Sorry ... what was the question?

How could a man count up
his losses as if they were sheep
called up to ease the terrors
of an unimaginative insomniac,
one with a wool fetish, perhaps,
and too much time to fritter away
on idle thoughts and figments;
possibilities that might have been
but never were and never could be?

Do you weigh them in a cosmic balance,
totting up the gains against the losses

as if there might be a single answer:

forty-two, rosebud, pi, the square

of the hypotenuse or Tom Doniphon?

The trouble is you have to know

the question you need or want to ask

and then be brave enough to listen

while the unimagniable universe talks,

wholly indifferent at the best of times

to hollow men with less time left than

they realise ... and egos bigger by far

than the national debt of Mexico.

Even then, all you might discover is
who it was that shot Liberty Valance.
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I may be going insane ...

So, the office was burgled in the dead of night. Is there some burglar school in this day and age where the Professor of Thieving forgets to mention CCTV in secure buildings? If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I would never have believed it. Can a human being truly be quite that stupid? Seems so ...

It's ours

there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by
nothing

that
gentle pure
space

it's worth

centuries of
existence

say

just to scratch your neck
while looking out the window at
a bare branch

that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won't
get it all

ever.

Charles Bukowski


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Lewisham Park ...

London's Lewisham rather than Sydney's. Today.

Picture by Cassie Herschel-Shorland (friend of Amelia Starr).

An non-believer's prayer

(for Matt Laffan)

If, as must be clear, I have forgotten how to pray,
................................................Oh Lord,
forgive me that these words, which here I say,
seem crude to you and sound so awkward
in their presentation of this late display.

An invocation: my entreaty for your word,
your act, your deed; some chance to stay
the paltry moment when the flesh, in discord
with the spirit’s longing now to set out on its way
- perhaps back home like some enchanted bird
no longer tied to nature’s willful disarray -

cries out for more: the sunrise of a bright new day,
cries out for more: the chance to be still heard,
cries out for more: the end, for now, deferred.
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looking for signs that you're stupid ...

I have no dout that Yarramalong, inland of Wyong on the NSW Central Coast, is a lovely little village. I might even choose to visit the sleepy little hamlet one day ... in daylight.

The first sign that I can be as stupid as all the coots of Centennial Park's ponds standing in a single column of stupid coots, each coot balancing on the shoulders of the coot beneath it (if coots have shoulders) came when I passed the sign for Yarramalong Public School, established in 1870 (see pretty picture).

I'm sure that if I'd actually known what I was doing at two-thirty a.m., as I drove the Transit van farther and farther along the Yarramalong Road towards the dead ends at Cedar Bush Creek and Ravensdale (both north-west of my initial point of departure ... Spike's parents' place in Dooralong) I would have seen SOME SIGN that I was travelling 18.4 KMS IN THE WRONG DIRECTION for a man who was trying to head south-east in search of the freeway to Sydney. Dickhead. That'll be a 40 kms round trip in the dark and misty conditions of a winding, undulating country road, which are simply THE BEST CONDITIONS imaginable for a quad with hand controls to drive his clapped-out, 14 year old, petrol powered automatic Ford panel van. So there's an hour of my life I'll never see again.

My defence is that I think there's a sign missing at the junction of Yarramalong Road and Old Maitland Road, when you're heading south. Travelling north along OMR you reach the T-junction at YR. A giant green sign points to Yarramalong. Another giant greet sign points to Dooralong. These signs confirm the easy to follow instruction's I'd received by SMS to guide my first visit to Spike's parents' place ... take the Wyong turn-off then it's LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, LEFT, LEFT. That makes the return trip easy peasy ... RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT.

Aha ...

Heading south there is no sign announcing FREEWAY THIS WAY - YOU DIP STICK. No green sign at all. There's a little blue and white sign, which reads Old Maitland Road (like that helps anyone without Google maps in their 1984 Transit van with 156,000 miles on the clock). And there's a BIG GREEN SIGN announcing FREEWAY JUNCTION 2KMS but that sign appears half a kilometre AFTER the turn-off ... so that's slightly less than wholly helpful to a man who was looking for the turn-off BEFORE he reached it in case, in his tiredness, inexperience, the dark, the mist and late-night / early morning uncertainty of the drive he missed the turn-off.

Got home at 4:30 a.m. In bed by the time dawn had broken and the birds were singing. Still, nothing could detract from a wonderful Saturday afternoon and evening with Spike at the Leonard Cohen concert in Pokolbin; nothing.
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Necessary noise ... part 14

Three of the best hours of music, words and performance you could imagine: Leonard Cohen and his brilliant band under a late summer's stunning sunset and night sky at Pokolbin in the NSW Hunter Valley. He surpassed all my hopes and expectations.

Photos by Spike.









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