procastinationable

for ash

You told me I could talk about her but I didn’t, whats death between old but new friends? Its just some elses pain. We all die, we all live. I struggle with that.

When I was 19 my mother died of secondary lymphatic cancer. I have said that a few times in my life. She was 48, twice the age my sister was turning on that exact day. There were only three flowers left on the new bouganvillia, the day before there were four. My dad picked them and pressed them.

My sister had an exam that day, I had been asleep and when I woke up the silver chain nurse was in mums room. That’s how death begins. But it ends slowly, graspingly, hesitantly sometimes she wondered if she had been dying for all these years, sometimes I wonder if I noticed. I had never seen a dead body, I haven’t seen one since. I had never seen a cremation inside its just another log to burn. I had never seen grey bones and flesh dust. But now I have, as do we all at some stage and if im honest sometimes im bitter for my loss, sometimes im angry. Its not useful these feelings but they come like guilt without thought. I want her here sometimes, I want her to eat cake or drink wine. For her to have those years where she can relax, nag my sister about having a baby, prod me for any boy goss. I want to want it more for her than for me but I don’t. there are births and jobs and life particles I want her in. I am a child again wanting everything. Life makes us adults and death makes us children. It’s a mixture of hurt and guilt and foot stomping tantrum, I haven’t moved on, I don’t know how you do. People do I guess, I seem to just collect my past and sling it over my shoulder, its big, kind of like a house, maybe I can live in it when my lease expires.

oh spring. i like it whatever city im in. its the shy season, blushing jasmin and iris and fresias. doesnt shout at you the way winter does or force its weight on you like summer not busy with melancholy like autumn. just quietly and softly smelling like itself. a season for bugs and loners as much as lovers and bees.

its quite a moment when you realise you have nothing at all to say.

the ballad of hairyface

oh hairy face art thou proud ?
for all that doth maketh thou shroud
dark strands of cloth do hiddeth thee
but one razor doth maketh free
what more can passeth thy time
than plucketh thy face and maketh thy rhyme
oh hairyface the world doth not yet see
the future of transgender springeth in thee

the ballad of unknowing

I know not, what i know
and yet as i know that i dont know
i somehow know, that not knowing
is the knowing of those in the know.

blobby

fitzroy hemmed in by a margin, fringed by a fringe. marginalia. who is the outside, would the real outsider please raise your hand. dont intellectualise, dont intellectualise. smith st is not a discourse on power. its just a street. some people live by it, some on it most through it. when a policeman talks to a homeless man, when there are four police cars before there is one ambulance to an unconscious Aborignal man in the middle of the street. these are moments outside of the centre. i choose to see what i see, i read what i read. whats real. whats just me. who knows.

suburbs read like that. mapped out, fenced in. an artery of dirt and blood and too much wine running under the skin.

god i even rhyme unconciously, thats truly disturbing, Dr Zeus and Tennyson have a lot to answer for. i really need to do some excercise bloborama needs to move it move it. unfortunately i also need to write 6000 words read two books and write a tute presentation in the next two weeks. all bodes well for blobomatic becoming the champion blobmeister at the blobothon. blob blob. having said that i resolutely decide to do some social activies this weekend before blobotron self digests.

oh for the love of cheese

something happens when u eat too much cheese, its not a good thing. its also not fatal, or paradigm shifting. its just not that great. i ate too much cheese. i blame sander mostly. damn those house mates that make a nice dinner which may contain just a little too much cheese for me.

nothing but cheese happened today. a beautiful moment on the way home from work, a cold but beautiful light shower partial clouds and light not easy to explain but soft and cold and sweet. thatsall.

the outside, airside skyway.always the light. never unknowable, never unreadable always just as you are, there. when i look up there, when im on down there. air and sky and ground. it might not be the sea but theres a planet here somewhere above and beneath and around the dirty concrete.

from the vault

Miserable git

I walked along the Merri Creek from the Yarra to Clifton hill, a moody walk, walking with my head full of unspoken conversations and well thought out rebuttals. This story is about me. I have never written a short story before, its inevitable its going to be about me , what else do I know, and I’m hopelessly and indelibly self absorbed. Walking along Merri Creek was as peaceful as this claustrophobic and polluted city can get, its pretty and if you don’t look at the rubbish that has collected in the trees thanks to the freak storm and subsequent floods and if you don’t analyse the smells on the breeze too much it could almost elevate me from the miserable gittness I am currently projecting. You’ll notice two things in my writing style immediately, I have little understanding of tense and grammar. After a while, or maybe now, if you are quick to judge, you might pick up that this format doesn’t sit well on me. It writes like I have tried on my mum’s shoulder padded suit jacket and it feels resolutely uncomfortable. I’m more at home in the blanket of prose and rambling observational analysis that is much like my life, I like to excuse my lack of direction with a sense of freedom from form. It’s a thin veil at the best of times but at worst derails me with the abject lack in the anything ventured ,anything gained department. But what really happened on my walk in inner city Melbourne? I did what I always do when walking in the city , I day dreamed about a violent confrontation ending in me dead in a pile of blood. Not generally what you would expect to be running through a late twenties female brain walking in the sunshine on a summers day now is it, well actually is it? I have always wondered if this wasn’t actually that uncommon amongst people, whether it was in fact maybe nothing more than some innate survival mechanism, role playing for the worst case scenario. I don’t do it out of paranoia, there is no fear there. I am not one of the many women who feel unsafe in unlit streets or chastise themselves for taking unnecessary risks, I feel like sometimes I am willing these things to happen just to see how I would react to them. If in a moment of crisis I would infact rise to the challenge or dissolve into a puddle of uselessness. Invariably I die, which given my theory on role playing doesn’t really bode well for my abilities in the fight or flight area. Today’s day dream involved a botched mugging resulting in a knife wound to an artery and a rapidly spouting loss of blood. There of course was no one around, not those two Nike wearing 30 somethings in matching track pants and certainly not that doctor looking person across the creek. I am of course in a part of the creek which doesn’t back on to houses, a major road or a café strip. And I am able to call an ambulance but unable to give them a specific location. There are twists and subplots and multiple variations on the ending .I stumble on to a mainroad only to find my blood supply negligible and die within meters of assistance, (that’s the gothic tragedy ending), I die alone in a puddle of blood toying with ideas of self and meaning and the finality of death (the existentialist ending), I call some old flame or unrequited love/ am found by some cute person, who helps me into the next life by holding my hand (Mills and Boon version) or the social realist version, where I’m in heaps of pain, it takes ages to die and I’m shit scared the guys going to come back and do something torturous to me. The last is the ending I usually settle on. I don’t have much time for mills and boon, Wuthering heights or bloody existentialism bar the occasional crisis or two. I didn’t have a single one of these scenarios attack me while I was walking in National Park in Tasmania, seemingly the city brings it on, something about the way the air tastes, the feel of concrete under your feet and the knowledge that you and everything around you is in a process akin to fetid decomposition. In Tasmania I sang and nutted out some complexities in my friends break up, I wrote little poems in the sand and I thought how nice it would be to just live, bum like on the beach in my tent. Backpackers didn’t menace me, sounds in the night were never anything but possums and the moderate panic about getting bitten by a snake was more grounded in a real and present danger than a thing to pass the time. There was still a sense of decomposition but also the regeneration that comes when things live again from the things that die, I don’t feel that in the city, not often. Today, I had a minor epiphany where I thought maybe infact the four hypothesis’s I have to explain my fixation with violent ends may infact be null, those being 1. I’m a miserable git, wallowing in miserable gitness who is too inherently gutless to top her self and is vaguely hoping someone else will do it for her 2. I’m a morbid git with an overactive imagination 3. Role playing 4. I watch too many cop shows. Today I thought maybe all this prose writing has been shielding me from my true calling, that having moved on from being a rather appalling poetry writer ,to an email writer, I could now see the new phase of my life becoming clearer. Crime novelist. I don’t have to be good at it. People seem to read this shit religiously, regardless of its general crapness. I guess my love of cop shows implicates me in this degradation of culture. Well I seem to have the multiple of scenarios ready to go, I have some obstacles of course. Apart from the obvious ones, lack of tense, no knowledge of grammar/spelling/punctuation, a real aversion to narrative structure and well lets face it, dialogue just has me a little stumped. How is it that you write a conversation that doesn’t sound like , he said, she said, and then he said, pauses to scratch her head, which by this time is well and truly over the idea of the conversation. Now the writer of the Monkeys Mask, name always alludes me, she did crime novel meets prose and well, it is interesting but not that interesting and its certainly not an easy configuration. So there are options, I give up is always the first suggestion and put my violent fixation down to any number of Freudian foibles or any number of the explanations listed above. Or in an effort of self improvement that I’m not sure is altogether worthy of the crapness of the genre picked, I learn just how it is you do these things and do them. There’s a friend of mine, who if ever reading this will be positively frothing at the mouth at the opportunity to tell me to stop being a miserable git, get off my arse and do what ever the hell needs to be done to stop my incessant whining, god it pleases me a little too much the level of irritation this could cause. How though do you learn to do dialogue and why can’t my calling be beautiful magic realism and linguistically complex novels of Nobel peace prize winning capabilities. Surely One Hundred Years of Solitude started on a walk by a river ? Which river , I don’t know, If I did then I would go there and hope to god the scenarios I start to see are channeling a less credibility challenged source. I dread the thought, new novel by young, although not that young crime novelist Kelly Sherree Warner (suddenly my middle name becomes an appropriate indicator) called One Hundred Years, One Hundred Ways to Die. I’m not sure that any of my friends would disown me as such, I think they are a little less shallow than that but a few would get a bit of perverse satisfaction in the fact that I , as an irritating youngster gave them no end of shit for reading Mills and Boon and telling me the spice girls were really new wave feminists. New Wave Feminists like Linda Lapplante is pushing some serious boundaries man. My friends would forgive me, my sister would be secretly delighted, an excuse to read pulp fiction at last and my dad well he’d be sure to make my web page with interesting links to crime scene investigations and statistics on crime in contemporary society. Would and could I sleep? It might mean my nightmares finally don’t involve serial killers, although I’m not sure that is going to do anything about the crocodiles that like to chase me frequently, altho in a stunning new plot twist artificially intelligent reptiles are used by cunning scientist to mask his attacks on women. Would there always be a social justice/environmentalist/ esoteric meta narrative to atone for my sins of cheap thrills and utilitarian sentence structure? Would I start each chapter with a quote from a decent well respected author just to show I can read and have some sense of perspective? Or would I revel in my trash and write papers on how, like reality TV trash novels enrich culture by representing the needs and desires of the lowest common denominator. Would I find love, fame, fortune, would I lend my hand to world domination by product placement, cross marketing and the endorsement of rightwing reactionaries. By now I realise that this isn’t and never was going to be a short story. I just can’t shut up for long enough to develop a character and devise a plot. And quite frankly the quick demise of my career from potential quality writer to crime novelist in the space of three small pages has gotten me more than a little miserable. And as an aside, how about the lack of paragraphs.

Marvin makes some noise

but i have a button for transcending

and roger here, he is good with a hammer

when i am transcendental

no one will worry that i have taken offence because i will be the fence.
dont give up on the pickets, my carpenter will be here shortly.
oh bugger maybe my carpenter was THE carpenter and therefore wont be along shortly as he got a little hung up. well maybe not the transcendental fence but the transcendental pile of white pickets.

buddha's better, a gardener and closer to the ground.

tommorrows the beginning of the year of living less sensitively and less tempestuously. I shall be the fence/pile of pickets. buddha will tend my petunias and marvin is NOT invited. altho i hear Bob is nice this time of year.

and Caliban says to Prospero, do your homework monkey boy. Prospero says to Caliban, who you calling monkey boy, fish face. The tempest according to kel , copyright 2005 .

i have to say my eyes are sore and i have a nasty feeling that the days of New Zealands cultural pluralism maybe at an end. damn those bastard conservatives they just keep on breeding. surely we can isolate the gene for that.

aah the curse of gradation

now a b is a high c , not a low d as i thought if theres one thing i hate its a credit. i have long struggled with my 'rather fail than be mediocrely crap' mentality thats why i dont participate in team sports or chess. its dumb, i know. My tutor particularly liked my annotised bibliography, which true to form i found mildly insulting. Im not competitive but i like to win, how does that work? anyway at least i wont have performance anxiety about my next one, the only way is up from here. uni god what was i thinking havent i had all these moments years ago, all my grand expectations and fits of abject acknowledgement of my innate dumbness (evidenced by that spectacularly wanky sentence) the words seem to get longer but they seem to say less.

dairy free chocolates alright aye, sat in the hippy section of uni today wondering what classes all these people go to. i dont got none of them in mine its about time i had a uni buddy. the boy that talks to me in anthrop makes me nervous cause he's a bit intelligent or at least very well versed in politics and history and assumes i know what the hell he is talking, which i dont. the cute (very proberbly gay) boy in my film class keeps wagging when im not and my whole AIS class feels a little sorry for me after my presentation effort - the girl whose presentation it was today said "oh no im doing a kelly, and not breathing" she was almost as red as me. and english is just dumb. im in such avoidance of the ten articles i printed out to read tonight.

personality #456

waa waa

personality #457

grrrr

i would like to feel

hard. to build an exoskeletal membrane between me and the world at least for sometimes. im so attached to words nuances shifts perceptions preconceptions. i would like to let it go. i feel like a nerve ending exposed. need a blowtorch and a litre of morphine that orta do it.

im sorry that i live in my emotions, i just dont know where else to go.

not sleepy, not sneezy, not dopey

uni frustration, headache, people talking, heater on too high and annoying short films about sweet bugger all. except harvey crumpet, he was cool, Andrej says clay mation should have died in the seventies i dont recon. i like it. i was going to write you a little poem espousing your virtues as absurdly as i could but then i got grumpy. so now im grumpy and the girl standing at the computer next to me is going to get it in the face if she looks at what Im writing any more.

violence is next to godliness, extremely pointless.

im grumpy but i wanted to say nice things. you should sing, because its a beautiful thing when you do. i will leave it at that.

singing for change on a suburban tram
the guy beside me has a tshirt with a picture of Ruddock and a picture of Hitler, it says, spot the difference, i want to say its the hat.

another guy, guitar in hand he works the crowd , "its an honour and a priviledge to play for you this morning " We look down, around. People with headaches just like mine, wish silently that they hadn't got on the Australian Idol tram. He sings well though, he sounds like someone young, maybe 30, his tone conversational, radio announcer, he looks like he has slept rough for a long time. his face is old, heroin aged, sunhardened. when he talks its a well rehearsed act. I wonder what he would say if i met him on his own turf. He sings. we are just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year, and i think maybe he's right. Its the same bowl but we are two different fish. i am closer to them, the black clothed coffee sucking producted hair women going to do things but not close enough that i don't feel the gravitational pull of the cracks in the pavement. Its not so hard to fall through. Just take your eyes off the ground. It feels wrong and right to give him my two dollars. I dont pity him, i would rather him have my money than the wilderness society, but there is something wrong here, something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.

News just in

Badgers say "Sod off"

its true

Keith, President elect of the Gophers against mercantile mischief, read the GAMM manifesto yesterday at a press conference. "Badgers", keith said, "have for too long sold silly hats for individual gain, its time," he exclaimed "for state intstituted chin stroking to be given serious thought."

Many in the crowd agreed. Although some, it has to be noted, did not.

me and nannas have a lot in common. we dont like to run much. we like tea. we're both fond of words like poppit. and well there is the flowers thing. i love flowers like a nanna. i love them most especially on days like today when theres sun shine. where grey nurse sky has given way to the blood of the queen. they smell , often more than i do, and thats enough my friend/s to make me love a lot of things. not things like poo though. its spring sprinkles and theres two weeks till my next assessment induced existential crisis woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

yep

its really important to breathe when giving a class presentation, also one should not arrive ten minutes late or with a full bladder. this may empede a successful transfer of information. these things you learn at university aparently.

i am waiting for devine intervention, or medical. Providential dentures that facilitate social cohesion. I am an inverterbrate on the desert boot of the world. flying high on the epidermis of a belated bovine. we are here, beneath you, squished, the little particles of not much flying on the bottom of quite alot.

thank god

"It is a far far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than toput forth on the troubled seas of thought." (J. K. Galbraith)

its voodoo in my springtime

Maybe I am them. Maybe I resist, I fight, I try but I open my mouth and maybe I am them. Invader. I have only the right to concur. To agree. I am not you. I am not an authentic voice my knowledge comes from a class room not from experience. But write culture out of a city and create a vacuum. Write kids out of the city. where are they then, this non space.Culture is not site specific. Culture isn’t frozen imbedded in the last native tree on st georges terrace. I don’t want to be a positivist. And maybe that’s what Len taught me at Murdoch, his culture is strong his language coming back, his dads stories strong his country wudjuck bibbumen strong, himself strong proud pissed off. I know its not everyones experience and he was lucky to have language still and country. but im never going to say that noongar cultures gone or dead or buried or alien to city because I know some crew who have resisted and persisted for too long to be written out like that. I don’t know why I am doing this study when u step out of the classroom none of it matters, none of its real. No one thinks about the construction of identity, they just do it. Who am I to challenge it either, I have no lived experience what I am doing is writing other peoples identity like I own it fuck it, fuck it. Colonizing lived experience with academic identity politics, i should have done accounting.

im really out of sync. two steps behind. mouthing words to songs that were playing yesterday. i cant talk to people i know or the ones that i dont. its interesting and frustrating.

dumb rhymes for dumb times

what is it, really. what does it, actually. who are you, totally. where has it, happily. its a flip and a trick and a going nowhere. its a hit and a spit and a feeling somewhere. a lie in a basement, a truth in an attic. a freudian shit and a physco's somatic. its a nothing, its a no one. its a fuck off its a come on. im kind of asleep and im kind of awake. fucked up and sorted, output intake.