and so it goes

hello

here below is raw, some of it may one day be beaten into submission, or allowed to percolate into something prettier, but for now, it sits here and waits.

for words a little more polished, visit the vault.

email me

jeannie(dot)polson(at)gmail(dot)com

from a letter to JM

In January I moved to Geelong, and I’m still here, and strangely loving it. I don’t think I see it as a long term thing, but I think I needed this space to breathe for a bit.

 

Things got hectic in derby town. I was coaching and skating almost every night between Melbourne and Geelong, then throwing guest coaching and advising spots in the mix from Ballarat, Daylesford, Gippsland, then further afield to Canberra, Hobart, Launceston, Perth… I felt like I was in a touring band. I’d blow into town, do my act, try to be entertaining and then leave. I’d get 3 minute tours of the city with whoever’s couch I’d crashed on and then its back to the rink, more more more. Since they’ve paid for your flights and are treating you so sweetly you are trying to do the best you can, really pouring yourself into it, and you can literally feel your brain being sucked out. It made me giddy and then high, and then exhausted.

 

In between that I was working in Lorne, as you know. Long drives twisting along coastal roads that I learnt to really love, but it was also very draining. It did give me some time to myself though, just this little bubble of space, some time to exhale.

 

I was writing, often with a piece of paper taped to the steering wheel, or sometimes just all over my arms and legs, and I’d stagger home tired and Id forget, fall asleep and wake up covered in indecipherable scrawl.

 

Then things got weird, I started getting bad headaches, dizziness. I would fall over and pass out It was scary and confusing. I got really tired and disorientated. Ended up having brain scans, blood tests, having neurologists poke and hit me with little hammers, looking looking, then sent to a psychologist. Talking talking, then the psychologist and the doctors agreed that my brain wasn’t broken, but I was. Sleep, sleep you need sleep. More talking, more talking … tell me about your past … but I don’t seem to remember much of my past. I have strange dreams, thoughts. Tell me tell me… Child, you have a disorder, a Dissociative disorder. There are others inside of you, fragments of the whole, hiding your past from you because they think it is too terrible and you will be afraid if you know.

 

Argh, headmess. So I had to sit with this in my lap, and look and look and look at it, and I’m still looking at it. And I think it developed into a thing of weird beauty in itself. It became an obsession, a mystery, a terrible yet precious Thing.

 

Meanwhile… My sister, cue dream sequence: In Dubai, working a great job, falls in love with a beautiful man, marry me, marry me he says. Busy, active fit – he plays three games of rugby on a Saturday and thinks nothing of it… He wakes up one morning with blood in his mouth and strange pain. A handful of days later, he is on a plane to England. I’m sorry son, but you have Leukemia. Advanced and severe. Chemo chemical dreams and more pain. She packs up their life in Dubai, quits her job, and sits beside him. Everyday in hospital, just curled up next to him on the stark white sheets. It is so hard for her, walking back home at night alone. She does not know Londoners.

 

He has a short break from chemo, allowed out for a week. There is a photo of them in front of a fountain somewhere. Despite the shortness of breath he wanted to take her on a tour. He got swine flu. Then pneumonia. By the time I got to London to hold her hand he was in a coma, she had been summoned to the hospital countless times by nurses saying Now, now, it is ending now.

 

We wandered London together, talking talking, her saying When (he gets better), then later, If (he dies). I got on a plane to go home and it became the If, not the When.

 

My father partially lost his vision. Eye surgery, pain, panic. He is very afraid of aging and deteriorating. When I was a teenager he made me promise that I would kill him if he became unable to care for himself.

 

In between all that, there is Him. Sweet natured and gentle, and so devoted. It is a different kind of love and it is intriguing. I choose, I lead, I decide. I’d wanted that badly in the past, always resented the feeling of being secondary. Now I have it, and it doesn’t feel right. Being equal is more desirous, but what does equal mean? He doesn’t read, he does not ponder the abstract, he is very hereandnow. He is amazing as a skater, effortless, graceful, agile. Skateboarding too – simply carving lines and trajectories through the city unseen by others. It is captivating to watch. He has a physical intelligence I am awed by. We long ago ran out of things to talk about, but there is still a heartbreaking sweetness to simply sitting beside him. It is startlingly, achingly clear that this will not last forever. It is still beautiful, perhaps more so because of this.

 

Now, there is working at a recording and rehearsal studio, more like a pirate ship than anything else. There are bizarre early morning shifts at a nearby hotel, my god 15 years of being a waitress, still still… but it’s strangely comforting too, my body knows what to do, my brain spills out in a dozen directions. Then there’s The Pulse, community radio station. I have my own 1 hour slot and stay on air after it for 2 hours, co-hosting. Bizarre, and amazing, I just kind of fell into it, but love it. I’m president of the Geelong Roller Derby League now too. Very different compared to my term as pres in Melbourne, but similar enough that you feel the clicking sound as things snap together.

 

 

 

yes

I think I remember you. Your face, your hair, the sound of your name in my hollowed out mouth. I think I remember the way we ever-so-neatly concertinaed, collapsed and congealed. I think I remember afterwards your profile in the dim light, head on the pillow, surrounded by a crumpled halo of hair.

Oh yes, I think I remember you.

folded folded

And I can feel her slipping into my skin

But she’s smaller than me and she doesn’t quite fit

And my finger tips curl where there isn’t enough bone

And my elbows sag

While my knees slide down

She’s such a little thing

She has to stretch my face back to see out of my eye holes

.

It’s complicated, this arrangement

This collection of selves

Universes messily folded inside other shells

Detail on the outside surface, unpainted inside

.

(Why is that? One of us wonders

That the outside is painted

But the inside is not)

 

 

oh

it would appear that I was wrong, and it was only a temporary hiatus

resuming transmission in 3, 2…

Around, again

It’s quiet in here, so quiet.

The buzzing has died down and it’s easier to drop away to sleep at night. I’ve replaced the internal with an external chatter, a chattering of teeth on teeth, that replaces the singing and sawing of bones in my skull.

The promise of summer is trickling down the streets all thick and honey like, coating us in a shiny kind of optimism that’s yet to surrender to the oppressive dry heat. Soon, soon.

sweetly

I’m dissolving my sugar into the warmth of you, letting it swirl out, whirl out, wind around this tarnished twirling teaspoon. Maybe I have said that thing again, that thing I never mean to say, that thing that slides out of my mouth in slippery ribbons, that you cut into lengths and tie to your fingers, to remember, remember. And this tea is getting sweeter, so much sweeter, as I’m adding more, more, more, tipping the jar upside down until there’s none left, all gone, empty, finished.

mass

And the crowd became this singular, gelatinous mass, the shapes and the spaces in between melding into one murky, pulsating plastic entity with so many yawning yellow teethed mouths. And the words grew fat into smooth black pebbles, every slurred and slippery utterance delivered in piles on the thick jellied street.

And there was no way into the mass, it simply formed and reformed, seamlessly, constantly un-du-la-ting. And every breath in swelled the whole, and every breath out depleted and flattened it, and every step, every gesture, every change in stance and direction stretched and condensed this living, breathing, seething mass. And it was permeable to all others, swallowing, encapsulating every solid form and every open space, mushrooming up into the space under bridges and seeping into every stairwell and doorway and yet despite its rubbery acceptance of everything there was no seam, no split, no keyhole, no way for me in to the mass.

If you go down to the woods tonight

You’re in for a big surprise

If you go down to the woods tonight

You won’t believe your eyes

-The Teddy Bears’ Picnic

Everything is upside down, inside out and back to front. I’ve lost my yesterdays and spent all my tomorrows. All that’s left is this crumpled, tattered day. I feel like the answer to everything is just behind this door, but there is no handle, and there are no hinges. Im running in circles on this giant clock face, chasing the minute hand and running from the sharp edge of the hour. I cant get away from this constant, maddening ticking. Do you know what it’s like not to own yourself?

wipe the smiles off those clocks

It’s like looking at photographs of your family and friends, but someone has gone back through all the albums and stuck paper dots over all the faces, or drawn thick black lines over all the information in the background that would help place these fragments on a timeline. Someone’s been erasing all the clocks, the calendars, the watches on wrists, the brands, the styles, anything – anything at all that might reveal a clue or spark some kind of response in my muddy brain. Many things don’t make sense now, and I’m not sure that they did then either, or if I’ve actually ever stopped running to look.

Leucadendron

There is something about it that always just gets me, in sun or in shade, no matter how straggly and ragged there’s something about it that always just gets me, those simple yet beautiful shapes and the way I breathe in and have that far away look, when I run a hand over those leaves or spot it somewhere far off in a garden in a street on the other side of the highway, catching the light ever perfectly so, humble amongst other more fabulously attention seeking plants yet quietly confident that its simple structure has a grace of its own, that somebody somewhere or nobody nowhere will ever quite see but it will press on regardless this business of living and dying and growing and thriving, in myriad variations and thousands of settings.