Post-hula-state
A poetry collection
Post-hula,
I stand in the hoop stupidly,
like it were a circle saying
“Look, here's the idiot!”
“Help”
Cried James Bond
from the broom closet.
It was beginning to sink in
he would spend the night there.
James Bond fashioned a bed
out of rubber gloves and A4.
The skinny brunette
mop lay beside him.
I watch the water
in the hopes that some
longer drift wood would drift along
for my project.
What do they say?
A pot watched…
A pot watcher never toils…?
I worry the water watches me too.
Of course the naked eye
feels naked.
I wish I could watch invisibly,
but it's basic optics that
a see-through retina can't see.
I am Jeff Koons
and I pretend to understand
whatever's going on in Yemen,
and in the 90s I had a love affair
with David Hockney,
and sometimes when I'm lonely
I sleep inside the balloon dog.
I know I am safe in there
because I keep the surface mirror-shiny.
Half of Charles Bukowski
He has hard hands, hands that are hurt,
hands with a memory for bottles and dirt.
And a genuine eye, an eye for the honest,
a tired old eye with a fly in its bonnet.
So prose skilled hands they let a most morose drinker sail,
faultless to those who don't notice those fingernails.
Nails so cracked and untrimmed it's grotesque,
they act as a typewriter hindrance at best.
So focused an eye, for those moments it catches,
faultless to those don't notice its lashes.
Lashes so heavy and blighted and torn
they down-cast the eyelids on which they are worn.
Over his poems these harrowing things
hang like a pairing of shadowy wings
and no matter how far from the poems I stand
they're as stuck as the nails on the ends of his hands.
...
And fell asleep with sugar on my tongue
(A short story that sits in between the second and third paragraph of Jhumpa Lahiri's “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”)
Mr. Pirzada's Lunar face beamed down on her. Her house was palpably empty and a green book sat on the table. “Would you like to read it?” He asked, very calmly.
“Is it the book you've been writing?”
“It's my project”
She opened the book. Instead of letters there were lines, dots, shapes spanning the page like water damage.
“I can't read it”
His body was stuffed tight with pride.
“Please look very closely”
She leant down further and waited. To her surprise the tiny dots of ink began to drift around like tea leaves. Pushing in closer and closer she realised she was not looking at ink but people. A miniature town Mr. Pirzada had built. It was hilariously beautiful. She continued to push further and further in until her nose touched the dusty road. She stood up to see fallen buildings and forests of unfamiliar trees.
The drifting tea leaves were now clamouring crowds, the warmth of the pages a sweltering blaze. Immediately sweat began to dribble. Shouting men stood in lines like clothespin dolls, legs snapping open, shut. Their thread arms held cold, slim guns. She looked into the back of a passing truck, who's wheels played the earth like a timpani.
Tony the Tiger lay dead in the tray. He was still wearing the dracula cape from his most recent commercial and his fur still smelled sweet. She could see he had sugar on the corner of his lips and sleep in his eye. Somewhere she understood she was dreaming, but the tumult couldn't be willed away. She questioned her immortality from the imagined bullets and shouts.
Amongst the drove she could hear crying. Through boots and tires she saw a baby she understood to be Mr. Pirzada. She gasped at every tread of the crowd, terrified he might be crushed. She reached through the legs, across the street. He squirmed as she lifted him and thudded her way through the crowd. The further she strode from the town the louder he shrieked, every step held exponential guilt but she took them anyway. She looked down at his contorted face and noticed the mouth. His tongue bubbled and pulsed like an aneurysm, melting to reveal shaking sinew. His face softened and his features began to drift down his head. Aghast, she tried to hold him close but he was already crumbling into chalk.
Nothing could express her horror so she stood silently opening and closing her mouth. She thought back to Mr. Pirzada's adult face. She no longer understood his smile. She no longer understood the kindness in his eyes so near incomprehensible catastrophe.
***
In the morning her senses were overwhelmed by the tart, metallic taste of bitter lime. She had no memory of her dream but remembered eating a sweet before bed, leaving the sugar coating on her tongue. She understood the flavour was a consequence of this. Still, she dressed quickly under a faint irrational fear: That unless she brushed her teeth soon the taste might never leave.
The Mary's room argument (if you agree that the brain-process of learning the concept of red is different from the brain-process of seeing it) is really just an impassioned metaphor for how physicalsts are nerds who don't go outside - something less suited to philosophy than to deep emo poetry. So I took it upon myself to reduce it to it's true form:
Physicalists
In their black and white rooms
and black and white lives,
they think they know all
without going outside.
They talk only of Smart not heart,
their black and white and brains
never notice the colour
that courses their veins!
Their black and white books
and papers and scrolls,
no matter how read,
cannot be red at all…
More writing