…the first poem that I ever wrote was yr eulogy. this poem I’m writing now is an elegy. the difference between the two is feeling. to the deranged soundtrack of five Bee Gees songs on repeat, I tried writing yr life as it drifted further and further away, the world’s last polar bear forlornly waving from a melting ice floe. the thing is, an iconic light can’t be written. and at this point, I could toss all of language into the steaming Birrarung. I don’t care abt elegy as a way to pickle the dead. immortality is for plastic or pantyhose. in The Undying, Anne Boyer’s daughter says to her: you forget that I still have the curse of living in the world that made you sick. no one calls the ocean broken. it’s a constant reminder that many pieces can move together as one, like a swarm of wasps in a trench coat furtively pretending to be a human. at yr funeral, I was a leak disguised as myself. I texted my friends I feel like a walking wound. my hair was greasy. my demeanour was sentimental. my energy was goblin. a pain so intense it was like I snorted it. every word in my eulogy reduced to sediment. yeah, the failure of language blah blah blah but how often do we feel it. I felt it. a family friend who is an ice cream entrepreneur described you in three words: ice cream ice cream ice cream. I think abt yr lactose intolerance. someone kept telling me how great an employee you were. it’s a short commute from the office to yr funeral. someone else told me they’re surprised that my eulogy isn’t entirely terrible. I can’t help but think that I should be allowed to write bad poetry abt you. another family friend mistook me for someone else. every interaction at this funeral is an anthropological case study I’m filing away for future reference. I remember thinking what do I do with my hands? our hands make us different to almost every other living thing on the planet. for example, yr baby bird hands. I didn’t know half the people at yr funeral. every reassuring touch felt like a plume of vape in my face. cc: this Youtube video where doves released at a funeral are crushed instantly by a passing truck. a fly dying in a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream. I’m trying to remember you before it’s too late. the world is always running towards me and memory is always running away. scientists have found that pain can both sharpen or blur memory. well, I think that pain should make up its fkn mind. I watch the film 2046, where 2046 is a place in the future where people go to recover lost memories. the camera feels exhausted. everyone is always leaning against things or into each other or off rooftops against a neon backdrop. life is so tiring, but I guess you wouldn’t know anymore. I’m reading abt a woman who inhabited a part of the world known for its barren nature. she needed to live inside the emptiness for a while. people write abt grief as absence but it’s the fullest thing in the world. it used to be thought that memories break down over time like a packed lunch forgotten in the sun. experiments with sea slugs, mice and fruit flies show that forgetting is a biological process. not decay, but deletion. a light is crushed in my head……………………………………

eternal phone lock screen image dad with head on hand on leg on chair blue jeans and half smile his precious fragile redundant body… did you know pearls are the only precious gem made by a living creature? I’m recently obsessed w/ this TikTok channel pearl6680 montages of pearl extraction set to Lil Nas X’s Call Me by Your Name an oyster spits a pearl out into the palm of pearl6680’s hand reminds me of viral pimple popping videos the way that pain can become a thing so totally foreign like thinking you see the one that got away in the distance and upon closer inspection realising that instead they are just a sculpture made from mincemeat with wet raisins for eyes… unlock phone to see dad with head on hand on leg on chair something wild about how we proliferate the technology’s blasé void with the endless dandruff of our memories something tender about how young he looks in this photo where I wasn’t born yet the way the future is pouring out of his face… I’m reading about how pearls are a defence mechanism layers upon layers of a crystalline secretion called nacre build up encasing any threat to the mollusc like how Julietta Singh wrote extreme physical pain swallows its object this isn’t some trite analogy about how pain can become beauty or a sad Disney metaphor for its lifechanging qualities or the tired rag narrative of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger it’s about how it is consumed… it’s about how it is digested… it’s about how it is accumulated… dad with head on hand on leg on chair his life a pearl I hold between my teeth I keep feeling and feeling with my tongue for that elusive fuzz…

could not believe how much ice cream there was at yr funeral the fever dream of yr death or the congealed skin of everything afterwards the simultaneous facts of yr quote unquote body & the mass consumption of ice cream could not believe how quickly you went from person to object an object to record to preserve to display Clarice Lispector asked if all objects are halted time I guess we are all bodies in the moment and objects in the making and for future reference, please refer to me in all correspondence as the body. dear, the body. the body, hope this finds you well. i look forward to hearing from u, the body. sincerely in these strange times, the body. my belief was something to suspend from a meat hook the ice-cream was something to do with our mouths yr life was something to flatten into a PowerPoint presentation concise for the purpose of ceremony in yr eulogy I wrote about the heart as a way to describe any part of the body that feels yeah yr absence is a wound to pick and pick along its edges sometimes army ants get stuck in a continuously rotating circle until they die of exhaustion commonly known as a death spiral I am urged to visualise the strange turn a dog makes when it’s about to sleep something cyclical about the way grief turns a person into a butterfly beating against the ribcage of the world I watch a YouTube video where the leader of Turkmenistan is doing donuts around a flaming gas crater called the Gateway to Hell to prove he is not dead god people can be such freaks about life never let me forget the spectacle of the living the spectacle of the dead

‘I have always wondered about the left-over energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill long after the rains have stopped’ Adrienne Rich – ‘For the Dead’ signs from the dead were clotting up the world’s arteries. all sorts of weird theatrical shit was happening all the time, clouds twisting into semiotic shapes & dog excrement arranged in profound & mysterious patterns. I was finding double yolks in every cracked egg & receiving mysterious hoax emails about God, heaven & cryptocurrency & AI telemarketing calls asking me… have you recently been in a car crash? my psoriasis was flaring up in sexy & esoteric epidermal crop circles. what were the dead trying to tell me? there was a very real possibility that I was coating things with a cinematic glaze. like ancient viruses sleeping in the Antarctic’s thick ice, I was not ready to feel after feeling so much. have you ever seen a salmon cannon? they are devices that catapult salmon across dams. a commenter on Reddit wonders if salmon think that they are portals to another world. 2017 was the year of realising things. 2017 was the year I was propelled into another world. I was writing poems about grief. I was trying to milk my pain dry. I believed that writing was a way of closing in, getting intimate with the details. I failed to remember that moving closer to something can mean moving further away from something else. I wrote about grief so much that I sucked the marrow out of its meaning. semantic satiation tasted like a used bandage, so familiar that it started to disgust me. I fracked my feeling core until the meaty centre of my heart closed over. things became so absurd with sadness, all logic leaked away. like this video I watched of a mum absolutely losing it as a baby lisps its very first word… anthwopocene. or like this time Ann from work gave me a handmade card after my dad died. she had painstakingly cut out & pasted an image of a vaguely azn girl to the front. I was confused by the racial inaccuracy & touched by the meticulous penmanship & completely unprepared for the revelation that Ann was a devout Mormon & this was a devout Mormon card & that she had written her devout Mormon email inside so I could begin my devout Mormon journey!!! all I can say is that some people see pain as a franchising opportunity. I’m thinking about that one Joan Didion quote that people always send you, a single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty, when someone you love has died & when you would rather be left the fuck alone. the way the word missing hisses out into the air from behind clenched teeth & how the missing will stretch on & on into the rest of my life like a blaring Hummer limo with lights ablaze. I used to think of grief as something to be purged. but now I feel differently. I feel it multiplying in my cells metabolising in my small intestine flaking off my scalp pooling in the corners of my eyes. a new haggard body part to add to my ongoing collection of haggard body parts. last night, I watched a film where the sad protagonist asks his staunch driver to take him somewhere she likes. they end up at a garbage plant watching clumps of trash fall from the sky with a strange grace. turning to him, she says… doesn’t it look like snow?

when it comes to you, this poem is just compost. all my words claw around you like naughty dogs. what I want to write is that you really noticed things. I still remember the soft sound of yr heel turning as you walked towards a bush to inspect a bird’s nest every morning. I write abt yr hands as baby birds because of the way they parted the branches. yr voice when you said look. you showed me that apathy was the worst type of armour. that in every moment there is a baby bird. my psych says on the phone, I sense a deep sadness inside of you. remembering you keeps the wound open. don’t forget that wounds are prone to infection. you grew up surrounded by rainforest. the last time I was at the movies before lockdown, I watched an Apichatpong Weerasethakul retrospective. so much rainforest on screen. I love his films because I think they show how haunted nature can be. in the sense that rainforests feel like the overlap of the living and the dead. have you ever looked into a rainforest directly? Apichatpong Weerasethakul once said in an interview: when we close our eyes, of course, we see darkness. but if we stare at this darkness long enough, we will see something… a mind from one world adjusting to another world. every time we go back, the rainforest gets smaller and smaller, beaten back by a glut of palm oil plantations. we used to mourn in nature but now we mourn it. sometimes when a crow dies, other crows will gather around and tear its feathers off. which is goth as fuck. grief is its own aspect ratio, narrowing and widening to its own beleaguered logic. Darian Leader writes abt using a frame to relocate one’s experience of loss. I google the world’s biggest frame. it’s in Dubai and 150 metres tall so, it’s still too small. my friend Anita asks me if I’ve heard of the start-up term valley of death. the language of money is always a breath away from the language of death. some things don’t die. jellyfish. hydra. amaranths. lobsters… not really. they literally grow too big for their shells. their whole lives are a process of shedding shells and struggling into new ones. lobsters eat their old shells. locked in cycles of consumption and growth until they die of exhaustion. Anne Boyer wrote mortality is a gorgeous framework. like all frameworks, it’s subject to collapse. a man in New York fell into a sinkhole filled with rats for half an hour. in an interview afterwards, he says that he couldn’t scream because he was afraid that the rats would enter his mouth. it must have felt like years. it’s been four years since you died. it’s rude how time is a construct. the impulse to preserve may be equally as rude. a mortician attributes the popularity of embalming in America to something called a grief bond. it’s hard to swallow change in a swamp of tragedy. sometimes we make phone calls to assert our mutual aliveness. John Durham Peters refers to communication as a disclosure of being. in 1925, an article in The Washington Post considered the possibility of a radio broadcasting the dead’s voices and whether the dead vibrate at a lower rate. I’m writing this poem to say something to you……………………………...