Oh Ted, never a truer…
Would that I could still hold a word in my head/mouth/fingers, for all I wish right now is that I could catch the flight path scream of life in all the silent and surrendered places that was the last week/end in Sydney.
But who this scattered and gone could pin down the half of the sky held up by Kaveh Akbari? How could someone so tired open their eyes to all the spaces between words, all the silences within sentences, all of the gentle within the disorder, the democratisation, the destruction, the chaos and beauty that would come from Liv(ing) in the finite? No one so sleepy, so ruined as me, could be doing anything but beating their name into the dust of us like Candy Royalle? Or surrendering themselves to the eclipsed desire of our every beating heart to merely make it to the end of the night like Doubting Thomas?
I know that the closest that I ever came was when I was at mother’s breast.
—
Poetry is a strange mistress. Even as I feel all the strange and swirling heat head mouth growl sob sigh clench fist pump twist blood blistering wildly – I wonder if the end of everything is, in fact, just the eternal now. If the only value in this particular art is in the moments that you make. For it won’t be the money, honey.
Realising again that nothing is the way you planned it and that instead of what you anticipated you have something gentler and greater: gratitude to those who listened; gratitude to those who stood beside you and shared their unbearables; and humility in the face of the luxury of creation.
Thank you to Kaveh Akbari, Amy Bodossian, Olivia Nigro, Candy Royalle, Thomas Day, Randall Stephens, Dan Crestani and (in spirit!) Jessie Ray for a beautiful Art Party. Let’s never say another thing again.
eleanor j jackson 