Lumberyard, piles of yellow-brown pine - everyday living, destruction - no such thing as something for nothing.
"An in your head a voice you'll always miss"
Broken shards of marble - broken domestic dreams, crumbling palace - transient nature of modern society - same material destroyed so easily.
Citrus trees and my heart in my throat. Sweet Orange, Sour Lemon. Bitter rind. Barrier between me and ambrosia.
Tiny red flowers on a skeletal tree.
Woman walks right out of a postcard and onto the winding street. Emblem of a nation, she walks like a ghost of tradition through the chaos of traffic - metallic destruction, cars silver and blue. Shiny and new next to her crumpled apron.
Cultural blue - Alphabets mix - Our products infiltrate their world.
Miles and miles of road that refuses to speak to me.
Ramshackle house that wants to be a castle - megalomania, den of ambition.
Trees blue like watercolours, like someone has scanned their image into photoshop and applied the filtersto it. Motion blur is a privilege, not a right.
The town that paint forgot.
Years of English lessons put to use. Some are eager, some are anxious. Man at the chemist talks with the ease of a native Australian, calm and loping colloquialisms and nouns that trip from the tongue. He has never visited our nation.
Brightly coloured bus. Mercedes. KEA~7408. Maroon with Miro-shapes in bright candy colours. Pink blue orange green. The pink-red of cherry Starburst. The green of geranium leaves grown bright with summer-spring rain. The orange of Tuscany and terracotta, the orange of mustard, of napkins, of the outback. The standard blue of a stylised sunlit sky.
Calm sea grows angry, but cannot approach a rage. Around the world, its surf beach sisters went their anger in was of which this infant gulf is not capable. The best it can manage is a whimper, a toss of its head, too emotionally repressed to raise the true power of its liquid fist.
Not sand but stones, each a compact brick of hardened memories. A bone. A skull. A lock of hair, soaked into granite and basalt.
Abandoned Eriksson flipphone, thrown to pieces with the tide. Iconic of a generation, it rests alone, useless, destroyed on this stony beach, where ancient remnants of our ancestors remain intact.
I do not think that my thoughts are terribly original or important. I wonder, sometimes, if they are my thoughts at all, or simply the echoes or the whispers of the generations that came, saw, conquered and died before me. and my brethren. I wonder if it is George Orwell that whispers my thoughts in the dead of night. Socrates provides my showertime ponderings. Sylvia Plath whispers my insecurities. Shakespeare is the beating of a lustful heart. Virgil. Fitzgerald. Euripides. Poe. Robert Lowell is my hatred of a generation. Kurt Cobain is my apathy. Jung is my mysticism. Buddha paints my ears with peace. I am not myself. I am the world. The movers. The shakers. The music makers. I am cowering, and I am tall.
"Every generation wants to be the last."
Gaudy flashing lights. A star shaped mass of plastic, the row of tiny lights reducing and reducing and expanding. Mesmerising like the beating of a Vegas heart, or the pulse of a body infested by radiation.
Blue velour seats, I know I'll not be allowed my gangling legs on this trip. Rack and Pinion, like some S&M club playtoy. Watch the passengers scream. Moves slowly, rumbling along like Connex and MET trains, but at the same time nothing similar at all. Shaky, can't write without disruption. Rambling and rumbling, cargo train through civilisation. Citrus trees, white houses. The smell of coffee. Chickens pecking mindlessly amongst the weeds. The mountain, formidable in every sense, looms to the side, its rock face watching us sternly as we pass.
