Cabin Boy

Gotta cut my hair again. It's getting too long, too... I
dunno. Makes me edgy. Like the new guy captain picked up
through India. Caught the tail-end of the glance he gave
me first thing this morning. Didn't like it. Warning
shot.

It's being stuck here that does it, more than anything.
Keep catching myself in the grimy cabin mirror, trying not
to look too close. Just passing by, I tell that face, not
stopping, just passing. Dunno if it's true really. Makes
me feel better though.

There's been no wind for weeks on end. Blue skies, blue
seas and palm trees: our own little slice of paradise, with
the sun baking down and our toes buried in sand. Gets to
you, after a while, every so perfect. Gets to me, anyhow.
Sometimes I want it all to just stop, you know? Just stop.
Freeze. No insects singing amongst the leaves, no waves
spooling lazily onto the shore, no creak of rigging set
tight for nothing, no nothing. Just me, and the quiet dark
behind my eyes.

Figured I'd never feel at home in paradise anyhow.

The rest of the guys are alright. They find ways to amuse
themselves: cheap drinks, cheap local girls with bigger
smiles the more you spend. Nowhere to take them but the
beaches, of course, but then who cares? Good a place as
any at the end of the night. They try and get me in too
sometimes, and god knows sometimes I want nothing more, but
you know those girls with their smiles and their big dark
eyes don't miss a shot, even when the moon's down. They'd
work it out, if I even tried, they'd know, straight away,
and then what happens? All secrets are worth something.
They'd happily trade me in.

It's a living, I suppose. Same as the rest of us.
Everyone just wants to get by.

But this waiting game, it's killing me.

The little things could give me away.

Like there was this puppy, on the beach the other night,
when everyone had picked their someone for the evening and
I'd run out of free beers to play for. Even Captain was
gone, leaving me stranded: taken the rowboat and back to
his cabin with one of the girls who talked some language he
liked. I was curled up to sleep, arms tucked in against
the mosquitos, when I heard this whimper, felt a wet nose
brush my face. Looked up into two big brown eyes. She
cocked her head and kept on crying, so I gave her some
water, poured out on a banana leaf.

Lapped it right up and cried for more. It broke my heart.
Gave her most of what I had left.

She yawned and curled up over my ankles, but I was scared.
You can get sick from dogs, you know. Really sick. So I
pushed her off and found myself another spot, while she
just shrugged and went to sleep in my shadow.

An hour later, I hear this whimper. It's her, paws up on
the bank where I'm sleeping, too small and tired to pull
herself up. What else could I do? I gave her a hand up
and we curled up together, two lost kids keeping each other
warm.

Told Captain about her next morning, when I was tidying up
the cabin from the night before. The woman had left her
scent on all the sheets: they had to be washed, to make
sure she didn't make herself at home. He said I couldn't
keep her, I should just leave her where she was. Fair
enough, I guess: she probably gets fed better than I do,
curling up with random strangers on the beach at night.
Keep meaning to sneak down with the scraps from dinner,
share them out between us, sometime when I won't be missed.

But it seems like I'll always be missed at the moment.
Even when there's nothing for me to do.

There's always something, and I usually get it wrong. Or
that's what it seems like. Always something wrong. He's
not a bad man, the Captain: just particular, you know? His
way is the right way and all other ways are a waste. Tried
making suggestions, at first, asking questions, but it got
me nowhere except stranded on some beach. Had to play all
my favours, and some of his, just to get back to the ship
the next morning, and then of course I was in trouble for
being late.

Learnt my lesson after that: just keep your head down.
Don't stand out. Just keep trying to get by.

He never beats me or anything, anyway. And when I was sick
he even put his hand on my forehead to see how bad the
fever was, let me sleep in the cabin 'stead of below with
the crew. My brain was snapping, seeing colours in the
walls, but at least I didn't have to keep my face up, face
up to them. And when he saw... well, dunno what he saw,
but I saw his face and it was like he knew...

Praise God for small mercies. He's not a bad man.

But still I don't know how long I can keep this up.
Sometimes I think, you know, give it up, go home. You get
a craving for the stupidest things, like tea and biscuits
on a fucking canal boat in the flattest, slowest river on
this green earth, and you think, well hey, what am I doing
here? What am I doing here, on the other side of the
planet? But then the wind picks up again and you set off,
to some new place, new strips of paradise, with more girls
with eyes that you couldn't read in a million years and
cheap beer and maybe the biggest jellyfish you've ever
seen, and you remember that this is still better than
winter, this is still better than the choices you had back
home...

There was this beetle I found on the rocks last night, on
his back and kicking lazily, like he couldn't even be
bothered to fight for life. Turned him over, and this
morning he was still there. Thought he was dead, but when
I picked him up he gripped my fingers like he knew that I
was his last chance, and how could I say no to that? To a
creature that didn't even know how to cry?

I'm getting too old for this trick, too soft. My underside
is starting to show. Gotta get out while the going's good,
find a new ship that needs a new cabin boy, find a Captain
who doesn't ask too many questions or look too closely at what's in front of him.
Cut my hair, get some new clothes. I can still pass. There's coconuts on the
beach. They won't mind if one goes missing. Just gotta
wait for the next boat out.

Australian Summer

Alone

Under

Skies

Torn,

Rambling

And

Limitless

I

Awaken

Now,

Smiling

Under

My

Melancholy,

Expecting

Rainbows

Butterflies

I made you a butterfly
For the boat that you made her
You handed it to her
And left me just hanging

A hand on my shoulder
As you handed it back
Its wings newly-coloured
And ready to fly

Serenity prayer

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

By way of apology...

It's complicated.

Sometimes I just need to walk out on something:
A fort-da game to test your patience,
Run away to see who follows,
Push my luck until it breaks.

I'm Jekyll and Hyde of a Saturday night:
The slightest thing could tip me over
And when the clouds gather, well
Girls are like the weather, remember?
You just have to let the storm break and pass.

I couldn't work out your hidden agenda.
Couldn't see what you saw through the lens of the camera.
Imagine my ad in a lonely-hearts column:
Lonesome aesthetic seeks companion in misery
To share hangovers, hang-ups,
And random acts of affection.
Doesn't exactly scan well, does it?
Not likely to land me someone like you.

The trouble is you wanted a performance
And I'd been dancing on command all week.
With half a beer down and only an hour
Between me and the way I sell out every day
There was no way I was putting on another show.

There are things I wanted to tell you, but

I bunched my soul up
As tight as I could
No longer accessible
Even by razorblade
To weather the storm
And keep through the summer
While I kept my head down
And served my well-paid sentence.

You made it unravel
But left the threads hanging
To tangle around
Every fragment remembered
To wait by the phone
For just one more weekend
As the time slips away
And I lose the strength to dream

“Dance,” he said. “It'stheonlyway. Wishwecouldexplainthingsbetter. Butwetoldyouallwecould. Dance. Don'tthink. Dance. Danceyourbest, likeyourlifedependedonit. Yougottadance”. - Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Au wa wakare no hajime

Scooping up treasures
From the mouth of the tide
And getting your paws wet
Gathering shells

Your spirit it flickered out
All in a moment
As brittle as seashells
And blue as the sky

After-image of sunlight
As I close my eyes to sleep
A beautiful weekend:
Here's to many more

Death and poetry

"I'm assuming you're dead then?"

The words came out with practised insouciance, just as planned. There wasn't much point getting upset about it, after all. It wasn't like there was much I could have done, being on the wrong side of the planet and everything.

He said nothing. It seemed sort of rude to force the issue, so I just stood there, looking down at the waterfall, waiting for him to volunteer something. Eventually I got sick of waiting.
"So, any post-mortem words of wisdom?" I prompted. "Come to tell me to repent of my sins, that sort of thing?"
He shrugged.
"Figured it was about time I saw the world," he said.

I didn't know what to say to that, and he didn't seem in any hurry to add anything, so we just stood in silence, watching the kids playing in the park far below us, listening to the water on its way down. An old woman walking her dog stopped to look up at us, and I wondered if she even saw him standing there beside me. I could feel his eyes on me, but I didn't want to meet them. After a while I realised I was crying.

"What's up, Lib?" I heard him ask, as casual as if we were sat in a pub back home, or lying out in a park in some village somewhere, falling asleep in the sun.
"Ah, nothing," I said. "Just the sun in my eyes".
I wiped a hand across my face.
"So, how's the wife?" I asked, as offhandedly as I could manage.
"Coping with it surprisingly well," he replied, "Though that isn't much of a surprise, I suppose. She's got the boy to keep her company after all".
"And how do you think he feels about it?"
"Ah, he'll be ok," he replied, "He's a smart kid. And tough, like his mum. They'll be fine".

I shrugged. It wasn't really my place to say anything, so I scrabbled for something to change the subject.
"So... what did you do in the end? Mazzies?"
It felt sort of rude to ask, but I wasn't in the mood to let him off too lightly.
"Mazzies are a crap way to go," he said, "Especially when me and the missus had enough stuff on prescription between us to open our own pharmacy. Nah, I guess I did a bit of a Heath Ledger in the end: mix this with that and that and a bottle of vodka and see if you wake up in the morning".
I laughed.
"Sounds like some of my weekends," I said.
"Yeah, something like that," he replied.

I looked up and met his eyes for the first time, and I saw he was smiling, but not at me exactly: more like through me, past me, at something I couldn't see.
"Sorry," he said, guessing what I was thinking. "Been having trouble focusing".
"Well that's not really surprising, is it?" I said. I forced a smile but my eyes stung again. When I reached out to touch his hand it was cold, dry.
"You couldn't have just... waited?" I asked, "I mean, I was going to come back, I only have a few more months left out here, I..."
I trailed off, seeing the look on his face.
"This isn't about you," is all he said. But it was enough to put me in my place.
"Yeah, you're right," I said after a while. "I'm sorry".

I looked up at him again, and this time when he smiled I smiled back.
"I am never gonna forgive you for this," I told him, but I flung my arms around him all the same and hugged him as tight as I could, trying not to notice the fact that I couldn't feel him breathing.
"I'll miss you, you know," I said as I pulled away.
"Me too," he said. Then he turned to go.
I watched him walk away into the trees until I couldn't see him any more. Then slowly I made my way down the steps beside the waterfall, got on my bike and headed home.

Back in my apartment I lay down and stretched out in the pool of sunlight spilling through my window, staring up at the sky and feeling the warmth on my skin. I closed my eyes and just drifted for a while, seeing red through my eyelids, listening to a song in my head.

"If you have to go, don't say goodbye..."

I must have slept: when I opened my eyes again the sun was setting. I watched it bleed out over the rooftops through the branches of the cherry tree outside my window, then I knocked back the rest of the whiskey and sang myself to sleep in earnest.

Mr Nobody called at midnight. I wasn't too surprised: just more ghosts on the line. I even felt like maybe I should talk to him this time, but as usual he didn't give me time to pick up the phone: just enough to kickstart the paranoia. I lay there listening to every tiny noise in the dark, feeling the bottom drop out of everything, his face in my head, not wanting to move to turn on the light.

"Your picture out of time
I've taken in my mind
Shadows kept alive..."

Somehow I slipped in and out of sleep anyway, losing the plot and then finding it again with a start, wide awake at 4a.m. with the cold conviction that I was waiting for something. Something was coming, to make sense of it all. I felt a pressure in my head, like something was growing inside me, stretching out its wings, getting ready to fly. And when, caught offguard by a beautiful dawn peeking in through the window I thought of all the people I couldn't share this with and felt my heart hurting, I wondered briefly if I was going to die too.

But it wasn't death. Just poetry. Different kanji, you know.

"Long horses we are born
Creatures more than torn
Mourning our way home..."

Ghost-hunters

We're talking about ghost-hunting over in Yaizu. Just another crazy gaijin thing. These guys are still the sanest I've met. Everyone gets their kicks somehow, I guess.

I'm not sure if I want to go. I'm not sure who I'm supposed to be, or if anyone else has noticed the 25-odd years between me and the present company. I'm not sure it really matters, either. I've already heard all the stories from the last 20 years, been inducted into the circle of firelight. Four hours sleep again and my brain is sticking, twisting round itself trying to find a soft spot to rest in, getting tangled in the details. Blame the guy from Singapore: yaki soba and Japanese breakfast TV, the kanji for Shizuoka and a girl who doesn't smile with her eyes.

He's picking at his fries and telling us about the women from Surabaya. It's all needles with them: the doctors cut them out, but more appear all the same, sticking people's insides like the dolls the women use. Or there's the story about the girl who thought she was pregnant: couldn't shit for a month, then after she went to the witch doctor she started shitting out spiders, scorpions, all the stuff the women had filled her with. Needles too. He says they worship demons, that's why their country is so poor. They don't believe in God.

I trade in my stories during the intervals – the watercolour girl in school, ouija boards, the doorbell ringing itself - and the Canadian guy tells us about a night on the railroad when he heard someone walking out in the corridor when there couldn't have been anyone there, but really we're just here to play the audience. It's easier than trying to make yourself understood when a guy speaks four languages and doesn't listen in any of them.

Like I told him I hate MacDonald's. He wouldn't let me get away with just passive smoking and taking in stories. Wouldn't let me get away with much if I listened to him all the time: I'd just be swept up in the narrative, taken in, knowing he's still going to answer the phone at midnight to whichever fucked-up twenty-something drunk-dials him tonight. They're all so made up, these Japanese girls: put together to unwrap and fall apart, melt in your mouth with an aftertaste of chemicals. Processed meat.

Fried McChicken turns in my stomach and won't settle. My palms start to sweat. There's the moment when I almost tell them that I'm going to throw up, but then it passes and I'm left just shivering, as Mr Singapore takes my hand, tells me how cold my fingers are (sort of my saving grace, I guess: he can't stand the cold). I feel contaminated by the interrelatedness of everything, like we're all standing on the rotting shoulders of our predecessors; international airports built over the graveyards so the newly-homeless dead can join in the carbon-guzzling race through timezones, consume and be consumed once more in the glorious McCycle of matter. Nausea again. Somehow the plot got lost in a newly politicised morbidity, the jungles of Cambodia maybe where my friend got his first taste of snake and war (puking, eating, shitting, shooting), or the giant roast chickens that a starving little girl saw staggering over the hills from Nagasaki. I don't know. Time to go.

Home alone later, I need something cheap like lust to keep me distracted while I try to sleep off the paranoia, the lights flickering through all those ghost stories with a guy I had nightmares about years back. It's like the dead are just another one of those unpleasant facts of adult life that you learn to deal with. Or just piss your pants, as my eloquent friend from Singapore puts it. 48-going-on-24. Best smile in the world if you can tease it out of him - one of those things I only realise when I'm drunk. "The human race will begin solving its problems the day it stops taking itself so seriously". Kinda hard to take paternal advice from someone you know wants to get into your pants, anyhow. Just smile, motherfucker, smile, and maybe I will just call you tomorrow. Winter's been going on too long to be fussy about who keeps you warm.

The rain starts, right on cue, and I lie awake waiting for the knock on the window, but all I'm really listening to is my own internal monologue, voices just out of my range of hearing. I'm thinking about the verb 'to sleep', with all its permutations, and realising we never made it out to Yaizu after all. Probably for the best. The suicides can keep themselves company tonight.

Amerikatana

Uiski, aisukurimu or keki,
Biru, kora, or bifu suteki,
Sandoichi, ika furai,
Hanbaga and appuru pai,
Miruku sheku, chokoreto,
Chikinbaga, furaido poteto,
Kappu nudoru, supagetti,
Miruku, jusu, aisukohi,
Chizu tosuto, remon ti,
Banana or sutoroberi
Piza, kechiappu, meron soda,
Chipusu, sarada, bitamin uota,
Donatsu, pinatsu batta, jero,
Amerikana on the menyu.

Shi di pureya, di bi di,
Aipodo nano, terebi
(with homu durama, komedi,
Nyusu and dokyumentari)
Rokkusu, jazu, kurasshiku,
All for your homu sutereo.
Koto, sukato, burauso, pantsu,
Nekkutai, seta, and t-shatsu,
Mekkapu, shanpu, erebeta,
Hero Kitti pinku baibreta,
Kashu mashin and kurejitto kado,
Supa sutoa or depato,
Pondo, doru, or the yuro,
Diskaunto wa 10 pasento,
So I'm tsua yu kan shi
It's kawaii for you and me
With 50 pasento ekusutora furi
And sabisu with a sumairu.