The fray

These nights of youth run fraying now -
Careful stitched seams
rough rended in the dark
of love and disregard.

Fresh hearts arrive like parcels
in the daily post -
We tear apart and throw away
the ones we love the most.

These nights of youth,
all swinging and bright -
Like so many strung out yellow lights
that fade to nothing with the sun.

The headaches are eternal now,
our keepsakes mostly lost.
Like fraying hem, time proves us,
we all will come undone.

Pictures of you

Life is at its closest to art when I awake inside this quiet lover's tangle, and ponder the open face of the next two hours at least. Here, right there beside me, is the wondrously touchable outcome of all the bumbling messes in the daily toss and fro. These mornings, that follow the fizzy bright yesternights of shiny eyes and exaggerated gestures, they are the meaty heart of the art of things, the times to believe that all of life could be naked, true and never boring. The rises and falls of a pretty young face, the thud, thud, thud of artery thick with life I hardly know, a whole streaming system of mystery. There is no picture in all of Europe more lovely to contemplate. They could be Gods of anything.

In the suburb

Beauty and perfection, they live on different blocks.

But beauty and youth, they are neighbours sneaking in each other's windows in the night.

MANifestRAYtion

I have always thought it an understating of us that women's bodies are referred to as being "hourglass". An hourglass is a hard thing. It is always the same. It doesn't move, except the sand inside - a depressing beige representation of the waiting nothing we're inching downward to. An hourglass is transparent. When you flip it, its form remains the same. It sits on a sideboard, a dead remnant.

For obvious reasons, Man Ray was more correct when he turned us into a viola.

A friend once gave me a card with a Man Ray photograph on the front and wrote inside: "To a very Man Ray girl". One of the best compliments of my life!

Joan

I love Joan Didion. Her writing is all hammers and nails. Bang bang perfect hard and sharp.

I wish she would come to my place for a cocktail and a smoke. She has one of those great old lady voices that make you wish you had five decades of cigarettes lurking in your throat.

Incidentally, I tried my first Old Fashioned this weekend, and I must say those Mad Men were onto something. I reckon Joan (Didion, not Holloway/Harris), would knock back an old fashioned like nobody's business.


“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget." - Joan Didion