On a promotional postcard over lunch, alone

There's a loveheart in the foam of my coffee holding together this table in a dry place w. untrimmed verges, concrete chipping into the asphalt.

I blame the drought so I drink like fishes do, which is to say they don't.

The fluff is falling scentless from trees so we're all fucked. Let's sing along, we're all fucked.

How or why to write a poem? At least I'll leave the word 'alienation' out, too many places to go at night. Sex helps, but brave new bodies close all around like doors and I've stopped knocking. There are just too many places, or at least one with psychedelic carpet and guitars dangerous as cats.

How are you dancing? It's not falling but we don't quite make it. This music is lidocaine and I'm spread thin between the floor and the ceiling.

At work, on no paper at all

Names for sensations slip out then slip away again. I've been awash in words for the past few hours and I'm making a habit of it; I suck them in then spit them out again without too much thought.

I saw a dead duck on the side of the road today. A mallard duck laid out on the kerb like one of those old oil paintings of the Fruits of the Harvest. He was soft and perfectly, wholly intact in the way only birds can be. It occurred that birds must be dying all the time but you only rarely see their bodies, or comparatively rarely given the number of birds and the number of bird corpses I've seen. And I looked at the small birds flying over my car, wheeling and diving with the kind of integrity and wholeness only birds can have, a little differently. Their bodies end up crumpled and riddled with ants, they soak and disintegrate in the rain, like trash.

Thinking it again another sensation shudders through me but the name is too quick, I don't catch it and I'm floating on a sea of words, ideas I look at passively. I suck them in and spit them out again, I suck them in and spit them out again.

Amen, amen, amen.

The pieces of paper set out by library computer carrels for writing Dewey numbers on

In front of a computer carrel I sit and sweat and grow steadily pinker. A boy (at what age will I start calling them 'men'?) asks me how last week was. I don't remember him. It dawns slowly that he may have been the boy I thought attractive at a concert I went to.

He doesn't seem too attractive now, and (not for the first time) I wonder what I was thinking.

The air conditioning recirculates dozens of different deodorants, perfumes & colognes evaporated off dozens of different skins, and they rise and meld, powdery and chemical. I wish I could come up with something better than the disappointment rising in me like damp, but you write what you know. I've come here to read about the crusades for a short story I'm writing. I'll take the books from the shelves and press them to my face. I'll breathe in paper and mildew until I forget I've ever smelled skin. I'll pile them high, rest my head, and forget.

On a laptop, sour with sweat, after remembering this 'blog exists

My jeans are stained with strawberry juice, printer ink and coffee. Does this say much about my personality? I think it says a lot about my jeans.

A receipt for petrol from BP

Whenever I hear someone say 'scorched earth,' as in 'we will scorch the earth and never speak of it again,' I always think of scorched peanuts in glossy, hard, plastic chocolate and long car trips and I get hungry and want to go somewhere, even if the conversation was very serious and someone is crying.

The back of a page of lecture notes produced by the library's laser printer

I know her. I get up and move slowly, deliberately, around this silent room where women sit reading magazines, drinking tea, chewing with theier mouths open. I am careful and I am polite but I look clearly at her, turning around from the kitchen bench, staring as I make my way to the fridge to look for milk.

I am a detective. In my head Identikit pictures are being assembled; would the girl I know wear those glasses? would she wear those jeans? would she still have that hair? I take not eof hte letters written in black Sharpie on her K-Mart pencil case. Could they spell 'Trini'? Could that be her name? She's reading articles on ADHD in children, and I picture a textbook PsycInfo search - 'ADHD', 'ADHD AND boys', 'ADHD AND boys OR sugar.' I'm framing her in my own Boolean operators - 'Trini AND year 12 Or a house in Wanniassa with Basement Jaxx on the stereo and an overflowing beer can ash tray.'

Do I say something? The silence in this room is purdah. We're safe in it, it would be heretical to push it aside. I spread the contents of my bag over the table - folders full of looseleaf paper, computer, bent and stained reading brick. I wonder what year she's in and if she's done psych stats yet. I wonder if she still wants to be an architect. I wonder ifher essay is due today or next week.

An envelope previously containing a bank statement

Driving between one place and hte next I dreamed up a fierce and funny monologue about being a shy girl, because shy girls don't get enough air play because we never ask for it and the non-shy are unwilling to give up theirs. It involved the word 'fuck' a lot, a lot of angry voices, fists in the air, that kind of thing. I never wrote it down because between one place and another other things came into my head and, besides, the shy girl didn't want to speak. One place lead to another, and another, and at far-too-early I was sitting in a girl's bedroom and we were both gazing off at our feet and I wanted to pull her into me, sleepy and warm, and sit there the rest of the night but the shy girl wouldn't let me.

Receipt for a reading brick; I had a brief and competent conversation with the girl in the pink cardigan who sold it to me

The aura of adulthood is in stained, worn carpet tiles with old coffee trodden in and wastepaper baskets and notice boards and feet echoing through stairwells. Its late afternoon and I'll have to walk across campus to get to my heated car with the protesting accelerator and dulling paint. I washed it last week on a whim and promised myself I'd keep it clean, maybe go to one of those car shops and buy polish and chamois cloths and the like. Clean cars are not grown up because boys in frayed baseball caps with dirt under their fingernails have very clean cars