A goodbye to posturing

Though technically enrolled at University last year, taking full advantage of the concession travel discounts and abundant free library facilities such posturing provides, I did not attend classes outside of the initial few weeks of first Semester and don't believe I handed anything in by the way of meaningful work, though there might very have been a metaphysics tutorial paper sat and a brief if also horribly wrong digression on 4-dimensional space-worms which I understood little of at the time and know to be utter nonsense now.

Knowing in all likelihood that I would be back, as I am now, in full academic swing the following year, I thought it wise to take specific means to set myself activities in order to retain my sharpness of mind (to be clear I am no supposing my mind to be that of a saber or samurai sword here that might lose traces of existence by becoming the point of a needle, but more a hardy hammer not descending so far as to become a Neanderthal 's wooden club). Such sharpening can be loosely denoted under the three major intellectual forms: reading; writing; and talking. Such as what makes the greatness of these forms in their expanse and freedom is only as usual their weakness, and thus I was a little more precise in my guidelines. Reading was aimed at the humble total of 80* to be completed in the year, varying with style, period, subject and inevitably quality, though such variance in the last category is not ideally sort. Spoiler alert, I didn't make it, but more on that for another entry. I'll skip to talking and be brief, as it explains itself, and if we're not clear on that lets talk some time. 

Finally to writing, the motherload, the many tongued fire of beast and snow that snuggles next to you on gusty summers night and asks so gently if you'll be ever so accommodating and let her eat your head. Yeah, we get along. My attack on this beast was two-pronged: other people’s essays and poetry. I feel like I'm just going to let the first spike sit out there for now, let you get use to the way it does or does not ride up nicely into your ethical arse, I had my justificatory spiel at the time, which I will share in good time, though again, that's not my point today. That means poetry must be. [Please make room for those around you rushing out of the theatre of the pretentiousness and indecipherable allegory].

It was around the same time as I created this space right here that I first thought poetry might not be that flouncy feminine bean-flicking phenomena I always had made particular mind to avoid. As a classics-junky I was aquatinted with greats that I loved. In high school I went through the usual Plath-Hughes infatuation, first year saw me become a Manley-Hopkins enthusiast (made more or less comprehensible when taken with the fact that I had just recently lost my family faith had from childhood), and I think Sexton is brilliant. I had dabbled, attended dinner parties and mistakenly shared an explicit erotic exposé on ‘original sin’ full of Nazi allusions to boot around a table of young Christians, but outside the shock and performance of it all I found a lot wanting.

Till I found myself writing it. Till I was standing in the shower composing phrases and trying to steady my hand as it bounced along with the jilting bus trying to write on the way to my various works. Till I re-read over old things and saw I had been writing it for years but had been too lazy to hit enter and thus was left with descriptive emotional blocks of text rather than stylised stanzas of prose. And as with how these things go, suddenly it surrounded me, a co-worker ran the open-mike night at the pub down the road, the housemate had a boyfriend who entered spoken-word competitions the Uni held on a regular basis, a friend had won competitions, those based on performance and others written, and then I was informed of a brand-spanking-new poetry competition being held for unpublished Australian females over aged 18. Hitch was that it was for 30 poems and that there was three months to go. Luck was that my laptop hard drive died three weeks out of the submission date and with it the majority of the poems I had paced myself to write in preparation. Classically my desktop decided to give out too three days before deadline leaving me with no means of retyping what I'd lost or composing brand new. These things are expected though, Baudelaire was a drug addict and Milton went blind, so I'd say I got off relatively lightly.

Now as technically the competition guidelines stated that none of the works were to have been previously published, and I don't have the strength left to go into the debate between online vs. print publishing and the fight between them for superiorioty and credibility, I'm going to share two with you that I didn't end up including in the final cut. The first I thought I had lost with the laptops decline though had the neat advantage of stumbling upon in its original hard-physical-written copy only this morning under a collection of papers on my desk. The second was the first thing I wrote after I thought I'd lost everything, and though I did initially intend to submit it along as well, forgot about it and probably appropriately so, as it speaks largely of works gone to me, which though may be ideal to share in a space such as this is a little odd and sloppy to carry on about in a larger collection of different works.

Crumble

The cut of the cliff edge as it

touches the sky,

a places' emptiness thats never been filled,

expect perhaps the odd wander from

centuries to days ago,

unassuming they make a way

though the gentle torrent of waters clear

that flow quickly beneath languid ferns

tea stained sandstone escarpments of rock

that hang around us as a shelter.

These cliffs will fall, he says,

one day,

and getting through these parts will be much

more difficult.

It's already hard whisper the scratches on

my legs; I have to learn to live with the

feeling of flies on my skin.

I have to try and be here all the time,

though even to be here now, in such a place

whilst in this place, I can't.

I dread the night steady in its approach,

to lie in the darkness and wait for a

rest that will not come, for the ability

to fall asleep on my own is lost,

I must trick myself into slumber through

boredom from overstimulation,

this idea of laying down and choosing

to sleep is a freedom unwanted. The shame.

These things and more fester and

consume the minutes I lay awake in this black.

A solid shadow of impenetrable silence,

as if a weight of rock has crumbled

and trapped me beneath it.

Lower Wollangambe, inspiration and location of conception for Crumble

Hard drive

They're gone now and most of them

didn't get the chance to live, as living as

a bunch of sounds, vowels and black

hovering punctuation can be, less so

now than ever when confined to an eternity

as pixels that waver on a

glowing screen. Fragments that corrupt

and implode neatly without show

in a rectangular box that decides,

without mind or reason,

to never illuminate again. The loss

is unsatisfactory, there’s no metaphorical

embers to scrape together and cradle

here, just the absence of a buzz and

the receipt from a man who told

you there's no hope. The life saver of man,

the thing to take him roaring into the

future has left this woman with half-

remembered phrases of expressions she

doesn't dare return back to the emotional

localities from which they initially

sprung; but she will. Like the traces of

old hair styles in hair they shape

memory: bed sheets blue to suit the mood;

a metaphorical analogy between the ecstasy

of the cunt and a midsummer bushfire; books

pressuring existence whilst another nestles

his head against a gutter; notions of totalising

Hegelian philosophy used to justify

infidelity; fortresses made of flesh and

bone; scatting phrases to defeat the weight

of intellectualism in an attempt to reinvigorate

the dying imagination whilst composing an

essay on Keats; sitting on a beach from

my mother’s youth; lover's and their

birthdays; a humorous rollick through the

debauchery of a contemporary music festival

as a way of distancing and yet coming to

terms with being just one more in the

crowd... Just silliness.

Things I should let lay forgotten, to instead

take up as I so oft rant about the chance of becoming

anew, and yet not, the loss I feel of these

words that not only were concretised manifestations

of my mind I could share and show off, but were

the very processes by which I could let carry on,

to discard through poetical distract, a means

of figuring out how to feel.

Gone entirely now, the experience, the feelings,

their conception and expression, perhaps this is

the ultimate release. Still I wait for the call

that might send them tumbling back.

* Truth be it, this number was by no means picked out the air, it was indeed the exact number of books read by a far superiorly intelligent female I acquainted late in the year previous as she so hurriedly informed me on our first date. I liked it, it sounded impressive initially, though when broken down to under seven a month, around one and a half a week and a general generous estimate of 200 pages a day, it sounded entirely reasonable to a girl unemployed and strongly considering flunking Uni that year.