The Australian receptionist greeting that gives you very little information on how long you’ll be waiting.

Poor guy, had a full bladder at Radiology and came in for his appointment 1 week early.

“He’s gonna blow!”

And so here I am, typing on the keyboard. Like many other keyboards. With the keys in an order, as there are many others. Not like the French say, but the outcome, yes the result may well be the same.

And so, here we are arriving with the convenience of legibility. Some of us with the luck and happenstance to decode. The word, lost in the sea. As if bubbles were more important than other bubbles.

And so I came to realize that what I was writing was mine, but once removed. Hosted elsewhere, saved in a cloud, a great anti-bubble in the sky. Permeable, impermeable, semi-permeable. Spelling supported, meaning contrived.

And so there I was, looking at images of people standing on a large tree stump, the tree is gone now. It must have been old. That is a message, without it it is sad, it is the without that hurts. Like the ache of knowing when something is there but you cannot see it. You cannot visit it. Pain both ways. With and without.

And so I thought to myself, perhaps only to make it better. To bandage the hurt. To shield my heart. “It’s not real”. Anything, and everything you have the chance to see through the lens of a digital screen has the potential to be un-real, fabricated, painted, generated, “realized”. The tree is not real. The image is not real. We cannot trust this screen. We cannot trust this time. I don’t trust generated writing.

And so we are jammed between the possible unreality of this rectangle, sacrificing physical truth for a convenient lie. Resting and waiting for us to die.

“What colour is that”

Is what?

THAT

Open your mind like a box of treasure
Turn over thoughts at your leisure
Some of hope and others pleasure
Pains un-boxed will not feather

Instead led out by the nose
“You casted invis?!” – remember those…
Let passion lie among the rose
And fast friends go unto the crows

I ask forgiveness from my mind
Softer thoughts, I beg and blind
As dust brush off a tome of time
Dignified un-signified, here I’ll sign.

The first thing I noted, arriving Melbourne late Wednesday was the oak tree’s near John Street. Branches parting down the middle. Like an office worker trying to do the spits over a power cords. Straddling, legs like bridges.

Past the first nine waves

Beyond the head chills, and cold feet.

Ringing in my ears.

Green rocks and golden light.

Perfect surprises warming our hearts and making it all better. In the end.

Feel the boil –

The hidden underneath

I can’t express time easily without saying it so allow me the long way to explain the soil.

Rashness. Suppress

Impatience, suppress

Jaw, clench.

Supress, neutral, square, flatly. I look at you, and purpose – the end of a working week. Late again, angry at how easy it is, the lack of accountability. To be better. Challenged.

Silent at the stumps again.

Another gin.

Suppress

The more money, the stranger the problem.

How are you going, he asked

It’s a bit late for that, I responded.

POEM

The rise and fall of a friendship

My near loss of a brother –

Rocked with illness our father

And the lies I tell for work.

Before Transformation

Krhaal was always the quiet one, the thoughtful one. Taller than most, always stooping, with a wiry frame that gave him the look of someone who had learned to endure hunger and hardship without complaint. His dark, shoulder-length hair was often unkempt, falling into his sharp, tired eyes—eyes that were always searching for something unseen, something lost. They held a strange mix of intelligence and sorrow, as if he had spent his whole life unraveling a puzzle that no one else could see.

His hands were calloused from years of living rough. Cutting wood, scribbling notes, sketching symbols, and turning the brittle pages of forgotten tomes. Even as a child at Wightlych Academy, Krhaal had an obsession with knowledge, especially the kind that should have remained buried. He was the first to question the oddities of their existence, the first to sense that something was wrong beneath the surface of their so-called education.

Despite his sharp mind, he was not cold. He had a dry, often morbid sense of humor, a way of deflecting fear with wit. He was the one who kept the group steady when they planned their escape, the one who never wavered when they set the fire that should have covered their tracks forever. But even then, a shadow lingered in his thoughts—an unease that he never fully spoke of.

After their escape, he lived in solitude, withdrawing from the world as if afraid of what he might become. His home in The Hollow Pines was filled with half-written letters, books on alchemy and other academic theory, and strange symbols scrawled on scrolls. Over the many years he grew gaunt, haunted, speaking of whispers in his dreams, of a hunger that gnawed at the edges of his mind.

And then, the letters began.

By the time the party returned to his home, Krhaal was already gone.

What they found was not him, but a message scrawled in blooded ink.

Letter 1:

They are coming for us.
I feel it, more than any paranoia. Their hunger for us grows. Resolute searching that never stopped.

They hunger for us – not as food but as something else. Something darker. Nefarious whispers in the back of my mind, in my dreams, in the silence of the night. It riles with change, of our return, of the purpose we can’t escape. I can feel it, growing is me, pulling at my soul.

We can’t hide from this. Not anymore.

— K

Letter 2:

Help.
Something has changed. I am weary with lack of sleep, and cold. I don’t know what it is, but it’s growing and I can’t stop it. I feel it creeping up my spine, prickly and sharp. It’s not just my body —it’s my mind I can remember the Academy. Do you remember the experiments? We must meet at the Tarn. Tomorrow night at sunset. I don’t trust myself alone. Bring the others, I need to know that you are ok.

Please. I need to know I’m not alone in this.

— K

Letter 3:

I think I’m close to a breakthrough.
I’ve been remembering the Academy and looking through old notes. The whispers in the shadows – do you remember the Master? I can feel his burning voice in my ears. The screams as we fled. The feeling of freedom, light coming into the world. Hope. But now something is gnawing at me. The price of our freedom – I know we don’t speak of it. Remembering our flight chills me to the bone. It doesn’t go away. No matter what I do. These memories are ice in my veins. We must speak, surely they are the key.

I will be careful with my searching. Please call by my house when you receive this. We must talk.

— K

Letter 4:

We promised we would never go back.
But I don’t have a choice. Not anymore. I can hear the Master’s quill, scraping on the parchment of my skin, scratching cursed knowledge into my bones. The experiments. The cold and starvation of our childhood. We can never be free. They kept us, watched us, shaped us into what we are. Something broken.

I don’t want to go back, but I must. I must face what they did to us.

— K