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In The End

 

In the end we were grateful
we’d installed the pull-up bar in the hall
and cycled to the gym on days off.

We snibbed the back door, but it opened outwards
so there was no way to block it from inside.
They were slow but determined

as they pushed through
the gate from the alleyway
usually held shut by half a breeze block

probably sniffed us out
from the old mattress we had left in the shed
stained before it was ours

but smelling mostly of our recent insomnias
our months of tossing and turning
across its crumpled springs.

You’d bought a vintage G&M cricket bat
for nostalgic reasons really
but kept it by the bed just in case.

When the lock on the door wouldn’t hold any longer
you took the bat to the heads of the uninvited
grabbed my hand and ran.

The Great Weight of Metaphorical Lightness

Never get so attached to a poem you forget truth that lacks lyricism – Joanna Newsom, “En Gallop.”

12744005_1050761621613372_681022737855470830_nJust as I was trying to learn that not everything in life is a metaphor, we got a new bed.

Beds are so deeply symbolic and a new bed bought together is steeped in meaning. On a more practical level, it really has changed our lives. Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic, but lives are just made up of days and nights. It really has changed our days and nights.

Sometimes I think I’m living in The Great Poem of Life where everything stands for so much more and demands to be read twice, scrutinised, figured out figuratively. Sometimes I think that sounds like an excellent place to live.

The old mattress has been dragged to the shed out back and very quickly looked like something one should not be touching, let alone relying on for the restorative properties of a good night’s sleep.

It reminded me of how the light leaves a person’s eyes when you suddenly realise you don’t love them any more. But that’s not something that’s happened to me for a while, and far too much weight to give to an old mattress that already sags with such woe and the burden of having been such a burden.

Building Consent

The romantic notion of buying a rundown clapboard villa
pouring heart and soul into doing it up by hand
spending all of one’s time loving it
back to life – gutting out the back half sourcing
sustainable surfaces for breakfast bars and just the right shade –
is quickly debunked as I walk past a weathered
rusted bungalow, boards rotted through
shirtless men shouting across the trampled front garden
propped with piles of Bunnings purchases
and a ‘dunnys R us’ in pride of place
sounds of dropped steel and hammered edges
everything shifting slightly in the relentless
heat of yet another day on this damned project
too many chiefs, too many cooks and not one chef in the kitchen
that currently looks like a workshop
sawdust lining surfaces and can’t even make a cuppa
with all this mess
all these people coming and going
traipsing through our idealised disaster.

0 jobs found

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I’ve embarked on a slow and lazy job hunt from the strangely privileged position of not really needing a job. I add obscure filters to my searches on Seek and write slightly-too-quirky cover letters. I’ve been taking my CV to bookshops, browsing the shelves, chatting about books, sometimes even remembering to ask for work. I’m tired of work for now.

But some days a passing sense of nostalgia drifts through me and I miss structure and connection; the way work gives one’s day, week, existence a sense of drive and purpose. Sometimes I miss extrinsic motivation, routine or feeling I’ve really earned my time off and sleep-ins through an exhaustive week of contributing to the world.

It’s likely I’ll be teaching again soon – you can take the teacher out of the institution, but you can’t… etc. And it truly is a good job: Worthy and hard. But for now I’m on hiatus. A sabbatical from usefulness. A pause from obligation. I find satisfaction in slowness and try to see like a poet again.

Bowie

David Bowie has died and there’s been a heartbreak fluttering in the wings for months.

David Bowie has died and I’m back to Valentine’s Day 2004
leaping in Wellington rain with one of my oldest friends singing along
Ziggy himself on stage mere metres away.

David Bowie has died and you have cancellations all morning so we go out for breakfast. The café is quiet, the chef your best friend.

David Bowie has died and I buy potting mix to repot the succulent I decorated for Christmas. I take my time to cycle it home, stop to sit in the shade of a eucalypt and write.

David Bowie has died and we’ve bought an outdoor table on ebay
drive to collect it from a neighbourhood of overgrown lawns and car collections
trash thrown in heaps on the footpaths.

Username ‘kewlshit’ is burly and mean. By god I bet he’s done some things he shouldn’t have over the years. But he’s restored the table to hipster-appealing charm, calls a younger man his “servant” as he carries it out shrouded bizarrely in leopard skin print.
It’s been 37 degrees and raining this evening.

David Bowie has died and we listen to all our favourite songs of his, remembering all the other times we listened to those songs, where we were and how they became so. I wish I knew you years ago.

David Bowie has died and we drink gin and tonics, watch the last half of The Godfather which we’d been saving from the night before.

David Bowie has died and I can’t stop admiring our new table, our first joint purchase, white and mint stripes on a wrought iron base. I wonder how something I love could have been created by a man I have nothing in common with.

And then I wonder if he too listened to Bowie tonight and which song struck him in the hardened heart as he sang along, what line reminded him of younger days or that party where he met that girl he fell for, the girl he perhaps bought the leopard skin for.

I wonder which album cover sticks in his mind, captures his imagination the most, which is his favourite lyric, his favourite Bowie quote and how he heard the news tonight, how it stopped him
before he had to get on with it all.

Spatial Awareness

One of the last things I did before I moved countries was hire a small truck and a storage space to house my many accumulated things. I was anxious-but-organised. A guy exposed his prejudices. Here’s the story:

I arrived at the storage place with my brother and our (male) friend. I had booked the space and truck well in advance and all was ready for me. I was pretty excited about driving a truck, to be honest, and the place I was moving out of had typically difficult access and narrow streets. It was going to be a blast.

I asked to see the space I’d hired, just to check it was going to be big enough for what turned out to be an enormous amount of stuff when I started packing it into boxes. I invited my companions to come and have a look too, as they had also recently laid eyes on my giant pile of things. The man at the desk made a flippant comment about how that would be a good idea, because men have better spatial awareness than women and attempted a very forgettable joke along the same lines.

When it came to taking the truck away he asked who was going to be driving it. At this point my brother and friend had had almost nothing to do with the whole process – except for groaning at the sexist joke attempt – I said I would be driving. Of course. This was my idea, my hoarded possessions, my move. For some reason he seemed surprised and said “good for you.”

Driving a small truck around the windy streets was as awesome as I had anticipated and after spending hours filling it with as much as we possibly could, I collected another companion, did a three-point turn on the hill outside my house, made tooting gestures as we wound past other heavy-vehicle drivers with whom I had a new found bonhomie and displayed some nifty defensive action when someone pulled out in front of me (how they didn’t see ME in a TRUCK is incomprehensible).

When I arrived back at the storage facility the man we had been dealing with stopped me and offered through the passenger window to back the truck into the garage for me. I wanted to tell him about the three-point turn, about where we’d come from and how I got myself, all the things I own and two passengers safely to that point, about how much fun we’d been having – but there was a small part of me that felt I should submit and let him finish off the process. For a moment I thought that because he had offered, it must mean I was incapable.

Thankfully, my friends insisted I had this and wound the window back up in front of his astonished face. I proceeded to back the truck neatly into the space provided, despite my apparent gender-related spatial disabilities. When I got out I was told how I could have done that better / differently / his way. I could not have been more disinterested in his opinion and had a photo shoot behind the wheel before unloading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Night walk

Late night hill walk past sunset but only just night after afternoon sun here in your springside hillside suburbia of blooming gardens, trimmed hedges. Flower steal. Streetside wild flowers grey as the night air dull light and wild again vivid, clashing in the flashes of streetlight, headlight, smiles from passers-by evening strollers sharing night adventure scrambling at the daisies sniffing in the jasmine… reminds me of your street last month… sniffed in more and the more it wafts nostalgia through me: Teenage feelings, afternoon after school walks home always spring in those days, always warmed by sunshine, smell and private joy. A strange strength in solitude. This late night hill walk street flower steal purple, orange. White yellow green yellow white.

So far away

The first words I ever pretended to read were Dire Straits as my mum handwrote the album details on the cassette she’d just dubbed Brothers in Arms onto. My brother whispered to me what it said and I repeated it aloud to the surprise of already proud mum, who I quickly put straight, never wanting to be seen as anything greater than I was.

This morning I woke with ‘So far away from me’ in my head and there I was back at that kitchen table, that kitchen of so many homebrand haircuts and baking afternoons, tears over flooded lino, burnt muesli and frustrations I will never fully understand and those lyrics that I just didn’t get or know I one day would.

And there’s Mark Knopfler again telling me passion can be mumbled, electric, eighties and understated, cheesy with rhyme and as powerful as those words printed, whispered, shared, confessed, recalled. As powerful as memory itself.

See your memories

I’ve become a little obsessed with facebook’s “see your memories” thingy whereby you can see exactly how similar you were feeling about life on this day last year, the year before or even back in 2007. It’s horrifying to see firstly how quickly a year has gone by and secondly how much has or has not changed in that 12 months. Horrifying but also sometimes affirming.

Here’s something from 13 months ago:

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Although I see no evidence of this actually happening, I’m still convinced it’s what the world needs. There are some stroppy, fiery, speak-before-they-think people running significant parts of this world and they’ll try and change us – make us feel that our ideas and decisions are less because we communicate them calmly; that our feelings and instincts are nothing compared to their grand plans and loud demands – but we won’t change.

Sadly, I think society still sees strength as anger over reasoning; volume, rather than integrity; busting things apart, rather than holding them together. But many of us are not impulsive or naturally angry people and our strength comes from the gentle, deliberate and well-considered way we approach things. We agonise over decisions because we know the impacts can be far-reaching and we take on many different points of view and consider them in own our time before forming strong opinions. We reflect on ourselves and make a point of being consistent and professional and never losing our shit in public. Other people might not always see that as strength, but as long as we’re acting in accordance to our values and taking our own feelings and beliefs seriously… well, frankly, other people can piss off.

About 5 years ago I was musing on this from a slightly different angle. https://saradhakoirala.com/2010/11/27/some-semi-formed-ideas-on-karma-and-physics/ I was thinking about how we can trust things to be okay for cosmic and scientific reasons and that there’s logic and necessity behind feeling all the feelings there are to be felt. The part I hadn’t realised at this point though was about trusting those feelings. That post five years ago ended with two questions I can now answer: You can and Yes. I realise now that we must trust our feelings. In fact our own feelings are often the only true and honest things we can know. It’s rare but refreshing to find other people who can also see this. More often than not people are invalidating our feelings, telling us to “cheer up”, “harden up” and to stop being “so dramatic.” People will react to our expressions of emotion with “it’s not that bad” or “it’s not that funny” (my most hated phrase to hear – I’ll laugh like a lunatic if I want to!) So rarely do people just let you feel what you’re feeling for a bit. Likewise, society has taught us that we can change people’s minds. Again this is invalidating especially for those of us who have carefully considered each decision we’ve ever made. In childhood we can quickly learn that “no” doesn’t necessarily mean “no” and that nagging, whiney, goading, pleading, bullying and persisting will get us what we want. Holding onto this belief into adulthood is dangerous and disrespectful and encountering it is a constant test of my resolve that strength is integrity and I shouldn’t have to raise my voice or cause a scene to be listened to.

My utopia is still a world run by calm and thoughtful people. People who listen to each other, trust their own instincts and make well-considered decisions based on feelings. If I continue to look back on my posts year after year, I want to still feel the same way and know that I’ve managed to stay true to these values.  We shouldn’t have to change to fit into society’s expectations just to live the life we believe in because, let’s be honest, society’s way of operating actually hasn’t been working out that well for society.

 

Home World


Wake to the sound of birds sun urging at the curtain
semi-conscious
mundanities of an incomplete (whole-wide) world
complete
later
thick clouds lower as the sun does
old windows rattle but no more than most nights
no more than they usually do with the momentum of life time tunes wine
ink paper brain (both sides) darkening
and cooling room (keep pace keep up)
chest both hollow and bursting heightened heart beat
sun back next day connecting
one by one by one
bringing it out from behind lingering clouds
wispy clouds long low clouds that cling to the horizon
too much and just enough all at once
this life
keeps happening
heart beat rattles too full too empty – let it
make itself heard felt known
heat words input output output output
heart (flesh) beat skip
frightening – out of control
but beat beat on
it’s keeping you alive
this world
this (fuck it) beautiful
this things work out things fall apart world
this moving on and staying upright world
this yours to own have live in it world
this hot and cold
this tears of joy sorrow and mediocrity world
this laughter of joy sorrow and awkwardness world
this heart leaping heart break
this moving on and moving on world
this all yours
this departure lounge arrivals gate
this stay away until you’re filthy exhausted until all you want is
this sweet smelling silence of home
this you know when it’s time to come home
this heat sweat and heart beat world
this life
meet connect move on move on come home
come home come home come home (move on).