In the space you leave for
other lives
the tiger bears a daughter of her own.
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In the space you leave for other lives the tiger bears a daughter of her own.  Bra shopping. It's been a while but I seem to remember being happier to dash a jug of sulphuric acid into my own fucking eyes than have to find an entirely new brand of bra. Turns out I was right. I've been looking for a new one since bloody Kmart decided to rejig the cups on their $9 T-shirt jobs, the fucking bastards. In honour of this shitty duty I commissioned, directed and shot a highly symbolic series of images around the item in question juxtaposing exploitative intersectional commentary with the fetishisation of ritualised interpersonal violence and gendered objects in the domestic context. Your gratitude is my oxygen. Anyways, all you titty-blessed girls know where my journey is headed; to the flash bra place/department store. Where there is nothing under $60 under any circumstances. Where an older lady clasping the pitiless tape measure of judgement will listen patiently while you try to explain your specific needs i.e. there's no tactful way to say I want a nice slutty bra for my giant rack that really puts it out there and gets me better service in the electronics shop, so I just admit as much in plain language. Sort of like the one I'm wearing now, only not so fucked-out and suicidal. Special occasion? Er... no... not really. Her nonverbal leakage turns slightly-to-decidedly disapproving.  No, you don't want the sort of lace that rips the shit out of your nipples or looks like a tribe of confused, mysterious serpents mating awkwardly under you clothing. Yes, you're aware that every single fucking lingerie manufacturer has a different idea of what DD looks like so you're going to be standing under changing room lights that are like the sun during the Rapture, turning beetroot red and itchy from all the new-bra starch while the mirror titters at your naked flab for three. fucking. hours, robing and disrobing over and over and over. You'll be informed that you are in fact an E and not a DD cup and that all the lightly-padded plain black balconette slash plunge bras stop at D. Sorry about that. It's the Mormon moo-cow erection-snuffing bras for you, you bossy big boobied harlot.  Are there any black ones, then? No, they won't be back in stock til next year. Do you detect a fleeting note of inveracity in this slightly too-glib assurance? You don't know any more. You walk once again past all the three thousand fucking kinds of awesome bras specifically designed for the people who don't really need one; they are all currently half-price. You will try to load your junk into jade and cerise Ds in the only styles you would vaguely consider wearing; they will defy you almost laughingly and slyly pinch your armpit fat into a sort of disappointed operatic Mandarin face. And in the end you will accept that matronly minimiser bra because it's black and not the colour of a floating corpse or pickled endometrium and you will pay that $70 like a grateful survivor. Then you'll go home, try it on despairingly and then fling it onto the ottoman at the end of the bed, uttering the first immortal line of the poem you are about to write and your partner will laugh because he is a man, balls can be saggy in the privacy of male attire and nobody dies.
On a far more tasteful note, we finally saw Only Lovers Left Alive last week and will review it pour vous soon. In the meantime, here's the very lovely Yasmine Hamdan and her enchanted vocal stylings from the soundtrack, which is just as much a gorgeous trove of atmospheric righteousness as the film itself. For all romantics, both hopeless and still hopeful. (Translation by Deniz Doğan) I adore you, even if a day passes by without seeing you i forget you? How come this time I drew you the Longing moves the nostalgia in my heart the night gets longer and the day passes backwards oh my fragile heart the separation is killing me I have no solution (hal) I have no solution.
The Lovely R and I recorded this tender gynophilic tribute for posterity during our survey of Port Chalmers for 'Surface Failure'. I decided it needed a rebuttal. In rhyme.
* More verse here *
freed of an expired horizon reason tires and lies abandoned warm gold wreaths the glowing round and wordless I am sounded rise and sleigh along a starless spine sightless idol sable-cradled hueless eye divinity entailed interred in intimate affinity override the pole retire in silken sullen swallow blue your hollow mirrored and allayed remains arrayed upon the faces of the faithful and enslaved. * More verse * Photoessays *My partner writes much better poetry than I do and here's the first of his shit. He's finally getting around to posting stuff on his page so check that out in future. S l e e p e r t o w n a shallow bay of memories with lifting mist and generally beyond the ken of waking thought the grinding drive the goals unsought by all except the outer shell the home wherein all daylight dwells a burning light to seal the flesh and sear away unwelcome guests who fill the air and deaden sound nameless in a sleeper town a shallow bay of memories with lifting mist and generally expiring cores of sodden hope that smoulder in their choking smoke no words of comfort to be told nor revelations here unfold a tidal silver here alloyed becomes pure black the deeper void to fill the lungs already drowned nameless in a sleeper town (the Lovely R)
 A L B A Tousled lime-white tissue born in bloodless green all pinched and pleated whorled in tumbled wonder powdered scent unseen but tasted and enfolded in moon and mallow -coloured dream. *  Profuse lutino minor leo, marmalade invader a kitchen tiger's questions always centred on the bowl. Gentleman-like journeys from the bedroom to the best sun in the house, the mouse eschewed a quiet life of laps and fireside required by a profuse lutino minor leo discerning marmalade invader. The Stellar Other I sometimes meet the lost at night and stepping over Cerberus's chain, you were returned to me I took your hand and held it to my face I saw you through our fingers your eyes always the colour of the scholar's dissertation their darkest blue reserve once more mine to remember. And from the first I saw the muses all attendant at your birth Fortune had bitten you and left her kisses ringed around your neck her favourite son, you were her gift to all who never knew her. And if you had been raised by erring wolves no one would have ever known to look at you you errant Adonaïs, your perfect clay proclaimed you from afar while the smoke rings took your fox-like laugh into the blacklight. And if your mother never heard you and your father never saw what they had made forever deaf and blind may they remain. They threw an alpha, ne plus ultra and to me your gifts all seven wonders and I knew you were my people born with stars upon your knees, and even from your height you would go down on them for me. You heard with one, but smiled with both our harmony a whole wordless and perfect as the moon ilargia, todas las estrellas y la luna. You gave Strange Fruit to me, her voice, and not its portent and in your bed your body spoke the language of its blessed shape I felt the word poured forth amid the dark miles that I passed all broad and full-blown driven deep against the slow roll of your hips your hand a sweet guest and my private whore Enkidu, incandescent milk-white, midnight shameless and unlettered you loved like you had never seen the sun but had been made to show me stars and as I lay under your shoulders your wordless mouth could mute the bard. You graceful bright and crownless Solomon I should have made your bread and washed your feet. It is a bitter thing to know our children left before we could explain ourselves there are no prayers for small things lost to ribbon red. And I did not agree to lose you to relinquish you to chemistry that Nemesis was never anything to me, but followed you until you fell into that falling sickness so unlike Caesar's malaise already crawled behind your aegis, your silver stolen, darkness knotted round your arm your hand lost to a fist and when your blue went down behind your lids no Orpheus could sing you to the light your left, that double bind your ruined side had found you. Sometimes there is something to be said for Nothing but we already knew there's no Elysium. When we go down with stars upon our knees it is to nothing and it drives the hardest bargain. Nothing could give no more offence to your creators than to offer you in pieces to return you to the Garden, with a smile, wreathed in laurel. And to whoever may have found what you had left my sincere regret, my deepest sympathies. To have laid you low and drawn the black around veinte dos veranos, twenty-two summers your bones not even grown more gifts than you would ever know laid out in shallow silver and when they weighed your heart Asclepius would weep beside the stones. Some days your loss is something fatal in itself caught in my throat to breathe or move will be to join you. That is what it is to lie with Nothing you took me down and widowed me and left me on the ground to burn my eyes out in your ashes. The stars upon your knees are on my own and I have always worn them as you wished. Inside me you have lain so undiminished Fortune finished with you perfect clay forgotten and I would trade her bitter, graceless favour for another day to lash the muses, change your name and feed the years to Cerberus, that punishment they all deserve. I found that I could play when you had gone and now my heroes wear your colours, delight their lovers with your smile. Never dream that no one lights a flame for you no sun sets on a day without my hands upon your face upon my life, you are still loved always the scholar's dissertation and my songs will wear the lustre of your endless constellation. * 
Tiny little dinosaurs are marching in through my front door they're sliding on the shiny floor these crazy little d i n o s a u r s . . . I've just finished the pics for the kid's book, now comes the formatting- hurrah... (faceplant). everything is copyright the author/do not even think about reproducing.   I am not sure why people insist on portraying glaciers as icy white and pristine, as though they must glow and even fluoresce in order to be significant to the human eye. Glaciers are not generally white and do not possess that kind of energy; they are dirty, injurious and protean, hungry monsters chewing and scraping the mountains as they plough downward, cleaving and collapsing on themselves along the way. What they have done is all around us and there is a terrible irony in the fact that we are now returning the favour, clubbing many of them to death with our own flatulent emissions. This is the Franz Joseph glacier in Westland, situated on the far side of the South Island as the crow would fly if any lived here. On one of our recent visits to the area we decided to turn south instead of taking the passes home and swing by all the stuff we'd never seen. To beat the feedlot hordes of tourists that spew from enormous coaches at around 8.30 each morning, we hauled out at six in the morning and pretty much had the place to ourselves. Where the Fox glacier sulks at the end of the burrow-like vale it has carved for itself, cloaked by visibly-encroaching forest, to my eye the Franz seemed far more present, still snarling like something at bay as you climb the last of the shingle berms toward it. To the south a slice of perfectly vertical strata forms an enormous cliff face at stark odds with the ground beneath your feet, either sheared cleanly by the ice in former times or thrust upward by some forgotten cataclysm. It presents its dew-soaked features to the rising sun, remaining dark and glassy in the hour of light beforehand. That hour is cold and heavy and silent, held in limpid suspension and coloured with the raw stone's breath; the air is damp and laden with the smell of thunder, lichen and powdered river dust before the stink of sunscreen and Calvin Klein are washed toward you as the tour coaches dock. Eastwards at surprisingly modest elevation lies the cupped, secluded icefield that sustains the glacier, so close to the sea that you can sometimes taste the salt blown on the wind. It is this strange adjacency that lends the West Coast its almost calculated geographical histrionics, its beauties squeezed into a narrow lane of forested meanders and gawping pitstops.  Standing before the streaming, broken snout of the glacier, at the very point where it ceases to be, you become aware of a silence that almost rings with abrupt cessation, like the violent echo of an argument choked off as you walked in, as if the ice and stone were parties standing fuming at each other. The landscape itself is scarred and heaped and gutted by this architectural ferocity, buried and exposed, creation revealed within destruction, its battered products released in streams and scattered as the ice retreats or rumbles forward. Even the few small herbs and floral speculators staking claims atop the silvery shellshocked alluvium are cowed, as though knowing it was just too soon. There are gravely-phrased signs posted here and there cautioning against approaching the restive ice as though it longed to dismember the unwary; not long after these pictures were taken a party of tourists was crushed to death as they posed for snapshots at the base of the floe. There are worse ways to die, I suppose. Having travelled extensively at the pleasure of my parents I was awakened early to the fact that alpine scenes and mountains in general tend to look alike, no matter where you are. I strain my eyes and heart in seeking out those subtle differentials, and while they do exist, buried deeply within angle and detail, more than any other landscape the montane place is a thing of infinite repeat, of giant scale achieved with a modest cache of fundamentals. A mountain is a mountain, except perhaps, when it is a volcano, and I do love this calm ubiquity. At any point upon the planet the very substance of the earth emerges at these high vantages, contending with the sky and acquainting itself with its own forgotten surface. We can see it as it comes up for air. Céili O'Keefe
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