Opaque - first published in Death of a Scenester, Issue One - COVERS 2010

Opaque tea and a cold kiss of the apple and I breathe in the wet air at the outdoor setting. White-painted cast iron, looking delicate and antique, but drags like a dead beast across the ground when you try to shift it. Shit. Ashes on my feet. Silent and grey like a disintegrated feather. I smudge it away with my other foot and wipe both feet, both sides, awkwardly on the dewy grass.

You’ve been missing for four and a half days. Approximately 108 hours. I imagine you, lying in a creek, bloated and drained of all human colour. I imagine you, haemorrhaging in a gutter in a ghost town somewhere, where no one hears your calls. I imagine you, flying from a cliff above the sea with sorrowful thoughts, your last, sorry to the end. I imagined the worst and immediately, as soon as I went to bed alone.

Down the gully creek
On black blood platelets
Black rings down the drainpipe
To the black walnut grove

I open that book and take a look with a quiet query in the secret chambers in my heart, a soft, skipping arrhythmia as I forget to breathe… looking for a sign of something, I do not know what. I turn pages sticky with old glue, looking for that clue, but frustrated with blankness I put it aside. It is crumbling now too, that book. Like the ashes. I feel deadened. Numb. Heavy. Translucent.

I stare dumbly at the flecks of leaf floating on the surface before I imbibe. It’s a warmth that bleeds down the throat. Do you feel me wondering? I am full of questions for you. They are pecking at me like Hitchcockian birds, frightening me and making me crazy. My head is composing a letter to you, years down the track, when you’re still gone. I imagine the worst. Begging you to come back… willing it. But curious about the life beyond it. Beyond disaster. Before disaster even. I am despairing at my own curiosity with this, always. It stares me in the face every day and I fight it. A ghastly, haunted reflection.

All at the same time I am lonely for your company, lusting myself into a knot for your body, breaking myself in to pieces with hopeless anger at your disappearance. So hotly blinding a contrast my hate and love for you in this horrible moment. Disparate. Desparate to see you. Why is the golden time gone? Things slip away like a ship to the bottom of the sea. I imagine heaven as scuba diving to the wreckage, to forever recall, reimagine the past happinesses, though they are now covered with coral and silt, with fishes moving quickly through it all like busy waiters in a big Paris café. Joy abounds and we float in the ocean, surveying all that pretty wreckage below.





I blacken my finger tips with apple ash before I pluck that green granny from the table and bring it to my lips for another go round. Numb it. Blunt it out. Soften the edges and dream it away. Fight through the panic when it rises and just go… run to that place that you’ll never get to, even when sleep comes. Did my darkness frighten you? Oh god… more questions. Squash it down now.

Down the gully creek
On black blood platelets
Black rings down the drainpipe
To the black walnut grove

Dark skies make the earth look greener
And broken boughs
Stretch down to woo us
Weeping, cold tears dripping
In to age old knots

Rainwater rushes like a wall towards me
Clay falls like towers, like a city earthquaked
Hoist myself in a supplejack swing,
Trembling, sing this song to bring you home