bus at our new home. It was am empty, stripped out shop-house on a main road in a small town - bare concrete, damp, no interior walls. I was angry that we were going to live here. But when I went inside I discovered that while I was away that day N had built a prefab wall in to make things more comfortable, so there was at least a separation between the front windows, the toilet and the sleeping area.

The second dream was out the back of the same place? In a kind of storage area. I opened a bag of kittens and they started spilling out. I realised only then how very very young they were - just born. Actually there were cats all over the place - I couldn't keep track of all the cats and somehow I needed to. Eventually on one shelf I opened a bag and saw the little black face of a cat sleeping. I immediately felt surprise relief to recognise Bella. Could I have been mistaken? But she lifted her sleepy face to me to say hello and I knew we were right in our recognition. Relief. 

saturday:

another in the long series of goodbye letters
finger grated on the fancy new grater
brown spots under the leaves of one of the oncidium orchids - do I cut it, is it too late?
pain all through meditation - in the front of my neck, as though I'm being squashed, in the middle of my back like a hinge on my spine
dancehall hip grinds, everything opens
beautiful rageful poem from a student
I read my own poems, too quiet, nothing lands anywhere
wild christian woman comes to witness, speaks about her different path, her time volunteering in Israel
George Trakl in the cab on the way home with groceries, I'm full of rage, can't bear sitting there, but nothing to say.

today I think I had the nicest teaching experience I've ever had. a student came back to my office, frustrated that he can't get a handle on his project. when he engages with the philosophers he is interested in, his personal voice - his bodily experience of time and space - gets obliterated. I showed him an arthur yap poem and as we read it he started to cry with relief. it was another's voice, articulating exactly the problem he had been caught in for months. I handed him the book and told him just to clear everything else away and live with that for a while. He looked like he had finally been granted sleep. 

working on a contents page for soft shroud.

1.    grafton bridge (seed site)

earth pocket cosied w suicides, dream-grads recomposing to a humusphere thick against, and all around, felt-concrete (the poured-set lids of saved-up violence; angry empty ones who swung). I dreamed forward to dream back to lower the body (one example) &        how did you understand this death? were there accounts?

                                    

                            debt?

                            - not debt - I mean death -  sorry, my                                                                               accent                         

                           

2.    hash house hole

vacuum forensicals: how did you understand

horizon type: genealogical. characters: me, others. I mean, Dad keep-him-safe, Nan as a girl riding to a dance,

Charlie after death as the body of a baby,

refugees.

law: Knifebeaks presiding over

the migration across the splintered floodland. 

            event: a body is lowered.

I dreamed last night that I answered the phone and N's ex girlfriend said "Hi, it's L." I said "Oh hi L, would you like me to get N?" but she hadn't been expecting me to answer. She said "N? N who?" pretending she hadn't been calling for him.

"N my boyfriend. N who used to be YOUR boyfriend." I wasn't trying to be bitchy but realised how it sounded as I said it. She fell silent, until I thought the line had been dropped. I said I was going to hang up and then I heard her whimpering. I kept listening and her distress became clearer and clearer. I told her to stay there, that I was going to send N around to see her and help her out.

the purple oxalis is doing very nicely since I moved it inside by the window. its leaves last forever, and are beautifully photonastic on long, windy stems. it only needs a very little water. no new leaves, though, sadly. it sent out a few when I first had it and they went mushy and died. I realised it was too humid in the porch, and I was over-watering it. now it's content, but it won't try again.

I just rode down to the plant shop and brought back in my bike carrier a couple of yellow orchids - small flowers on long stems - for the window box. First plants for the window box. I'll build it up slowly but as I sometimes work at the table in the mornings looking out that window I want to make it pretty. they had some multi-coloured lantana at the shop that could work well there, but expensive. and I remember what a pest they were in Australia. one day at the port kembla house I ventured up to the back of the back garden and found lantana had taken over EVERYTHING. I hacked back what I could then gave up. I did a terrible job of looking after that place. stuck in thesis misery, relationship drama.

Shortly I'll transplant the bromeliad, now I have new soil. The guys at the nursery, wanting to be helpful, wrapped the orchid stems in paper for me, to protect them as I rode home. But I found they just caught the wind like sails, so I tore the paper off and let them bob around with me the midday heat. I was almost purple by the time I got home but the orchids are okay.

aimless, drifting.

glassy eyes fixed on the rippling water.
-

we brush our feet over a silk carpet that seen from one direction has the colours of a garden of roses, blooming in many shades; seen from the other it takes the colours of the stems.

the classical pianist chides the maid for neglecting the air conditioning. after the meal, while she's serving the chocolates, we applaud her cooking. water trickles through the pool on which the dining platform is set. the lights turn suddenly green, we all look hard and indistinct. it's a fault in the wiring of the adjustable RGB lamp. 

I had tea with a friend and trouble lifted away. the moon let me go. hormone hell over. one week exactly - 26th Feb to 5th of March.

It's not that there aren't other factors, there are, and some months (not many) go by without too much disruption; I might feel more tearful and tender, dream more, need to take things slowly and be introspective, but nothing BAD happens. But if circumstances are off (say I get sick beforehand, or there's some life-upset) it's like - the kind of transformation you feel when someone dies or violence enters your life. a sense of evil in the world, in the people on the street, in the room next door. And of personal and collective doom, of an unclean death in process now, all around. here on the later cusp of it, it's not that I don't feel that that perception is real. but it recedes, and I do not want to chase it. maybe in a couple of days I will be able to put into words the other, safer reality. for now I just feel relief and by simple things- exercise, meditation, sleep, regular waking, regular work, trees, friends - I try to secure it. 

I dreamed that campus was a small resort, and I was arranging accommodation and events for a writer, and tickets to go and see a movie with N. The students saw me in line and I told them I was taking time in lieu. then I was sitting with the yoga instructor at a table at breakfast. A couple stood up to speak, the man pulling the woman up and saying 'my wife has something to say. she would like to apologise to you all'. The yoga instructor pinched my hand, to express tension and dismay, because we both knew immediately he was abusing her. The wife proceeded to read out an incomprehensible apology full of psychotic religious reference that he had scripted for her. I watched her eyes and his eyes, both big and brown and bruised, and saw there the history of what she had been. my hand was being pinched throughout. 

every day collapse, every day resurge. nothing I can easily control. just do my best. is it really not like this for other people? if I can't go this path there's another path. 

peeled a stamp onto it and sent it off. righteous anger. in a box: 'that it was like hearing a baby cry and being unable to pick it up.' 

--

I saw today a crying baby being carried through the jammed mall. maybe a year old, passing me on my right. mouth wide, wet face... carried by a young dad, baby reaching hand out to young mother....

and passing me on my left another one year old, also being carried but peaceful, and transfixed by the mirror scene, chasing it with head and eyes as they passed, face full of wonder....

decided to learn to twerk. fell down dead inside of 30 seconds.

how to.

a commenter: "WTF is this 787 know right from wrong fucking young girls YOU FAILED YOUR MOTHERS YOUR MOTHERS TOLD YOU GO TOO SCHOOL NOT SHAKE YOU ASS ALL YOU GIRLS LOOKING AT THIS ARE FAILURES YOUR FAMILY IS DISCUSTING YOU PIECE A SHIT"

yup he's a poet.

links off a twerking video both to an unassisted freebirth and a water-inflatable male sextoy demo. 

I dreamed last night that the mum made soup for everyone, out of menstrual blood. It was nutrient- and vitamin-rich, thin like vegetable juice, frothy, and somehow sterile, as in, asexual - like, agamogenetic?