Filthy and Beautiful | The Official Website of Tourettes
Poetry, Wanking and Sandwiches since 1977.
The Nights So Bright It Will Blind You
Serenaded by sirens and smoke I climb from my bed
To find the world in flames
I stare in wonder
With nothing but the scars on my back
And then run
Like dirty water into sewers
Free
Tonight our worse laid plans will come to pass
By dawn we‘ll be standing over shallow graves
Sharing a bottle of whisky
Laughing like lunatics in some B movie
Hold me and tell me of madness
I don’t want to sleep with you; I don’t trust your dreams
But who wants to be alone when the moon is naked
And the stars giggle flirtatious, filling me with blood and longing
Hounds roam the streets, baying for love
The prisons empty soon as the sun is setting
So drive, until we’re out of gas and danger
And bask beneath the stars in the safety of our illusions
Everyone looks sexy in handcuffs
Now I am free to follow my desires
How disappointing they should lead here
A dream of greatness
Blinding in its lucidity
Damned to haunt the edge of freight train dawns
I said it all for effect
Bleaching the night with my words
Alone in a bed of ghosts
Drink with me – please
Paint rainbows on night skies
Kiss my mouth of sores
That spills secrets
And charming madness
“I want to taste you” etc…
When the phone calls
Ignore it
Temptation, fleeting, relentless
I’ve broken my back over this key board
Hunched and disheveled
One day I will have something to tell you
Other than the life and times of the idle poor…
Will you still ignore me?
Yesterday the sun rained gold
I walked to the ocean and thought of you
I can no longer distinguish weeks from days from tomorrow from now
My father says there is no difference
Perhaps this is progress not madness
Perhaps its one in the same
Two Weeks Ago
Two weeks ago
We decided we no longer believed in forever, love or revenge
You have to pay interest on easy answers
And those are the kind of debts that bankrupt the soul
We knew each other inside out
Shared beds, delusions and nightmares
We drowned out the world
With whispered reassurances
Of all the holidays and happiness
That lay around coroners of tomorrow
It was pretty far from perfect
But then
We are humans, what do we know of such things
In the kitchen was a leaky tap
All night we’d hear
A watery heart beat
Drip, drip, drip
We changed the washer
Called a plumber
Wore ear plugs
But it was relentless
Drip, drip, drip
In her blue eyes I could see the condensation
Of madness
One morning she said
“If I don’t dream soon ill go crazy”
I tried everything
Stuffed cloth in the taps
Sung songs about deserts
played the drums at 4am
Turned off the water at the mains
But it kept coming
Drip, drip, drip
And pretty soon I could no longer see her behind
Those blue eyes
When daylight washed through that old house
We went about life in choked normalcy
Occasionally bumping into each other
As we drifted through our routines
And making love
When night fell
Like winter rain
We’d embrace
And listen
Drip, drip, drip
This continued for the better part of three years
Until two weeks ago
On a Friday I think it was
We packed the few things we owned worth stealing
And filled the house with petrol
I held her hand and we watched it burn to the ground
And then without a word
We turned and went our separate ways
Heading North part 2
this is another couple of chapters to my novella. if you donate to my Iceland fund you can get the whole damn thing. just click here
Afraid Of The Dark
That first night was unbelievably long. When the fear arrived it caught you by surprise. Against your better judgement you’d hoped to shed your old life like dead skin and begin anew up here. But then as a man, who is adept at running you should have known you’d bring the residue of your past with you, contaminating everything. You swallowed another two beers to dull the senses, but it was to no avail. There you were, dead sober in the middle of absolute nowhere. You lay in bed listening to the cacophony of the countryside: insects, cows and dogs, the wind and the river all coming together in a discordant harmony. But they were soon drowned out by something louder; the nervous chattering of the city. Even at this distance you were near deafened by the demanding cries of cell phones, the dirty talk of laptops with their alluring curves, the witty Facebook comments, written in that detached language you use when speaking personally in public, the interchangeable friends based on convenience and shared loneliness, and of course the parasitic magic of Mina. All of this you heard screaming at you from your bed in your dead father’s dilapidated holiday home.
Morning found you deep inside your sleeping bag, only your nose poking out into the freezing air. Still in your cocoon you hopped to the kitchen. In an old tin pot you boiled water over a gas cooker. Outside, sitting in a red and white striped deckchair you drank shitty coffee and took in the view. An overgrown field stretched out in front of you, ending at the banks of the muddy river where two giant pines eclipsed the morning sun. To your left an old fence sagged with age and beyond it in the neighbor’s farm, a few horses grazed amongst the wreckage of various machines. You thought about writing for a while but decide to clean the house first.
You managed to full five rubbish sacks before lunch, mostly filled with trash and water logged books. One of them had been a gift from someone you once loved and no longer knew. It had a sentimental message written inside the cover. You read the scrawled handwriting quickly and then placed it amongst the old newspaper and rat shit at the bottom of the black rubbish sack. For lunch you made a salad sandwich and drank a beer. Already the place was starting to look lived in. You managed to salvage an old H G Wells book The First Men in The Moon. You remember your father reading it when you were a child. As the afternoon ripened you nailed boards over the broken windows using a pot as a hammer. You knew you should have brought your tools but they reminded you of who you used to be two lifetimes ago. The darkness came quickly, flooding the house in minutes. You walked from room to room, lighting candles. It was wasteful, but comforting. You thought of Mina.
Writer’s Block
The next day the writing began in earnest, or at least that was the plan. It was sunny and you dragged the kitchen table into the field out back and set up the typewriter. Under the watchful gaze of your neighbor’s horses you sat for hours, putting down the odd word or two before screwing up the paper and starting over. It was like trying to read in a dream. Eventually you took a break and walked down to the river. Taking off your clothes you stood waist deep in the freezing water. You thought of all the days spent on building sites where this would have been your dream. But nothing tastes as bland as your own cooking. A minibus full of school children sped across the bridge, half a dozen little faces laughed at your nakedness. You got out and returned to the house.
By nightfall you had written one paragraph of average prose. The style that had made you a small star in your creative writing classes felt pretentious and self important up here. You smoked a joint and drained a few beers. It was only nine thirty but seemed much later, a type of lateness you hadn’t known since a child, where it feels if you were to stay up much longer all reason would dissolve and the madness of the moon and stars would descend screaming to earth. You read a dozen pages of H G Wells and thought of your father. Outside animals called to each in foreign tongues. When sleep arrived you relaxed and only then realized the tension you had carried on your broad shoulders throughout the day.
Heading North
This is the first two chapters of my novella Heading North. You can read the rest by donating $15 aus (19.855 NZ) to my help me not starve in Iceland fund here
You were heading north. Leaving behind another town whose name you couldn’t pronounce even if you could remember. You were over the limit, in a hurry to get someplace you didn’t need to be. Escape implies avoiding some kind of threat, but you were in the opposite situation. Back home the biggest danger you ever faced was receiving a B for an essay. And now that chapter of your life was finished you were supposed to either become a tutor, teaching theories you only half understood to kids who only half existed, or go back to the job. Or run.
You looked at your hands clutching the steering wheel, they were a mess, and the useful things you had learnt throughout your life had left them aged before their time. You cut off the end of your thumb once at work. You lay in the back of your dad’s car holding your t-shirt over your hand. You’d worked for him since leaving school despite everybody’s expectations of “great things”. You remember the radio played Rod Stewart and you asked your dad to change the station, as the t-shirt slowly turned red.
You turned up the stereo as you hurtled down the motorway. It was October but winter still painted the countryside grey. The landscape flashing past was a kaleidoscope of empty fields and tangled forest. You blasted the heater and pulled your brown hoody up around your head, thinking about the last conversation you had with Mina.
“Are you sure you don’t want breakfast?”
“No I’ll get something on the way up; I just want to get going”
“Ok… be safe, I’ll miss you”
“Take care”
The whole thing looks trite on paper but at the time it was moving. Mina had wanted to come with you. Well really she had wanted you to take the writing residency in Berlin. but your life had always been simultaneously safe and difficult and now approaching the third decade of your life you wanted a change. So you rejected both the love of your life and the chance of a lifetime and drove your piece of shit car to the holiday home of your dead father to write.
You pictured Mina as you drove, sitting cross-legged with her pug dog eating pasta and watching something on TV. But not really watching it. You pictured her in class talking passionately about obscure poets and alcoholic authors. You pictured her alone in the flat the two you had shared for the better part of three years. Guilt burnt hot in your gut and you opened another can of beer from the 6 pack, riding shotgun. It was warm from the heater but it still cooled the burning. The stereo kept singing love songs so you changed it to talkback and listened to lonely people being racist.
At the Four Square 30 minutes from the house you stopped for gas. Apart from the familiar green and yellow paint job it resembled the dozens of ramshackle sheds used to store farm equipment. There was a border terrier tied to the gas tank with a worn orange rope, the type of dog that was on that show Bengi you watched as a child. It was going crazy, barking and snapping at you. A man in his fifty’s with a huge gut stuffed into a black woolen jumper walked out.
“Fucks sake Jeffery shut up,” he screamed at the dog, which ignored him.
“Sorry mate he ate his whacking stick a while ago and now he’s out of fucking control” he said kicking the dog aside.
“Its sweet” you slurred, “can I get 40 bucks gas” the man looked at you with a hint of suspicion
“Where you going?” he asked starting to pump the gas
“Up to the village”
“Why the fuck you going up there”
“My Family own a house, gonna write”
“About what?”
“I’m not sure… life I guess” the man looked at you again.
“Life? That’s gonna be a boring fucking book” he took your money
“Write something about spies; like that book… the fuck was it called… you know the one?”
You didn’t.
“Well good luck up there” he said walking back into the green building. The dog started up again and you left.
The Village
As you headed further north your surroundings became more familiar. Houses peaked out at you from the dense bush as the old hatchback struggled up hill. At the summit there was a break in the forest and you looked down into the valley surrounding the village. Descending you passed the commune on your left and remembered being unnerved by the vacant stares and unkempt appearance of the inhabitants. You slowed down and saw they had built a giant dome out of corrugated iron. The sun reflected off the silver, blinding you briefly, and you thought you saw someone watching from behind the fence, but when your eyes refocused there was nobody there.
Near the bottom of the hill was a school and on to the right a dairy that sold ice blocks, sour milk and not much else. You crossed the bridge that ran over the muddy river that snaked through the village. As a child you used to hold your breath from the bridge to the house. You always beat your siblings. You pulled the car into the overgrown driveway and filled your lungs with the country air. The house towered over you to your right. You looked up. Things had changed, but then the last time you came up here was before the “tragedy” as your father always called it, and that was over fifteen years ago. Overhead a hawk circled and you wondered if it was supposed to mean something
Entering the house you were hit with the smell of mildew. Most of the windows had been smashed and there was water damage everywhere. A scrapping noise came from above; looking up you saw the arse of a rat disappearing through a hole in the roof. This was not how the house had looked in your memory. Returning to the car you retrieved your things; a red and white chilly bin full of food and booze, a bag full of your city clothes, some light reading and your old grey typewriter, dumping them in a pile on the bed. Once again you surveyed the house feeling your heart sink a little. The bedroom was filled with old books and half melted candles. A large double bed sat in the center of the room, the spaceman duvet decorated with rat shit and bits of broken roof. The bedroom opened out onto a large living area, which had a small kitchen off to one side. The walls were covered in faded maps of the surrounding area and pictures you and your siblings had drawn as children. Everywhere was the clutter of time left to its own devices.
The promise
The cracks in the promise
Are visible everywhere now days
You have to shelter indoors
Curtains drawn
nightmare box screaming
If you want to keep believing in its wounded
TRUTH
Beneath our beds
Heaving pus filled lungs
Keep cities glowing
nightlights
on the edge of a raging cancer
we are so safe here
skyscrapers
point to a bankrupt heaven
newspapers dance
down greasy streets
giggling
headlines
that read
“Stupidity is recession proof
Invest now”
Logos leer and howl
Obscenity
From every surface
Everyone wearing white earplugs
Lost in Sex symbol loneliness
You can see it all
Without even looking.
I feel sick, here, below my heart
But they tell me this is common and to be expected
After all
I’ve grown up fearing the Sunrise
I hold my breath all day
And masturbate with the lights on
My generation has silently declared
Politics dead,
preferring conspiracy theory tales
Blaming aliens and cloud formations
For the side effects of bloated appetite
and dead fuck ignorance
and my only question for god is
If you’re down here with us
Who’s driving this thing?
And no matter how long I stare
I see nothing
Beyond the promise
We are wild beasts
Broken
Delirium
When the cages rust around us
We will be neither
Safe nor free
Perth
It is five in the morning and I am standing in line in a tin shed. Despite giving off the appearance of being a glorified barn, this is the Tiger Airlines terminal. I hate flying; I used to be scared of it, but now, like so much in life I once feared, it’s just boring.
I reach the tired women behind the counter.
“Do you want to sit in the emergency row? You’ll get more leg room.” Her dialog is flat; her words made out of syllables devoid of meaning.
“Sure.”
“Are you willing and able to help in the case of an emergency?”
“Yes.” I reply, deciding it won’t help either of us to mention my abject cowardice or the stomach full of valium that will soon render me incapable of walking, let alone assisting hysterical passengers out of a burning jet.
I take my boarding pass and go through security. A fat man pulls me aside.
“Got to test you for explosive” he mumbles, waving what looks like a dishcloth on the end of a stick over my body. He places the cloth into a machine and then gestures for me to move on. I wonder if his job would be any different if the machine was broken.
I go to the “bookshop” and browse shelves filled with books by John Grisham and magazines decrying startled looking celebrities for being too fat or too thin. In the end I buy a film mag I wouldn’t pick up in a doctors waiting room and take a seat.
I am going to Perth to see Jean-Marie, an architect who speaks about matters of space and design how most people discuss the weather.
Jean-Marie has only two discernable moods, a sort of agitated confusion that involves lots of head scathing and a manic happiness that verges on insanity.
She picks me up from the airport in a white sports car.
“Hi” she says, scratching her head and looking around. We hug and I get in the car. It is filled with fast food packaging and beer bottles.
“Whose car is this?” I ask.
“My brothers” she replies before pulling erratically into traffic at speed.
Jean’s house looks like it could be straight off the set of Neighbours. When I walk in a small rat comes running at me. I give it a sharp kick to the guts before realising it’s some sort of dog. Jean enters the house after me.
“Rookie!!” she cries, patting the shaking animal. I shoot it a ‘keep your mouth shut’ look as we walk through to the kitchen.
“We’re staying out here” she says, leading me down a hallway and out into the backyard. In the middle of the lawn is a swimming pool filled with leaves. A dead seagull floats in the centre, it wings out-stretched, perpetually soaring through a sky of shit colored liquid.
“Need to clean that one day” she says off handedly, seeing me eyeing the pool. We enter a small white shed out the back. A single mattress and a desktop computer are the only furnishings.
“Flash” I say, throwing my bags on the floor.
“It’s good, private. We should fuck now before it gets too hot” she says already peeling off her clothes.
Jean shares the house with her four red headed brothers and Saan. Saan sailed to Perth from New Zealand after buying a yacht on a drug induced whim. Impressively, he almost made it, sinking just outside the harbour. After six months here he still doesn’t seem any closer to returning home. Saan is sprawled out on the couch in the living room. The rat dog is standing next to him with a tennis ball at its feet barking. Saan is stuck in conversation with the animal.
bark
“Shut up.”
bark
“Please be quiet.”
bark
“Stop it.”
bark
“For the love of god.”
Even though his boat “Gone Fucking” is at the bottom of the ocean Saan still dresses like he might sail off at any moment. Today he’s wearing white boat shoes, board shorts, a tight polo and a captain’s hat. We say hello and then I leave him to continue arguing with Rookie.
Jean takes me to see the house she is designing.
“Its going ok” she says, swerving to avoid running over a small child on a bike. “I kinda took some liberties but you know, makes it difference.”
We pull up next to a house with a screeching of brakes. It is quite similar to Jean’s except much bigger. And it has a large brick tower.
“What do you think?” she asks smiling.
“It has a tower.”
“I know.”
“Did they ask for a tower?”
“No. They said they wanted to set there place apart from the other houses but.”
“Well it certainly does that.”
“I know!” Jean yells and we speed off to the liquor store.
After a couple of days of solid drinking we decide to head out to the beach. One of Jean’s brothers comes with us. It’s hard to know which one as they all look the same – tall with red hair and also have similar names – Dan, Sam, Pete, Augustus. The beach is like something off a postcard; golden sand, blue ocean, clusters of tanned people who obviously own gym passes. We set up in a free spot and Jean immediately runs into the water while I get changed. Saan eyes the ocean suspiciously; he’s developed a strong aversion to the sea since it took his boat from him. The water is cold and rough. The ocean is another thing I used to fear and now find dull, like a bully whose violent nature has become benign with the familiarity of years.
I’ve only been in the water a few minutes when a commotion breaks out on the beach.
“What’s going on?” I ask Jean, who is treading water a few feet away.
“I don’t know those people are yelling.” I look at the crowd pointing and waving their arms frantically and I feel like I’ve seen this before. In a movie perhaps. And then it clicks
“SHARK!” I yell doggy paddling as fast as I can for the beach. Jean-Marie who’s a much stronger swimmer, shoots past me, reaches the shore and calmly walks back to where we left our stuff. I splutter and splash though the water until I feel the sand beneath my feet and then sprint out, falling on the beach panting.
Saan walks over and stares out at the ocean.
“Apparently there’s a shark out there” he says and spits aggressively into the sea and walks away. Sharks still don’t bore me.
We drove around the streets of Perth. Jean is drinking and playing loud German pop music. Everyone here has money. Of course this isn’t true but it’s the impression you get and one their happy to present. The streets are lined with sports bars, late model SUVs and European cars. Everyone looks tall and well nourished. Well except the poor people of course, but they are far and few between and as the saying goes anyone can get a job in the mines. So it stands to reason that poverty is a lifestyle choice on their part.
Jean-Marie crashed the car last night. Yes she was drunk, speeding and doesn’t have a license but it wasn’t her fault. Or at least she’s not accepting responsibility. One of the brothers, the one that owns the car, won’t talk to her anymore. She is trying to remedy this by furiously tickling him while the rat dog barks like crazy. Saan is trying to talk everyone into using the insurance money to buy another yacht.
“I know where I went wrong last time. Wont happen again” he’s drinking out of a bottle of red wine we found in a chest filled with sentimental things. Along with the wine there was also a letter, which Jean wrote to her mother when she was 15, detailing why she wants to be allowed to drop out of school. Some of her main points were:
- I think you’ll agree that I’m much happier when I’m not in school.
- I’m not going anyway.
- I will pay board when I find a job.
It is 42 degrees outside. All the grass has died except where the reticulation unit is watering it. Sitting in the most isolated city in the world, the air-con struggling to keep the house below suffocating, you get the feeling that people were never meant to live here, well not people that value green grass anyway.
One drunken night Saan is telling us about how the currents of the ocean work. He draws intricate diagrams on a napkin. We are sitting outside, on what I think is a patio, but I could be mistaken. I don’t have the mind for such details. There’s a table that looks like it’s sealed with centrepede flesh, like a prop from the film of naked lunch. The beer fridge which moments ago was well stocked, is now almost empty. Jean is playing with the rat dog by the pool. Throwing his ball against the fence and laughing manically when he catches it. I stumble over and scruff up her hair.
“Don’t do that” she says, hitting my hand away. “You’re fucking up my style.” Jean’s hair is thick and dark brown. Styled to look something between Justin Beiber and a member of Flock of Seagulls.
The dog returns, drops the ball and starts growling. Despite being vegan, animals always hate me. I don’t think their little brains can process the sacrifices I’ve made for them. Jean gets up and walks into the shed leaving me and rat dog alone. The growling continues and he starts to advance on me. Growing up in a house full of dogs I know how to deal with them when they get uppity, and give him a good kick. Admittedly I grew up around obese Labradors not handbag dogs, and I send the beast flying into the pool.
“Jean” I say getting no reply. The dog doesn’t seem to know how to swim.
“Jean” I say again. A bit louder this time.
“Yeah?” she says coming out of the shed.
“Dogs in the pool” I say pointing to where the animal is struggling in the brown water.
“Oh my god, he’s drowning, he’s drowning!!” Jean starts to yell. I think about jumping in briefly but then remember the dead seagull and instead do nothing.
“He’s drowning, he’s drowning!!” she continues to yell, not making any moves to get in herself. Eventually the brother whose car Jean crashed has to jump in and pluck Rookie out of the cess-pool. The dog stands there shivering, glaring at me.
The next day everyone has a hang over. We find Jean’s diary and take turns reading out excerpts in funny voices while she’s at the super market. When she returns there is a fight.
When the beer runs out again we decide to head to the zoo.
“It’s only twenty minutes walk” Jean says, frying up Kangaroo steaks for breakfast. We amble down towards the waterfront. The temperature is in the high 30’s and after a few minutes I’m sweating like a pig. We walk for over an hour before finally reaching the zoo. By this point no one is talking. Even Jean, who suffers from acute verbal diarrhea, is silent. Before heading into the zoo we stop at the supermarket for supplies.
“Ok, so can you pay for everything?” Jean asks me.
“Great” she says before I can reply and starts filling the trolley with meat and cheese.
The zoo costs 23 dollars to get in. I work out that’s almost a third of the dole in New Zealand.
“Better be some exciting fucking animals,” Saan mutters as we walk in.
First we go to see the reptiles but the enclosure is closed for breeding purposes. Then we head over to the marsupials but there are no animals, just a few empty enclosures. It’s the same thing at the tigers and the monkeys. We head back to where we came in.
“There’s no animals,” I say to the obese women behind the counter who’s eating some sort of cream pie.
“Of course there are you just can’t see them. They are hiding from the heat,” she says licking cream off her fingers that resemble uncooked sausages.
“Well I didn’t come here to smell them.”
“No refunds” she says curtly. We leave and get drunk at the pub across the road.
On the flight back to Melbourne I’m again asked if I want to sit in the emergency exit row and again I swallow some valiums and pass out. I’m awoken by the plane shaking. The people on either side of me are gripping my arms.
“It’s just turbulence, planes only crash taking off and landing” I mumble before passing out again. It’s the beginning and end you have to worry about the rest is usually pretty boring.
Help me not starve
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so im off to Iceland soon to write my first novel. I’m trying to raise money for things like food. follow the link below to donate to a semi worthy cause. you get gifts. yes gifts!