Skydekkerix

Devil we been at this a long time

You and I

And aren’t you getting tired?

Aren’t you sick of me

Getting pulled out of the fire

At the last minute

Every

Damn

Time

 

The book describes you as a hungry lion

But I know

A lion is a coward

Who sits on the edge of the firelight

And preys on

The small and the weak

And there ain’t any of that

Here

 

You don’t know me

Half as well as you think you do

But I know enough

About you

To know you are trapped waist deep in ice

Cold and hungry

With nothing to eat but yourself

And all you know to do

Is to try and hurt your way out

 

But happiness can only be made

You can’t take it from someone else

 

And even though it would be so easy

For you to turn around

 

For you

To make some good

 

I know

 

I’m not going to give you an inch

Cos inches start adding up to miles

I can’t leave anything for you here

No path or place

No way for your words

No room to swing your weapons

 

And maybe

One fine day

You will get tired of slinging sick

Onto a brick wall

And leave me alone

We can always hope

Looky looky here it me trying to be regular as my after work poo and post a little sumthin sumthin on this here website for the second week in a row. Ima tryin to prioritise the gettin words done stuff more, I got lot’s of books to write and time ain’t move backwards. If my brain melts out my ears I’m blaming your hungry and thirsty arses for it. Anyway without further french here it be:

Bungee Cord

Of course flying looked easier in movies, but it also looked worse. Especially coming just out of eighties special effects. And though I was barely five, I relished the challenge. Training with blue monsters in an abandoned quarry I’d never seen outside of my dreams. They taught me the skill over several nights, and I never mentioned it to my folks. How do you talk about that? To a failing marriage with overworked parents and probably one or two too many kids. I can’t remember specifically why I didn’t mention it, but part of me knew there were some things just for me, and like a lot of what I’ve seen or done in my 34 years, this was one.

Back to the quarry. Rust red Queensland dust. Rolling smooth walls, like deep sea waves in water not shallow enough to break. A sky as blue as a neon sign, fluffy white clouds in perfect cartoon clarity. And even back then I felt the clean air and smelled the fresh smell of dust. My dreams were always hyper-real. A thousand other lives I’ve lived, shared with no-one, my own to keep and shape myself with. Precious and vital. I wouldn’t have survived without them.

The monsters, random, refracted images of toys and cartoons and animals, taught me with joy. They welcomed me like toddlers bringing adults into their game. Gleeful and earnest. We ran at full pelt across the compacted earth of the quarry, the monsters whooping beside me as they leapt, showing me what to do. As they reached the arcs of their leaps, they’d be drawn up into the air, as if attached to an invisible bungee cord. Swinging skyward in erratic movements.

I jumped with them, and something in my core showed me what to do, a feeling like longing. I used all of my willpower and burgeoning imagination and pulled upwards, like grabbing a rope attached to the deep of my gut and wrenching it upwards. I flew and tumbled and ran again without stopping. The creatures pulled at my arms and shouted and I was in the air again. So high I was sure I would die if I dropped, the red earth now far below and I in the neon blue. The wind filled my ears like cotton wool and I felt blissfully alone. Like I was the whole world.

I never saw the monsters again after those dreams, but something strange and special had happened. In all my dreams from then on, I could fly. I knew the physicality of it, and it came easy. It was so real in my dreams it felt like it could bleed into real life. Like any moment I could wrench that rope up and take to the air. Like all the things that life tried to beat out of me were more real than the mask of the mundane.

And I’m not completely sure why I’m telling you this, now, to everyone. Maybe I’m just again baring my throat to the universe and saying, “try and take mine from me”, because you can’t. Because I can fly.

Oh chickens you done thought I’d forgotten you and whaddya know
I done did. I got three jobs and a toddler besides the bold and beautiful biznit so boy oh boy oh boy I am weary, but here a little post for my babies to remind you daddy still got some sugar. Here it be:

Decor

“Now, how hardy are these to heat?”

Mortaris gestured to the everbleed roses arrayed in front of him. His coal-black, gauntlets scratching the bestial helm fused to his decayed spirit. The Chamberlain looked up from his scroll, seemingly distracted. “I… I’m not sure my lord. I’m sure they’ll be fine. Very ominous. Now could we…”

“Because I want to surround them by fire you see? To keep with the blood and fire motif. I’ve explained that haven’t I? Because that witch turned my blood to fire and destroyed my body, leaving me a vengeful wraith.”

“Yes lord, you have made the motif clear. It’s a lovely idea for the throne room, but if I can just catch you up on the movements of the army of Gilead. You see they’re getting…”

“I don’t think roses are good with heat. Which would be a shame, as I quite like the symbolism. Maybe some kind of succulent? That still fits with the metaphor.”

“Lord their army has teamed up with the hero Renfar, he’s said to be the second coming of…”

“Or eucalypts, they thrive in fire. Hmm… I like that a lot.”

“Lord if I must, time is short…”

“Yes you are completely right. A snap decision is the right path, oft that leads to an unexpected and greater result. Yes, we will go with the roses I think. If they die, it will increase the sense of melancholy.”

The Chamberlain sighed, glancing out the ornate arched windows at the gathering horde. “Well if that’s sorted my Lord, I have some urgent business to attend to in… the stables. Yes. I’ll just nip off and grab my riding boots.”

“Of course Chamberlain, go see to the details, as you always do. I’ll get to work here.”

The Chamberlain was already several steps to the massive demonic maw that engulfed the doorway to the throne room, his scroll discarded on the floor.

“And Chamberlain?” The Chamberlain jerked to a stop mid-stride, the sound of trebuchets being constructed audible after the squeal of his boots on ruby flagstone.

“Yes lord?”

“Fetch my gardening gloves while you’re there will you?”

Chickens you know I been dealing with suicidal thoughts since I been a wee lad, and I been dodgin those uppercuts so hard my neck hurts. I gotta lot of tricks now, from mantras and prayers to full blown crazy person magic spells. You aint keep yourself alive from it for over twenty years without Learning, but recently I done found a good trick that keeps working.

When that thought stabs me and makes me say “I want to die” I counter it on its own stupid terms. I say “I don’t wanna die, I wanna have sex and play warhammer”. And though those aren’t the best and first things in my life, it works as a little circuit breaker. These thoughts are stupid, because you don’t wanna die. You want to have fun and stop hurting, and one usually leads to the other.

Life is full of little good shit I wanna do. And though it’s also full of big good shit, sometimes its hard to see cos it’s so large. Sometimes you just need breadcrumbs to lead you home.

Here some microfiction about that. Sorry I ain’t post last week man have I got Excuses.

Givin’ Up

Another man approached as he stood by the railing of the Story Bridge, hands resting flat, doing the maths on the distance to the asphalt and contemplating if he should dive headfirst for a sure exit, or if it mattered. Not holding back tears because he already felt dead. Despair replacing the water in his cells, fingernails and hair already grown out like a corpse.

He’d practiced for this, the speech he’d give. That there was nothing that man could say, because all the bonds he’d ever had to this earth had been broken, all the strings holding him down had long been untied. Faith and trust and promise were all just vibrations in the air, empty because there was nothing to fill. He’d searched long and far for home and love, but they’d never been there in the first place. Just little drips, sporadic like Chinese water torture.

He was sure now. God was dead in heaven and man was on his own. With no hell to avoid and no paradise to strive for, what was holding him back? What kept him from returning to the primordial soup of cells and atoms and elements?

He’d ask what the point was, but he was already sure. There had never been any. Just another empty word in a haze of gas. It had never mattered, and this grief is what he should have been feeling all along.

The man tapped his shoulder, and he spun, ready to unload his grief and rage. To bring the universe down with him. “Hey mate,” the man said, brow furrowing in an instant. “You know you’re standing on 50 bucks?”

He looked down, under his worn boot, one that had been laced to his aching foot for too many miles, yellow plastic peeked out next to the cigarette butts and blackened gum. A grin pulled his cheek like a fishhook pulled by a newborn.

“Ah, thanks mate. Yeah, that’s mine.”

He stooped and slid it into his pocket, looked up, then walked to the nearest pub. He’d wait there until this little gift from the universe ran out. If it ever did.

I done promised ya’ll I’d keep posting my stupid little stories so you can make fun of me again and I am a man of some of my words. I used to be a real tortured writer, and have to squeeze the words outta me like a dehydrated, no-poop-for-two-days roast dinner dump, but now I am a lot more things (day job, 18 month old, regular household chore doer) I find writing is like the best thing I can do. I can’t pretend this job is miserable no more, so in the interest of not appearing a wanker here another one that I had a lotta fun writing:

Baleful Polymorph

A new leaf, that’s what Frendrick decided in that moment of peace and wind and loud silence. The experiment had worked to some degree, and he was sure the university would be very interested in his findings, but suddenly none of that seemed important. If suddenly was the right word for how he felt, now maybe a better term, for now seemed so much more important than before, when after had consumed him. He scratched his arse with a giant hairy paw.

The bustling university district stretched out from his perch on the balcony of his penthouse suite in the transmuters’ tower. Magic potions and crystals were strewn across the floor, and the laboratory behind him was scorched purple. His new muzzle was aflame in the smell of his experiment, and with the soup of city fumes. Getting away seemed the only choice, somewhere with fresh air.

Hunger pulled at his stomach like a toddler trying to grab something forbidden from a parent’s hand. He considered going to the market, but the logistics overwhelmed him. Besides the fact that the strap of his purse wouldn’t fit over his beefy ursine shoulders, counting coins without opposable thumbs would be next to impossible, and furthermore he was quite sure he’d forgotten how to count.

No, a brisk exit from the city would have to do. Find a beehive, some berries and game and sate himself, then a long nap. His nose would lead the way. Science and wizardry be damned. It seemed so childish now, when dwarfed by the desire for feast and rest. He would go, but first there was the holy experience of sun and breeze to revel in. To ponder the universe and its bounty. The roar of silence and the ache of the biggest question there’d ever been.

What was he going to have for breakfast?

Aw baby(s) I know I been all quiet on the western front lately and you know I’m sorry but life been throwin me around like a gorilla that fukn hates a little monkey. I done been writing but this world be hungry in lots of places for it, so to show you I care ima start postin my little bits again here and there (the microfiction exercises I do with my wife while we do cheap korean face masks together). Take me back internet, maybe with a bit of lovin we can both die happy in bed together.

Here’s one:

Myxer

The Myxer sailed somewhere off the Whitsundays, the reek of booze wafting in the brisk sea breeze. Nano drones swarmed the air like mites, gathering footage. The cloud intelligence sorting through thousands of camera angles and years of footage to create the cheapest and most powerful emotional impact. Streaming it constantly in a fever dream to the world’s train rides and work shits, all the while the public manipulating the constant bender.

The Beverage Dissemination Officer was one of the few human crew of the ship, a savant constantly interpreting the Myxer app, getting beverage suggestions and targets from the internet audience and working in a blur of activity, making wild drinks and sending them out on cheap Japanese waiter robots.

Everyone was more than shitfaced, the constant running deep-and-meaningfuls a roar combined with shattering glass and sneaky overboard vomits.

Whether the Beverage Dissemination Officer liked his job or not was impossible to tell, maybe he didn’t have time for want or opinion. His concentrated frown was set in concrete, and he lived from microsecond to microsecond, buzzing like the nano drones, the biggest cog in the stopwatch.

And then, like the voice of God, an announcement played over the speakers of the super yacht.

“Sorry guys, we haven’t been picked up for a season 34. We’ll be heading for Singapore, economy tickets home will arrive in your inboxes.”

No one noticed, they continued to slam down random beverages and vomit and cry and fuck themselves into oblivion. And the Beverage Dissemination Officer barely broke stride, the app had shut down and now he was unchained. He made for the sake of making, because the universe had lost all time and contents. Drinks combined like chemical reactions in primordial ooze. New ones and old ones, created in instants by the divine, a constant flux of creation and consumption, with not a moment of space for anything but the frenzied now.

I ain’t been shy about being a wizard. I used to be, used to hide it like a shameful secret. Like accidentally shitting your pants a bit and then desperately doing a load of laundry so the only woman that has sex with you don’t see. But I remember, at one of my many rock bottoms, the good lord spoke to me and said “The world needs a wizard”. And you know what, it do, it desperately do. And after long years in outer space on the mission of the sacred heart I can say with confidence that there wasn’t anything else I could be, because I wouldn’t be here. It sounds crazy but I ain’t been shy about being crazy either. I can do both.

Lordy I can tell you that when the love is gone, when the universe is crumbling, when you got nothin left but pure hope, you’re gonna need a wizard.

 

How to Come Back

When you have suffered your slow heat death

When all you see in your mind’s eye

Is a degrading kaleidoscope of of colour

When you are far from shore

With no hope of returning

When all your love has gone

A spell

Put your hands together

And explode

Spread yourself far

Fling yourself beyond the edge

Of the universe

Atomise and disintegrate

Become sparse

And now

Find the spark of you

That small white light

The soul and centre

Pour everything into it

All that hurt

From long years of sorrow

The laughs

From every joke you’ve told

Every smile and touch

Backed with true love

Every time

You’ve

Given up

And come back

Draw from the expanse

And fill it into

A single point of light

Feel the gravity

And light it on fire

Take that fire into your hands

Into your veins

Feel it flow through you body

And return

Look at everything new

Watch yourself from above

See all you’ve done

All the mistakes you’ve made

All of the love that’s held for you

And think

I need to look after this guy

Minden was a place of extremes. Depending on the year, the barren, clay-packed hills and fields were either ravaged by terrible bushfires, burning the already brown grass black, or terrible storm fronts that would lift sheds in the air and submerge whole buildings under a torrent of filthy water. Growing up there, I don’t remember a time of calm or peace. There was always a looming threat, a pillar of smoke or a bank of green clouds just over the edge of the hills on the horizon.

The two-lane rural highway that the pale orange school bus drove to take me to school had a kill count to fill a professional Call of Duty streamer with mad envy. Riddled with potholes and blind corners, and haunted by trash heap Skylines piloted by plastered teenagers with their feet welded to the accelerator. Every morning, the bus packed to standing room only, and rocketed down Lowood-Minden road filled with unsecured and unsupervised high-school hellions.

My stop was at the entrance to a cheap, colour-by-number housing estate just off the Warrego. I was a wretched fourteen year old, thin as a whip from sharing a single income through a family of nine. By three-quarters through my second year of high school, I had firmly trimmed my tall and sensitive poppy and hid in the grass from the predators that moved through the early naughties school system.

I shared the stop with my main school bully, a hefty, freckled redhead with a heart of violence. For the 45-minute journey to Lowood, I was his to enjoy.  Whether through impossible to navigate word traps, or good old fashioned clenched fists, he would have his fun until we were dropped off, then go his separate way past the homebrew alcoholics and unleashed Dobermans that were our neighbours.

That morning, in the middle of bushfire season after a long drought, we weren’t alone at our stop. A new family had moved from The Gap, seeking cheaper rent after a bitter divorce. The new kid was the same age as me and my bully, but taller and somehow scrawnier, as though God had pulled him like chewing gum from the bottom of a school desk. For the first time since I had started walking to that corner, the bully had a new target.

I kept my head down as the bully probed him for weakness. The new kid was more confident than me, worldlier and socially capable. By the time I saw the flash of pale orange come around the corner, the bully was growing impatient with the new kid’s stalwart self-assurance.

The bully continued his attack on the new kid as I took the empty seat furthest away from the both of them. The new peace of an unexamined 45 minutes was a godsend. I stared out the window at the passing hills and cow paddocks, blackened by daily fires. My mind wandered beyond self-preservation, into creative and constructive territory. When I reached school, I actually felt ready to learn and progress, rather than tired and jumpy.

I had a brief glimpse of what school was actually for, shaping and growing. Where classes were opportunities and broadened horizons, rather than a list of tasks to survive at the end of my rope. I finished the day with a rare lightness and optimism, when I’d be usually planning a way to make myself throw up and get out of going to school the next day.

On the trip home, the bully took the seat right behind me. The bus rattled as we ploughed along the highway, the yelling and cursing of the densely packed students deafening. I tried to ignore him, tried to get back to a place of peace and solitude, watching the scorched earth flick by the window.

I felt something wrap around my throat. Thin wire bit my skin and blocked my airway.

“Hey cunt,” the bully whispered in my ear.

I scrambled to try and get my fingers under the wire, felt the blood failing to circulate through me head. I gurgled, trying to shout for help. My vision dimmed.

“What the fuck are you doing?”  The new kid dove over. He wrestled the wire out of the bully’s hands. I wheezed.

The new kid and the bully shoved each other. The bus driver swore at them. I moved to a seat on the other side of the bus. Tears stung my eyes so I pointed them towards the burning paddocks.

When we got off the bus, the pair started shoving each other. The new kid put his guard up as the bully started swinging meaty fists at his face. The new kid slapped his punches away, eyes wide, stumbling as he stepped backwards.

I walked away, leaving the both of them, shame digging into my core and twisting. I didn’t talk to either the next morning, waiting for the bus while standing on the edge of a blade.

Two years later, both of the bully’s parents died in a car crash on that same highway. I didn’t see him at school again, had no idea whether he’d dropped out, if he had family to look after him or if he had to try and make it on his own. All I knew was that I wasn’t a target anymore.

The floods came after that, washed away all the ash and the local service station. Replaced it with silt and a new form of destruction. Through the flood I stayed locked at home amid a turbulent ocean, and tried yet again just to survive,

Looking back, I don’t know where I’d begin to try and fix that place. I don’t think it’s possible short of a biblical redux, short of humans becoming a different animal.

Violence is unsupervised, life is unsupervised, no amount of school programs or anti-bullying initiatives could change that.

I don’t hold that bully, that kid, any ill will. He was just another broken piece of a broken place, like me. More I hope that he found his own healing, as I later found my own courage.

I like to think maybe now, after the fire has scorched us and the flood has washed us away, we could both be different animals.

The word is out

The beast is loose

The frog is drinking all the rivers

The hungry, hungry for compliments caterpillar has eaten the village

The Harry Potter is hoarding all of the sorcerer’s stones or some shit

Your ego is wild and free

Unchecked

And ruining your social interactions

Your craft and soul

Arm yourself

With the rifle of your self loathing

And the ammunition of your mistakes

Counted one by one

Felt ploughing through the small of your back

Clothe yourself

In the garb of the hunter

The shitty webcomic t-shirt that your wife hates

The worn track pants you got for free

You don’t know where or who from

Go barefoot in the wild

Shod in scars and dirt, feet unwashed before bed

Lie in the scabies of your unwanted arrogance

Find the beast

Great and hairy

Clawed and fanged

Hiding in the wilderness

Preying on the weak

Your insecurities

Your lacks and wants

Harm it and degrade it

Bring it down and down

Into the dust

Chained and torn

And after it lies there

At your mercy

Take it home

Leash it and feed it

Scraps at first, the leftovers from your miseries

Then meals

Bacon and eggs

Club sandwiches

Roast meat, peas and gravy

Shave your beast naked and cold

Wash it

Brush its hair

Cut its claws and blunt its fangs

Tame it

Call it new names, slave names

Self confidence

Drive

(I always liked Banjo)

Teach it tricks

Let it do new things

Make it earn its place in your world

And when your beast is new

Beautiful and unrecognisable

Ride it

Well hey there my chunky newborn babes. I’m postin again and there ain’t nothing no one can do about it, and there aint no one who wants to do nothing about it cos you all been real nice about my posts and I am real grateful.

Here another one and it makes me real nervous to talk about this biz, but I also get real nervous if I see a particular pattern of seeds in bird shit on the ground so no news there. Hope you enjoy or feel something or at least don’t say mean things about me on the internetz.

S xx

 

Old Battle Wound

 

And here it comes again. A shot to the nerves between my shoulder blades. My fists clench, and the words spill from my mouth.

“I wanna die.”

The pang recurs daily, almost hourly. Even though that battle is long since won. Even though there are years between me and that desire. Just a pang and a dark memory from a time before the light.

It was so natural for me to say, in time thankfully long past, and the fight to where I am was bitter and long. These old wounds don’t fully heal, and I’m not the warrior I once was.

By god I wish it would stop. I don’t need this reminder of times gone, of ghosts still too real. But wishes are nothing, and purpose remains. There isn’t a sea of joy to fall into at the end of this path, but more paths and paths beyond.

Ah, all this doom and gloom, hanging onto my legs like cobbler’s pegs on a peaceful walk through wild lands. What’s a little limp in my step when the air is fresh and new and full of opportunity?

I may scream and curse and carry these old wounds for the rest of my life, but I will die a man that conquered this. A man that lived and found a life whole and filled with good.

Just as I may remember and wince with pain refreshed, I will look back and smile at the memories I fought for and won.