Gallery painting

“You don’t love her, you only love the frame you've trapped her inr”
was one of his favorite thoughts
love to him after all
Was walking aimlessly through an art gallery

Starting off patient and curious, taking his time
reading every letter of every placard, every date and contemporary
studying every brush stroke and finally,
annihilated by beautiful simplicity,
forgetting himself

But the annihilation was always short-lived
And the second climax, after the first, was no climax at all
Each canvas being of such an unattainable standard,
For how could they not be? Hanging there so composed and self-assured
How could you hang so without once being thought
worthy of preservation, of a golden frame
A true masterpiece

But like the prodigies that created them,
the manicured hands that waved down the
Trains to the sandstone art academy;
five-pronged tools of Providence
falling to Earth in order that the rest may taste
Ambrosia with their eyes
Will all inevitably discover on their arrival
so many others of their kind
So too could individual paintings when placed
side by side, arouse my sentiments
The way a building in lower manhattan might
Strike me as tall

And finally, with aching feet,
with blurred eyes and frantic
cursory glances he realised for the first and hundredth time
That each was beautiful in its own unique way
which was to say that all were in the same way
trite

And the rest of the gallery,
All the rooms he had not yet visited
Now only interested him
Because they were just that,
rooms he had not yet visited

Boutique Hotel

J. was walking up to his room from the party, drunk and with little command of his legs and arms. In the poorly lit hallway he exhibited his drunkenness, colliding with doors and making exaggerated movements in the hope that he would come face to face with a person from his youth and be forced to explain himself. He pressed the button for the elevator and waited for what seemed like minutes, but if he was impatient he concealed it well. “Why should I be in such a hurry?”, he asked himself, not dismissively, but as if to construct a table in his mind of all the things that could possibly cause someone to make an enemy of an elevator. When the doors finally opened with a dissonant screech, he remembered that his room was infact on the first floor, and registering this as a characteristic display of absent-mindedness he abandoned the machine entirely. Abhorred, he ascended the stairwell at great pace, taking the steps in twos in what he could only have described as an attempt to salvage the time he had lost waiting for the elevator.

Sullen and exhausted, J. made a bee-line to his door, apparently giving up on the attempt to draw attention to himself in his inebriated state. On the way he stopped in his tracks to examine a picture frame which hung on wall. It was a grainy photograph of four extravagantly dressed women standing atop a set of bleachers so that they were elevated them several feet above those surrounding them. They were clearing posing for the camera, paying it more attention than the spectacle itself. However, as is often the case with beautiful women, their labored carefree expressions appeared even more natural than the surrounding spectators, whose squinted eyes and focused, blank expressions made them appear utterly miserable. J. stood frozen in his place, staring at this photograph and then at the caption, ‘British models at the Melbourne Cup, 1967’. He wondered if they were still alive and if so, if they remembered this particular day. He wondered if their daughters aspired to be models, or if they had even had children. He pitied them, but mostly he pitied himself. “If i’m ever remembered, I don’t want it to be as a single seagull in a flock, darting for discarded food”, he thought to himself. “I don’t want to be a pillar of a bridge, buckling under cars, soaking and miserable from choppy wind and waves. I don’t want to be a button on an elevator someone presses to get to their room so that they can fall asleep watching television.”

unopened gifts are still gifts

This has been a terrible year
The kind you wish to sever,
the kind you vow will never, Eat into the next
But every passing second says i'm only digging deeper

Tell me Where is the floor?
The pulse beneath the ceiling that tells me i've reached Beijing
Where everything's clear, so different yet familiar
I swear that I have been there before
Like the stenciled mark of war

Tell me who still keeps score?
This desperate race for postcards we won't misplace or send back
It's always the same: Gathered in a hurry
To cover up our worries

What do you want me to take?
From this static of voices, panicked and entreating
It all sounds the same, You swear that its important
Admit it's all just noise and

Just cast it away, The tide will make forgetting
The only thing worth telling
To the strangers you meet
the pieces you were sure would soon make you complete

White pages are for liars and business listings

I can't for the life of me figure out What I will write next.
Turning phrases and probing syntax can be fun for a while, just like stage-actors must find a thrill in trying out their foreign accents on strangers.
They have been ruined, ruined by reassurances that they're troubled albeit capable of pulling off a convincing Southern drawl.
But what about learning a language? You're gonna have to before you're 25 because that is the age the glue in your brain's language centre begins to solidify .
And for a moment you could understand how single women must feel sporting the unfilled vacancy they embellish for years in want of infant.
Days and decades pass, but eventually she will lift the Non-smoking sign from the door handle, flag down the maid and fall atop her sterilized hotel mattress to remain forever in situ.

And the desperate act of finding a book or a glove or a car key or a piece of lego you are convinced you saw a minute ago when you weren't looking for it.
Maybe you weren't. Maybe you had just worked yourself into such a frenzy that at the time you weren't concerned by trivialities, except ofcourse the one you were agonising over at the time. But that never feels trivial at the time now, does it?
This sequence of panic, desperate reform and relapse has been running since I was old enough to guess what I wanted. But it's only when you get a little older and find common similarities that you realize what you want, or rather, what you are of capable of attaining.
The hypothesis of your own inner-workings, the tumors and the antibodies you once squirmed over, that you swore you could feel moving around inside your stomach, will haunt you to no end. After all, it is only after you attempt, fail, become confused, and break out in disgusted dry-heaves that you know with any certainty that you're not cut out to be a surgeon.
Or a Sagittarius.
Or a CEO.
Or a fully functioning husband-father package.
Or an outgoing person.
Or anything. at. all.

"The Divine Conscript" In Petrarchan Sonnet Form

How vexed is modern man, the listless heir
To parable and prose, to sordid script,
Starved for instruction, he seals his Crypt,
Chattel to a watchful paragon's glare;
Idle cherub minds in pilloried prayer,
As fostered lamb on lifeless blade is stripped
broken and dismantled, the divine conscript
lacerates thee to the beat of his snare (despair)
Flog the yawning Centurion with haste
Hold his stead with wide eyes and dare not stray
Or return to the barracks, deed erased
As devout thieves lament their Lord's decay
And howl like orphans "Don't leave us to die
like winge'd game from celestial sky"

They howl "Noxious Christ, we will all soon die
as winge'd game from celestial sky"

They howl like orphans "Ne'er leave us to die
as winge'd game from celestial sky"


They howl like orphans "ne'er lead us awry
as winge'd game from celestial sky"

Allocation Exhausted (The Convenient Idiosyncracies of Hybrid Hardcore)

'Sold out', a demoralizing and dreaded label by any band with a semblance of integrity. For vacuous, uninspired collaborations of electro and gangsta-rap that currently dominate the airwaves the prospect is not so much of a consequence as an achievement. Soulja Boy has every right to bask in the silence of victory, just like the prolific DJ/Guy wearing a tank top/kid sitting at his computer using Virtual DJ BETA Edition who remixed his music. Both parties took a heavily-exhausted angle and somehow made money off it-a feat impressive by any standards. However, it is impossible to argue that the entire pop genre isn't based on the concept of "selling out" or compromising one's musical integrity in appeal to a force fed MTV-generational fan base.

In recent years I have observed a trend of scrupulous pop-punk bands I once enjoyed debilitate and cross the divide, allowing their music to be exhausted by the radio repeat button. I reflected on this when yesterday I listened to the band "30 Seconds To Mars" for the first time in several years. Here is one band that, through no fault of its own, made the descent into the playlists of pre-pubescent teenage girls nationwide and was subsequently deleted from my memory. To this current day I cautiously change radio stations, hoping that the bands I happen to enjoy haven't made the transition into the public's stream of collective consciousness. Which brings me to the point of my ravings; One thing I found interesting about the song "The Kill (Bury Me)" by 30STM was the fact that in radio edits there was a notable absence of Jared Leto's climactic scream towards the end of the chorus. Let it be assumed that the broadcasting station identified screaming as so intensely inconducive to gathering listeners that they actually censored it.

If this is the case, it certainly explains my adoration of the pop-punk/hardcore genre, embodied by such bands as The Devil Wears Prada, A Day to Remember and Four Year Strong. Perhaps the popularity of such bands can be attributed to the confidence of fans that their music will never become mainstream so long as the distinctive hardcore undercurrent remains undisturbed. Do such pop-punk fans tolerate the insufferable breakdowns and "gross holes in that guys ear" for just that reason. And should such bands be labeled as sell-outs themselves as proponents to what is arguably a half-hearted genre?

untitled

Do you yearn for tragedy?
A tapestry of trauma you can see?
Falling skies and tempered seas
A telltale heartbeat

Cities burn on your mistakes
a secret you discovered far too late
Thinning weaves for lady fate
let's hope she can't tempt you

Cause everything is different now
Your film has a new director, tell me how
He plans to work this out
And everything else that you've gone and forgotten about