Latest news: Texture of Silence illustrations have made the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Longlist for Best Artwork.
The waves that once washed along
O’Connell Street have taken the bus
south to Cronulla. Although they paid
their fare, the other passengers
complained loudly, and not a few
disembarked.
The midday insects buzzed in the gum trees,
and invisible heat refracted distant waterfowl.
With the scenery out of the way,
I approached a stranger seated
at the water’s edge.
“I’ve come to warn you.
The river’s flow is orthogonal
between its shores,
and its cloudy blue is beyond
all that is natural.
Delfina and Pierrot are on their way to New Zealand, travelling backwards through time inside a cardboard box that was meant for a fridge. Pierrot became a translucent alien like Delfina when she buried him in sephine. The previous instalment is here.
Delfina explained time travel
à la mode.
“As we travel, our presence creates
new timelines, more realities
in the eternal infinities.
“In misdirected desire, the cicadas sing
their enticements to my lawnmower,
but its blades are dulled, and merely
caress the grass.”
“I didn’t ask about your feeble
suburban atmospherics.”
The sun is in its Ptolemaic orbit, epicyclic,
if I’m not mistaken, and its light is focussed on
the kitchen cupboards. Coffee’s in a capsule
and bread is in a toaster.
The songs of rowdy traffic lorikeets
are mimicking my neighbor yelling at the kids,
and a distant mirror is shattering,
with someone’s cherished image
dissolving in the daylight.
—It will do.
One packed toothpaste and a sewing kit
for essential sutures.
“Space-time, its nature is undeniable,”
(in lieu of a goodbye) and that one headed off
towards tomorrow’s sunrise.
The one indoors was waving from a window.
“Everything may be cleaved in two,
so it is with digital computation.”
When fantasy disappeared from Fênix and everyone left, Sorry, who fell out of the sky with her Subaru, and a possibly undead storyteller, were left behind. She warned him of an imminent electrified dystopia, and they sought sanctuary in Guarapuava. On the way, they saw herds of armadillos ridden by sephine spiders. Part One is here.
Luck was with us when we arrived in Guarapuava:
the world had not yet ended, and by the teary shores of
the Lagoa das Lágrimas, we came across
the Pensive Teahouse, open after midnight.
Friday night at the Ghostery on Relentable Drive,
and a whirl of leaves blew in,
took my vaguely personal shape.
Talcum-powdered others
like to do their ghosting,
whispering and wispy pale,
but I don’t play that game,
I’m as solid as a memory
of a memory.
Microscopic particles of time
rain upon our lives.
Paper promises grow brittle,
mapped forgiveness folds, unfolds,
frays and tears along the creases.
Our memories refract through prisms
until the brightest day is lost
in anesthetic runes.
~/~
I heard a motor revving in the carport,
and from my gate,
I watched my Kia Starfish drive away,
with the spindly legged carport
galloping behind.
Someone in a Chrysler Valiant driving along the Botany Bay shoreline has picked up a couple of skeletal hitchhikers who have come from the sea. The first part is here.
We are Sam and Sammy,
please drive us to the West,
to invoices and wheat fields,
where desiccants and accountancy abound,
and everything is warm and flocculant.
in the pavlova recipe
Sorry, I have to take this,
the pavlova says. The microwave
is ringing and they speak together in whispers.
travel blogging
Down by the seas of roads and rails—tarmacs lined
with dashes on the runways to the shallows—
the metropolitan trains approach a nexus
where all begins and ends.
Once my life was stippled on those waters
and broken on those shores.
Through the window, washes
on a watercolor planet,
rainy autumn shades in spring, and
in the early evening, scattered photon showers
are forecast, a luminous return of light
from the shadow sun.
Indoors there are smaller mysteries,
trailing motes in negative space—
old-fashioned sunlight
leaving lamps and bulbs,
domesticities and peripherals,
drawn out between the curtains
to the shadow sun.
The rail clatters its rhythms but the carriages never move.
They’re always here, and through a frame, a door,
a window, a hole cut in a rainy mirror,
you can see them waiting.
Telma was painting the feature wall
with essence of vanilla. Joanne was reading
a possible book, perhaps the persistence of trains,
or a painting, the persimmonence of time.
She’d need her glasses to be sure.
He stood at the door with a forlorn smile
and a hand-drawn mustache—
a comically tragic pastiche wearing
nothing but tennis shorts and socks.
My name is Rodney, might I
come in?
I know who you are. You see
my name is Rodney as well.
Everything is ordinary, the rain birds
said, and I believed them, though
the morning breeze had blown
my cat away, and the wasps set up
a circus in the bedroom.
When I voiced a few concerns, they told
me that the wasp show must go on,
and when I hinted at a discount on the door,
they insisted I must pay full price.
Time is not a river in the mind,
it runs in agitated swirls and eddies,
with a little fabric softener.
We’re pebbles skimmed across its waves,
seabirds too ungainly to find its sky,
who skate along time’s surface, and
never understand its heights
and depths.