Hazing

The city looked weird.

Something had vagued out its huge perimeters and lay a faded filter over everything.
It smelled kinda like smoke, but not enough to point a finger at bushfire.

Besides, it was the end of autumn.

Could it be fog? When is it foggy through the day?

I waited for rain to hit my balcony and regress the dryness of my hung clothes, but no rain came.

I could find no reason for the world's reduced opacity. Weatherzone would quiet a silently beating mind, but that seemed too much effort, and too capable of ruining mystery.

I shut the bathroom window, not sure if I was keeping out the cold or the pale haze, whatever it was. 

Turning the corner and looking down the hall, I froze.

A foot off the ground and as opaque as the haze, floated a woman.

Shlugs

Shlugs shlurp along the ground
Mooshy goosh, rain is found
Slimy slops and silver slicks
Goopy gurps, wet wobbly icks.

Somnambulism

Today's word:
Somnambulism - sleepwalking.
(Som-nam-bue-lizm)
In a culture of fear, I watched my fellows slip from hypervigilance to somnambulism, and wondered if they could wake up a little, just for a while, long enough to make the Earth worth coming back to fully.

Going, Gone

"I'm leaving"
She said, eyes to a windowed world
The stale cigarette lifted to her lips

She smoked whatever she could find.

"Where?" I asked, meaning, 'Why'?

"Pretty far away," she smiled, a curved consolation

And looked away at nothing

Which is what we'd become.

Eternal Struggle

Bloody lips
Taste of death
Spread around
With every breath
Preach to your choir
Ceasefire, a pause
Peace on Earth
And also, OMG Star Wars!

Snip Snip

These women have 3 people's-worth of eyebrows on one face.
Make-up thick with tonal denial.
Hair choppy, on-trend and unflattering, or layered to the hilt and borderlining the shades of old age Jane Fonda is keeping shapely thighs running from.
Feet kept stilted off the ground by thick heeled boots, as if the small shards of hair all over the floor is a sea of tiny alligators.
These young women are all thin and likely nourished on vegan feedstock, except the transsexual who is definitely prettier than me, and has hairier legs than me.
Funky '80s music lies its way out of a concealed speaker.

I sit here in dread. These trendy little darlings of the Syd Road scene are going to snip at my blondes?

The air is dancing with overpriced product scents and the high timbre of all the women, who have, in close enough quarters, adapted to share a single cadence, pitch and cuteness. Black jumpsuits and sharply winged eyes reflect 400 x over in the mirrors, and suddenly I'm in some never-ending tunnel of dark-clad, perky femininity, waiting for my head to land on an invisible chopping block, and for the usual post-cut regret to strand me in my bathroom for an hour here or there over the next two weeks while I fix what I smiled at and paid for.

But I didn't pay for this haircut, so I'll shut up now, and hope history gets sick of repeating itself.
And yet, here I sit, getting the same cut as always.

Night Magic

Of the songs I performed at my gig two Sundays ago, one of my favourite was Walking the Dead. It's got some real vocal and guitar drone to it, punctuated by shrieks of the guitar.
And I get to bellow out pure pain in vocal bliss and lyrical confession on those final notes before leaving the audience stunned into momentary silence.

Only, I didn't play Walking the Dead at the gig. It isn't even finished yet. It's just that playing that night in many ways felt like being in my own dark, greenlit bubble with massive reverb leaving my voice to float like tendrils across the empty carpet and curl around the silhouettes of watching humans, guitar purring and growling (though often awkwardly like a bad cat that wants out of its laundry prison). And in that space, it feels timeless, like it still exists, like I'm still in that eerie, comfortable spotlight. It was dissociative, so I can detach it from its spot on the timeline and move it anywhere and play anything within it.

And I choose to play many songs there, one being Walking the Dead. It's like having a stage in my house, but I have it in my head.

But the more you play a memory, the more you rewrite it, and the tape slowly turns to fuzz.
Then I guess you go make a new memory.