These writing exercises are based on an exercise from Pat Pattison’s book Writing Better Lyrics.

I write for ten minutes, preferably first thing in morning. I pick an object or a concept or emotion and allow myself to immerse in the physical and mental sensation of the subject.

I have been running a minute or two over to complete them as I know they are going to be read. I’ve corrected spelling and formatting but otherwise what you’re reading is how it is coming out.

These will feed into lyrics as the month progresses.

12/01/2017

My eyes hurt. My eyes really really hurt. The lids feel thick like fingers are resting across my face and the lashes are gummy with sticky mucous. My dreams were fitful. Phone sex and football.

And the sunny voices of the children next door, with high placed resonance and rising accents are a gentle finger up my spine, reminding me that waking is hard and clouds me with nostalgia for youth’s irregular eruptions.

My anxiety won’t let me enjoy anything. A day of relative calm is followed by night terrors of global warming and my news feeds are streams of caring despair and orange coiffed cunning clowns.

Where is Grock? Where is slow burn and fantastic repetition raised to filigree perfection. Where are my friends? In chemotherapy! And why does my home town fill me with old dreads and I shake in my head as old ghosts rub up against my skin like ice wet with summer running feet puddling red earth muddling with straining greens and fairie gardens.

Where are the fairies? We replaced them with bug eyed aliens and lost our faith in institutions stuffed our heads with conspiracies and fabrications and laid down our arms and surrendered to our worst laziest excesses.

Here lies the hope of summer crushed in the cracked earth of the deep dry winter and the dusty pollution thick heavy rolling roiling clouds suffocate me and I don’t think the sun will ever rise again.

14/01/2017

I remember caring. I remember that feeling of my chest being full as I watched the game, or waited for you to arrive.

I remember that I had a spark, that in the blank face of eternity I cared about tiny moments and sculpted meaning from gestures and syllogisms and cried at trailers for Disney movies and Christmas TV commercials.

I remember being an animal. Throwing you down, you ceding your space and surrendering all sense and enveloping me in a sweaty crush of golden slick skin and tongue and cunt and legs wrapped like a bear crushed my cock between us like a spasming peripheral.

I remember waking up from anxiety dreams and you murmuring and the weight of your comforting arm. In the great maw of indifference, the cliff face of existence, the stubborn insistence that this tiny glow makes a difference

I remember that once I cared.

15/01/2017

The dust piles up against the shabby blanket where someone has been sleeping rough.

He scrabbled for shade and cool cement just off the main street under the awning of the football club verandah.

You can see where he coughed up on the wall and the furrowed trail of his belongings is a snail shell humped through a skinning wind oven forced gale that burned and dried sinuses and eyes.

It looks like the ants rose first and he fled with flesh prickling as a thousand tiny legs drummed ten thousand spiky discomforts on legs, buttocks and back Look! there is a button up shirt and here is his underclothes abandoned where he danced barefoot in the carpark in the grey early hours.

He missed this perfect feather. White spined, black with a grey middle and white striped. Currawong? but perfect like a spaceship designed for multiplex blockbusting, I’ve never seen one so smooth and it glows in the afternoon heat like liquid as I turn it over and over.

The wind kicks up another notch and the old ladies collecting donations on the street surrender their disembowelled umbrella to the willy willys and head into the clubhouse for gin and ceiling fans.

The feather thrashes and screams Resist! in my hand and I pocket it carefully to share later.

16/01/2017

There are some mornings when the abyss is great.

There are some morning and there is no abyss. Abyss-less.

There are some mornings where you have to press yourself against the sheer wall and lean, lean, suck in your chest and belly and keep your centre of gravity towards your spine.

Some days when you’re glad you prepared for this, some days when you know that no matter what you did you couldn’t have prepared.

And on those days you have to trust.

On those days you have to know that your feet have fallen on this trail a hundred times, no a thousand times and that this dance is yours.

You know every intimate dust shuffle, every turn and every stone, every crevice and every hidden hand hold.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t find new paths.

That doesn’t mean that today you will be at your most efficient, your most elegant, your most authentic or your most true.

But it means that you know the dance.

Trust yourself.

Trust your feet.

Trust your legs your hands and your soul and step.

One foot after the other.

Drop your weight at the knees and let your body flow.

Clear your mind and let the answers rest unbidden like birds on the street, crowding the wires with catcalls and shrieks.

Let your mind cherry pick the data and dance with yourself.

Dance.

Dance.

If you are game you can fly.

Put your feet together and fall forward.

Again, trust yourself.

You’ve flown a few times, you know the ecstasy, you know about the roar of connections in your creative mind you know the thrill of being in touch with the vibrations of life with the breath of the creation.

It’s only on special days that you have flown before but the beauty of the dance is that today might be one of those days, and even more so if you fall with arms out and feet together, with eyes closed and open your nose to the possibilities, to flow, to dance, to fumble, to joy, to horror, to heartbreak, to flight.

Sitting on this chair

Is a poor substitute

For wandering country lanes

Holding your hand

Stopping in at country pubs

For grudging nods

From disinterested bar
Keeps and sideways glances

From old men huddled

Over pints as if they were

Fires keeping them warm

Sitting on this chair is

A poor substitute for

Lying breathless under

Damp sheets floor laden

Til groaning with three

Layers of adult clothing

Hurled aside with teen like

Joy let the search for bras

Begin!

Sitting on this chair

In this boiling city

Is a poor substitute

But I get to sit on a

Chair in the grey small

Hours and know an

Intimacy that I never

Imagined to feel again

Sitting on this chair is a

Poor substitute but a

Joyful one and I love

Just thinking of you

17/01/2017

No one call tell that I’m an alien.

That underneath this pink warm goo I am cool and blue and smooth to touch.

No one can tell how confused I am by human interactions and relationships.

If I had a heart it would seize at the daily horrors I witness in my own locality. The callous indifference to the poor, the pointless casual racism and sexism.

My gods if they knew what I really was, would they hesitate in beating me to a bloodied, dinted pulp or would they raise me like a deity and worship my seeming cold indifference – which is actually a numbed muted horror.

I have been observing quietly for 4, maybe 5 decades now, 40 something tiny solar revolutions and still I witness the same stupidities as I did on the day that my consciousness first arrived. Man kicks dog. Dog bites man. And the circle of stupidities continues unabashed and unabated.

For a period there it looked as there might be progress. The bubbling stupidity and discontent had subsided, there was public shame to acquired from lazy thoughts and febrile attempts at decency. But a few years of hardship (and what hardship! No wars, no famine, no disease) ok I must reconsider the accuracy of that sentence. After a few years of perceived hardship all the unabashed ignorance has boiled to the top of pot again.

In contact with my siblings over the last decades I had felt my corner of this world immune and I saw active resistance but when offered a lazy alternative they were devastatingly quick to grab at it, like unseemly grubby, sticky, whinging children.

My god I am so embarrassed and ashamed for them all.

18/01/2017

The notes are like spiky clouds
I can hear every finger fall
Your labyrinthine number methods
Produce a harmonic complexity
Unrivalled in the bardic mysteries
Where boys who never own
Manhood wail and stomp you
Glide with a majestic unruffled
Calm throwing up wakes of tone
Poetry and sex and adult shimmy and
Shake and poke and probe and
Peel away peel away peel away
Bound for heart bound laser
Precision convex focus that
Burns burns burns strong
Woman frayed and frazzled
Alone delirious such danger
In the borderlines where you
Dance from piping squeak to
Baritone lush croon your
Voice is a guide to one
Woman’s journey one
Woman’s dreamland this
Woman’s work? that woman’s
Tome at the base of the
Mountain that is Joni
We all sit with addled
Awe anyone with sensitivity
Touched dumb and senseless
Familiar furrows offer
The only opportunity to
Come to grips to deal
With the ranges and the
Dizzying peaks

19/01/2017

What is the right age to teach our children about violence?
It’s a broken heart that asks this question.
It’s a stomach full of dread for my daughter.
It’s an enquiry asked of a world that visits indiscriminate violence daily, hourly, momentarily and casually.
It’s asked for a world full of car accidents, cancer and refugees.
A world that nurtures with one hand and casts aside with the other (with a third, fourth and fifth circling ready to smack you in the face).
When do I teach my daughter about violence? And how?
Do I explain that when she sees someone hit in the face on television that that really really hurts and she must never ever do it to anyone except when that boy at school hits her and the teachers keep ignoring her that what she’s going to have to do is hit him. Hit him again and again and again until he learns that there are no victims only kids who will hit him at school as hard as he gets hit at home?
Do I show her pictures of tiny doll bodies washed up on western beaches and concrete dust covered porcelain faces frozen in shock motionless in the back of ambulances, swollen with ghosts?
Do I hit her? So she knows a thousandth of the trauma that we (my people, you and me) inflict on children every day in the name of empire and dominion?
Do I teach her to hit and let her practice on me to flog away my complicity and despair?
Do I hold her, just hold her, hold her and hope that somehow violence swerves away from her on the road, overlooks her in the bar, grudgingly acknowledges her friendship in the playground and lets her be?
If she never experiences violence will she be half a human, condemned as much as those who never know love?
If I could throw an invisible umbrella around her with sides that dropped and all that she saw was joy and love and light and gossamer diamond but no.
What is the right age to teach our children about violence?

19a/01/2017

It’s so hard to do this knowing that there might be people watching. Every keystroke is accompanied by knowing laughs and amused leg to foot shifting as a fence full of giggling black birds watch with open faces snigger every time I fail. Every time I fail to dive in properly, every time I type not immersed, not wholly present but instead just imagining what it’s going to look like when it’s done and it’s crippling. I can feel them know, their eyes press like tiny fingers into my back and my spine and with every poke I’m getting more and more tired of my turn pf phrase, of my choice of words, of the rhythm of my writing, always rolling always the same my own me has become a cliche over the course of just a week and it’s not because there isn’t a long way to go or because I have reached some final artistic destination it’s just that I’m creating for an audience, even if it’s an audience of cackling blackbirds even if it’s an audience of no one at all, doesn’t matter they’re in my head and I have to make them go away if i’m going to do what’s right here. Ugh. Fuuuuuuck this. Ugh

I think this is going to be a question of willpower and strength and input and muscle and I can do it.

We’ll see tomorrow

20/01/2017

That feeling, in the Queensland summer, of lowering my foot into a cold bath. The water rising like a second skin, like a jelly aura around my foot and my ankle – finally resting around my shin. Gentle eddies and currents swaying as I shimmy and sloosh, small circles, large circles, back and forth, making boat like waves that crash into the walls, crash into the river bank walls sending water insects flying and causing sunning lizards to scornfully dance then come back to rest on the grey dry rock just out of the reach of the discoloured and wet black. A young girl waits on the shore “Papa!” she cries and her eyes dance like the water and her smile is a second sun. Dazzling and warming like whiskey and soup and blankets and soul music. My shirt is dark blue with sweat but still she leaps into my arms before recoiling in pretend anxiety “ew Dad you’re SOAKING”. Released, she goes to harass the lizards now warily inching towards the cracks in the rocks and I sit on a bench under the gracefully sagging willows and sort through the notifications on my phone – urgent, non-urgent, incredibly urgent, stunningly mind-trembling bowel shatteringly urgent and the ones that I am going to answer today. Because today is our day, mine and the girl with the blinding smile’s and we will spend it wandering in the summer haze, pointing out the birds as they float on the city’s thermals, discussing the issues of the day (who is now friends with who and the cruelty of little brothers) and gifting her those memories and the respite of childhood that might carry her through the horrors to come.

21/01/2017

It was hard to see him from the back of the crowd. A tiny carrot coloured voice that electrified with promises of simple times like my parents talked about. They were scared. They were scared people. They didn’t understand. They didn’t want to understand. In the town where I came from people didn’t like to take the extra minutes and I don’t understand why not, it’s not like they didn’t have a lifetime to understand in but they didn’t want to. They thought ahead a day at a time, maybe a season at a time, which gave their lives a monastic simplicity. What’s for dinner? What’s on TV tonight? Did you see that funny video on the computer? Can you believe what they are saying about toilets? About toilets? we’re all going to have to use the same toilets from now on. What? Who said that? It was on the news. Well this is a democracy, they can’t force us to do that. Don’t you worry. Well I hope not. I’ve been in the mens. It was disgusting. You boys. Hahahahaha. When was that. That was at that festival in… in about ‘93. Ohhhhh. Yeah that was wild wasn’t it? Wild times hey. Hahahahaha. Well. What was on TV tonight again? And so it goes. And the man with the braggart voice. He electrified them. And we took the bus. They let Dad have the day off work to represent us they said and we took the bus and we came here. And it’s hard to see him from the back of the crowd. There’s a small child on the man next to me. On his shoulders. And the child has her face painted with a flag. And her feet keep clipping my head but I’m afraid to say anything. The man looks fierce. What’s a few shoes in the head? There’s a lady crying behind me and her husband is holding her tightly around the shoulders and doesn’t even grimace as the odd blast of winter wind hits us and in front of us a different lady is praying to herself. She’s doing it quietly but we can hear the odd word. She sounds frightened.

22/01/2017

Notes from a Taoist temple

The ancestral hall is very quiet
More numbers than faces
Peer down from the walls as
We step carefully from room
To room unsure of the
Proper way to show respect to
The dead of a different world
And challenged by a
Veneration that is alien
And strange

Incense sticks burn and
Make the air thick and
Sweet and whole families
Line up like ghosts their
Tiles have a strange unfocussed
Quality and a patina that
Seems unrelated to their
Year of death see here
1923-1976 and 1989-1990
Have the same hue

Some tiles hover over 
Rich offerings like still
Life oil paintings except
Instead of fruit there is
Snickers and Picnic bars
And Tim Tams and gum.
Some tiles seem lonely,
Perfunctorily maintained
One joss stick and a no
Brand pack of jubes

Our steps still slow squeak
On the clean vinyl floor and
Needing to breathe I step out
Side leaving you in silence.
My eyes are met by a harried
Middle aged woman, sweets
In one hand dragging with the
Other an uninterested girl,
Smart phone focused

She regards me with fair
Suspicion, jerks hard on
The arm of the quietly
Protesting girl and
Disappears inside to
Impress upon a young mind
Respect and fealty
Tradition and propriety
Family and mortality

23/01/2017

And so we marched
Engorged with empire
Swollen like wet tampons
Or bloated carcasses
Drowned in slippery
Edged dams

The world was a
White noise shriek
Of voices and opinion
That we couldn’t
Discern let
Alone understand

The ground underneath
Us buckled and shook
And nothing killed the
Despair, no TV, no drink
No drugs, no sex
Nothing could

So we puffed ourselves
Up like peacock
Size rats and
Strutted and waddled
And cried out God!
And cried

Out White Rights! and
Men’s Rights! and
My Rights! and we
thrashed and we wailed
But not enough too
Late the

Empire was gone
The world had
Changed and the
White noise scream
Of choice and
Opportunity and

Challenge
Was
The
New
Reality
And

We bloated and swelled
And mourned the
Empire of privilege
And influence and
Dug in ready for
The fight

24/01/2017

So it turns out that you were a decent man.
Perhaps a bit rash, perhaps you saw the world as a two tone party, evil and good with no greys and only distinctions that were clear as a star on a Texan winter night.
There were bad men around you for sure.
Men who exploited and profiteered, who were happy to manipulate you to their benefit (and they did, forgive us all, they did).
Your country lost so much wealth and so much honour while the evil men around you accrued so much money and so much power over life and death and used your armies to persecute a dirty dirty lie.
A lie of exceptionalism.
A lie of moral superiority.
A lie of unambiguity.
Lies.
Lies.
Lies.
But amidst all of this you were the moral centre.
A good man.
A man who believed in his personal responsibility.
A man who didn’t take privilege for granted, a man who had persecuted his own demons in the pursuit of service and a man who truly believed, no matter how self deceived that he was doing the right thing.
Taking the higher road.
Helping to enact the will of a benevolent, loving God.
Helping to make the world great again.
So it turns out that you were a decent man.

25/01/2017

So it turns out that I need whales
I need large silent sliding tectonic
Shifts. It not something that I realised
Until today because I simply couldn’t
Perceive that they even existed
And that for the tiny filigree of
Rhythm and articulation to
Dance there needs to be sub-
terranean rolling, graceful and
Steady. If I can hold the whales in
My head I’m sure that I can
Really fly

Espy dance te well ya
need tae loon tae fargo
round titty tell to
bev tae scream tae
peridockers perdickers
periwinkled black and
black and blue and
gregious harmers well
amongst us fleeing
fliers doot aur rahge
and perple pooar hast
abandoned sunny vis
ages terrble n strange
keppie swum in dark
till nightmahres of ben
kers terror and benker
broth n when ta coot
were dun with sellin
g te filthy fucker jus
t ran off. Off to fealt
y off te swell to puck
ered lip te gorgy sw
ell n when she gets
back tis just as well
she won’t know that
you failed her

26/01/2017

So what’s it like? To walk and leave deep, indelible footprints in sand. Where the sand shifts and scorching winds blow but it takes 200 years for the edges of the footprint to start blurring and smudging? What’s it like to be that pinion eyed moral crusader running around frantic, making little  fences decorated with tiny flags that designate which footprint attracts shame and which footprint is to be celebrated joyfully and which footprint was never there at all. Do you ever feel foolish? Scurrying about making pointless noise that does nothing but divide when there is a desperate aching yaw which you can watch cleaving – you don’t even need to squint to see the tears. Stupid busy men and yarp ladies. And yarp men and scurry ladies. God I hate you all. Do you ever stop to feel. Feel heavy dead skin shoes, crushers and beaters and blood making kickers. No civilisation ever progressed without violent conquest I have read. But why do we have to be proud? The west’s conquest is at least bloodless now. Maintain the front lines with CGI robots and spandex ambiguity. Still violent. Still an empire. But bloodless at least. Maybe we could have a Hollywood day and maybe eventually an English day – when all the other tongues are silenced and it feels safe to go overseas again and you can scurry, scurry, scurry around your tiny fucking footprints.

27/01/2017

You would be having a lot of loud fun here. Packed in the shade of the pub while a hardy, drunken few brave the afternoon sun or the street. All of us pissed, sweaty, stinking, singing to songs we know and shouting during those we don’t. The table is a brawl of empty plates and glasses of every shape. He’s drinking light beer and he’s drinking gin. She’s drinking champagne and she’s drinking rum. We can hear a meat eating competition somewhere and there is AC/DC and a glass smashes and someone yells “Taxi!” and I see your morning walk to work on my phone. January in England is so alien. Your blue sky seems crystal shrill and sharded where ours makes the windows cry with condensation – your air rushes you along with a piercing pinch and ours holds you like a gummy glove and the trip to the beer garden toilet is like a swim and you arrive back to the table drenched. “Haha!” cries my Colombian friend “See the Aussie sweat!”. Your breath is taken with a kick to the lungs and ours is like a sweet soporific draft that medicates against the racket and the press of rancorous bodies. An Australian January is a glorious thing indeed.