Mediocre Epic(P)

PART I

He takes a knife
From the fifteen dollars
Seventy-three cents knife block
On the greasy Laminex
In the massively empty kitchen
In a blandly horrific
Three bedroom home
In a suburb far far away
He takes the brightest knife
To dull the pain

An incision from left to right
Accentuates his eyes
Makes him look
Beautiful
Reflected
In the unwashed stainless steel
Or clownlike
Like the sideshow that he is
It makes him look
Happy
Like he is laughing
Or screaming

In his favourite dreams
Everyone
Hates his intestines
The doctors shake their heads
Off their necks
Freud is silent
(Thinking about his mother)
His girlfriend leaves him
His teachers peer gingerly
Choke back their wisdom
And point out instead the brilliance of the sky
A pale shade of something
Reflected twice
In his brimming laughing
Mind’s eyes

Furrowed painted faces
Not as beautiful as his own
Mouth verses from the Bibles
(Available in a variety of designs and colours)
The sacred word of contract prophets
Unheard over the roar of mediocrity
A deluge rising from their cracked skulls
Drowning

Feeding time


PART II

God was great.
He’d achieved so much
In less than a week! and
Still had time for a break
From His busy schedule

Years wasted away
Hunched on special
Ergonomically-designed
Instruments of torture
Tracking mounds of life
As they stumble through
Fluorescent labrynths
Piled high with riches

Built by God’s own hand
These divine truths of commerce
Outlined in glary neon haloes
Blinding

A Life
Full of pages
Tattered buckled with the years
Bound with countless ropes
Around countless poles
On countless street corners
Forgotten torn wildly inaccurate depictions
Of nottobemissedevents
He had missed

He’d been busy

To be continued.

Small Note Found in Jacket Pocket (P)

You know me
You must remember
Half-hearted questions
To half-stammered answers
Trembling eyelash and twitching mouth
Causing earthquakes and tidal waves
Down further south
While your teflon glances
Left me conveniently incontinent

You must remember
An arm sliding softly
And skilfully towards you
As I kept my gaze balanced
In the space in between you
And your other reflected
In the glass that would hold you

Remember when
Your face
Pressed against this cradle
Slumped on the edge of sleep
As close as you were able:
Spirals unnumbered
Overlaid the fields
Luminous in my wake
On a day that would break
If I loved it too long

In luscious pain I
Asked water and sky
To give you to me
Then I left and…
You don’t remember?

Stone (P)

In darkness I call
My fluorescent dove
To light the way
Along this lonely shore

From a thousand stones
Laid bare at my feet
I pick the one
Most unsure of its place

The shape of this stone
All it can tell
I smell its cracks and
Listen to its weight

I speak to it
With plastic fingers
Draw its name
Wait for its stony silence

At last, a pattern,
Hints of morphologies
A familiar theme
Buried in its flesh

Thoughts fly from me
In bursts, in furies
This stone decodes and encodes
And my eyes widen.

You are a Saxophone, Solo (P)

Three steps in and already
I like your shapeless hair,
And your stubborn belly,
Where your music comes from.

Your arms
Are trunks, downy and
Your stubble sparks
Red lights.

I sit down.

You open your eyes too filled with
Bright water blue glass and
Your fingers are moving too fast and
Your lungs are breathing two vast and
You scream listen through
The articulate brass –
I can’t look away.

Toilet break.

Tip your world
Upside down and
Your spit slips out
Of that pale golden horn,
Hammered with flowers
Before you were born.

Saxophone solo.

Smokey wooden
Air pressure
Builds inside me
Just watching you.

I can’t get up.

Your sisters smile,
You laugh silent and
Blow my brains out.
Your brothers smile and
My wide eyed traps
Wait for you to fall in.

Superior Vena Cava (SS)

Blue Line. The lights on the wall of the tunnel flashed past and flashed past and flashed past and they made me dizzy and I started thinking about my Mum sitting in front of the window with the sun making her old tired face neon bright like the Coke Sign in Kings Cross, and Oscar kneeling obediently stuffed at her feet. It made me start to cry and then I blacked out. When I came back there was a stupid bitch with her legs crossed sitting facing me and she was wearing a fucking tight snakeskin dress that was so short I could see her skid-marked mauve panties which were probably from Target. I gagged loudly at her and she gave me this look that made me want to rub a kilo of Ajax Oven Cleaner into her pussy with a scourer, to try and get rid of that fetid smell. I jumped up and pushed past her dirty big potato knees and lurched down the aisle, and I turned around and shot evil into the back of her head, and the cockroaches crawling around in her nasty Nice 'n' Easy Platinum Blonde hair got excited, started swarming all over her face. Then her phone rang; sounded like Greensleeves or maybe it was an icecream truck grinding her sagging arse into the ashphalt in front of my primary school.
I sat on a short seat facing away from everyone because I really couldn't handle any more fucking ugly people today. I really couldn't. I sat and I pulled out the timetable and opened it to the middle, where the map of the world was. All the different coloured lines snaked all over the page and I got hard so I put my hand into my pocket with the hole in it and touched myself. I could've come right then and there but I'd lost my Gowings handkerchief on the Red Line last week and I hated being sticky, especially on Thursday, late night shopping.
Some faggots were drinking Bundaberg Rum for fucks sake and the shit that came out of their mouths was embarassing to say the least. I turned around and they were right behind me, and they had some girl lodged in between them, she was staring straight ahead while one of the chumps had his hand on her tit. All three of them were wearing South Sydney Rabbitohs jerseys, and they stank like Bundaberg Rum and I felt the MacDonalds Happy Meal that was slowly rotting in my stomach do a backflip. I shot each of them in the head once with my Thompson Auto Deluxe and sprayed their carcasses with Glen 20, which kills the bacteria that cause bad smells. The big turd on the left honked like an ass and a fleck of spit landed on the girl's face. She didn't even notice.

Pink Line. I woke up and we were stopped at Campbelltown and there was no one in the carriage. I sat up like a rabbit and grabbed my bags and ran down the steps and out the closing doors. My arm got stuck but I pulled really hard and then my bag got stuck but I really yanked it and the handle ripped and all my timetables were in that bag. I screamed at the fucking guard to stop the fucking train my timetables are still on the train but the fuckhead didn't hear me and it was then I felt very, very sick. I cried and punched the train as it pulled away and I threw a 5 kilogram bag of Jiffy Firelighters at the guard's stomach. He doubled over and fell, but his belt got snagged on the handle just outside the door and so he got dragged upside down along the platform and his face was a bloody mess by the time he finally fell free, 50 metres away. And as the train picked up speed it suddenly slammed into the pylon holding up the overbridge, which collapsed crushing the driver beyond recognition and that night his wife was being fucked in the arse by the Russian delicatessen owner from next door and when she got the call from the station office at 5:37am she screamed for three hours and then when their only son was finally asleep in his own room she took 29 Zyban Tablets with a bottle of Midori Melon Liqueur while staring at herself in the unwashed pans in the sink.
I watched the train disappear into the night and I wondered how the fuck I was going to once again get the timetables for every single bus, train, ferry, tram and monorail service in Sydney. I threw up into the pot of a large artificial plant and noticed stringy bits of something that may have been the lettuce in my KFC Bacon and Cheese Tower but I wasn't sure.

Yellow Line. There was a Sydney Ferries ferry chugging along in this gorgeous pool of white light, and I closed my eyes for a second. I saw the inside of the ferry, actually inside it, into the engine, and the engine was a glowing rod of energy that pushed the ferry through the water. I felt my hand touch the engine, and these lines started crawling over my skin, marking the routes that my blood travelled, each stop carefully inscribed, timetables rolling out into infinity, precise, absolute, no margin for error. And the trains and buses and ferries and taxis and trams and monorails and cars all interlocked and flowed as one, always on time, no peak hour, no traffic jams, no road rage, no accidents, the streets paved with golden neon signs and green lights and buildings covered in gigantic smiles complete and whole.

Green Line. A really campy Lebanese fag sat next to me and lit a Peter Jackson Ultra Mild and then smoked it while staring out the window onto the main street of Guildford in this horribly vacant way and you could tell that there was nothing behind those glassy green eyes. But he was so beautiful and I tried to smile at him but all I could manage was a sad smirk. So instead I grabbed the cigarette out of his hand, and while it was still lit I ground it into his Nivea for Men cleansed and toned complexion and when I took the cigarette away there was a dark, smoking black hole which turned out to be his mouth and what it said was: Do you mind not sitting so close to me you like smell really bad do you ever even shower? And your teeth are like green jesus!
So I kissed him on the mouth and breathed in the smoke that was billowing from this gaping hole and I could see inside him. He was a hollow shell filled with smoke and the inside of this shell was lined with thick black tar. It was then I realised that I knew this cocksucker, that his face was 12 foot high and was right now smiling down on a seething mass of Sunday shoppers in the Central Business District of Sydney. I fell in love with him not long after that.

Grand Opening

This blog will now double as my writing showcase, because I'm too lazy to create my own. And it'll be convenient too, once I head overseas.

Wheels in motion

I have my passport. Tomorrow I will be injected with Hep A, Hep B and Typhoid. Friday I get paid quite a bit money for doing something. In a month I should have enough money to buy my plane ticket. Things are happening! I am going overseas! I'm a bit excited. :)

In other news, I will be beginning my free Producer/Presenter Training at the FBI (radio that is :) next week. I think I'll start off as a producer, and then if I've got the balls, Sydney may be treated to my dulcet tones in the not too distant future. Yay.

I've decided the best way to learn German is to use it, so as often as I can, I'll be posting things in German. They'll start off fairly silly and irrelevant, but who knows, in a few months I may be writing novels and posting them in Deutsch! Über yay.

Guten tag. Ich heiße Philip. Ich arbeit in SBS TV. Ich mag mein arbeit nicht! Aber, ich werde aufenthalt bis ich wegfliegen!

Yes, I can see all the German speakers doubling over with laughter, but at least I'm trying goddamit!

This season, try on a new good cause: Free Tibet!

I just watched Kundun. For the past few months I've been under the Tibetan spell. It all started with that damn Austrian skier Heinrich Harrer and his book Seven Years in Tibet. And now it's a major motion picture (which I haven't seen yet). Of course, many of you now know all about Tibet and have bought the book and seen the movie and wept at how wonderful Brad is. We'll come back to Mr Pitt, but first, I'd just like to say how annoyed at myself I am for getting swept up in the Tibet-mania that's found its way into the public consciousness.

Yes, it does seem that Tibet has been given the sharp pointy end and that China is very naughty. Well, actually, it's the Chinese Communist Party that's very naughty, and it's not only fucked Tibet, it's also fucked the Chinese people, including, but not limited to practitioners of Falun Gong. But these things, and all the other human rights abuses, genocides, civil wars etc go through stages of popularity, don't they? For a few weeks (sometimes even months) the Hollywood producers pose next to the brave, visionary filmmakers, the reporters mob the heroes, everyone reads the book and sees the movie, there's a gala dinner to raise money, and we all pat ourselves on the back for caring for our fellow man. And then we move on to the next earth shattering news. Like Michael Jackson's wandering hands. Months after the Dateline "world first" story on the Darfur crisis has been forgotten, the people in Darfur are still suffering, and only the committed lefties still pay any attention.

**Why is it that being "left" means giving a shit that people are killing other people for believing in one type of god rather than another? It never ceases to amaze and sicken me that a lot of people - a fucking shitload of human beings - are more interested in who's shagging who on Big Brother, than about the hundreds of Iraqis dying under their occupation by the Bush Regime. And they're 'the right'.**

Wow, what a diversion. All I wanted to do was complain about Martin Scorsese. Kundun was great, ok, I enjoyed it, it brought Tibetan culture to life for me in a way no book could. But my god, do I hate the way he over-over-over uses cross-fades. What's wrong with a simple, elegant, nicely-timed cut, for god's sake! And that superfast pan thing he does. Jesus. It seems this guy has appointed himself as the spiritual and secular leader of Hollywood. Like he's the only bloody American making 'important' films in this day and age. He's almost right, but then he forgets P.T. Anderson, David Lynch...and a few others who I can't think of right now. I have to say though, I also liked the only other movie of his I've seen, Gangs of New York. But again, those fucking cross-fades. Grrrr. They make me not to watch any of his other 'masterpieces'. Someone should introduce him to Mr Kubrick, or Mr Tarkovsky. Those boys knew a transition was no toy to be waved around willy-nilly.

Back to Brad though. I love the guy. I really do. He's incredibly hot, not even taking into account that he's pushing 40. He's a very good actor and has almost never made a bad film (I refuse to see Thelma and Louise, so I can continue to make that claim). He has excellent taste in music (during the audio commentary for Fight Club he mentions that both he and Edward Norton were pushing to have Radiohead on the soundtrack. Can you imagine how much cooler that already cool movie would have been with, say Lucky playing while that very major thing at the end of the movie happens?) *Sits in ecstacy for a moment* Brad is now on a tv commercial for the Make Poverty History campaign, looking very nice in black and white I might add, along with 32 other famous people. I have some issues that I've been wrestling with on this whole campaign. Firstly, stars lending their names to any 'good cause' has always made me flinch a little. There's something a bit tacky about the whole thing, no matter how besplattered with cow dung while hugging malnourished children in Rwanda they may be. Also, this article by John Pilger in the Green Left Weekly certainly puts a dampner on the whole Live 8 Bono/Geldof party atmosphere. The Live 8 concerts, the G8 promises to eradicate third world debt, and Brad, are all intricately linked. (I knew I could fit it in somewhere) It seems celebrities can tell lies too, not just politicians.

Just to wrap everything up. You've witnessed first hand that how even someone who gives a shit about the world can be distracted by a ruggedly handsome man in a white t-shirt and jeans, or the overzealous use of dissolves, or any one of hundreds of other things. You've also seen how confused I am about everything. One can only imagine how those poor people in all parts of the 'free' world must feel, being bombarded with beautiful, beguiling images of a commercial Utopia while their leaders tell them everything is going to be ok, and no-one even trying to tell them otherwise. Even the 'lefties' don't know what they're doing most of the time, regardless of their good intentions.

My, I've had a nice rant in my blog this evening. If only I was this talkative in real life. I'd have real friends then, I know it.

I Might Be Wrong (Actually I Probably Am)

Listening to the live recording of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood at KRCW Studios in New York. The show is called Sounds Eclectic, which I listen to over the internet, and for the most part I like it. Every week they have a special guest who plays live. The guests are usually excellent. Radiohead spoke to the host, Nick Harcourt, who annoys the hell out of me with his American-tinged British accent. Call me superficial, I don't care. I can't take anything he says seriously. During the interview, Thom Yorke sometimes strikes me as being very slightly arrogant, but then, when you've got a voice and a mind like that, I guess you have the right. And he's rather cute :)

All the songs sound great. There's a small audience that cheers occasionally, but most of it is just Thom and Jonny sounding very real. I love the little extra lines Thom throws in, like in Punch Up at a Wedding he sings "Don't infect me with your poisons (of which there are many)".

I now have a German Language CD-ROM. I WILL use it at least 15 mins everyday.