Journey to Arnhemland
Somewhere far away, there is a farm, a dog chained to the fence, a sullen farmer, a doting wife, a sullen child, a doting child. He isn’t sure how much more he can take, she doesn’t know if her love outweighs the way he sprints across the grass at night. At a bitter end, crossroads and then some, she will realise it doesn’t, and he will win, and she will lose, her children will both lose and win, and she will not know where she is, which side the sun rises from, and where it sets. Against a hundred sunsets they will keep winning and keep losing, keep drawing, keep winning, baby, please, keep putting your money in those goddamn fucking slot machines,
We can’t go
Home to your mother unless we bring her a 20.
His mother wastes away in a chair she’s had for a hundred years, and the girl just keeps writing and singing, writing and singing. She can’t finish a sentence without replaying the song that’s already on. She writes an entire piece like this; stuck in an endless time loop. It goes on and on, and she doesn’t notice it. She’s too consumed by what’s pouring out of her skin, beating in her heart and icing her lungs. That doesn’t matter though, because everyone else can hear it, and they hate her for it. They smash her plates together and throw her egg cups in the trash; they paint over all the windows and turn the whole house black. It’s dusty and cold in there, but she still wouldn’t know. They hate that about her. How could she not know that the light in the bathroom never goes out now? She’s a terrible roommate. Maybe the worst they’ve ever had.
On the farm a thousand miles away, the dog is still biting through the chain. The evidence of it all is still plastered on the walls, and no matter how many times summer rolls over in the field, the cicadas will never forget what they saw. This piece feels horrible, by the way. All thrown together and hasty and wrong and I hate it, but I’m still going to put it up anyway. Some of the stuff I write is created inside a shaky, loud vacuum. In this place, I do not care what anyone else thinks of me, how they think it or what they do with those thoughts. In the other vacuum, as in, the one I frequent most days, where I make nice stories and poems to coat the surface of the sun, all hazy and yellow, it’s much brighter. Those are the pleasant ones. Reading them feels easy and natural. On days like these, though, my brain is overloaded, thoughts spilling over and tripping on the entrails of the next. It is thus, incredibly important that I vomit out the words, rearrange them bleakly to make them look nice and then hang them on the wall. Don’t you think it’s a pretty painting? Don’t you think they could house it in the European contemporary section of a museum?
Franz Wright is sitting far below the ground, nestled in the dirt. His skeleton is in the same position, hands still turned towards the light. The sun never penetrates the soil, but he swears he can feel it on him. He talks to me, stalks me, sits in my ears and tells me over and over again;
There is a life which
If I could have it
I would have chosen for myself from the beginning
