An admittedly derivative but honest experiment in classical romantic verse.
To the greats.
To her.
http://mindruleslife.blogspot.com/2010/09/ode-to-lives-lives-heart-first.html
Monday, 20 September 2010
Friday, 17 September 2010
Wednesday the 15th of September - Day and the Night Before
Prologue to the Day
14/09/2010 – Night
The trend for recent evenings hadn't been broken tonight, she'd kept him up later than he'd have liked. Since knowing her he's found sleep's overrated unless it's by her side and even the sight and sound of her on a cold screen are better than hot dreams of sensual taunting that end, awake and alone in an empty bed.
Guilty people apologise, sorry people apologise constantly. It's an idiosyncratic reflex of his, born from being the butt of blame for years and years past. Not exceptionally so, because all children and teens surely experience this, but it was too easy to learn the wrong lessons from the events and chastisements that surrounded him. It was just unfortunate that the perception required to garner the right lessons from them had developed in him too late. So he became, as he inevitably would, a sorry person.
Demi and Nathan had been sitting on Skype for two hours and still hadn't spoken of anything real, Nathan had been too busy to find out why until he, almost instinctually, apologised for nothings said that couldn't have offended which had been remembered in contexts which hadn't been spoken. He'd asked her not to write of him because he thought her thinking fond thoughts of him so often would wear thin so quickly, and that was the one thing that scared him more than the speed at which he was falling for her. Nathan knew this request was a trespass to anyone who glowed with fires of creation but had asked anyway. Demi told him it wasn't to do with that, it was her fear that had made her quiet. Her fear was the same as his, and when he realised a fear like this freezes her tongue and burdens her heart the same way it does his, he knew what he would say would reassure them both.
Wednesday 15th September 2010
{Sitting on the first train for months}
Nathan rose late this morning, a result of a night spent shamelessly 'Skype-ing' with Demi, in each others distant company on the cyber-plane - in image and sound - until the early hours. He spent the hour between eight and nine a.m. dreading how the tattered state of his French knowledge wouldn't be enough to get him through his nearing exams and wondering how it was he would get back on top of the life he'd let fall apart like badly played game of Jenga. Finally, after deciding for the umpteenth time that nothing but his own actions would save him, he tore himself from his warm, comfortable duvet-wrapped indolence and squinted his eyes to spot the slight variation from the navy green and threadbare brown of his carpet which would be his underwear. Putting those and his Karate bottoms on with a black hoodie, grabbed the empty tea cups from the previous night and pulled open his off-white bedroom door and made for the kitchen. After pacing around the cramped and putridly coloured, linoleum floored cooking space a few times, indecisively opening and shutting cupboard doors, he realised breakfast wasn't worth the trouble yet. He had things to do and for once intended to do them.
He went downstairs and out to the driveway, intending to work out what was wrong with his car. The cause of yesterdays commotion. He was sure it was the temperature gauge or thermostat pump that was playing up, so he put water and fresh coolant into the radiator, left the cap off, started the engine and waited to see if the liquid was pumped through the engine properly. The engine kicked over and did its usual jogging and juddering but then started running more smoothly. The bubbles formed in the coolant sitting around the cap as it should, then as the engine warmed up and needed more liquid to cool, started bubbling over constantly, like a miniature rusty-watered geezer. It seemed consistent though, which wasn't – contrary to how it may sound – a good thing. Nathan said one word, the only word one knows will encompass dismay such a this:
“Fuck.”
He'd have to take it to the pro's... again. A service he couldn't afford but knew he needed.
He took a moment to stare disappointedly at his incapacitated green tin of freedom, then swallowed his pride and walked along the coarsely cobbled driveway into the yellow cask he called home. His father was sitting at his computer desk, fiddling with the buzzer that his own late father – Nathan's Grandfather – had used to call for help when he was too weak and still too proud to use his voice. Mark had cared for his father for three years, since his first stroke, until the end. Two weeks and three days ago.
“What'cha doin' with that?” Nathan asked.
“We need a new doorbell, so I'm recycling this”, replied Mark, with a hint of mock pride. Nathan had heard the buzzer a couple of times over the past few days but hadn't thought anything of it, now he hoped this was why. The thought crossed Nathan's mind that his father had become somehow attached to the sound and worried it might be unhealthy, that it might inhibit his grieving to keep hearing the piercing bi-tonal bleep calling him to anything. Even if it's not to the aid of a slowly departing father. He almost asked him if he wasn't sick of the sound, but decided against it.
“Would I be able to get a lift to the train station in an hour or so?”
Mark looked amused and clicked his tongue patronisingly.
“I thought your car sounded a bit off...”
“I think the thermostat's buggered, it's pumping when it idles, but I drive and it just overheats.”
“Well, yeah, no problem, taking it to the monkeys?”
“Certainly am, lucky me, they'll probably change the fucking wheel again. Morons.”
***
Driving into Morisset used to feel like driving into ground-zero of some decades old disaster, the Chernobyl of the Central Coast, but by most accounts there never was any major catastrophe. Over the last few years it's undergone an overhaul, gained new shops, a golf club and course and moved a certain defining land-mark a little further away.
“It's been a year or two since I've come here, the scenery's changed but the feelings the same.” Mark said, in that vacant tone one only gets when distracted with a task as mundane as driving. It had been two years since they'd come here together, Nathan had noticed the same thing.
“That feeling being there makes the place even less trustworthy. You at least used to be able to see how dodgy it was. Now it's hidden, it's like the town equivalent of a banker, suit and tie covering up its nefarious business dealings.” Nathan hadn't had any real experience with bankers, but he'd heard most were less than respectable characters and liked pretend to know things.
Morisset train station feels like a waiting room at the edge of sanity. Situated a few kilometres from the aforementioned 'defining land-mark' - a mental institution – and judging by the state of the commuters you'd be forgiven for thinking that the crazy's catching. Nathan waited in the platform-side waiting alcove and felt like he was in a gaol prayer room. The bland aesthetic left him trawling his mind for entertainment, but all he found was worry. Forced reflection, again. Dedicated erudition had stopped being his primary vocation recently, as quickly as it had started just a year ago and he hoped the worry didn't show. He hoped he didn't look like one of the stations regulars. He hoped he was, as he'd let himself feel over the past couple of days, getting back on track.
“S'kuze mayte, ya got any durries, bro?” The drawl ripped him from his daydream to a beak, rather than a nose, attached to a red, unshaven face topped by a black and white Adidas hat sweatily leering at him. He took a moment to realise this was in fact a request.
“No, sorry about that.” He wasn't at all. “I don't smoke.” He does.
“No worries, cuz.” The man left, presumably to ask someone else for 'durries'.
Nathan strolled around the waiting room again, admiring the brutalistic ingenuity of the dirty yellow painted cement block of chairs in the centre of the room, topped with a patch of soil which he could only assume was meant for plants but where now only cigarette butts lay.
He heard the trundling wheels and hissing breaks, and when the windows turned silver he took the cue and walked out onto to the platform to meet the train. The man who'd asked for a cigarette strutted excitedly along the platform toward the back of the train, knocking his knuckles against the metal side of the corrugated carriage as it slowed. It was then that Nathan noticed that he had on, to match his black and white Adidas hat, a black and white Adidas tracksuit. The continuity of his outfit was ruined only by the the fluorescent orange neckerchief, which left one only wondering, 'why?'.
Greeted with the usual smell those latrines on rails offered, Nathan walked along the carriage in search of a seat. Choosing one that looked cramped enough for him to look too big to sit next to, he sat down, took his laptop from his bag, turned it on and began to write.
... Wednesday 15th September 2010
{Sitting on the first train for months}
He rose late this morning, a result of a night spent shame...
Thinking back over the day he realised how contradictory the violence with which rigmarole can play itself out is. You can do the same thing countless days over but still gain new insights, feelings and opinions from it, all depending on things as simple as mood or weather. These moments spent writing himself as another were the only places and times he realised it. A million different fates await the same person in the same situations, this was where one could go to escape the fate.
Forty-five minutes later the train pulled into Hamilton station, just as he was beginning to get used to the smell. A changeover and a few more minutes gone and he'd arrived on campus, the rest of the day was to pass in a daze, most favourably in the company of Demi, lying on a small patch of grass that glowed in the midday sun. The rest in sepia hewed snapshots of French dictionaries and the under-edited prose and poems of his some of his less-than-inspired peers.
The sun leaked it's yellow warmth over the day until it turned amber and slowed the traffic of those beneath it. Finally it ran out at half past five, when Nathan watched the spring twilight leave the day at the mercy of the moon and stars from the window of his writing classroom. This is where he found out the days prose and poetry was less than it should have been but more inspired than it seemed, this was where he was surprised to find out Kai's stumbled and esoteric poems weren't as bad as they flowed on first glance, and then nodded along with his tutors analysis until seven p.m came, when he left.
Walking from his Creative Writing class, scouring his mind through a cracked jewellers lens of narrow thought, he uncovered a memory from the days haze that lifted him from his somnambulism. He'd made plans with Demi. Tonight he'd spend enveloped in warm, mutual longing and deep, teaming lust. Tonight they'd find their ends together then search over and over again.
14/09/2010 – Night
The trend for recent evenings hadn't been broken tonight, she'd kept him up later than he'd have liked. Since knowing her he's found sleep's overrated unless it's by her side and even the sight and sound of her on a cold screen are better than hot dreams of sensual taunting that end, awake and alone in an empty bed.
Guilty people apologise, sorry people apologise constantly. It's an idiosyncratic reflex of his, born from being the butt of blame for years and years past. Not exceptionally so, because all children and teens surely experience this, but it was too easy to learn the wrong lessons from the events and chastisements that surrounded him. It was just unfortunate that the perception required to garner the right lessons from them had developed in him too late. So he became, as he inevitably would, a sorry person.
Demi and Nathan had been sitting on Skype for two hours and still hadn't spoken of anything real, Nathan had been too busy to find out why until he, almost instinctually, apologised for nothings said that couldn't have offended which had been remembered in contexts which hadn't been spoken. He'd asked her not to write of him because he thought her thinking fond thoughts of him so often would wear thin so quickly, and that was the one thing that scared him more than the speed at which he was falling for her. Nathan knew this request was a trespass to anyone who glowed with fires of creation but had asked anyway. Demi told him it wasn't to do with that, it was her fear that had made her quiet. Her fear was the same as his, and when he realised a fear like this freezes her tongue and burdens her heart the same way it does his, he knew what he would say would reassure them both.
Wednesday 15th September 2010
{Sitting on the first train for months}
Nathan rose late this morning, a result of a night spent shamelessly 'Skype-ing' with Demi, in each others distant company on the cyber-plane - in image and sound - until the early hours. He spent the hour between eight and nine a.m. dreading how the tattered state of his French knowledge wouldn't be enough to get him through his nearing exams and wondering how it was he would get back on top of the life he'd let fall apart like badly played game of Jenga. Finally, after deciding for the umpteenth time that nothing but his own actions would save him, he tore himself from his warm, comfortable duvet-wrapped indolence and squinted his eyes to spot the slight variation from the navy green and threadbare brown of his carpet which would be his underwear. Putting those and his Karate bottoms on with a black hoodie, grabbed the empty tea cups from the previous night and pulled open his off-white bedroom door and made for the kitchen. After pacing around the cramped and putridly coloured, linoleum floored cooking space a few times, indecisively opening and shutting cupboard doors, he realised breakfast wasn't worth the trouble yet. He had things to do and for once intended to do them.
He went downstairs and out to the driveway, intending to work out what was wrong with his car. The cause of yesterdays commotion. He was sure it was the temperature gauge or thermostat pump that was playing up, so he put water and fresh coolant into the radiator, left the cap off, started the engine and waited to see if the liquid was pumped through the engine properly. The engine kicked over and did its usual jogging and juddering but then started running more smoothly. The bubbles formed in the coolant sitting around the cap as it should, then as the engine warmed up and needed more liquid to cool, started bubbling over constantly, like a miniature rusty-watered geezer. It seemed consistent though, which wasn't – contrary to how it may sound – a good thing. Nathan said one word, the only word one knows will encompass dismay such a this:
“Fuck.”
He'd have to take it to the pro's... again. A service he couldn't afford but knew he needed.
He took a moment to stare disappointedly at his incapacitated green tin of freedom, then swallowed his pride and walked along the coarsely cobbled driveway into the yellow cask he called home. His father was sitting at his computer desk, fiddling with the buzzer that his own late father – Nathan's Grandfather – had used to call for help when he was too weak and still too proud to use his voice. Mark had cared for his father for three years, since his first stroke, until the end. Two weeks and three days ago.
“What'cha doin' with that?” Nathan asked.
“We need a new doorbell, so I'm recycling this”, replied Mark, with a hint of mock pride. Nathan had heard the buzzer a couple of times over the past few days but hadn't thought anything of it, now he hoped this was why. The thought crossed Nathan's mind that his father had become somehow attached to the sound and worried it might be unhealthy, that it might inhibit his grieving to keep hearing the piercing bi-tonal bleep calling him to anything. Even if it's not to the aid of a slowly departing father. He almost asked him if he wasn't sick of the sound, but decided against it.
“Would I be able to get a lift to the train station in an hour or so?”
Mark looked amused and clicked his tongue patronisingly.
“I thought your car sounded a bit off...”
“I think the thermostat's buggered, it's pumping when it idles, but I drive and it just overheats.”
“Well, yeah, no problem, taking it to the monkeys?”
“Certainly am, lucky me, they'll probably change the fucking wheel again. Morons.”
***
Driving into Morisset used to feel like driving into ground-zero of some decades old disaster, the Chernobyl of the Central Coast, but by most accounts there never was any major catastrophe. Over the last few years it's undergone an overhaul, gained new shops, a golf club and course and moved a certain defining land-mark a little further away.
“It's been a year or two since I've come here, the scenery's changed but the feelings the same.” Mark said, in that vacant tone one only gets when distracted with a task as mundane as driving. It had been two years since they'd come here together, Nathan had noticed the same thing.
“That feeling being there makes the place even less trustworthy. You at least used to be able to see how dodgy it was. Now it's hidden, it's like the town equivalent of a banker, suit and tie covering up its nefarious business dealings.” Nathan hadn't had any real experience with bankers, but he'd heard most were less than respectable characters and liked pretend to know things.
Morisset train station feels like a waiting room at the edge of sanity. Situated a few kilometres from the aforementioned 'defining land-mark' - a mental institution – and judging by the state of the commuters you'd be forgiven for thinking that the crazy's catching. Nathan waited in the platform-side waiting alcove and felt like he was in a gaol prayer room. The bland aesthetic left him trawling his mind for entertainment, but all he found was worry. Forced reflection, again. Dedicated erudition had stopped being his primary vocation recently, as quickly as it had started just a year ago and he hoped the worry didn't show. He hoped he didn't look like one of the stations regulars. He hoped he was, as he'd let himself feel over the past couple of days, getting back on track.
“S'kuze mayte, ya got any durries, bro?” The drawl ripped him from his daydream to a beak, rather than a nose, attached to a red, unshaven face topped by a black and white Adidas hat sweatily leering at him. He took a moment to realise this was in fact a request.
“No, sorry about that.” He wasn't at all. “I don't smoke.” He does.
“No worries, cuz.” The man left, presumably to ask someone else for 'durries'.
Nathan strolled around the waiting room again, admiring the brutalistic ingenuity of the dirty yellow painted cement block of chairs in the centre of the room, topped with a patch of soil which he could only assume was meant for plants but where now only cigarette butts lay.
He heard the trundling wheels and hissing breaks, and when the windows turned silver he took the cue and walked out onto to the platform to meet the train. The man who'd asked for a cigarette strutted excitedly along the platform toward the back of the train, knocking his knuckles against the metal side of the corrugated carriage as it slowed. It was then that Nathan noticed that he had on, to match his black and white Adidas hat, a black and white Adidas tracksuit. The continuity of his outfit was ruined only by the the fluorescent orange neckerchief, which left one only wondering, 'why?'.
Greeted with the usual smell those latrines on rails offered, Nathan walked along the carriage in search of a seat. Choosing one that looked cramped enough for him to look too big to sit next to, he sat down, took his laptop from his bag, turned it on and began to write.
... Wednesday 15th September 2010
{Sitting on the first train for months}
He rose late this morning, a result of a night spent shame...
Thinking back over the day he realised how contradictory the violence with which rigmarole can play itself out is. You can do the same thing countless days over but still gain new insights, feelings and opinions from it, all depending on things as simple as mood or weather. These moments spent writing himself as another were the only places and times he realised it. A million different fates await the same person in the same situations, this was where one could go to escape the fate.
Forty-five minutes later the train pulled into Hamilton station, just as he was beginning to get used to the smell. A changeover and a few more minutes gone and he'd arrived on campus, the rest of the day was to pass in a daze, most favourably in the company of Demi, lying on a small patch of grass that glowed in the midday sun. The rest in sepia hewed snapshots of French dictionaries and the under-edited prose and poems of his some of his less-than-inspired peers.
The sun leaked it's yellow warmth over the day until it turned amber and slowed the traffic of those beneath it. Finally it ran out at half past five, when Nathan watched the spring twilight leave the day at the mercy of the moon and stars from the window of his writing classroom. This is where he found out the days prose and poetry was less than it should have been but more inspired than it seemed, this was where he was surprised to find out Kai's stumbled and esoteric poems weren't as bad as they flowed on first glance, and then nodded along with his tutors analysis until seven p.m came, when he left.
Walking from his Creative Writing class, scouring his mind through a cracked jewellers lens of narrow thought, he uncovered a memory from the days haze that lifted him from his somnambulism. He'd made plans with Demi. Tonight he'd spend enveloped in warm, mutual longing and deep, teaming lust. Tonight they'd find their ends together then search over and over again.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Self Temperature Gauge - Day: Tuesday 14th September, 2010
{Pulled over at the roadside, waiting for another friend to come with tidings of help, water and relief from the introspective pit-stop he'd coasted into}
He'd noticed the temperature gauge of his poorly kept 1993 Toyota Vienta creep up half an hour earlier, and had left the rush hour traffic for the hard shoulder immediately. Only fifteen minutes of cursing and despondence had passed before Bowen had fortuitously happened upon his dire situation. One hopes they can rely on the kindness of strangers in a situation as inconveniencing as this one, for in the 'grand scheme of things', that's all it is. An inconvenience. However, one rarely can. They'll always try to suppress those fleeting hopes that a friend or acquaintance might find them because an inconvenience as stunting to a days progress as this one always feels far more weighty than it actually is. When that friend does turn up out of the haze of the alien highway, it's on a breeze so sweet to breathe you're almost happy to be there.
Nathan used the little Bowen had to offer with a gratitude seldom felt in the everyday. The phone had felt like a prayer with a guarantee, the simple telephone conversation with Kale – another generous friend who lived nearby – like the first drops of water to a parched man's throat. But in this case it was water for the cars parched engine Kale had agreed to bring in the next hour or so.
Was he really that negligent? Were mundane tasks of vehicular upkeep really that much of a stretch for him? These questions played on his conscience like fingers on an unmaintained violin.
It was only now he took the time to realise and reflect upon how buffeted and blown by the winds of fate his passage through life had been. Fate was always one of the many things he refused to believe in but he now found its attention grabbing efforts to be more difficult to ignore than ever before. A firm believer in the power of the self and the propensity of one's own determination to shape his path however they may want will never give fate's claims to causation praise unless it deals them a bad hand. Then they'll curse their luck and question their direction and drive with a contempt to match any of the innocent victims of circumstance and judicial sentencing unfairly rotting in gaols the world over.
Cars charge by, blind as red-sighted elephants stampeding in flight from a pack of hungry lions. It's abnormal, the inhumanity one experiences when they're stuck at the side of a highway. So much life driving such powerful machines, the capacity to do so much damage but all they want is to go, go, go. One falls off and the rest will keep on. A symptomatic by-passing of nonchalant power wielders, taking only brief notice of the one who for all they know has been sacrificed to the wallet of the roadside services.
The mind wanders like an Ibex, up and down sheer cliffs of doubt and vulnerability in the face of a standstill. The embarrassment leaves you nothing but slivers of hope. Luckily he'd made his call. Luckily he had Liz and Kale.
He is a friend indeed, or can at least claim to be so, with all the evidence given and in light of the age old proverb hypothesising that to be the aforementioned, one must be in need.
At the roadside today, need defines his every movement and want his every action. But of course, in those ways poetically relative ways, the reaction is warm and incites
Here You Will Find…
A mind in which a decision was made,
today
in the faces framed and hidden by tint
speeding by, expressionless,
only hints
perhaps of a life lived, perhaps of an existence.
May not the worth
save that which entertainment gives,
be all that ties us to this earth.
May not the price,
save that which being takes,
be all that others know of our quarrels,
for in those reflexions that pass we see,
our essence in vicarious triviality.
NS
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