A Brief History of Seven Killings

Preacher says there is a god shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.

I'm not calling him a coward.  I'm not saying he's stingy. But sometimes when you're too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.

Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it's some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way not to live at all is to take life one day at a time.  It's the way I've discovered to not do a damn thing.

Even if it never comes the point is I'll be waiting for it and the waiting is just as bad because you can't do anything else in Jamaica but wait for something to happen to you.  This applies to good stuff too.  It never happens.  All you have is the waiting for it.

He say the point over and over, from one direction then the next with new words and the same words until he figure they get him point.  But as usual white bwoi think black man stupid.  Them get the message from he come through the door.  Stop mess with white people.

I am slowly realising that even though the Singer is the centre of the story that it isn't really his story.  Like there's a version of this story that's not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja.

I wonder if you find this as obscene as I do that they are so quiet, as if this is work.  There will be no last words.  I wonder if you are crying now.  I wonder if you hope somehow the Singer will hear you begging for mercy.
But you should know this.
The living, they never listen.

Make me ask you something, you think Trench Town is a favourite spot for anybody living in Trench Town?  You think any of them sitting on a stoop saying, Now this is the life?  Tourist funny, boy.

Bushwick.  I still working my brain on how Jamaicans can come to a ghetto 5 time as big and with tenement three time as high and think they're better off.  What, nobody know the difference between a good thing and a bigger bad thing?  That must be for some other brother to figure out.

Hey me now... these meant something to me but they don't really give the full sense. When it starts, a boy is being buried alive. The Singer is in it but not of it, and there is a building inevitability to a climax that happens like midway, and then consequences spill out slow and certain for years and decades and may be  only at the end of all that do you know why. And there are times you lose what is going on in the language and times it seems perfectly clear. And it understands real poverty in a way nothing else does.

And I forgot to mark my favourite line where he says it's so ugly a picture couldn't cover it because a picture would smooth the lines have some beauty. And then later someone else says that that beautiful line also has too much beauty.

Like the difference between poverty and the povertiresque in Pierre. 

Anyway, I would read this one again and anything else by him too. It gets into something... Like Arundhati Roy says... How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everyone? No, by slowly becoming everything.

How we live now

On the way to breakfast this morning the whole breakfast crew happened to be on the same train on the same car going in. So we all walked together. It was my pick so we went to this trendy cafe down an alley off queen street where they serve craft beer after ten.

Jem and I mowed the lawn and lost the lawnmower gas cap over the weekend. While I did that he pruned the lime, not fully but enough to take some of the most egregious out of it. It's still got a bit of fruit from last season and is already starting to bloom again.

Spring is coming. You can feel it, but it's still so dark and cold each morning that getting up is like a daily struggle.

I levelled last week in Pokemon there was a double everything event on and I played like a fiend, plus got an amazing legendary of both kinds.

My new income requires budgeting. We figured out it's less than the dole. If course I don't have bills which assists in all that but still. It's so easy to forget how to live without tons of money. I used to rule at it, but you forget and it's such a luxury not to think about it. In Brisbane it's all about having more meals at home.

I have a date night movie with Jeremy tonight, we're going to see Magnus, the Scandinavian film about Magnus Carlson. I'm pretty excited. We saw Dunkirk and Gold for Jeremy over the weekend.

Nick and Kimmi are leaving town on like the 14th. We're giving them a going away party on the 12th. That's like two weeks away and then they will just be gone. I feel longing about that but it doesn't seem real.

Jules has invited me to a cider night Friday, and we have the lan party Wed as always, and I have dreams about working through some projects and pruning the rest of that tree.

I'm lonely, but I don't really want to see anyone.

I bought external batteries and jean shorts last week.

My school contacted me about the letter I need to send back as far as what I'm doing next year. For now I'm stalling but not for long.

Today is about my diary and letters from Joanna and walking the streets and Pokemon, I plan to stay out straight to the evening. Tomorrow should be cleaning the house and then we'll see.

Verses from Adelaide

These are a couple of prose poems/ babble I wrote while in Adelaide. I got to see fall twice this year which felt pretty great and there was a lot of running around both kangaroo island, really pretty nature place and barossa valley wine country.

The Southern Ocean

A deeper blue
Beneath this water, other water
Between the waters and the waters
The sand like white powder, soft
Limestone cliffs, carved out in convoluted hollows
Gentle waves flutter against them, digging further
Rocks on the shore, tumbling like giant's playthings
And underground, like the crystal caves of dwarves.

Adelaide Hills

Crimson leaves
Fall in the cemetery, fall in the hills
Drive out to watch the colours.
Apples growing pendulous in the trees
And grapes post harvest with a yellow tinge and flares of scarlet, crowning leaves.
Roads wind
Hills up and hills down and vistas on hills looking down.
Fat eucalyptus trees
Apple orchards
The Chardonnay tastes like butter just like books
Shades of plum and red pepper
Leaf litter in the rain.
A gulf opens up, hazy and grey into spectacles of farmland.

The Enchantress of Florence

In the day's last light the glowing lake below the palace city looked like a sea of molten gold. A traveller coming this way...might believe...the monarch so fabulously wealthy that he could allow a portion of his treasure to be poured into a giant hollow on the earth to dazzle and awe his guests...Nor were there guards at the golden water's edge; was the king so generous then that he allowed all his subjects...to draw up liquid bounty from the lake? ...But then the sun fell below the horizon, the gold sank beneath the water's surface, and was lost. Mermaids and serpents would guard it until the return of daylight. Until then, water itself would be the only treasure on offer, a gift the thirsty traveller gratefully accepted.

"Keep your secret," he said.  "Secrets are for children, and spies."  The stranger got down ... "And for sorcerers," he told the driver of the bullock cart.  "And for lovers too.  And kings."

Without water we are nothing, the traveller thought.  Even an emperor, denied water, will swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

Fires began to burn in the twilight like warnings.  From the black bowl of the sky came the answering fires of the stars.  As if the earth and the heavens were armies preparing for battle, he thought.  As if their encampments lie quiet at night and await the war of the day to come.

We will take your finest offspring from you and we will transform them utterly. We will make them forget you and turn them into the force that keeps you under our heel. By your own lost children will you be ruled.

Tell me everything. . . and then you will be free.

And in the absence of the men the women of the capital learnt all over again that they were not made of lies and treasons but only of hair and skin and flesh, that they were all as imperfect as each other, and that there was nothing special if they were hiding from one another, no poisons, no plots and that even sisters can in the end find a way of getting along.

"I jostled her," she said, " I shoved so that she almost fell and she was my senior. I did not honour her and now she is gone."   Akbar comforted his mother.  "She knew you loved her," he said.  "She knew that a woman maybe a bad jostled and a good friend as well."   But the Queen mother was inconsolable.  "She always seemed so young," she said.  "The angel made a mistake.  I am the one who was just waiting to die."

In bed she whispered to him that she had another self inside her, a bad self, and when that self took over she was no longer responsible for her actions, she might do anything, anything.

Return to Oz

The Adelaide botanical gardens are a gateway into faerie. I came back here because it is the space where I broke and made my life, all alone, 16 years ago. I wasn't sure what I would find, probably nothing. The significance of this kind of place tends to move when you go away from it for a while, and like always when chasing dreams, the map is fuzzy and unreliable.

Just inside the gate in the deep shade of a fig tree, an old woman was in gentle tears, perhaps seeking its lifegiving comfort. Her voice was matter of fact, a notebook open in front of her. She was relaying the details of someone's coma, their next step treatment, the spectre of death nowhere in her words or tone but everywhere in her face.

Follies and fake Greek statuary littered the path as I went further in, like a stage set signifying opulence. I saw a tall cigar pine, the last clue of a childhood scavenger hunt, so went that way. It led me to a missing link pine, one known through its fossils but then discovered to still be alive in 1994. I was alive.

I found my way to civilization and my innards pulled against it. Circled the water lilies with their fable of the girl who fell in love with the moon and trying to get closer to him fell in a lake and drowned. The moon took pity on her and turned her into the Amazonian water lily, who only blooms at night when her lover gazes on her.  (The moon is drowning while I sleep.)

I circled the Appolonian aisle, all Japanese river fountains, feng shui, hedges, and then the Dionysian aisle, an arbor of wisteria. A child screamed, barbaric and raw. The birds screamed, dulcent and free.

A tunnel of pine boughs led me underneath a troll bridge. I felt a thrill of fear. I was careful that I let no branches touch me but as I crawled under another bridge, and then another I began to wonder if I was on a path at all.

I climbed out before the cliff. Back almost civilized people picnicking, I don't know where I'm going but I can feel so strongly where I should not be.  Then lorikeets played in a formal fountain, Versailles in paradise.

I can see a glass palace in front of me. Is this where I am going? It seems too large, too grand. When are things bigger than you imagined them? I thought it always went the other way.

And yet, and yet there is something familiar about these sealed shut panes of glass. The fronds and vines that press hungrily against the barrier, reaching for me. The giant grotto, shaped like the large fireplace in the witch's house, shaped like my heart, at one end.

Both doors were open. I held the threshold, held back by an invisible force. Do I want to go in, after all? Do I want to give it up, all those years of wanting? Will that be some kind of end to it all? But then again haven't I already walked through these doors? Didn't it already happen, in dreams? I held my breath, and stepped inside.

Dreams from the last two months.

The last one was last night

It was me and Jeremy and we were going from one factory to another. We had to engage them, start them running. Big and silver like a futuristic hospital. The rhythm of the dream was kind of like a computer game. Like we'd go out and come back and it was like you'd level up. There was one factory and it was so nanotechnology inspired that the whole facility looked like a USB stick but you could look at it zoomed way in and see all these component parts.

We were in this really fun high energy rock band. We were working on out next album in this shabby but capacious share house. White boards, all one level, kind of a mess. The main character was this blonde girl who looked a little like tank girl but was kind of innocent, gullible, silly. She had all these necklaces around her neck including a miniature teddy bear she called Steve, who had this little key attached to him as well. Anyway there was a whole part where we were at the house talking about or trying to write some songs. It was a little creative difference ish, but not in the screaming breaking up way, it just wasn't that easy. And then we had to go to our concert. It was like living end style music, a little pop punk but good, kind of jumpy v high energy and cheerful. She's singing, Geena in empire records ish, and there's some glancing to and fro at bandmates etc. All good feelings. At the end of the concert the band had like six people and the front four jumped into the crowd, one after the other. Blonde girl has been making eyes at this shaved headed kind of homeless looking punk dude during the concert and jumps into his arms. Then after he's like holding her and they're talking. He is shallowly charming, and he's spinning this whole line about how his friend wanted nachos but they got messed up. It seems kind of transparently untrue but she's kind of uncertain but falling for it a little, in that you know something bad is up but you don't know how to get out of it so you go with it even though your instinct is being sticky and bad kind of way. She's like you want to make nachos? And he's like that's the beauty of it we don't have to. Then he hooks Steve on his finger and looks at it and says you hide that and she murmurs. But that kind of convinces her like a sign. So then we have an establishing shot of the house and then I woke up. He wasn't going to like rape her, but maybe rob the house or maybe just like score a free meal. He was dodgy though.

I was at Tony's house and his girlfriend was into indoor gardening. He had a lot of beautifully constructed small tendrilly vines.

The younger brother of the family maybe 12 or 13 had been hit by a car,or run into one anyway. He was in hospital and the family was talking about admitting their daughter, about 19 to the hospital to keep him company. But the girl was heavily pregnant, and the family was afraid she'd pop in the hospital and that doctor had refused to deal with the birth.

Before that I was in their yard, a long prospect of grass, splendid but featureless. And the servants, an older woman from the house and a gardener were telling me stories from the family, this one among them. They had a big house, white.

But before that, Jes and I were at these people's house before a concert and she was irritated because she was ready to go and I kept having things to do. I took cheese and butter from their house sort of ganking it bc I forgot it from the start. Like at the shops I was at before.

I was the captain of a space ship, male, a disk ship. We were a kind of space adventurer. There was a villainous lizard race. We were at war with them and trying to avoid them mostly as they were stronger. I could shrink the spaceship or the people were miniaturised. So when I was on shore on a planet I could carry the spaceship in my arms and talk to my crew through a slot . The war with the lizard people went on for a while . I was on a barren planet and how I remember it was that someone creeped up behind me . I thought it was one of the lizard men . How I remember it when I was attacked from behind and I grabbed my attacker and choked him and then broke his neck but after he was dead I realised it was not a lizard person but another humanoid race . I started to stash his body in a pile of leaves but then dragged it into a nearby marsh. He turned out to have a crew that had landed on the same planet. In the meantime my ship had a navigational fault. This ship navigated by a jumping method . It would identify an area of space with less than 30% density and then leap the ship there. This enabled us to avoid our enemies because we could jump from place to place far away in space with little control but fair certainty of safety. Since it organised the galaxy by density rather than linearly we could run and hide very effectively. However without the navigation system we could not necessarily avoid jumping into the middle of a star or planet. So we needed the assistance of the other crew to repair the navigation system and I did not trust them enough to tell them I had killed their friend. The other crew was also space adventurers but they had been less involved in the war. I did not think they would understand how trigger happy I had gotten. Further we were stranded so very vulnerable. They were looking for their mate and I was going through the motions of looking with them cognizant that the body was not well hidden though it was a swampy planet.

At the base of the garden was a tiny gate. Big enough to crawl through but not big enough to walk through. She walked me down there and was going to turn over the key to me, so wanted to show me the basics so I could explore. She deliberately didn't tell me everything she knew though.  The door was a small arched wooden gate, well seated into the back fence, and the key was an old fashioned wooden pencil. You could use the pencil to note your thoughts and experiences but even if the lead broke, the wooden bit would fit in the keyhole. So she showed me how to use the key and then I went through. I think only one person could go through at a time because if I went, she stayed, and the idea was that she had gotten what she needed to out of the place and was handing it over to me, thought I needed something too. She explained to me that the tiny people lived here. There was a path that went left and right, and a small creek. There was a sign that said to stay off the path, but it was really the only way to go, so both of us walked on it. I started out crawling. She said there was a better chance of seeing the tiny people that way. They were there and she had seen them, but they were shy and not that common. There were a race of bigger people who lived further in. Anyway, the rocks and bark hurt my knees so I stood up. Cats could live back in this world but no people. Still you'd see the occasional neighborhood cat you recognised.

I walked along the path to the left first. It seemed to be the longer way. The creek followed the road, and it was lovely in an English countryside kind of way. Far in the distance I could hear was seemed to be excited voices going up in cheers and cries, and I could see a bunch of dots that would seem to converse, then a cry would go up and they would all move. This, I thought must be the tiny people. But when I got there, they were birds. Tiny finches, green on on the back, white belly, with both black and scarlet on their heads. They were lovely, and it wasn't a kind of bird I had seen before, but I was still a little disappointed I hadn't seen the people.

The path continued up a green hill and turned, it seemed to go on a long way, and so I wanted to wait to go too far until I had more time, a proper expedition. So I turned back and went to the right of the gate. This way the road didn't extend far before you got to a small tavern. This thing had room after room and there were people carousing in one room, playing darts in another, and some people actually lived there. There was a girl a couple sizes smaller than me because I tried on her clothes, who had a whole walk in wardrobe and a couple of rooms. And a boy who also lived there. He was interested in the key but I got the impression it wasn't easy to take if I didn't let him.

Over the course of several visits we got to know these people and there was this whole plan to do a prank on these kids, we were going to take the girl's clothes to our side of the gate. It was like a joke, but also we really wanted something too. Then I woke up.

The Lake Isle Of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

– William Butler Yeats