This feeling isn’t me. 6

Pubic hair, broken knee. 6

Splintered foot, bruised foot. 5

Through my awful groans. 5

Trusted pains all alone. 6

Fallen, cracked & chipped teeth 6

Where am I to start, the start? 7

This smiling being of my heart.7

Popping shuffling aches. 6

However might it end? 6

Gravel crossroads, we depend.7

Nails in arm in arm in arm. 7

Suffocating myself; helps. 7

Drowning grin of punish welts. 7

Stomach sick with bubbles. 6

Brained with tummy troubles. 6

“Have you still got the shits” she said from the doorway.

With you, yes.

“Yes” I said.

Later I would think how awful that sounded. Why say it like that? Coupled with the clicky voice of Australians from the big city.

Ra-ra-ra, just awful- making me feel worse.

I was thinking about getting out of bed and feeling better too… oh well.

Driving on the wrong side of the road again. In the correct lane, worrying. I don’t want to die, not necessarily. Not at all really. Put the fender to bed, wake up feeling refreshed. Alone.

It’s just like she always said. Following up, looking for love, crying in the mornings. Physical activity to exhaustion. A caprice, ant like-not strong enough and smothered by the hive mind. I’m yearning for something different fearful of the same.

Competition strikes me as something dangerous and harmful- a sweet spot untasted or felt. Moving without moving, my eyes haze and I worry about all the things I’ve compressed. The vacuum, that shrinks my flesh around bones. Time will not tell you you’re fate until it’s dying hour. Words in whisper, thoughts from nowhere. Then hollowing suction that winks blindly at each victim. A moment, another moment, the straight red line. Buried, left pocket. Buried, right pocket. Both palms empty. Skeletal fingers and cracked teeth. My heart just isn’t in it.

Set & Setting – let me have this breakthrough.

A tiny dose of the house of god, I can hear my heart beating. I’ll conjugate my past self until i’m put away.

Lindsay ate the last of the Migoreng. I was humbled, distraught and dishonered. I’d been toiling all day but there was no respite to be had in a bowl of steaming hot MSG noodles. My heart ached. By valves sqwonked on and off. My eyes scratched with parched tears in the air conditioned room. There was, no more Mr Mighers.

Asthma puffers

Panadol

Heart palpitation medicine

Bandaids

Note pad

Bad smell

Very tall (6”3)

High visibility tight shirt

“30 years ago, I took medication that made my skin sensitive”.

Looks like he has outgrown his skin

Unpredictable character

With a forced audience, have you ever worked in sales?

Asked to become umpire

12th of Feb 1977

Grew up in: Wynyard.

Blacklisted from the team.

Poor guy looked he’d had a hard life. Came in looking for a bumbag.

He tried to be a close talker, his belly rested on the misc objects.

Wooden table, beautiful macrocarpa, strewn with the medical history of this ghost. Diabetic and lumbering, a scroll like medication list told all that his GP had tried.

“My bumbag has frayed” he said to me. Lumbering and lolling, back and forth from right foot to left.

And his glasses were the kind that you could flip the shades down and up, down and up.

He told fibs. Lies, confused curling misinformation about knowing “people in high places”. The boss of the AFL would pay for his clothes if only he could get to Victoria. Size 15 shoes were his carriage, he’d never hitchhiked and had only travelled once, from Wynyard to Hobart.

Guessed age: 65

Having a warm, unfiltered heart, all showing, like a mushroom in spore. So refreshing, his tears, completely out of context, confronting, uncomfortable, real emotions, laid bare were his troubles to the front girl of the counter.

It’s times like these that I wish that pain showed as a colour on your skin.
Like a bruise – what’s the threshold? How can you tell?

Internal lies. Lies. External truths, lived, fabricated or otherwise.