Some women are standing on the corner.

June 20, 2008 at 7:54 pm | Posted in writing | 24 Comments
Tags: australian sentences, love, prose, writing

‘Tis a difficult subject on which to be discursive without betraying a certain, hmm, well let me just say that my monogamy has been serial and more a product of laziness than any moral compunction. Despite the quite necessary complexity of my speech (I am quite enamoured of delicacy, possessed of a tremendous respect for the exquisite precision of which the language is capable) I am a simple creature, a male human being and as such require little more than a full stomach and a soft place to devolve in order to be happy.

It rained this afternoon, a sudden storm gone almost before it arrived and now the sun is setting behind grandiloquent purple grey clouds. It is as if I am contained within a generosity of soft light. It is possible to love someone you can not touch when the world is so aligned. Are the gulls heralding morning there, my love? The sea, no doubt, seeks calm.

Language and light, both ways of being touched. I have never slept with a woman with whom I have not fallen in love. That is a simple sentence, like fingertips on a forearm, deliberate and smiling. Slept with, you see. Sex is quite random, dependant on availability but when waking up next to in the 2 am and feeling blessed by some eternal as if an angel has landed to take away all fears,

Long ago I was resigned and resolved to being a constructor of difficult sentences which could not slip by unfelt. I am aware that to be loved by me is an unneeded challenge.
When I was young I could not understand what a woman would want with this, the tugging why of it, but soon learned puppy dog eyes. Now I am older, raggedy and limping. The streetlights struggle in vain to overcome the night. There is the club in which I began my career, entertaining the strippers and the band. What a life. Miles Davis taught that there is a melancholy to love, a permanent yearning. Three legged dog was never as obvious as it appeared.

There is a gaggle of girls available on the corner, secretaries and receptionists. They are so young and the obviousness of my attempts to hide my easy money and my familiarity with the requisite understanding is really just a subtle exercise in revealing them. An aboriginal man is busking the didge. They know me, recognise my admiration for any culture in which the title ‘Aunty’ is the highest attainable.

I am walking home to write about women. It will not be my best work, my darling, but I hope you see in it that my love of the exquisite precision of which the language is capable is actually a longing, an aspiration. And that the light which has fled over the horizon while I was writing these Australian sentences is the same light which is now gracing your soft skin.

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