grace; 09

''grace; 09'' (click:"grace; 09")+(transition:"fade")[a jetty is a long weekend stretched out, limitless & belly side up] (click:"long")+(transition:"fade")[a rusted mirage pleading] (click:"rusted")+(transition:"fade")[creaking with penciled in likelihoods and salt-coated plywood] (click:"plywood")+(transition:"fade")[I eat fish for the [[first]] time in a decade]

//''I am not a disciplined person ''// I would liken the start of a poem to wrestling eels from a rusted exhaust pipe somewhere out in the umbre desert. Knuckles taught as my grip on them tightens and their slimy, muscular bodies wriggle in earnest, driven by a primal fear of existing beyond the figment of allegory. Every day I wrote-learn discipline from scratch. I lose hours to the ritual of becoming. If this is a rat race, I am the smallest, weakest rat. There is no triumph, only sweat staining the dirt and the guttural sting of a slow decline that burns away in symphonic, broken cycles. (text-style:"emboss")[URGENT ACTION REQUIRED]: Don’t turn back. Shatter your achilles heel over and over until it forgets how to hold you up. I haven’t replied to your email. I’m watching live aerial videography of humpback whales on their migration up past the Kimberley. Rust-coloured cliff faces smile down at a slow calf looping playfully around his mother. He doesn’t know what an email is– but he knows how to [[swim.]]

//''Imagining fission in a state of regret ''// It’s unfortunate that people, once they have finished being people in the mythology of our lives, are demoted from somewhere to put all of our love to being a lesson. It’s grimy and utilitarian but their greatest gift - my greatest gift - is course correcting power in the destiny of others. And destiny is made up of infuriatingly little pay-offs - I will always know how to perfectly stack a dishwasher because when I was 19 I fell for the girl next door and we moved in together three months later. No matter the shattering heartbreak I will always know how to min-max stacking a dishwasher. Or you’ll work with someone every Sunday for six years and then never see them again, but when it comes to choosing music for your wedding it’ll be Silverchair because he’d always blast Straight Lines at knock-offs and that leaked into your discographic bloodstream for good. (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[Maybe unfortunate isn’t the right word. There is surely a nobility in taking care of this power. Of treating it with the same respect you might a bomb; gingerly and with tenderness reserved for life-altering impact. When driving along the coast road, I notice that my friend’s brother has memorised where all the potholes are dotted along our route. Even as the sun dies his muscle memory guides us from one side of the asphalt to the other, wheels bouncing gently over the edge and onto the dirt. For every dodge there has been at least one thunk of the mudguard that hasn’t been] [[forgotten.]]

//''Flee cycles ''// You have caught me spoon-feeding my amygdala again. We are circling over deep waters and a pearl-white plastic cup is my only companion. I take solace in small citations of daily satisfaction but up here is lawless and clean - the saline inkpot pulsates below, welcoming my death. That’s so dramatic but I am a catastrophic thinker first and a rival against gratuity second. As a person who worships ritual I have eased comfortably into the solo itinerary of a one hour flight from Melbourne to Sydney. I check in via mobile two days before, I don’t throw up in the Uber while driving through Essendon, and I arrive with enough time to look mysterious yet approachable reading Text’s latest essay collection by a promising young queer at the Jetstar boarding gate. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve lent into this fear knowingly, encouraging it to take up space where I can’t afford to let others root. In 57 days I will take a four hour flight to Perth and spend the longest time (bar a South Africa trip as a baby) that I ever have in the air. I have life’s great motivators of love and unvisited maritime museums drawing me across the country, yet I remain markedly terrified. In preparation I am disentangling this paralysis from reality, inviting reason to pull up a [[chair.]]

''//Accept the extreme dry as permanent// '' Enchanting hymns of the Facebook dial-tone nestle against my tympanic membrane; the opening tonality of FMaj7 pulls together the notes of ''F, A, C'' and ''E'' in what is both a call for analogue nostalgia and attention power play. This communion on screen pinches and tears at the kilometres between us. The empty space is holy, the wanting a prayer. The jostling of absence hits like eight years old again and being roughly towel-dried at the edge of an ocean pool, feet gripping the sharp and speckled concrete. Salt is on our fingertips and in our lungs, burning away at a feeling of being present. We smoke fat fillets of blushed salmon beneath the Illawarra Flame Tree. Maple syrup and brown sugar brine permeates the sharp blusters of wind that strike in beneath proudly worn new jackets, and we hear over the radio that they’re introducing biosecurity measures against fire ants in New South Wales. (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[There are moments from childhood that are so stark - stark enough that I can smell the burnt skins of jacket potatoes wrapped in foil - but surrounded by static. I think there is only so much room for these memories to make a bed in quantum slivers of grey matter suffocated by consumption. I’m growing tired of the neon flashes, micro glimpses into strangers’ worlds, intangible hope intersected by 30-second weeknight eats. It gets too much and I think about when everything is still. The air hangs heavy on the hottest day of the year - the millennium drought rages on while the Bureau’s Head of Climate Analysis prophesies this ‘hot, dry future’. Our group of fifteen or so have mindlessly dispersed around the edge of the riverbed that cuts determinedly through scorched dirt and sprawling, long grass. Nobody speaks but the sound of the bush approaches deafening - the hum of insects rolling over us as I feel my cells attuning in response. This week, thousands of people around the world queue to buy the first iPhone. My dad brings it home in a box and we marvel at the technology; a wonder of human’s determination to] [[connect.]]

''grace; 09'' a jetty is a long weekend stretched out, limitless & belly side up a rusted mirage pleading creaking with penciled in likelihoods and salt-coated plywood I eat fish for the first time in a decade (click:"fish")+(transition:"fade")[think about my ancestors] (click:"ancestors")+(transition:"fade")[their embalmed histories clinging like oysters ] (click:"embalmed")+(transition:"fade")[to the hulls of wooden beluga whales ] (click:"hulls")+(transition:"fade")[I read on wikipedia about how jeff buckley died] (click:"died")+(transition:"fade")[fully clothed and alone in the inky, freezing waters of the mississippi river] (click:"inky")+(transition:"fade")[I cry into my pillow about it for [[weeks]]]

''grace; 09'' a jetty is a long weekend stretched out, limitless & belly side up a rusted mirage pleading creaking with penciled in likelihoods and salt-coated plywood I eat fish for the first time in a decade think about my ancestors their embalmed histories clinging like oysters to the hulls of wooden beluga whales I read on wikipedia about how jeff buckley died fully clothed and alone in the inky, freezing waters of the mississippi river I cry into my pillow about it for weeks stare into the deep from the edge of the jetty before breaking wishbones in the shallows again and again (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[the oldest mollusc is known to have lived for over 500 years] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[but most only live for a few hours, their home in the sediment a waiting room for memory] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[I might die, just out of spite, or from this feeling of sudden dousing] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[maybe this moment is exactly what you said it was] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[and it just needed time to swill in kelp-strewn oceanic alchemy] (click:"kelp")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[percolating in the ripples of hindsight and strange shimmering deep-sea dregs ] (click:"strange")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[at easter, I attend my friend’s church and bow my head] (click:"church")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[praying to the god that lives behind the waves and lies amongst the tussock grass] (click:"tussock")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[I am not devout, but revel in the feeling of togetherness, fears drowned by the refracting colours] (click:"fears")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[from an imposing stain glass [[portrait]] of our holy mother]

//''Tethered twin masks wink at each other ''// I visited two lakes this winter - Eildon and King. The marshes of East Gippsland ebb and guide us towards the island where my friend’s grandfather’s cottage sits, overlooking the glassy inlet. Eurasian coots stand proudly guarding the jetty and then tuck down their heads at dusk. I think about what it will be like to submerge my flat chest in water. Will salt cling to the scars, marking the ocean’s territory in the genealogical cartography of my transition? Bathing makes me think of cleansing, and cleansing makes me think of people who take more than they are offered. In the courtyard in East Brunswick, he posits that a stubborn can of whole peeled tomatoes paints a terrible fortune in our relationship to god. I tell him to piss off and he slams the flyscreen. Now everyone I love has to elbow him out of the way to take up residence in my [[skin.]]

''grace; 09'' a jetty is a long weekend stretched out, limitless & belly side up a rusted mirage pleading creaking with penciled in likelihoods and salt-coated plywood I eat fish for the first time in a decade think about my ancestors their embalmed histories clinging like oysters to the hulls of wooden beluga whales I read on wikipedia about how jeff buckley died fully clothed and alone in the inky, freezing waters of the mississippi river I cry into my pillow about it for weeks stare into the deep from the edge of the jetty before breaking wishbones in the shallows again and again (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[the oldest mollusc is known to have lived for over 500 years] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[but most only live for a few hours, their home in the sediment a waiting room for memory] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[I might die, just out of spite, or from this feeling of sudden dousing] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[maybe this moment is exactly what you said it was] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[and it just needed time to swill in kelp-strewn oceanic alchemy] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[percolating in the ripples of hindsight and strange shimmering deep-sea dregs] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[at easter, I attend my friend’s church and bow my head] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[praying to the god that lives behind the waves and lies amongst the tussock grass] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[I am not devout, but revel in the feeling of togetherness, fears drowned by the refracting colours] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[from an imposing stain glass portrait of our holy mother] (click:"holy")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[her woeful eyes bargaining with me to let go of the suffering— ] (click:"bargaining")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[in much the same way, millions of sand particles force my perspective downward, to the beginning of things] (click:"beginning")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[when I feel disconnected I brave the web of [[digital]] astrological co-minglers]

''grace; 09'' a jetty is a long weekend stretched out, limitless & belly side up a rusted mirage pleading creaking with penciled in likelihoods and salt-coated plywood I eat fish for the first time in a decade think about my ancestors their embalmed histories clinging like oysters to the hulls of wooden beluga whales I read on wikipedia about how jeff buckley died fully clothed and alone in the inky, freezing waters of the mississippi river I cry into my pillow about it for weeks stare into the deep from the edge of the jetty before breaking wishbones in the shallows again and again (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[the oldest mollusc is known to have lived for over 500 years] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[but most only live for a few hours, their home in the sediment a waiting room for memory] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[I might die, just out of spite, or from this feeling of sudden dousing] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[maybe this moment is exactly what you said it was] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[and it just needed time to swill in kelp-strewn oceanic alchemy] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[percolating in the ripples of hindsight and strange shimmering deep-sea dregs] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[at easter, I attend my friend’s church and bow my head] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[praying to the god that lives behind the waves and lies amongst the tussock grass] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[I am not devout, but revel in the feeling of togetherness, fears drowned by the refracting colours] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[from an imposing stain glass portrait of our holy mother] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[her woeful eyes bargaining with me to let go of the suffering—] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[in much the same way, millions of sand particles force my perspective downward, to the beginning of things] (text-colour:#FFFAFA)[when I feel disconnected I brave the web of digital astrological co-minglers] (click:"brave")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[ignoring where I don’t sit right in the constellation of serif fonts and greyscale fruit scans] (click:"fruit")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[she asks if I’ve ever tried writing things down, tilting her head to mock the stray dog hairs on my creased collar] (click:"tilting")+(transition:"fade")+(text-colour:#FFFAFA)[once, I reply and recall the chipped brick exterior of my childhood library, the quote about — too dark inside of a dog— blares neon in a dream, brother]

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grace; 09