Sticky Tape Images

i am trapped in the symbol of waiting for a train that never comes, swept away from the gloom of lighthouses and the shallows of the sea, dragged along the white, endless median strip that travels to grey boxes, lost in the madness, the marvellousness, swirled into the humming folk melodies that bring me back to my lack of stillness, to the bridge over the creek, the horses following fencelines like soldiers, the ocean town that grows older and smaller in rearview mirrors, because i’m leaving again and it’s all i seem to know how to do. inside me it feels too heavy to capture the ache and blues that i swallow, so i try to freeze it into these lines of prose that sand the rough edges off the feeling. they half-heartedly photograph the blur of dying yellow-greens fading into mellowed greys, the commotion of motion that drifts outside train windows as i’m pulled across paddocks. it’s a dreamlike state captured for some, a confused jumble of letters for others. there are holes in this net, cuts to my line, and the words keep falling through. so i pick up pieces, sticky tape images, the things i am able to retrieve, moulded with the violets of morning and mourning and the ugly sunlight of 3pm: the plastic peg on a hanging green leaf, the chattering teeth of a rattling coach, the softness of a cat’s belly, a half-unpacked suitcase sprawled across the bedroom floor, the porcelain grey of the cracked sky and the hope (i hope, i hope, i hope) the hope that it will rain. it’s weather that whisks me back to places where the picture is whole again, no rips to be seen, none at all.