Water

Riding home the other night I wanted to be a river and so I was a river. And the place where that wanting happened was right where I saw the mysterious owl a while back. I was wondering if those two moments are connected.

All I can think of is it's a spot where the network of roads and paths meets a much older network of creeks and rivers - one made by the restlessness of my human family, the other by the restlessness of water. And since we're mostly water maybe there is just one restlessness? It won't stop wriggling. We rely on that restlessness to ferry oxygen and whatnot around the network of creeks and rivers inside us.

(Sure we have a heart to move that stuff around and the world doesn't. The thing that moves water around the world is heat and gravity, which is to say everything in the universe. So the world's heart is everything in the universe, including us.)

What I wrote the other day and then deleted was that when I was a river I wanted to pour myself into the world's wounds. It seemed too grandiose a thing to write just like that. But fuck it: rivers have grandiose feelings: that's just how it is: they just pour themselves endlessly into the mother ocean: deal with it. Don't pretend they have tiny feelings about work and mortgages and renovations and waiting for tradies, cos they don't.

Anyway it just seemed a natural thing. The wounds were there. Why not pour yourself out and into them? Why not?

When I was a mountain the stuff just oozed out of me. It seeped out of the high places and ran down rocks and poured itself out into the world like a giddy cyclist crossing from the road to the river path, guarded by the memory of an owl.

Later it was 2014 so I was at work. I was staring at a big steel garbage skip and then I was the steel, full of old crap like broken chairs and bent racks and such. All I felt was homesickness, a dull aching want to be ore again back beneath the soil. Down there we felt the pull of two suns. One we'd never seen but was rumoured to be way out somewhere beyond our home. It was hard to imagine but that's what the old stories said; now I was steel I saw it every day, so I'd have something to say when I got back home, that was for sure. The other was its child: the molten core of the living earth. It kept us warm. X

Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too

Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too and so I was, for a little bit, a river on a bicycle, running through the streets. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. I poured myself downhill into the world.

Then yesterday in the hall I got bored of not being a mountain: "Fuck this not being a mountain shit, I'm gonna be a mountain!"

And so I was a mountain. I liked it. Time was different. Birds flew around me and found little holes in me and laid their eggs and raised their young and shat on me. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. The wind was just so: whoosh. It was pretty cool. You should have been there.

 Then today I was in the mall. This little red-headed kid was just staring upward, face all screwed up, looking amazed. I looked up to see what all the amaze was about and there was the sky: huge as a motherfucker, just there. I was like fuck yeah kid, I know how you feel. Look at it all full of clouds and such. That's where the oceans go when they get hot or when they just need a holiday. Whole oceans just hanging up there, taking in the view. X

world

world
wo(night)rld
wo(ni(river)ght)rld
wo(ni(ri(world)ver)ght)rld

Fuck yeah language

I did this thing today where I gave away the chance to have an interesting day. I swapped it for money. This was 2014, it was a thing back then. We called it 'work'. I had three jobs of work. Today I was a four billion year old technician in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, a giant cavern on the side of an ancient river. The wind blows past it and it sings, it can't help it. It's like a giant termite mound just there, all shot through with tunnels and secrets.

I was walking around at work, four billion years old and then I got bored and decided to be a system of rivers and oceans, walking around the convention centre. As luck would have it I had an ocean inside me. Some time before LIFE had done this thing where it wrapped bits of ocean in membranes and sent them off onto land to see what was what. I was one of those. My veins were rivers, rushing around. My bones marine fossils or somesuch.

This was back in 2014 and we had this thing called language

o man
It was so fine
you could do almost anything with it
ah it's hard to explain and maybe you had to be there but man
it was really something

FUCK Y
            E
                 A
                         H L A N G U A G E
it was so good

I was drunk on it, which had its dangers. One time I got too drunk and I vomited a whole bunch of it up, letters and syllables blergh! all over the floor like
aft me i a the whe is is is an t y u i o p

Outside there was some giant explosion going on. I could see it through the window. It hung in the sky and made things warm. You could see by the light of it. It felt dangerous and daring, navigating by the light of an explosion. I liked it. X