Graffiti

 

to erase me is to wipe
away the graffiti as though
it can make up for the 
late night tags written
under cover of darkness
where I wear the smell
of spray cans as deodorant 
and the rattle of the ball bearing
the music of our minds

This came about because my daughters had this whiteboard in the lounge room when they were practicing dance and Physie routines. The board was clean and next to it was the whiteboard marker and eraser. I debated getting the black whiteboard marker from my pencil case (I am a teacher after all) but stuck with the purple and wrote this up on the spur of the moment, tapping into the impermanency of the surface and the content of the poem. Tonight the girls are using the white board to play games of Hangman.

As a side note, does anyone else have trouble spelling “graffiti”? I always mix up the number of “f’s” or “t’s” but thankfully I wrote it correctly.

I Am The King

I’m riding past the fibro houses linked like rosary beads, counting them as you would Hail Marys because only Mary understands housing commission. And everyone knows at least one teenage mum. I stole the bike from someone’s front yard but told mum I found it in a hard rubbish clean up. Gave it a coat of paint from a spray can. Maybe one day I’ll drop it back where it came from. Right now, I am king and priest.

Weekend Blackouts

No, not a weekend of debauchery but snaffling a few minutes for some creativity in the midst of a crazy busy week.

Meanwhile the novella lies neglected waiting for a brief respite from the chaos to get more words out and finish it. The end of it is so very close.

Anyway, blackout poetry is like little moments of clarity. Find the right words and erase the rest.

Random Calligraphy

Below is a collection of sample sentences and ideas I’ve had, playing around with new markers and pens.

Handwritten Pages #30 Carapace

“Every time you slam the door a fairy loses its wings,” her mother yelled down the hallway.
She leant against the door, watching and waiting for the wings to float down; one onto her pillow and the other beside the laptop on her desk. Their thin, steel-like frames and metallic membranes were added like plates to the almost-finished coat on the dressmaker’s mannequin.
Slipping it off the mannequin and dressing herself in it, she confronted her image in the mirror, the light reflecting a kaleidoscope of colours on the carapace she wore.
I will not need to fly, she whispered, when I can wear armour.

Handwritten Pages #28 Mix Tape

We were two halves, each a side of a mix tape. Made up of songs that created us in our understanding of the other.
Yet your memory of me is a bootleg, a copy passed around by word of mouth. Continually copied until the reproduction was a new original you made of me in an act of collective forgetting; when the memory of the song was more powerful than the original.
How often did we have to respool the cassette when it caught in the tape deck; wind it back on with a pen jammed in the cogs? I doubt you’d recognise the original tune now that it’s stretched and warped.
I want you to press “Play” for old time’s sake. Would you?

Handwritten Pages #27 Origami Heart

We knew him as the boy who flew a kite from the classroom window on a very windy day. He said it was made from pages of the local newspaper pilfered off a random driveway on the way to school, straws from the canteen, and half-dried scraps of sticky tape. A loose thread pulled from the strap of his backpack anchored his flight of fancy. It gained altitude and we added our own strings to let it fly higher.
We asked him why he did it.
He said he had an origami heart.
The next day the wind was still and he did not return. At an assembly we found out he took his life.
The day after, we made kites. Some flew, however briefly; others smashed into the ground. I don’t think we truly understood why there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in an object.

Handwritten Pages #26 Knitting Fragments

After watching Disney on DVD as foreplay, they fall to playing at prince and princess. He murmurs refrains of lullabies as he pulses within her. She hums them back as incantations, weaving the fragments into a sonic mosaic as the template for the hagiography of the life they are trying to create.
They ponder what will knit in the darkened void of conception; if naïve belief in hopeful songs will tread lightly over the darker presence of evil in the harshness of the life to come. Concerned how to balance the dark and light.
The little death makes her shudder in fearful bliss.

Handwritten Pages #25 Grace

I hid half of you inside my womb; a secret you knowingly planted but wanted to forget.
Two halves made whole then multiplied by division along lines we drew down each other’s bodies.
Until the time I presented her to you and showed you who you were, who you are and who you could be.
And you had the audacity to ask for her to be called Grace.

Handwritten Pages #24 Tethering

Towering above her by mere centimetres, her daughter on the cusp of identities offered her a hairbrush and elastic. “Plait, please.”
“You can do it yourself.”
“But you’re better at it.”
With the elastic snapped to her wrist she brushed through her daughter’s hair with one strand floating as the lightest tether. As the mother of wands and hands she gathered up the loose strand as an act of sacramental mythos and believed a rope of three cords was a firm anchor. Otherwise her daughter would ride out on open waters from the security of sanctuary even while she harboured her own childhood fears.
Abruptly interrupted.
“Mum, can I cut my hair short?”
Her daughter the helium balloon, straining at the string.
“One day, sweetheart.”