September 18th, 2024
ABOUT LOVE
ABOUT LOVE
Deaf couple,
seated shoulders abreast,
mc cafe date,
matching paper cups of nondescript love potion,
doing crossword together,
lip syncing guesses,
whispering sweet nothings.
~
Justin Timberlake gets jealous.
It’s bad for his mental, and he can’t fight it.
~
Young couple,
quotidian street-corner rendezvous,
close chat ensues (approx 30cm lip to lip):
she tilts her head while beholding his gaze,
he clutches the space between her elbow and shoulder (tricep?).
she dusts the breakfast morsels from his chin before her scheduled errand (work). his reluctance bubbles up. she slips away.
he is alone. my colleagues watch on in voyeuristic social critique.
who loves who the most?
September 6th, 2024
BIG BOY
Pat lived a quiet life.
He was a mid thirties something, wellkept, single man. He never felt the need to be apart of speed dating and gardening groups. He found a lot of his enjoyment in the company of his ginger, bushy-tailed cat Trick as well as the peace of his bedroom flat in Aro Valley, Wellington.
As Pat’s 39th birthday approached, he found that begun to reflect more on his earlier years. In his self-awareness, he realised that he’d become more reflective as he begun to notice the tells of his ageing frame. In Pat’s job, he was a seasoned and solitary IT Mr. Fix-It - a force of wisdom and knowledge on his own. Amongst the few friends that he had, his years had got away with him. At times the ribbing of a self-depricating New Zealand culture started to wear on him too.
Am I really old? he would think while tracing the undulating lines on his cheeks in the bathroom mirror. The irony is Pat would feel both content in his life but also prompted by his inner critic to an unattainable pursuit of ellusive mental youth. His line was snagged.
Pat loved to look for signs in life. It was his way to make sense of change and to perceive a path through the unfolding uncertainity of life. Like the time Trick turned up on his doorstep when he was really needing a friend and the happy accident of Trick’s furry coat ressembling a patchy number 3 - Pat’s auspicious number. These all added to a greater belief that there was a ‘something of sorts’ prompting Pat through life.
One day, Pat had gone to see his doctor for a general check up. The bus driver who dropped Pat outside the practice was in a particularly nice mood - an entry into Pat’s day that had him tapping his toes all the way to the reception desk. The doctor on the other hand was less gregarious. He had Pat stand on the scales...88kg...179cm...he scribbed on his paper, stuffed it in Pat’s cupped hands and mumbled the words ‘good day!’.
On the walk to the bus stop, Pat was less happy than before, he flipped open his phone and Googled his BMI to find that he was 10kg over the normal weight for his height. The thoughts of his experiences at work and amoungst his friendships rushed as affirmation and clouded his self-assured beginning to the day. Pat made it to the bus stop, sat down, let out a sigh and waited for the bus to arrive.
A few moments later, a man on the street walked toward Pat with a smile - a powerful one, Pat thought. In that short few seconds of an exchange, Pat felt noticed and present - the clouds seemed to dangle away like theatre curtains. The man stopped, smiled and beamingly looked at Pat as if he knew him and said “Hey Big Boy, come to the Les Mills gym tonight - you’ll love it” seconds passed and again “Come to the Les Mills Gym - you’ll love it” and then walked off.
Big Boy? Pat thought. Two words that when apart could be construed as a slant of size or age, but when brought together under these cicumstances landed feathery and softly like a snowflake.
How?...Why? Pat thought. How did life orchestrate what seemed like such a turn of surendiptous events. Pat couldnt help but interpret the unfolding of the moment as a gesture or a lay up. One that he filed into his proverbial backpocket as the bus approached.
The bus arrived and doors flung wide, Pat braced himself lunging himself through the open doors as if he was passing through a portal from dissonance to harmony. Perhaps one less worry and one less care to slide off his shoulders.
As the bus pulled away from its stop, Pat flickered through the halls of his mind. He pondered the eternal return of life; how moments seem to reoccur, repackaged in a kind of stoic time-space loop.
But also, the existence of moments that override our sticky fabric and precarious quotidian loops. Pat looked out and upward through the window of the bus, breathed out and smiled, wondering how the great ordinary seemed to fray from his perceived ties of monotony when he let go of the reigns of understanding. Its ends unraveling into a kinder kind of providence whispering:
Life is not short, it is long, it is full, and it is good.
August 16, 2024
SHORT JOURNEY IN PERCEPTION
SHORT JOURNEY IN PERCEPTION
My brief bus trip never feels quite enough to download Brooklyn, Wellington’s tapestry of commuters. (I did say brief.)
Today there was an air about my morning scramble. I felt calm and less concerned about my inner state, enabling me to watch, soak in vision, and perceive.
I caught a glimpse of a man seated sideways on his bus seat. Askew and unrelaxed, he twisted his torso forward in the direction of the bus trajectory.
Today there was an air about my morning scramble. I felt calm and less concerned about my inner state, enabling me to watch, soak in vision, and perceive.
I caught a glimpse of a man seated sideways on his bus seat. Askew and unrelaxed, he twisted his torso forward in the direction of the bus trajectory.
As my eyes stumbled down his stature, I saw he was clasping a stick tightly in his right hand. My eyes surveyed his prized posession, mapping its form — it’s collapsed and disassemed form.
A cane is what it was.
In one blink, my eyes returned to his face to ascertain further signifiers of the man’s story (or the one I was constructing).
Jet-black glasses; thick wraparounds, concealing his sleeping form. His black beanie was oversized and pulled down over his eyebrows and spilling onto his eyewear.
He seemed blind.
The blind man twisted and turned in his seat in what appeared to be his quest to find a reference or a clue of his geographical whereabouts. As I surveyed him, he looked in desperation out the window for a sense of the familiar.
Perhaps he was blind, perhaps he was not. Nonetheless, I was astounded at our shared act of “looking.”
It is human to look. Looking is a way to know what is in sight. Looking is a quiet act of tracing the modular world unfolding, with the hope to arrive at an ‘aha’. However, looking is very much a loaded act of perceiving.
The blind passenger on the bus cannot physically see the blurry city rushing past his window. He is more attuned to the changes in rhythm of the bus: the tired squeel of its brakes, the ruffle of its contents preparing to alight, the quieting of conversations as the behemoth crawls to a standstill. He can only sense but never fully know.
It was Kurosawa who said ‘the role of an artist is to not look away’.
I cannot help myself from consuming the world in front of me. Claiming it through the tunnel of my eyes, projected onto my mind. Streaming light through filters of experience, upbringing, culture, and so on. In a myriad of life loops: I walk, I see, I perceive and I walk on.
Looking fascinates me.
July 19, 2024
CENTRAL PLATEAU : HOME AGAIN
‘under the state of a strange land...welcome home’
- d. dobbyn
July 9, 2024
LUCKY DOG
Shook my head and lit my cigarette
There’s all these things I don’t remember
Yeah, How lucky can one man get?
July 4, 2024
INFLATION
Perhaps true vulnerability requires a true cost.