enterprising transient.

the pieces / of your broken

little hearts.

o children.

rejoice.

he walked back in late, from the dim afternoon.

settled in the lone chair. watched her huddle

close, closer to the oil lamp, the scratchy wireless.

like she could get inside it. like proximity counted.

they were pitched here, high on a creviced outcrop,

with the dusk settling

with weight

around them.

a million miles from curses and frontlines.

the stillness more eerie when they moved

through it.

so.

they did not move.

it felt like ashen armageddon. holocaust. the

negative image of survival; the world was dead.

long live the widows.

they had not spoken in a day, they sat alone and they puzzled and they wandered, thoughtless, heavy,

like grieving mothers in a nursery.

he watches her, tucked like a parcel on the stairs. a dent in the cavernous, empty space.

draped over her own knees. the locket heavy around her pale neck.

he watches her. she keens further.

he watches her. the chemistry involved in maybe being

the last two,

the lip-bit alchemy of worry, and duty, and blood, and youth.

he stands at her feet,

he pulls her to stand.

he unclasps the locket. pliant, tired, she permits him to

walk her, smiles when he moves them awkwardly, laughs when he pirouettes into her, gives in to the utility, the trust, the boredom,

the terror, their youth,

the pressure

dimness

mourning

intimacy

childishness

softness.

Paralysis.

he stops them. he pulls her back.

she knows this part, the low-belly instinct of what boys mean when they hold you in place, when they level their eyes at you.

she looks away. she wanders away.

he counts, maybe, or stands still, and still empty, for a moment longer, then he walks after her.

she watches the last of the light draining as he presses his lips to her neck.

her eyes close but she keeps breathing.

and this is how they re-write revelations. the two children,

snaking, clumsy, a mess, in silence,

in distraction,

in failure.

she washes their clothes, almost humming. maybe humming.

the solid calm of counting sins, the dark pride.

he sleeps, dreamless, and wakes to the

dawn,

How it is I know not—yet behold! the something which

obeys none of the rest,

It is offensive, never defensive—yet how magnetic it draws.

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies

undaunted!

To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can

stand!

To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!

To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns

with perfect nonchalance!

To be indeed a God!

O to sail to sea in a ship!

To leave this steady unendurable land,

To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks

and the houses,

To leave you O solid motionless land, and entering a

ship,

I took a trip to America again this year. I go every year, it’s cheaper and closer and more deserted than Europe, I can indulge my pulse that has always run toward the empty roads, an excuse to disappear that is culturally putative. The road trip as an icon of freedom, of independence. No one talks about the road trip as suicide, testing the waters of your own absence. I believe every car on every highway that I have ever passed has always been driven by desperate people, soft of tooth, their desires parallax. A silent code we back roads transients self-consciously share. We are not a community as much as we are graveyards. I read through my diaries written in between trips and I speak so longingly of the autonomy of it all, never admitting it’s my resistance to the spaces I have hollowed out at home that leads me there over and over, useless and weak, a politician fucking a rentboy in desperate silence or an adolescent, staggering fit of rage about growing up.

***

September 4, 2012

You know that feeling, when you’re driving through a country and it’s boring, beautiful and boring in the way of unknowable, unbreachable things, but you reach a place - perhaps it’s the time of day, perhaps the cooler breeze on a warm day, perhaps it’s shadowed streets, perhaps it’s the cut bones of a desert town - and you want to pull over, stop the beating of the engine, invent yourself once more, right there. You find the endpoint, and it’s such a transgression in the rhetoric of a road trip, it should be all lazy giant circles and running from your own shadow until you wind up where you started, slightly sadder and older. That feeling, it’s like a dare from the great blue sky. And you sprint, in the time it takes to play the name of the place with your tongue, silently, against the back of your teeth, you sprint through the ways you could construct this, the hundred impossible ways you could have this thing.

But there is no way. At most, you dawdle through it, archiving the dapple of the afternoon sun through woody branches, the way you could have been a gardener here, an author. Smile your best smile in a cafe, in love with the laminate of the counter, the stiff swivel of your stool. Fetishising an inanimate life. But no, you can never know the stories, the histories of a youth spent magnetised to the view north, the view out. You can never have it, you’ll toss out your snickers wrapper and takeaway coffee, clamber wordlessly back into your rental and drive toward the sun, in a gaol of your own domestic fantasies, your parallel, beautiful insignificance.

***

Last night there was a boy I used to know in an alley, a gallery thing, performance artists in glad wrap and my first DJ set in 18 months looming inside, sickly pink, yellow and blue neon lights hanging, and the night was clear and warm. A gentle Sydney summer night, rhomboid patches of sky through the jigsaw skyline of Chippendale. He and I have always been particularly attuned to performance, to what will sound and look the best when we tell it back, but I sought him out after hearing his name, needing to see his face move after a year of blinding rage at the thought of it. The conversation was not as cautious as it should have been, probably, but with no objective I suppose that’s harder to gauge.