…utiful book containing all the good work I have done in verse form since round about Y2K – when the world was intact, computers were optional: way back then. My friend wrote, I have been reading your story about how the printing got done. He said he liked it, “just as I immensely appreciate every post you make.” I hadn’t realised he was reading me, it feels like a sweet subtle connecting of our souls over all the cold lonely dark miles of sea and…
…re smiling tolerantly. The newly-arrived ladies wave when we get off. “Have a great time in Berlin,” my friend says. The love. The moon. The insanity. The mess. The three drunken Polish guys who ask for money, shoving a filthy coffee cup under my nose and rattling it. “Für beer und weed?” The gasp that leaps out of me when we reach street level and a low tide of litter has buried, like old snow, the bottom of all the tyres on all the bicycles lock…
…et. His voice came out whiny and high and aggrieved. He went all the way round behind the counter to reason with the airline crew member, waving his boarding pass: But you don’t understand! We’re all travelling together! Her expression was priceless. She tried a couple of times to explain the airline’s policy, too polite to point out that he and his friends were probably seated together and would all be reunited after fifty metres of tarmac in ano…
…ing when you daren’t look left or right, you must keep following the scent underwater with your nose until you find its home cave, that treasure. Just as I reached for my mountaintop – balloon, umbrella, cave – a large man standing nearby said, “Guten Morgen meine Damen und Herren, Ihre Fahrkarten, bitte.” Tickets, please. He went first to the woman on my right and I just pressed on, shaping a tide of sand across the page. The outer part of my min…
…him plaintively. Clearly he had brought no strawberry cake. He tickled her under her chin. “Und?” he asked her. “Hast du keine Lust mehr, Bücher zu lesen?” Don’t you feel like reading books anymore? How Germans speak to dogs – courteously, seriously, with familiarity – makes me truly love them. You’ll see some raddled punker and some lady in expensive trainers, their two dogs tangle in a sniffing wreath along the river path and they both stand the…
…, anything that is pursued of one’s own free will, is oriented towards the common good, and is unpaid. The formality makes it sound almost stultifying but there is all this generosity and warmth beating away underneath. As Australia turns itself into a vast gulag for imprisoning children, and other countries up and down the escape corridor into Europe close and razor wire their borders, Berliners are opening refugee cafes, holding garage sales and…
…dy felt like sending me a postcard through the mail. I just love postcards. Occasionally I send them to myself. Weeks later I came home and opened my postbox at the door of my new sublet apartment with its old-fashioned sign, “Briefe und Zeitungen,” letters and newspapers. This torrent fell out. As we get closer to Christmas I want to remind myself and us all that this world is made up of seven billion diverse humans, and that by and large, humans…
…huff when I politely told him you talk plenty and listen little and you have tired us, please we don’t want your company today. The little black and white doggoe who fell in love and came to coil around my feet everywhere I sat down. The overpriced food und undercleaned toilets. The stripey palms, one of whom had capsized into the river. The water soft and idle and fresh and fast moving on our skins. The sensation of sleeping 13 hours at a time l…
…A friend of mine driving her nephew and niece said, they were arguing in the back. One of them had a goldfish that had died. Girl, 3, asked, But why do we die? She kept asking. And if we die, why do we live? Finally her brother (4) said, exasperated, Joanna don’t you geddit? We’re all just trying to become god. (There was a pause. Then my friend said he said): And I already am….
…ounding, crouching in my car outside a cafe ringing a friend, to say can I come stay with you, can I come right now. In the last months of his life Dad had a carer who lived with them, and she loved him and he also loved her. Her husband would come home from work every evening and climb the stairs to shake Dad’s hand solemnly. Meanwhile the rest of the world talked over him. Every few days a nurse, or sometimes two nurses, came to give the carer t…
…ous Danish crowns, Euros, Australian dollars, and a shard of porcelain I found in Lisbon. “I’d really like to get rid of these,” I told her, picking through the various sizes and counting out the right change with agonizing slowness. “Sie haben gut gesungen,” she offered brightly: You must have sung really well. It took me a moment. “You mean because… people have thrown these… in the street?” “Yes,” she said, beaming, mocking herself just a little…
…g home sore from a non-massage and felt glad of the girl with her spunky round voice and her star-spangled stockings crossed over each other, comfortably loosely, as she leaned against the door. Glad of the blue sky when I came out of the train, its creamy little penguins of cloud. I stepped round nine Australians in the street who were saying to one another, patiently, “I want to do the museum and then the Wall,” “Well, I thought you wanted to do…
…er, bolder, breathlessly. We’ve arrived! I buy the journal. We walk on. My companion guides me round a brownish squelch coiled on the stones. I look closer. “That – is just a big fat brown hair scrunchie.” He laughs. “And yet…” I am pushing my bicycle, I don’t want to risk a bad slip, a bad slide. I tell him about the dog mess I found on my first visit to New York, wrapped in a flattened red singlet bag and shaped exactly like the drawing of a hea…
…althy? I tipped the plastic duck-beaked bottle to show her. “This stuff is complete poison. It goes down the drain and comes back out the tap, goes into our rivers. There is a brand called – Frog, I think they sell it here, you might try it.” I strove to sound as casual and off-handed as I could. This is perhaps the five hundredth such conversation I have had in a grocery store with a stranger and I’ve got skills. “Have you ever thought about tryi…
…hat is simply the way we do it. Last weekend tramping a thirty kilometre round between two scenic villages I lost sight of the trail of intermittent blue dots painted every now and then onto a tree trunk to guide walkers. Just as we reached the fork and needed our blue dot there it was. How come this trail was so well marked and others have been ill-signed and in disrepair? My partner shrugged. “The trails are maintained by different hiking clubs…
…s opposed to the hustle and throng of the medina where people greet us ‘welcome, welcome,’ and return smiles with great warmth and ease and employ the most genteelly probing sales techniques in (they say) the world. This young man is named ‘given by god,’ or ‘gifts of god,’ and we looked up his name in a list of the 99 names of Allah which, I only slowly realised as we were discussing these names with a nearby restauranteur, are perhaps not so muc…
…ng bottles for the deposit all over the city. I gave her two euros saying, Sie haben solch eine schöne Stimme, eine echt schöne Stimme. You have such a lovely voice, a really beautiful voice. This was perfectly true and she knew it. We thanked each other bashfully and she went off down the swaying carriage where to my surprise people pulled out their wallets and broke the fourth wall. I, too, am afraid to sing in public; I, too, have a voice. Her…
…it to them personally, I thought if you needed such a thing it might be easier to just come and choose it for yourself under cover of the night. I indicated a rowdy crowd of revellers who live around the church at the bottom of our road, one of them in a fragile house ingeniously made from a stack of opened umbrellas. Dreckig, the little boy said again. Das müssen Sie wegwerfen, you must throw it away. I said, well, if after a couple of days no o…
…mp3 download of ‘Hey, Big Splendour’ – the debut album of Cathoel & the New Government: a collective of musicians who love jazz, folk, funk, punk, country, poetry, & silence. We met on subways & on the street, in cafes & bars, at gigs, in Melbourne and New York….
