Tomorrow is my Mum’s birthday, she’s eighty. Tomorrow is already today in Brisbane because Australia is tomorrowland. I rang her on the videophone we used to so dread in my youth. She looks pretty in her top and skirt. I had a red ‘H’ and a purple ‘B’ from the cafe table where I sat […]
I love how in Germany restaurants closed on Mondays will say, Montag ist Ruhetag. Monday is our day of peace. And every single day, week in, week out, when you are finished your work and knocking off for the day, home time is Feierabend: celebration-evening. People will say to one another consolingly at the checkout: […]
I was at a dinner party and came over all poorly. In fact I thought I might throw up and had to kind of bolt from the room. Must’ve been the Tramadol, an opiate fed to me by my beloved who had acquired it from his father, who suffers from extreme chronic pain. “They’re not […]
I must have lived in Berlin too long because it’s screeching hot on a Sunday afternoon, I am exhausted, and somehow the idea has crept into my head that I would like to drink a martini. It won’t dislodge. Opening my parents’ liquor cabinet is a dispiriting experience. It is a small, oval, glass-panelled thing […]
Six beautiful teenage men were doing parkour across the roof of the sunken restrooms by the harbour. Ropes gently knocking against masts, land-passengers drowsing at cafe tables in the sun, and this buoyant half-dozen pruning their dedication, lightness, skill. It was wonderful to watch. They do it in total silence, wearing soft shoes and baggy […]
On New Year’s Eve after a quiet dinner party at the home of a Romanian artist & Swedish poet, I climbed the round hill that gives Kreuzberg its name: cross mountain. In the dark it resembled Borobudur, with heads facing outwards as far as the eye could reach like ten hundred white buddhas. Three different, […]
I feel widowed. I am winnowing. Dancing through this manuscript one last time with my tiny stave ~ of ink ~ finding out the hollow places where the old log gives ~ and pressing down ~ and crumbling those away, a crocodile who stores everything edible beneath the melted snowline, in a slurry ~ these […]