wildness

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Dancing in the dark. It’s so beautiful. I heard about it back in Melbourne, where it was born (and so was I), and just kept not going because I felt too shy to go on my own. In Berlin I signed up for the No Lights No Lycra facebook page and waited for them to […]

Berlin, Berlin, I cannot but love you. Unbelievable, unmistakeable. The contrast to Copenhagen is immediate. At the airport nothing works. Every toilet is barred with tape and the man in the kiosk is grumpy but funny. He raises his eyebrows and shrugs. We are laughing. The train smells faintly of old urine. When we get […]

Scampering down the steep stone steps to gain the river path I met our neighbour, skulking behind the boat shed. He was smoking pot. I told him so. “You’re smoking pot!” ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it’s just so…’ ~ waving his hand to encompass the day, the deepening afternoon, the greenery. “I agree,” I said, and […]

When I walk between the quiet cottages and see people with their heads bowed, eating dinner… I can feel the wildness in my heart and I feel like a teenager, it feels like rage.

As I walked, a man in brief, flared jogging shorts came running towards me. I decided I would look at him the way men sometimes look at women. I gazed at his ankles and shapely calves. I gazed at his thighs. I gazed into his face until he had to look back at me. He […]

8

Years before I had driven from Adelaide to Melbourne with my then partner. We towed behind us the tower of terror: all of our possessions lashed to a homemade trailer. His possessions were mostly tools and mine were mostly books. In a seaside town we stopped with his best friend and her husband. They had […]

Tonight I saw the moon for the first time in ages and my heart caught fire from its coldness. Only a more-or-less moon, more than a morsel and less than a round, most of its pearl face unhidden by us. Severely it rode the dark blackwater sky. All about me everything was frozen.    

You see, I am still living in the dreamtime, where my ancestors are my brothers & sisters and trees my playmates. Sometimes I’m wiser and sometimes they’re wiser. We hold hands on the street. There are streets everywhere and everything is streets. Sometimes the world overwhelms me. I cannot move & I cannot speak, cannot […]

What is that book you’re always carrying? my friend wanted to know. So I opened it and read to him: “But the first of the thunder and lightning was always high, wild, savage and frightening. Every year people in our part of the land were killed by lightning. Yet long before I learned at school […]

6

On the Weihnachtsmarkt before it closed I had this most marvellous adventure. Rounding the corner my friend & I following the thread of sound came on these two solemn, courtly black American musicians, not young, setting forth the Gospel According to Lionel Richie. I have never been a convert but somehow the lissom groove of […]

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, […]