Wasp Summer

By Silence

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 10:23:00 GMT

Angrily, I learn loving with you
It's painfully slow.
Uncertain children, shy of reprimand,
Rarely act. Only when they feel they will not fail.

And silently.
How hard it is to learn a lover in silence!
Communion is the gently-rising journey,
Rocking, rising like a sleeper train into the Mountains.

But silence, in itself, is not communion.
Silence, like jail, bars the body, and allows
Only the mind its awesome width.
So much so, that sometimes, I fight loneliness
Even as you're inside me
Separated by silence.

by Sam, after Rilke

Experimental Poetry: Lilith

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:13:23 GMT

lilith is empty
lilith is a bitch
lilith is the first feminist
lilith is attacked from every angle by this unique group of women with a drive for understanding one of the most controversial female archetypes

lilith is but one of twenty names by which that first woman was known and each name is supposed to contain a "secret of sexual mysticism"
lilith is invoked by an adept bent on the destruction of his plane of existence
lilith was adam's first wife

lilith is really short
lilith is weird
lilith is arguably identified with the owl in isaiah 34

lilith is a gypsy who was turned out by her people in italy in the year 1420
lilith is between these two streets
lilith is represented as a powerfully sexual woman against whom men and babies felt they had few defenses and
lilith is thus a female night demon

lilith is athletically built
lilith is well respected in electronic music circles
lilith is about many things but first and foremost is the music
lilith is displayed as a drop of fire
lilith is just something else

lilith is winsome
lilith is the perfect seductress
lilith is not a mother goddess; she is not an archetype for the loyal
lilith is humanity

lilith is still reading
lilith is one example of the process
lilith is a model for oppressed womanhood
lilith is an innovative decision support system

lilith is not a planet
lilith is 118 days with a daily motion of 3 degrees
lilith is the primal egregore of unfettered feminine sexual dominance and exaltation
lilith is equal to adam from the beginning of time
lilith is has "a set time for everything”

Five Weeks

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:01:05 GMT

From the hall Liam doesn't hear her breathing. Her chair is stiff-spined with absence. The cat is grumpy in the chair, head on paws, ears alert, willing her to return. An acrid flicker from beyond the front door. A very uncharacteristic cigarette dies on the path. What shape is she in? Liam considers deciding for them both. Fuck it. Just fuck it. But he's stubborn and can stay angry a long time. He's going to wait her out. Force her to do the deciding. Decide something.

Through the door, Liam sees that paper delivery man, the one they hear spitting from his van as he does the rounds, has paused at the end of the driveway, staring back at the verandah. “Do you ever want to commit social suicide,” she's asking? “You know, just give everything you own away? Lick the eye of some random at work, wank on a packed train, lie naked in the road outside your house? Tell everyone what you really think but invent stuff to make it more hurtful. Punch your father. Write devastating letters to your exes that will make them kill themselves in shame. Resign by postcard – 'wish you were here, fuckers'?”

“No,” says the paper delivery man. “No. It's 5 in the morning.”

“I know,” she says. “You're here. Can you give me a lift to the river?”

“No,” he says. “I can't.” He canters back to his van. He hauls the side door shut and quickly disappears behind the van.

“Can't what?” she asks as the van pulls away, “Caaaaaaaaaaaaaant.” She giggles. “One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. Five birds on the phone line, five coffees through the night,” – she's wired - “five cigarettes at dawn, lighters drawn. Five weeks. Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive. Weeeeeeeks.” She does the worst impressions. This one is of the Two Weeks lady in Total Recall. Her Christopher Walken is pretty bad too, thinks Liam.

Her voice has almost no tone at this volume. “Five weeks. One maybe baby.” She giggles again. “You're a Maybe Baby, little thing.”

Magdalaina sighs heavily, tries reasoning with it, “I'd be a terrible mother. Liam would probably be a great Dad, but he and I can't even look after each other, so how would we turn you into a decent human being, hey? I'd be dooming you to spend your adulthood sitting in community health centre foyers with wheezy Nonnas and alcoholics waiting for your counselling sessions. It's no way to live.”

Liam would go back upstairs but he's been reading the same paragraph for an hour, mind wandering into angry, imaginary conversations with Laine where she always says the worst, shitty thing to end it and he always loses.

Whark-whark-whark-whark. The five crows shoulder-to-shoulder on the phone line have a collective thought and fly off. “Yeah,” says Laine. “Leave when it gets too hard... God, I'm sick of myself.”

She hauls herself up off the step and coughs, dislodging some nicotine gunk from her almost virginal lungs. She spits neatly into the grass. “Coz she's a lady,” Laine sings. With one hand, vaguely, she scratches the side of her head, her imaginary 'cat ear' where Liam scratches when she's pretending to be a cat all over him.

She softly touches her belly. “No, no, baby, no, no, no. It's not meant to be accidental like this. You know, we're meant to make love and I'm meant to say, “I'm ready now. I want you to come in me. I want to feel it,” and he's meant to say “Are you sure?” with this look of pride and I'm meant to say, “I'm really sure,” and he looks at me deeply and lovingly and we kiss, we're deep in each other's mouths. We're so close and we come together and you're conceived deliberately, in joy, and you grow up smart and beautiful and we manage to educate you well and you love us and we'd kill for you and we cuddle you all the time and tell you you're so loved, tell you every day. That's how it was meant to be, kiddo. You're not meant to ever feel doubt about your life and here we are talking and you can feel that I'm having trouble with you and it's not fair on you. It's not fair either way.”

In the darkness behind the end of the light in the hall, Liam unclenches every muscle in his body. Starting with his hands, he rolls his mind up his arms, over his neck and skull and then works down his spine from his shoulders. Untensing his solar plexus is the hardest. Focusing on it makes his throat burn and his heart feel crispy.

He steps into the weak dawn leaking onto the floorboards in the hallway and says softly, “Do you want a glass of water, Laine?” She lets out all her breath quickly as if it will make them both disappear. “Laine?”

“Why are you awake?” Laine turns her head just enough to avoid Liam's eyes, flexes her right knee in and out, pushes her knuckle into her sore hip.

“Because I could hear the delivery man's breathing when you were asking him those questions. Do you want to lie naked in the road?”

“Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes,” indignant.

“Laine, it doesn't matter how it starts. How did you start?”

“It does matter. Probably drunk and angry too. We'll fuck him up if we start out wrong.”

“It's a him?”

She stops flexing and knuckling. Starts again. “Shut. Up.”

Liam stops breathing.

Laine hisses “Shuut UP. SHUT uup,” like a ham actor testing emphasis. She lets her tears chase liquid snot over her mouth until she's disgusted enough then hoiks and spits neatly into the grass.

Liam breathes again, “So ladylike.”

“Shut up. Can I have a tissue?”

“Only if you come in. The cat misses you.”

“Why?”

“I miss you too. You've been gone for five weeks.”

Laine turns, is a shadow haloed in the watery dawn. Liam can't see her eyes.

“I'm OK. I'm back in the room now.”

Woman's Own Erotic Manifesto

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:38:16 GMT

Important	Useless
Erotica	Porn
Roleplaying	Missionary
Seduction	Sleaze
Adventure	Exploitation
Communication	Vacancy
Experimentation	Danger
Intensity	Pain
Condoms	Shaving
Sweat	Lingerie

Willkommen in Berlin

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:58:13 GMT

Tiergarten is lush under the low, soft grey canopy. Strangers (frequently Americans, never Berliners) say hallo. Dogs are small and pampered in this genteel quarter. Children are exposed to culture early. The city is lush with summer rain. There are no reported water shortages here and as they do not hose the streets down with drinking water each morning, as the all-female street crews do in Barcelona, I am free to take very hot baths as frequently as I choose.

I have chased dextrous red squirrels, sleek hares and relaxed wasps in abundance here. I've seen photos of suburban foxes and wild baby boar. Berlin is on the cusp. Berlin's always on the cusp. Each generation has had its stories of how the city will soon be finished, vanished, build out, built under or finally at peace. The stories are sediment beneath or rough render slapped on its twisting body.

Then there is the smell. Berlin's sewer scents leap from the carefully-wrought grates and smash you in the face. Every few hundred metres, I am confronted by the odiferous breath of a city never afraid to delve amongst its own shit, rifle through its foundation stones, to cannabalise, resymbolise, rebuild and all the while mock. Destroying and beginning again. That's why I am here.

I realise now the reasons I came here were pretexts that I, prematurely, perhaps, but necessarily, burnt like books. I needed to free the energy to start rifling through my foundation stones, grading, discarding, admiring old work with new eyes in order to design and build my better self. This is my work now. Not the tedious admin, the wrong pleasures sacrificed. The work has begun in uncertainty, surprise, gratitude and adrenaline, as I always begin. Reining in my excitement while secretly imagining my legacy. Better concentrate on the work, though. It's time to develop some discipline.