About a summer
Summer is an umbrella and trails a shadow as well as blinding light.
Standing around under stars is easy to do, flick into the same old tune.
Somewhere between the sentimental and the cynical, that's where you'll find me.
To the place of ghosts
Signs point elsewhere. To the place of ghosts. On the road to nowhere. The lost radiance. On the journey you pick a lot up however. And that is the journey. To not end. Even if nowhere. Always with the empty inside that is yours but along the way, the stops and potholes, rims, shoulders, shatterings, asphalt flowers that are the tradition of the road, and the company.
Rain
A shawl of rain on street-brown buildings and no spare change.
On silence
Even when there's only an estimate of this beauty, there's silence in heaven for the space of half an hour. Unlike the vocal tributes and hallelujahs of so many sports fans. To understand through the gut magic.
There is silence and silence. We have to ask whether Cage comes to silence or if silence has turned out to be the hammer we all had expected (or rather, hoped for). It takes a few listens more to fall with the noose, to hear the delta calling. Will death eat itself?
If there's a silence in a room someone will try to fill it as soon as humanly possible. There are two ways in, addiction or escort of the Blind Guardian. Silence can be as final as the exquisite score.
There is silence as I sit here staring at the screen. A struggle happened and so much has changed.
Poem with stones
What lies before already exists.
The future does not exist.
The past is ahead and alongside.
Each stone on the road you tread resists your claims to it.
Providing for shadow
How do you read or understand a body? How you stand with someone, away or in? Just don't pack the party up to move it indoors. Let the wind fierce and the purple rain, graffiti embraced worldwide, as public as any penny, as you walk with a, with b, with a concern about blooms, or who rules. The sun rises up in your own northwest and a smile fades into it. It's hard to find that silver lining in the pour though you could get some backup facility running at a moment's notice, when storm clouds in and it starts to rain on Arabic television news. What's hidden in the moving text at the bottom of the screen? English characters or sets encoded, ASCII text, or a woman's secret language lost. Through the drought they stopped waiting for a lucky day. DVD reigns, though you've collected 745 books or magazines for self study. You might jib at it as relief while an obscure void inches wide beneath your feet. What of travel and holidays? When people speak as if being foreign turns English into a pale image of the past, repetition somehow alters the throw of policy’s dice into its shadow.
Tsunami
Water has taken away my family. - Mother, what's happened? I saw you yesterday and now you're here. You're not dead, you've gone to another village. Please come back. - We hope the funds allocated for the people won't be lost to corruption. - It came just like a river. People were running here and there. They couldn't decide where to go. - My son is crying for his mother. I think this is her. I recognise her hand, but I'm not sure. - There just aren't enough body bags.
We thought it was the end of the world. … The water was as high as a coconut palm. … It was all over in 25 minutes. That's all. How can that be ... such devastation. - Children in emergency wards were killed. Soldier patients suffering from malaria helped to evacuate other patients. - I need baby food as well ... no aid has come to us yet. - No contact makes us fearful. We're trying to send helicopters there. - Where is the military? They're just taking care of their families. There is no war in Aceh now, why don't they help pick up the bodies in the street?
This was the only thing we could do. It was a desperate solution. The bodies were rotting. We gave them a decent burial. - Police told us to come and have a look at this collection of ID cards. - We met in university. Is this the fate that we hoped for? My darling, you were the only hope for me.
Dead: they are dead, my cousins, their children, many of my husband's family. There are too many funerals, he has to stay to help them. - She went under a car, it just went over the top of her. I just got picked up and chucked against a wall. I was a lucky one: we cheated death. - Then all of a sudden we saw what looked like a wave surge into the garden ... at one point I had to scramble up bamboo trees to avoid the rising water.
I hope and pray that we can at least find their bodies so that we can see them one last time and give them a decent burial. - Information reaching here suggests facilities at Kalpakkam nuclear station may have been affected by the tidal waves. - We don't have confirmed data … - The TV, everything gone. - I've got calls from people down south who need clothes to bury their dead. They have none.
- Wednesday 29 December 2004
Those quoted, in order:
- Anbalakhan, who lost her husband, son and two daughters in the wrecked village of Karambambari, Tamil Nadu
- a woman at a grave site, Tamil Nadu
- Indonesian House Speaker, Agung Laksono
- Rajith Ekanayake, a security guard at the P&J City shopping centre, Galle
- Bejkhajorn Saithong, searching for his wife on Khao Lak beach
- Lieutenant-Colonel Budi Santoso, Banda Aceh
- Sofyan Halim, Banda Aceh
- Citra Nurhayat, a nurse in a Banda Aceh hospital
- Nurhayati, who has only had bananas to feed her 3-month-old baby since Sunday, Banda Aceh
- Djoko Sumaryono, Indonesian government official, says of Simeulue
- Indra Utama, community leader in Banda Aceh
- Venerable Baddegama Samitha, a Buddhist monk and former parliamentarian, at funeral of Queen of the Sea train wreck victims near Galle
- Premasiri Jayasinghe, Colombo
- a young man at the site of the Queen of the Sea train wreck near Galle
- Mrs Seeli Packianathan, returning from Sri Lanka, at Sydney Airport
- Les Boardman, returning from Phuket, at Sydney Airport
- Joyce Evans, of Melbourne, in Sri Lanka
- Kolanda Velu, from Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu
- spokesman, Indian Prime Minister's office
- Indonesian Vice-President Yusuf Kalla, in Medan city
- Roshan Perera, at the Catholic church in Mattakkuliya, Colombo
- Kusum Athukorala, local aid worker, Mattakkuliya, Colombo
Democracy
- Arthur Rimbaud, from Illuminations - translated by Jill Jones
"The flag passes through foul country and our lingo muffles the drum beats.
"In the centres we’ll feed the most cynical prostitution. We’ll massacre any reasonable revolt.
"To the spicy, damp countries! in the service of monstrous exploitation, industrial and military.
"Goodbye here or anywhere. We’re willing conscripts. Our ideas are savage. Ignoramuses about science, we’re sluts for comfort. Stuff the world. This is real progress. Onward, let’s hit the road!"
a day
I have had nothing interesting to say for months, which is why I've been hidden away. The train this morning made an alarming clunk coming into Central. I am supposed to go shopping tonight and have rid myself of a heavy a load to carry. ... I am suspecting that Mark Young is getting all my mail and I'm getting someone else's bills, with my name on them. People kept bumping into me near the turnstyles, like planets, like that poem I once wrote. ... they say I may just look up again, in an instant, and it's all down the dizzy way again. I have enough difficulty with keeping track in the world so I don't have the need to wear machines in my ear. The crows seem to have gone from the street, we have the magpies back and the little birds. I was standing next to an airconditioning vent yesterday ... and it was making a wonderful thick swirly off-rhythm and I wished I had a recorder to get it down. ... I wish people would stop hosing their own personal concrete. The air is thick with winter sunshine hanging off fume.