surferdude182:

(by Mentalitätsbestie)

This morning when I was walking through the park I saw an old couple riding past on vintage bikes with big wicker baskets attached to the front. The man was wearing an open chested Hawaiian shirt and aviators, and the woman had on high-waisted leopard print pants and her hair in a half-beehive. Both of them were laughing and riding really fast, and in each of their baskets was a puppy. 

That kind of image stays with you, is all.

Pillow faced and malleable

We bit each other’s shoulders,

Burying teeth in flesh

For fun;

Leaving crescent shaped bruises

Like thin, first day moons.

Five of a kind fingers,

Making new tracks over old veins.

Remember how

I licked the apple from between your top lip and front teeth,

And you laughed.

Long after we finish eating

The bowl of soup stares back.

A large broth eyeball,

Eyeballing.

People on the street walk past,

Oblivious to the intimidation tactics

Of consommé and plastic tablecloth.

The soup is barely touched;

Going cold,

Big as the moon,

Deep as anything you can imagine

And infinitely round.

We are hypnotised.

Reduced to children learning to swim

Dipping through a surface layer of skin,

Kicking to the top of the bowl.

Two four pointed stars,

Bellies arched toward the sky.

With beached fish mouths thirsty for air

And heels like stones dragging us to the bottom,

We find balance

And womb-like underwater sounds.

We are leaves on top of a pond somewhere,

Weightless in knowing

Gravity is conditional.

And I guess it’s pretty obvious

(That that soup is a metaphor).

Some banquet, alright, broken open at the hips,

A mattress bowl pot-luck of limbs.

Legs heavy with the after birth of un-had sex

Curve of back knotted against lower half

Arms waterlogged from lack of swimming

And eyes wearing their lids like blankets.

In the Diazepam glow of a half lit room

I try and memorise the weight of my outline,

Spread over the Ikea bedspread like Jam smeared on toast.

Lately I’ve become aware maybe I am only half aware of things. Sometimes I feel thin as water. As though if there were nothing to hold me together, like a glass, or a pipe, or a riverbed, I wouldn’t hold shape.

What I want is to be completely real in the world. I want to etch my outline, the tips of pointed toes spiralling in circles like a compass marking my circumference wherever I go. To occupy a small, mobile piece of space. And also to have a sense of what that means.

By the time I left his bed I was already half in, half out of whatever space we had created. A bit like the ghosts I imagined entwined between the branches of the fig tree outside his bedroom window. ‘You’ll have an awesome time,’ he said, placing one hand on my shoulder.

I crossed my fingers in the front pocket of my jeans and hoped he would be right.

Back in my mother’s car I thought about parking next to the water tower on the way home, to have one of those significant ‘saying-good-bye-and-coming-to-terms-with-things’ kind of moments. Seeing as I’d managed to fuck up every other rite of passage, I wanted to do this one thing properly. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to cry, and I wouldn’t find an appropriate song on the radio or anything, so I just went home and waited, sitting on the end of the bed in the empty room.

I leave early

All Vegemite breath

And bedroom dew skin.

As the damp morning

Fills my eyelids

I follow the sound of trains

To a wooden bench

And wait

Amongst the chocolate wrappers and condensation

For the day to catch up.

It was after the party, after the cheese on toast was reduced to crumbs within the bed sheets and false eyelashes were stuck to the bedside table, and also after the late night infomercials and the morning after aspirin dissolved into Berocca, that I remembered. Remembered kissing above a tub full of ice and floating beer cans, one hand hanging onto the shower curtain, one foot resting in the soap holder. Details vague, tongues coated in tequila. 

Grey clouds passed,

And didn’t rain.

It was the kind of day where rain would have worked;

Metonymy, and all that.

Instead the sun came out,

And I forgot to mourn.

There has to be consequences for that kind of apathy.

betterbooktitles:

Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach

Reader Submission: Title and Redesign by Maxwell Benwell.

I spent winter in Austin, with its numerous shades of brown. Winter in the Austin Four Seasons, all peeling brown and gold wallpaper.

              Back in L.A, playing pool in the Tiki Lounge guest room with a bottle of Malibu and Robert Johnson on tape deck South had seemed like a good idea. It was South with-a-capital-S, and all we had talked about for weeks.

‘Maaan,’ Blaire had crooned, a bottle of Southern Comfort swinging from his right hand. ‘Think about it.’ 

I thought about it while he took his shot and sunk the white ball.

        ‘We could get away from all of this Hollywood bullshit.’

He passed me the pool cue and sat next to me on the couch, placing one hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s not for us,’ he said. ‘South is where the real America is,’ he said. ‘We can build us a fire in the desert and look out over the plains at sunset with a bottle of moonshine,’ he had said.

He talked slowly, trying to make me see the things in his mind, describing, in detail, the Southern girls with Southern accents, hole in the wall bars with clapped out blues musicians playing in the back room, open spaces and the type of moons made just right for howling at. ‘We’re not going to find any peace here,’ he said, ‘just…’ And then he trailed off, looking down at the hole he was burning into the couch with the lit end of his cigar.

           But I knew what he meant.

           As idealistic as it all sounded three days later I found myself on the Texas Eagle Amtrak, going South. South East, after changing lines in Springfield. The train moved slowly, working its way through hick towns and grain fields. It was early in the morning when we reached the outlying suburbs of Austin and the first thing that struck me, even under the orange-morning glow of the Texan sun, was just how brown everything looked.

There was a moment when I woke up this morning where the world seemed quite still. It was after I untangled myself from the sheets and pulled the curtain fully across the window frame. I put the fan on low and listened to the neighbour finish whipper snippering the lawn edges. He put his equipment back in the shed and a couple of cars went by on the road. But after that there was this great big space of time where there was just no real sound at all. A bird started singing up on a wire somewhere and after a while another joined in. But besides the two birds, and a few cars, and the low hum of the fan, for a good fifteen minutes or so there was nothing. The world didn’t seem to mind I’d turned my alarm clock off and slept in again today. But then the ceiling fixtures started to shake and the walls began vibrating. Dave was listening to Yes again, and he was doing it real fucking loud.

Check-in by Brecht Vandenbroucke * on Flickr.