this man.

he was growing into middle age, and was living then in a bungalow on woodland avenue. he installed himself in a rocking chair and smoked a cigar down in the evenings as his wife wiped her pink hands on an apron and reported happily on their two children. his children knew his legs and the sting of his beard against their cheeks. they didn't know how their father made his living, or why they so often moved. they didn't even know their fathers name. he was listed  in the city directory as thomas howard and went everywhere unrecognized, lunching with kansas city shopkeepers and merchants, calling himself a cattlemen or a commodities investor. someone rich and leisured with the common touch. he had two incompletely healed bullet holes in his chest and another in his thigh. he was missing the nub of his left middle finger, and was cautious lest that mutilation be seen. he also had a condition that was referred to as granulated eyelids, and it caused him to blink more than usual, as if he found creation slightly more than he could accept. rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rains fell straighter, clocks slowed, and sounds were amplified. he considered himself a southern loyalist and guerrilla in a civil war that never ended. he regretted neither his robberies nor the seventeen murders he lay claim two. he had seen another summer under in kansas city, missouri, and on april third, in the year 1882 he was thirty four years old. after eating breakfast, he, along with his companion bob ford, prepared to depart for a robbery. they went in and out of the home preparing their horses, dodging his gleeful children who were lost in games under the warm morning sun. he removed his coat as the day grew hotter, and unbuckled his gun belt, lest the firearms made him appear suspicious. before leaving he glimpsed a dusty picture on their living room wall, he stood on a chair to reach the portrait, and bob ford fired one final shot into the body of jesse james entering the back of his head and killing him instantly.

i tap my fingertips against the wall which shelters my little world inside my apartment and think of things to write about. what the fuck do i know, what the fuck do you want to hear from me? do you want me to tell you that i'd go sober for you, because i swear i would. i wouldn't touch a drop (nor would i want to) and we could work on the nicotine addiction. but maybe i just miss when we were kids and kisses on the cheeks was all we needed to show each other our i love you's, when we dreamed up stories in our heads and bought cheap candy and pop, lost in those late weekday nights in the summertime. before these clothes became our caskets and all the kids switched to cocaine, because whiskey never mended our minds. i remember when your lips tasted like cherry chapstick and vanilla ice cream, before we melted them into cheap wine and wrapped them around even cheaper cigarettes. i have this small intangible memory of the night when we knew things had changed forever. when we huddled our little frames together in the parking garage across from the royal albert arms, smoking john players between bands feeling oh so punk. we kissed and smiled and laughed but i knew that you would never taste like that cherry chapstick again.

today i found out that during the american revolution i had two great great great something er other aunts named Lonely and Desolate Gage. neat!

i sit and try to write a story i hope you would read. something with power and imagery. but the only thoughts that creep into my mind are grass stained knees in spring, or the smell of sunscreen on her neck before lunch. the maddening rush of puppy love at sixteen or the shattering of a cars windshield (over and over again) and i've learnt that in a car wreck i'm always invincible but in your eyes i'm wandering and miserable. i used to hide under bedsheets and read novels that always ended too soon, we would grip hands at the sad parts and place each others fingerprints methodically on one another's skin. the pounding of hearts is softer then the pounding of shot glasses on the bar top but the pain in the mornings can feel very much the same, and one inevitably replaced the other when this other was lost. the smile of someone i knew but did not recognize any longer left me slouched, hands on knees, in a back lane of our busy little bar. memorizing the pavement as the nerves built up inside and insisted on leaving, and all i could think was what a waste of beer and what a waste of love and what a waste of an already wasted day. all the drugs and the alcohol and the nicotine that deteriorate my insides do not change a thing.

after a day like that all i can say is what the fucking fuck.

so my birthday is coming up, here is the one and only thing i want (in mutant green please!)

PENNY AUSTRALIA from Penny Australia on Vimeo.

osborne village

anonymous

i don't know what happened and i don't think i'll ever understand. how we lived in each other's palms and how your fingerprints became suns and moons or how you left something like planets on my skin. you turned into silver and gold threads, longer then our veins and laced right through my skull, swelling up with every single thought i ever had. and we always had these state lines cradled in our shaking hands but it never stopped our fingers from intertwining or our spines from melting into mountains. and our eyes were always tinted blue from looking up. so i'll never understand how you let me lay on the floorboards in your chest and sleep inside your rib cage when you were always going to leave. i have your words and promises, still soft with cracked edges like seashells in my back pockets because i promised i wouldn't let them get swallowed by the shore but it doesn't really matter. we don't exist anymore.

"i think it's strange"
i stated as we stood under the giant elephants in the museum,
           "that we hold on to memories and thoughts and phrases and people and places
and ands and ands and ands.
                   and that one day someone from a distant generation of ours will face the end of the world, they would have had our blood and our dna
                           and perhaps even my freckles and your blonde hair, and that someone will be a part of us, and they will be there at the very second that the earth dies, so in a way we will be there too."
with a
breath
and a
sigh
and a glance at my worried look that you never understood
        you tucked up close
    and whispered "i hope they're in love when this all goes"

maybe i'm just a sap for anything that comes out of south africa, or maybe it's my intense crush on Yolandi Visser, but  this may be the best half hour (i watched it twice) that i have ever spent.

we imagine being a spot of dust settled in the cracks of some old manor or mansion, buried in history and moss and mildew, far far from here and now. i watch my bitterness soften at the seams as the world dulls it with every drink and late night, just as the wallpaper of an abandoned farm house curls up around the edges and rots away with every summer sun and dew dropped morning. and i ramble ramble ramble on paper and we wish on air.

this is my infrequently used tumblr: dear wendy. the "stick to yr guns" dot tumblr is not mine, and fuck the bitch who used it. i started it so i could post dope stuff which seemed out of place here. sex, drugs, violence and other overtly trendy shit in photo form and such. with university rapping up posts will be more frequent if you care er whatever.

Paris, Texas.

i wanna write a country song and call it "she was a whore but i miss her cooking", also, you should probably watch this movie. 

the average heart beats sixty something times a minute but your heart was never average. in the middle of a car wreck you turned to say, "living was mighty pretty, maybe you and i will do it again someday?" they'll scrap the steal and bury our bones and its all just proof that the work of the ugliness is to highlight the beautiful. our clothes will probably end up in thrift stores, scooped up by trendy kids, on a particularly hot day in may and when we used to touch it felt as though our skeletons and skin would love each other even if our minds did not. we moved into the cabin just for fun, at seventeen or something, and not for very long. the roads were dangerous and we missed our friends after a few weeks. but the sun warmed the floorboards and couch cushions so perfectly in the mornings, and the lake was a dark green which cooled our everythings. we heard our grandparents in the trees and burned sage to keep the indian ghosts dancing. at night we hid from sleep out on the dock, i swore the candles would keep the spiders away (often they did not, but you never seemed to notice) and your lips were still hot and pink from the sun of the day. although that was long ago before we turned in our bones, but i think you would have agreed that she is a tapestry of new memories and old feelings and a little fucked up but god damn she's a pretty human being.

    

Paris, New York, Belfast, or Reykjavik?

how dramatic

i've come to realize, albeit without remorse, that i have lost some freedom to write whatever i desire for fear of certain emotional vulnerabilities. this is a loss of anonymity and an alter-ego that was originally known to only a select few. in recent weeks i have written many pages of words (on the backs of novels and napkins and such) which will never end up here due to this realization, despite the pride i take in their sincerity and their (supposed) poeticness. the awareness of all this came in the basement of limieght after receiving a text message about the death of a friend overseas, in december, but unknown to me until that night. i wanted to express so many things but did not know how. i started this project at a point in my life which harboured much security and stability. this time has now passed, and although i have grown accustom and found inspiration in this new and unanchored chapter i have become aware of how my words may be received and reflected back upon myself in day to day life. i love skateboarding, and find therapy in the simplicity of skating down an empty street, but i can assure you your grandmother can skate with more skill then me, and all my favorite authors and silver screen heroes have died due to heartache, alcoholism, and car accidents which reflects poorly on my taste in father figures and whatever. my writing process is fairly simple, too many cigarettes, too many beers in the faint hours of early morning (which seemed to lack reality and structure), with an old war movie on mute of course, currently bridge on the river kwai. alec guinness walks with a limp which reflects mine during those absurdly cold january mornings, attributed to a certain motorcycle that i lack courage to ride again (another metaphor perhaps). only about twenty five percent of these writings make it on here, and unfortunately they tend to be the weaker of the bunch. i fear making the same mistakes in terms of my choice in women, i fear my lack of confidence in myself and who i am, and i fear an unknown future which once belonged to a military life, then to a girl, and now to nothing. nevertheless i will not stop writing if you continue to read, but from this point on these words are fiction and not fact, and never think otherwise.