Neither here, nor there, nor somewhere in between.

Any man's significance seems mighty insignificant
to anything outside the sea shores and mountaintops.

He can try feel at one, but he'll never be more than alone.
He can filter the seas of minerals and life,
but his eyes will never see a speck of purity.

He can leap off bridges, fall through clouds and glide through the stratosphere,
but he'll always fall short of real bending fear.

He can hunt down oxen and deer, study their bones, pick their brains,
drape themselves in their fur,
strap on their horns and wear their hooves as boots,
but he'll never attain their wildness.

He can study mathematics, calculate decimal points, measure bacteria and
square root that by half an atom till kingdom come,
but he won't know true preciseness till his own time has come.

His time and numbers play no real role, His words plays no real role,
fur and bones play no real role, trees and their leaves,
wild flowers and their honey bees play no real role,
bricks, glass, mirrors and plastic spoons barely make an utterance,
while the aging man's body is somewhere in between.

His equations aim to explain, but his science only detracts,
his poems aim at being content with misery,
but his language merely distracts.

Neither here nor there nor somewhere in between.

Every poet, every pianist, every trapper, every fisherman, every cowboy, every tramp, every monk, every shaman, every ju jitsu master, every mathematician, every astronaut, every alcoholic and their fathers and their brothers, their enemies and their friends.

Neither here nor there nor somewhere in between.

you've got to ask yourself...

I sit to rest a while, on the edge of a magnificent, impressive bridge. It is a monstrous mix of metal, looking like machinery, like a robotic arm ready to move both masses of land which it joins. Sitting in the middle of it, I make believe these are my arms, like I can move these peninsulas according to my whims and gather the boats beneath into a pile in the sea just for its aesthetic value. Just to temporarily please my wandering mind and waning sense of self, like priding yourself over making a sculpture of pretzels at a bar whilst getting drunk, but instead of whiskey I have the warm sun and my weariness. I laugh to myself as my giant robot man-day dream begins to turn into a Japanese animation.

I open my eyes and look at my real arm, my hand has been bandaged up after an accident involving a rusted screw piercing my palm. There is something about having a bandaged hand or a slight limp in your step that makes you feel a little bit more masculine, like a boxer or a wounded soldier or Clint Eastwood, it makes you want to spit in the dirt. I reach two fingers into my inside breast pocket, but instead of a .44 Magnum I pull out a small bar of hotel soap. I unwrap the little plastic packaging with a slow smooth finger move and drop the bar down below me, into the sea. It fizzles a while, I watch with the warm Mediterranean wind blowing my straw like hair madly and I smile an evil grin. I Look to either side and spot a pretty girl who has just witnessed my strange act, I quickly try to rub the evil out of my grin and replace it with something nice, but by the crunch of her eyebrows and the wrinkles on her forehead I realize I have failed to redeem myself and she looks down at her feet and continues to walk across and off the bridge.

Frustrated, I dig through my rucksack to find another bar of hotel soap I rip the plastic off with lightning speed and stand up. I look calmly into the distance a moment then peg the soap off the bridge as far as I can, it pains my raw palm wound but the pain is worth the distance. The bar flies through the air, flipping and soaring in slow motion. While watching in anticipation I feel my hand begin to bleed again. The bar collides with the mast of one of the tall sailing ships with a loud clang, it bounces back a few meters and into the deep green sea. It seems to bubble and boil, as does the blood in the middle of my palm seeping into my dirty white bandage. I start to breathe heavily, standing with my legs spread shoulder width apart.

If a pen can be a sword and a boxer can be a butterfly, can a bar of hotel soap be a .44 Magnum?

Ivan has kept the lighthouse for over thirty lonely years, its staircase is filled with old novels.

"...i've kept that lighthouse for over thirty years" he grunts gnashing his teeth, "now the sky doesn't storm, the sea doesn't roar, the gulls aren't flying, the grass is too green, the crabs aren't dying and nor am i."
he pauses, looks to his boots and sighs, then continues a touch more cheerfully "but at least i'm old, have a beard and hook for a hand.

woman and child.

...He sat there for hours, catching the blizzard in his beard. He shook, shivered, snorted and bounced his numb legs. But when he caught first glance of the two walking by him, a whirling warmth lined his stomach and thawed out his insides. He smiled as if the boy was his own.

birds and bees and beds and futons

This place was massive, a warehouse the size of a suburb, filled with furniture for the Sunday consumers. We all sat together in one of the display rooms, the whole family. We were spread out all over the thick cushioned lounge, it was long, so we all fit on it comfortably. My father said it reminded him of the lounge his family sat on, in their fifth storey flat in a grey concrete apartment building in Wroclaw during the 70’s. We lazed around, tired from a frantic sleepless night of moving furniture, boxes and white goods, our muscles ached and our caffeine tics toced. We sat and watched the crowds rotate from display kitchen to kitchen to office and through to lounge room; it was a life size dollhouse. We watched the Indian families, the Arabic couples, the trendy lovers, the Chinese children running around, the dread-loched beach siders pushing their newborns in new prams. Sure it sounds diverse but really it was about as multicultural as the furniture they were looking at, same thing just different colours and shapes. For a moment, as the crowds walked past and looked awkwardly at us watching them, I proudly felt like we didn’t fit in.
There was some tacky 70’s hit playing over the system.
“You love this song don’t you?’ I said sarcastically to my old man.
He listened a while.
“I don’t mind it” he replies after some time.
“It brings back memories”
He stared at the high iron ceiling, where the music was apparently coming from, after the chorus passed, he continued…
“When I first came here and I was going to English classes, the teacher brought in the lyrics to this song and the class sang it together. She said it was a good song for us to practice, because it has a lot of verbs”
we listened some more and all looked at each other smiling, my mother, father, brother, sister and I, almost laughing. The song finished and no other followed, just the sound of peoples footsteps hustling about the shiny wooden floors. We were silent for about five minutes whilst my father contemplated with nostalgia in his eyes.
“Her name was Ruth” he said
“My English teacher, she tried one time to explain to us what the word ruthless meant”
I thought about the word a while and then the name. I couldn't think, I felt confused to be here, I think we all did a little. We decided we could make some bookshelves instead and pushed ourselves out of the comfortable lounge and left, walking against the grain of the crowd. Even when my dad was driving down, from the 5-storey car park, he drove in the wrong direction most of the way. People wrinkled their foreheads and waved their hands, palms facing up. We all laughed as my mother grinned nervously and my dad zigzagged through the car park singing the chorus with a strong accent.

“When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.”

diving through the sky into the earth.

The pale grey concrete highways heading south always remind me of an American freeway, just like the ones on the high speed police chases across California, filmed from a helicopter.
With my window open and my sneakered feet on the dash I tilt my hat forward to block my eyes of the bright warm rays. Every so often we burn across a high bridge suspended over a gorge with tall trees and a river underneath. The shadows of the bridge cables flicker over the bonnet, up my legs and skip over the brim of my hat, one by one.
The dry grass plains are tightly stretched across the horizon, like the skin of a drum. I only wish we didn’t know where we are going so we can improvise a beat on that drum like those outlaws running from the cops do.
I wonder if the dead wombat on the side of the road knew where he was going, or if this hitchhiker in sandals, with her knotted dreads and belly sagging out of her little shirt and over her tight waste band, knows where she is going. The crows on the powerlines I don’t wonder so much about, crows always look like they know exactly what they’re doing and where they are going.
In the corner of my eye I watch some skydivers drifting down from the sky, the parachutes and air gently letting them down. I take my hat off and stick my head out the window to have a proper look. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, one of the five sky divers speeds past all the rest at an incredible pace. Both his body and his parachute are facing the wrong direction. I pull my head in the car to watch this horrific scene through glass. In the car we all catch the sight of this man’s last seconds on earth, before he hits it. All we can do is watch and yell and scream and grab our jaw dropped faces. His arms and legs flail in a terrifying manner as the whole gravitational pull of the planet sucks him down. He disappears behind the trees and we don’t see the impact. The other divers slowly float down towards him. We turn to each other and all swear and cuss for a while, then go back to silent gazing out of the window. The rest of the day goes on like any other day and the incident is never mentioned. Things like that stay in a person’s head somewhere; maybe in some slight way even change them. Maybe I didn’t know where I was going that day after all.

You can only write about dreams in Braille.

After a long walk in the heat of the city I walk into a shaded park to find a spot in the shade. I sit in the lush, thick, greener than green grass and feel the cool breeze sway the white hairs on the back of my neck. The sensation lifts the goose bumps out of my skin and a shaking relief goes shimmering down my spine like wet sand. Running my index finger across my arm, I try and read my goose bumps like Braille. All I can understand is that it says something beautiful, but not quite logical or useful to me, something about the relationship between the grass, the trees and the sky. I cannot usually read Braille, but I can sense that these bumps include the words: beauty, soft, air, wings, fur, gentle, and maybe even love. These words sit in my head side by side and when I tilt my head back and inhale, the air rushes in and blends and shakes them all together; creating another eruption which sets off another spinal Mexican wave of trembling vertebrae. From my spine the relief-quake follows into my nerve branches and releases firmer goose bumps on my skin. These bumps are clearer and more defined and I am able to understand more of the Braille. It tells me why the birds are singing in the trees and why the flowers look so comfortable swaying in the wind and why the air feels so satisfying rushing into my lungs and why i can use this air to blow a feather away.
As the sensation wears off, the goose bumps soften then disappear and the answers fade. I fall back into the grass. Sometime passes whilst I stare into the sky and as my eyes close to sleep, I picture the earth as an ants nest in some dark woods. As I get closer to sleep I imagine a young boy, in overalls and no t-shirt, one day finding the nest and jabbing a stick into it.