And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Build me a thing.
Build me a giant thing.
Build me a broken down giant thing
Build me a rust coated broken down giant thing.
Build me a thing where the rust has rotted the corners
away to a tetenus sharpness, which teeters above me,
where the component parts are badly
lashed together with blue baler twine.
Build me a thing that the wind can get lost in,
a thing that moans through the night,
build me a thing that grumbles its decay
to the sleepless and the lonely.
Build it to remind me of all that is lost.
Build it to remind me of
missed opportunities,
broken promises.
Build it to house dying cats
Build it with enough space beneath it
to allow the growth of bindweed,
the reproduction of flat and ancient
insects.
Build it to remind me of you,
to remind me of love,
to remind me of the things I had
that I threw away.
..."The phrase used to be "possession is nine-tenths of the law". These days that is not true, some companies want you to not actually own a lot of things that you posses but merely 'license' them. Nothing belongs to you, you iPeasant, everything belongs to your lords and masters...."
From Here
with litigation by a large and potentially
dodgy American Oil Company, he
lost four games of Pool, he ate
a ready cooked meal, he emailed
a friend, he successfully modified a
report allowing a steel company to
allocate the despatch of steel box frames,
and he watched a TV show
about a man who felt too little
in a world that felt too large.
The flowers have been dried, pressed,
placed steadily in a book
which is up there
somewhere in the attic, somewhere.
And there’s a cup of tea waiting for him
when he gets in, there’s cous cous to make
and garlic bread to watch. There’s dinner
and then no embarrassment
in working out who washes, who dries.
The transaction is brief, businesslike.
There’s room on the sofa for one
to sit and one to lay, for one to read
and one to watch television and her
leg bends just enough
to rest comfortably on his thigh.
And he knows why she says the things she says,
And she knows why he does the things he does,
And even though there are no suprises anymore,
this is enough, and this
is the second stage of love.
"I for one would happily support the imposition of stringent new restrictions on civil liberties, as long as they specified that any idiot who says “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” was automatically locked up for the rest of their lives, on the grounds that their crushing stupidity represented a danger to public safety.
Rev. Stuart Campbell, Bath"
". . . You will leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You will know how salty
another's bread tastes and how hard it
is to ascend and descend
another's stairs . . ."
I suppose I’ve seen it in others.
Seen the TV movies, hung out
with a mess of Serbs and one
Croatian girl. I’ve traced my
finger over the curve of the map,
imagined the cracked
surface of an aging photograph,
spent a bit of time eating only
that which is foreign to me.
Really, I’ve done nothing, know nothing, understand nothing.
In my fantasy exile, my friends come with me.
In my fantasy exile, the journey is romantic
and only the old ones die.
In my fantasy exile I know I’ll return
and in twenty years
a girl who looks like my sister used to look
will run out to meet me.
And always, in my fantasy exile
I’m exiled here, to this place here.
Where I grew up, with the people
I know and the shape of
the land is the same
shape as my voice,
and the shape of my voice
is the same shape
as my dreams.
“I’m a Syrian” he says.
“From Syria.” I answer back.
“No,” he says “Assyrian. Only one word.
Iraqi Christian. I come here because
my country is not safe.”
This was years back; between the
first and the second Gulf wars,
and this was a taxi in Sydney where
the driver flouted the cigarette laws governing
Hackney Carriages, who would tell you how
and why he came to Sydney.
And the story started with Saddam Hussain
and ended with his daughter still over there
playing soccer for the women’s national
football team.
“America will kill him I think.” he said,
“And then I will see her play.”
and he was right on that first part,
but I’m thinking he was probably wrong
about the rest.
I wonder if he’s still there, driving his Taxi,
telling his story to tourists and businessmen.
And I wonder if he’s still
smoking his cigarettes, gesticulating
wildly and angrily at any passing Mosques.
Peace be upon you, Random Australian Taxi Driver.
Peace be upon your daughter.
I hope that you got to go see her,
or she got to come see you.
Recent Comments
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amberglow said:
[this is good]excellent--and tragic. We're stuck with them forever, too. read more
on Fucking Boomers -
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on Late Fragment, by Raymond Carver