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

world

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

Swanston St

'If you belieeeeeeeeeeeve'
- Cher

1. The morning was crisp and bright and clear and cold and I rode to work through it. I was running late for work so I rode down Swanston St even though I fear death.

2. Swanston St is an experimental sound installation run by buskers. It's a bit like a giant open-mic night, but reversed. In an open mic night everyone plays in the same space, and you distribute the acts through time. In the Swanston St installation everyone plays at the same time and the acts are distributed in space instead. To hear someone else you move a few metres in one direction or another.

3. Riding along it, like I was doing, was pretty much like spinning the dial on an old-school radio. Every few seconds one signal receded and the next one took over; in between was the thrum of traffic like white noise. White noise separates signals on the radio dial like white space separates pictures in a gallery or words in a poem.

4. hey
i am
a
poem look
at all the
whiteness

if i am lucky
i will transgress something
and then i can
be famous

5. Here though like I said everything was separated by traffic sound, which is the true song of humanity in 2014, the song we keep singing to everyone and everything, beneath our breath and through our breath:

zang-tumb-tumb-zang-zang-tuuumb tatatatatatatata picpacpampacpacpicpampampac uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

ZANG-TUMB
TUMB-TUMB
TUUUUUM

6. Anyway I was lucky and I was not late, in either the late-to-work sense or the 'late Michael Pulsford' sense. I am pleased about that because I like being alive. The thing I like about it is being able to experience, also you get to do things. The world unfolds with you in it: just so. It squirms like a puppy. I am scratching its belly by mashing my fingers into this black bit of the world in front of me with language on it and language comes out of it and it squirms into your eyes and you can read it. These shapes are the happy squeals of the world when I tickle it. X