j11kay

The proper response to your dog doing a natural behavior you dislike (digging/barking/protecting etc) it to give them an appropriate time and place to engage in that behavior

The proper response to skateboarders damaging infrastructure is to build more and better skate parks, or build skate elements into the public infrastructure on purpose.

The proper response to homeless people sleeping on park benches is to build them houses.

you see how there's like, a commonality at play here?

The proper response to a disruption is to address the root of the disruption directly, not somehow attack the disruption itself -

you don't invent a muffler by swinging a bat at the engine noise, you don't relieve your hunger by punching yourself in the stomach, you don't resolve public unrest by sending armed men to control them and you don't prevent homeless people using bus shelters as a roof by removing the bus shelters.

Here is one that isn’t much

Waking and walking

Green to orange and a look

Not a glance or a gaze

This is one that knows it will never be bold

Shoes alike are drumming on bricks

Branches never dreamed to touch the sun

Pleading cupped hands want light

There is one like any other

Pressing into concrete

Growing on a traffic island

matted and dead as the dressings underneath it

on blocky cuts of jarrah flesh

is woven spinifex that used to drift

such a reddening carpet dirt-caked

thick as fur

bristling with its faded wearing word

embraces its guest tightly

as if it might sink through

warmly in the stinking heat

there was a metro line once with tracks built faster than the train ran and a carriage full of people talking

people sitting and standing and clutching the handles and in the baggage compartment and spilling from the windows like a flutter of ticket stubs

a clutter of eyes sliding up and down the route map until they could not see so far

children leaping across junctions and clinging to the rooftop

suitcases on the glassiest wheels rolling up and down in waves

breezes and sparks and newspaper planes and deepest roots of rock

an early morning train commuters caught, their sleeves and sights

alt text: v

hello sir

right away sir

you can order on the touchscreens

next please

paper wrapper

yes ma’am I have your thick shake here

beep

hello two in the morning

ding dong

beep

sir I can’t hear you

sir put the bottle down

sir is it ketchup on your hoodie?

tell me

did another person spill it with your hands?

hello sir right away sir

I’d like a cheeseburger and answers

beep

who did this to your life, sir?

also PSA, I want to try writing for other people!

if you send me a story about you or someone you know through the submission button on my blog, I'll write you a poem (if you want it to be private then I won't even post it here, I'll just send it to you)

anyway this is one of my favourites

Little Dipper

winter is the sight of her by the lake in vivid darkness and the taste on skin of inky air that holds her as she glides her way to swim

it’s the way she climbs the crags that breaks the dullness of the twilight and in rushes like the reeds leaves colour burned into the ripples

in a rusty shade of orange like a second setting sun

and she breathes

and summer linen slides from shoulders to the rocks flutters free before she slips through bars of moon

but for a moment I can see the silhouette the diver cast in the river soaked with stars that rose to meet her

and for a wrenching little second she stays under by the creekbed

as my river siren holds

her fiery breath

and captures mine

until the surface and the silence break with bloodshot eyes, and laughter

and she’s standing on the rocks dressed in a grin

so bewitch me little dipper like an artist or an angler cast your shadows on the shallows

draw your line in

hey there

behold your friend

below the dirt

hear one more clicker’s press

another casket laid

they’d like to say some words

and when he wakes again it’s dark

in someplace he has never been

where gone are all his hungry teeth

that cut him from his itching bones

I think he’ll find the peace he needed there

if life alive had failed to give him rest

but still for years his veiled picture hangs

and two days late his father found the tears

so I will make it warm, when he comes home.