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 #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.”

Handwritten Pages #23 Return to Sender

Return to Sender

As the mail dwindled to bills and junk mail, so did his supply of scrap paper for shopping lists, reminders, numbers to call for appointments and snippets of love letters he wrote to his wife, dead now for three years; and the secrets he told to the person he imagined at the end of the address marked, “Return to Sender.”

Handwritten Pages #21 Read Me

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Fumbling in the darkness you believe you can read the lovers’ braille of gooseflesh on my arms. Except you stutter like a toddler, stuck sucking simple words found in my nipples; repetitively mouthing without nuance or inflection, nor grasping the meaning of what you read. I hold the shaft of the pen you want to write our history with, squeeze the ink dry. You’ll read my note on the table in the morning.

Handwritten Pages #20 Sunlight

He grasped the early morning shafts of sunlight striking through the gaps in the curtains. Strips of sunbeams speckled with diamonds of dust. Harvested like shards of honeycomb, stored in jars and placed around the house as lanterns. He spooned mouthfuls of amber twilight from the jars and ate the light to satiate the darkness.

 

Handwritten Pages #19 The Baptismal Slough

Under the shelter of the summer storms clouds he waited, held within a womb of humidity, his body slick with sweat.

As he drew breaths, held deeply then exhaled slowly, the skies rippled and pulsed, heaved and held back their waves before splitting above him in a gushing of waters.

The tackiness of his sweat sloughed off like old skin beneath the baptism of new rain.

A midwife to his own rebirth.

Renewed skin, perfect in its newest gloss, dressed in the lifetime of variables: family, work, love, pain, futility, faith, doubt, hope and sex, until worn threadbare, stained and tattered. 

And he would wait for the next storm, for another baptism, another cleansing, seed to impregnate the soil with his vision of himself.

 

* with acknowledgement to Bruce Dawe and Shakespeare

Handwritten Pages #18 The Kiss

Their kiss was a reintroduction to joy; the passionate self-belief everything would be ok in a screwed up world when the screwed-uppedness manifested in a constant shit-storm that threatened to drown them and salt the earth in the aftermath.
To get there, invitations slipped in as ordinary moments as the antithesis to pain’s physical form: meals in Tupperware containers reheated in microwaves and eaten with grief and gratitude; cups of tea with phones ignored and flowers as prayers for healing.
And in the end, the scraping away and the shovelling of shit to make manure for a broken soil leading to the kiss of forgiveness and the parched desert of intimacy soaked with rain awaiting the bloom of wild flowers.

Handwritten Pages #17

 

Standing inside the phone booth, its panes of glass crumbled to hail stones on the concrete floor, with the receiver cradled against my ear, I pretend to put coins in the slot while listening to the dial tone. The static drone a soundtrack to the anonymity of pain. Stabbing the numbers in a sequence I have never forgotten, hoping to call the ghosts of the future to tell them not to wait up for me.

Handwritten Pages #16

 

Autumn of Cheeseburgers

I walk through the autumn of cheeseburger wrappers drifting on the updraft of car exhaust with only enough change in my pocket to buy you and me an ice cream cone.