i.

this is the last time i try & turn us

into the ocean. i want to be wave motion

but know shitting & sweating are the same

pack aged par cel complete with Atlantic

origin story, each cell repeating murky beginnings

on election night meeting at a birth

day party, talking only of endings – it is hard

not to be political, difficult

to divide via semantics, the physical

, the actual & the symbol.


ii.

we hold hands for the first time watching

Salo or 120 Days of Sodom dir. P Pasolini (1975)

. above her covers winter is holding on out

side, wrist meeting mine half way across my chest

& i am facing away – she will have to see my eyes curl

in the laptop screen, repress a smile through torture

deprivation shit-eating howdidtheyeven?? apparently,

(i’ll read this later), Pasolini gave the kids chocolate,

& they were constantly on the crest of laughing

fits. Salo has been mostly banned in Australia. so too

once was Salinger, & so are visual depictions of the inner

labia, even now, viewing Salo is only allowed

with 180 minutes of extra material, which we will not watch

so I guess this is illegal but


iii.

i know all words have their

place-making agenda. we hold hands & two nights later

she’ll tell me how her mother died of cancer when she was

fourteen . i’ll ask if she heard through a network

about my own run-in, whether she is surrounding herself

with this on purpose. she’ll say

she never got to see how chemo actually

happens. i tell her everything became an image of myself

amplified leaving its brine in my

memory & finger shadows on my back. she likes the way

my veins bulge. nurses told me

they were clear as day but thick skin required extra

downward pressure. we hold hands while the moon

pastels her motions fissured & silver, a reflection


iv.

on the water, hyperbole skipping at some hundred

knotted characters. it resonates & grows while we filter

feed on what we want to know – at least we can

download Salo, watch above covers & hold hands

while the new PM occupies negative space. i know

he & i are the same in that we are both obsessed with self

replication & validation before a recognised audience.

he is buoyed by the country

voting like the inward-looking sickly, while i am stuck

on the analogy – it is too transmutable, or perhaps it is simply

too easy to get cancer. all

this information is more likely to divide


v.

than unite, dears caught in backlights

tracking anachronisms through dimming

distance. afterwards we put on Slacker dir. R Linklater (1991)

& spend all night almost

fucking, half skin against hemisphere, these two surfaces –

planets apart from one movie ago when holding hands

for the first time, now plying planets into poems

to dissolve insurmountable distances, as though words

are alchemy of Fe 2 or 3 plus concentrates in the current. we touch

& reach constantly. we try not to break the illusion

that to be staring into eyes is to be sharing thoughts

& feelings, a cross-purpose colony , a multicellular entity

coming together & glooping into history’s ether. swim

, reel, swim.Salo finishes with the final


vi.

crushing fade out of ambivalent dancing & we realise

that we are watching, still attached by the ends

of our upper limbs. without growing fins

she looks me in the eyes & tells me about Pink Flamingos

dir. J Waters (1972) & how Divine eats dog shit, not

chocolate, & there is nothing quite like it

in all of cinema.