Diversion Car.

From my diversion car I watch the unhappiness capsules pass. 
On tracks predicted, on time scheduled.
Northbound to cold homes, where twitterglows seep under doors.
Slump to sigh, the droolers are lost in their forgotten epiphanies.
On their iron ruts, they thunderumble past shrouded windows, pulled against shame and judgement. 
Where are we today? No map can pin us, untrackable behind our mirror windshields. 
We're off the grid we groomed, lost in a late understanding.
Too far gone to reconcile belief, there's no incense that will hold me now. The fictioned burdens dissolve, an ooze of disappointment, as I slip backwards. And down. 

Deadline.

He slumped asleep, on the couch facing nowhere, in the fake library, no small talk left inside.  He's far from his Powerpoints now, voicemail unchecked, a mind done. There was a day he was master of all, a time for polish, a time for whiteboards and muffin meetings. Moments in a recycled calendar, moments already decomposing in a landfill of daytimers and deadlines.  The children are off doing their busy thing, his only duty now is to fill the days quietly, fussless, an affordable wait. It's a nice place, they keep the chemicals hidden, the ambulance ramps discreet, the exit code only 6 digits. The dust spirals soft in the sunlight, settling gently, respectfully on his shoulders. The lightest of indignities. 

Tea Tree Music.

Here in the mall, we're all half off our best. Husbands, defeated and overspent, slouch angrily, discount sneering, muzak despaired. And so it was at the Tea Tree too. Acres of black tar, sunsoftened and acrid, cached our Adidas footprints and preserved tyre tracks. Bordered by a firewall of majestic gums, all paper-barked and fragrant, their leaves shimmied to the eternal roar of 1,000 ton air conditioners. Inside, we refrigerated masses hustled, escalated and bagged. From the food court I would spy you, sorting albums, fake smiling, pretending to care. Dolled up, gorgeous by the Bowie rack, you were all business, until you weren't. When we finally kissed, you were my best birthday present.

Metropolis.

Let's not be friends. Let's not be pretends. I sense a history of heart and hope, of once genuine belief and faith. These remembrances, all sentimental blathers, are bad echoes of half-lived lives. Everyone rewriting their own story. Every one of us trying to redraft and reframe into something more noble. Vertical but horizontal, trying but not really getting there. This is the way we age. Slowly weighted by the everyday. Walked by. Looked past. Underplayed and ignorable. Balancing a leg to the other, shifting weight, trying and twisting, to see what may work and what may not. All your slow blinks and orchestrated sighs won't make a difference. But this fiction fable will have to wait, because I'm about to breathe some recycled air, freshly imported from Canada. Let them off, disembark their big city fantasies for a few days. Get them lucky for an afternoon, show them their devil, uncork tomorrow's regret. We've got souls to harvest next season, make them a worthy fruit.

Gotham.

Your emergency warbles and spurts separate the traffic below, a yellow bloodstream of frustration.  I trace your arteries with my finger on this window. In this city of maximum, there's always more to feel. It was a downpour between buses. She spat the dummy and disappeared in a huff of impatience. Uptown, barging alone, the enraged occasional tourist. Always against the traffic, never wondering why. Escaping from the big city, we race under a river and past the swollen graveyard hills. Undressing, rinsing, resetting. Those uneven streets of day desperation and stark night illumination are already fading, rear-view. From pixel-lit runways the planes throw us pilgrims furiously into the night. Up and out of this place, rising traces of light, prayers ether-bound. YYZ, LHR, CDG, AUK, neat rows of nervous lives displaced, dispersed, distanced. 

Layer Cake Dusk

Spirit got lost there in the desert. Maybe it was the horizon, maybe it was the haste. Chasing the sun through a moonscape of closure and desperation, passing silvering clumps of RV hovels, the spinifex and blood earth a hard home to those who had given in, given up, given it all. We sluiced the shiny road at fake speeds, chasing microdots through our mirage of domestic satisfaction. And then that gash, that brittle layer cake, plummeted beneath us. We lost light, sediment by sedimentary moment, until it crept up into an absurd fuscia Miami haze. The canyon breeze untangled hair from your dark eyes, unlocking youth, whispering of 1987. Something eroded then, some dampening spirit took to the edge, and feeling the stir of possibility, stepped out and onto the nothing. Stirred, humbled, reminded, we cateyed it back to bling city.

Warm the plates.

The roses on the wedding china are fading. Decades of spuds and butter, round ball meat and ceremonial gravy. The petals from a steady hand are being scraped away by a shaking hand of Sheffield steel. Nine thousand meals, they were pale witness to suburban drama, tired tension and too much silence. Heads down, forks up, eat the green stuff, stop making a clatter. Decades we sat over these steaming plates, four square and strong, twice exiled, foreign to ourselves. Dinner was the gravity that pulled us together, a simple ceremony soundtracked by a poetry murmur of taps and tinkles, slurps and sighs. This wasn't the good china, but it was the best china.

The seventh son of the seventh son.

Here comes seven. He's stepping in, up and across the threshold, the litter runt, now like a lord. Gifted with the miracle. Someone did the counting, a knowing nod and small awe of something bigger. Something whispered in byres, spread in hayfields, considered like a praetie, examined in sideways squints, suspicioned over tea, never asked. She passed on the cure in her final days. Passed it down, passed it away. Into the hands of the wiry man, an incantation, a whisper, a miracle moved. "Just look into the cup", she'd said, and there it was, a dust mote, cast down from his blooded eye. Do you believe in these spirit things? The water-rod and the gypsy touch, the coffee grounds and tea leaves? These mysteries of hope, desire lines between sweated truths and darkness. In a country night, with only fire for company, there's plenty of space for all that, for places the embers go, for explainers that can't.

A weakness filled.

This is the best of us we'll ever be. 

All here, together, all you and me. 

Each half a weakness filled,

Each other the stronger build. 

It's you my dear, as it always will. 

Black wire carpet.

In this salon of hope, a haze of beauty chemistry, ceiling smudges of aubergine musk vapour, tanlines for hair. We're getting all blown up into feathered crowns, jostled around in the faux leather, sweat sticky and spongy. The plink plop of blades dip into their green antiseptic bath, deft hands tilting, angling, securing necks and jugulars. From above, it's Whitney, crooning lost love and redemption, a yearning soundtrack for the familiars amongst us. We're all here, old people into new people, spritzed and varnished, leaving our dregs, our sheddings, a black wire carpet on the floor, to be swept away like shame. 

Ambulance stains.

The crows came today. Reclaiming their streets, all beaks and black, more silhouette than bird. Into bare branches they clambered and shoved. Go bushtail, flee greyback. Their cries echo back, colder, off our brick and plaster nests. Pinging the emptiness and disguised decay. The blade geometry of broken glass, ambulance stains, eroding paint scallops, a salt vein fissure. Cackling, they wait, knowing what comes next.

Smoothing disintegration.

Crumbs were whole once. Connected and part of something made, something nurtured and purposeful. Now, all but small annoyances, these dreg reminders of what was, run hiding on the faintest breeze. Into corners and carpet tangles, sanding smooth broken edges, crumbs discarding memory, their momentum only gravity. We went our ways, north and east, but mainly south. My new app reminds me of that day. All rain and ominous, a stale inevitability over us. We needed a big fire that wet night, but even that didn’t catch.

Reminder paths.

I'm waking up a server in Australia to write this for you. Over miles these memories seep, through bedrock cold, past bone and history, shivering aside friction-worn dust of a billion lost loves. That's where you are now, you too soon and I too late. There under the recycling and the regret, slowfilling a volcano dormant from fury, I see the silver trails of our lives, those hesitant, curled and jittery reminder paths. Bold turns considered, shortcuts unravelled, but mostly rote walking between the lines, a GPS boredom. Blindly leading ourselves downhill, numbed and comforted with the familiar, a smear of forgotten years. This calendared path is where we are going next, birthday candlelit, inevitable tourists. Black to blinding, we're crystals to be shaped, jewels from dust, unblemished in memory, unmarkable for once. As you are.

This is 40.

It's fivehundredeightyfour steps from here to there. From home to school, a path beaten, a father's best job these days. Under leaf showers and over frost hard sod we tread through every season, bringing then younger, taking them wiser, our precious cargo.

On our backs, the sacks, the math and the drama, tangled vowels and spilled colours. Secret symbols inked on hands, mystery rips in jeans, gloves abandoned. We carry sneezes and chills, ferrying lunches and tempers every step is forward to a future that none of us travellers know. This is their wondertime. These years, before the clouds of responsibility. This fragile wonderbubble of infinite possibility is what we carry inside, what we nurture and nudge down the path every morning.

These are moments in days, in weeks that become months in years that become our life. This is what 40 is. This is the gift we wrap every day.

Underwater things.

Move as slow as that fisher's boat. Unanchored, undirected. Nets and hope drifting, unfathonable. Slow your breathing, your steps specific, pre-plan and measure. Nature control. See the day as a process, a staircase of moments.

There's a light and heat overwhelming. There's that slow invisible pressure to do less. There's that sun bleaching all ambition.

This heavy silence of underwater things is a tension, a driftworld, half visible by imagination, fear floating somewhere, everywhere. Only the hard rock concrete remains unaffected. Poured and formed by dead hands in cooler days. Thrown up and muddled in, a wave barrier more than a beach. No cushion comfort for our intermittent white bodies, a rough reef eroding us in flakes and dust. The weedseeds, waiting in their holes, dark, patient, counting the sunsets until their counterattack.

Throned on his balcony, upon his wicker, a morning to sunset surveillance. He reads, he watches, he murmurs and bides. Surely wondering about roads and paths, choices and turns, doors and eyes. Under light and through the dark. A Sunday night sepia already blurring the corners. 

Zamboni forgiveness.

Standing high in the icebox. Up in the rafters, on plastic wood textured after a fallen sequoia. Watching people make circles, make scratches, make breath clouds. Clockwise conversations on a Friday night, replaying office drama and schoolyard trauma, overlapping ruts, the same offences crisscross-carving pirouettes in the pristine ice. A tracing of simple human stories, freshly cut, laid bare for anyone to read, until the Zamboni scrapes it away with a flood of forgiveness and absolution.

Photosynthetic.

The giant sequoias strain at 122 metres, gravity pulling down their thirst for light. No more for you, wood tower. Down here in the undergrowth, we settle up to our height, our eyes finding their perspective; over heads or under chins. The unsatisfied attach synthetic skins, elevators, tilting into baby walking again, negotiating balance, gravity cheating. Perspective uprooted, heel and toe become foreigners again. Uncomplaining rivercrack feet carry me through these miles, to moments forgotten and unbelievable. Through forests intimidating, over streets ablaze. Walking small, talking tall, trying to be true to my ruled self. By metre by mile, exchanging oxygen for memory, all until we're finalized, chopped, soiled, splintered into root food.

The starlings of Dubrovnik.

The starlings of Dubrovnik take back the town at dusk. More wing than fuselage, more echo than vision, they see us for the bumbling streams of nervousness that we are. In this landslide of a town, between sea and tectonic fate, they cackle and chirp, fleet and history-free, black darts in an orange sky. We, free to soar and dip, strafe and bomb your tiles and dresses, your ceramic, your silk. You, tanned pilgrims, all sparkle and flash poses, your crosshairs on your churches, your marble steps, your fevered etchings. Click, flash, capture. Your starbombs of light bounce off a millennium of blanched stone, stealing soul from the souless. We don't blink anymore at your lust below our wings. You are walking between walls already crumbling. Our airspace is clear. We soar, we dip, we strafe, laughing at your pilgrim frenzy.

Time is a gravity.

This cool honey water, an antigravity embrace, submarinating me, suspending everything, all organs and bones supported, reassured, unassigned. This was what it felt like in my 20 year old body. All possibility, flawless, unweighted by comforting excuses and the consequences of fear. This time machine dissolves all, stripping to bare skin the invisible layers of pretend and presume I've accumulated, blister-like. What matters to a weightless mind? Unanchor from the rubble below, a debris field of dulled freight, all tumbled and churned over, there's no treasure there. Time is a gravity, let's push for a future.

Baptism.

Catching the embers of yesterday's parties, echoes from another time zone, pings of urgency, losing their meaning already. Here under the black mountains, the monte-negro, the silhouette shards are just enough resistance to keep this world unknowable. But I'm ready to descale, to saltify, to slough this skin for fresh and pink, submersion, submission, sublime. A mad dash to the sea, a fury of white noise, stretched metal skin and shallow breathing, we arced over the atlantic blue. Thrown down on this side, all stunned and a world behind. Intruding, diluting this familiar seaside calm, a heat blanket, a glimpse of a different meter, a slower urgency, an already sense that it is lost. Not everything translates.