Pilgrim's Progress - Wicket Gate

even the glare here is organized

Pilgrim's Progress - Day Wait

For you these walls are tightened air. Are chairs of solid water. And those houses, elements shaped. And for you the same, but various airs - winds in clot; breezes boxed; gusts that are unsure. But for me: - all this is time coming through. Halted. Moving. Waiting. Delayed. At a peak. In a fall. This photograph is a catch of it passing through. See how that chair is a sturdy pause of it? See the table, a hoping wait? But the wall surrounding the window is a gone of it; and those blinds, a reluctance of it to stay - a want of it to go. While the houses roofed in the distance - can there be distance when all is time? - are the mutes of it entombing. And through it all these words are spray; a fingered wisp; an issue.

Pilgrim's Progress - Day When

The new and thick shag-carpet won't hold me - is it quicksand; flood perhaps? And these walls: - you might convince the picture-frames, but might I wander your milky depth? As fridge appears all steady act, but I know you're halted water, convention-encased; boxed by name, as infinite depths swim at the granite kitchen top; as the bedroom doors thin skin.

I won't use you - I can't name you. But I will walk through our listening views: you're a flood in stall; you are breezes boxed. This giddy we we are.

Life in a Suburb: Day When.

Into the 1

10 things that happen after you say goodbye:

The conversation shifts

The conversation refines

As the place of conversation also shifts and refines

The conversation shapes the 2 who talk

Their bodies create a 3rd - the body between them

This body takes shape

This body shifts and refines

Then all 3 overlap

Into the 1

Typing this message

there are places in Australia unfit for music

certain walls. certain walls with certain doors. pale color texture surround that becomes forgettable - lived among so many times. and the conditions - the noise out there; the noise, in here: the street and neighbor echoes the mute harangues of mind. under a celcius high from those nimbus lots, tufts that metal blue, filling these shadows here with weight. under the grey tv. across the couch too hot. under the doors tight shut. yes: there are places in Australia unfit for music. where a breathless air won't get

the coat

Inside pocket. Put it there. (He puts it there.) Make sure it stays. (He makes sure.) Push it all the way in - we've a long way to go. (He's doing this now, but with some difficulty. The coat is someone else's and old.) Now walk with me, here, she says.

He's walking now and thinking about what's happening. About what he's involved in. About wearing the stranger's coat that's old, carrying something hidden she thinks important, about which he knows nothing, while walking with this woman who keeps on walking and whose name she won't tell.

You don't need to know it. That's what I tell him. He doesn't need it anyway. This isn't personal. Anyway, the way he asks it makes me feel odd. He doesn't look when he asks: he stares into distance, right out there - like this: - and then mumbles it. I don't know his name either, and that's fine.

They walk for 3 days. They keep getting lost. Keep taking wrong roads. As he keeps mumbling, and she keeps her name. But they don't stop. Only to eat or sleep. You'll cop it if you stop she says. Just as he wonders how she'll take it when she finds out it's gone. Through the hole in the coat I found this morning. Not my fault he says to no-one. It's getting colder now he thinks.

It's your fault, she says. You're wearing the coat. It's your pocket. You're here to carry it and now it's gone. All this time: and now it's cold: and I don't know where we are or how we got here.

He takes off the stranger's coat and folds it. Dusts it clean and places it slowly in her hand. Asks What's your name? And she speaks. And he walks away. And he returns with what she needs and takes his coat.

Because I'm you.

Words that wore out he used most. Without even a feel for the time he used hours of them, in train terminals, in lectures, over dinner, over the phone - no matter what the situation called for, he'd just pour in an hour or two of these words that wore out. Long ones, uneven ones, ones that would easily offend or be misunderstood, or ones he knew would repeat well. Words that moved easy across a page or through a conversation, no matter what the meaning attached.
"Why'd he do that?"
I don't know - whose asking?
"I am."
You are?
"I'm the guy you're writing about."
Oh - so, but why ask then?
"I want to know."
But you already do know - don't you?
"That's just it - I don't. Not until you write it."
OK. Well he, er, that is you, did it because, because, well, because words just don't stick with you.
"Oh."
Yes. They don't stick. You find they, er, slip around a lot; you find they slip around and slide like streaks of an oily mist.
"Yes. I do."
And you - even a writer like you - you can't actually speak them. Yes: you write them down - that is you type them down, all day long, every day, every week, at your smoky old desk, in that crippled chair, but you can't speak a word of what you write. The reams and books and all the countless publications. All of them, you cannot speak.
"I know."
You, do?
"Yes. Because I'm you."
You are?
"I am you: I write, and I write, I never stop, all I do is write about you, and what I write, becomes you; it speaks you. I have no need to speak therefore you see; have no need to be a speaker or one who speaks. Because you are what I am."
Yes. Yes. Right. It is me. Him in the terminal, at the lectern, always on the phone. I remember now, it is me. But - all of this - I was writing about you.
"No: Not quite: It is I writing you."