2013

Creatures are hurtling themselves at me, kamikaze-like. A brown bunny in the headlights. A moth stealth bomber pirouetting past my head at close range. The cat nibbling on my hands as I stretch out on the bed. Flies inundating the house with their rainbow tinted bodies. Worms drowned in rain puddles on the dirt road. A spider floating in the toilet bowl. A velvety green grub on the wattle I brought in, which stuck to my finger temporarily like resin. A grasshopper, almost golden, in the grass. Maternal bodies all of them. In me a temple to maternity, this dedication to raising my kin, despite my many shortcomings. Cockatoos screech like harpies on the balcony. They scry the sky––foretelling something. The new moon. Making blood where blood had lapsed. I’m premenstrual––all of my sisters have forgotten my name. My dull pain swells––my seven sisterly pains. That I’m a blabbering daddy fool too often. When I yell I make mess and human emotions get tangled. That my brother is sicker than we’d thought with addiction. Hurting himself and everyone more and more. That mother lore is a psyche casting out, I call out for her, but her candles are all lit for my poor sick brother who is bleeding still all over her floorboards. Though my diet exists of sugary pulses and gluten sustainers. I eat the fats that make brain lethargy to get through the day. And the children need me more and more. And I am wilder than the ocean, untameable. And my heart cries out for a folkloric adventure. And the owl hoots at my bedpost. At first it came from far away. Now it is nearer. I’d expected something augmented––a not so ghostly tuning peg. It heralds my vulnerability, my unsheathed pain. It could have come to remind me of the origin of all pain. When we separated from the maternal waters. We were abjected––into the world. So, rejoin to the world in a confluence with all suffering. So rebirth. Weave another strand in the web of reality.

Boundary Speak (Diaries 2013-2021) centrally focuses on reportage of my life’s happenings, notes on readings, phantasms or wild forays, thought fragments, riffs off music, and footnotes from poems that take me on a strange journey. My outsider artwork is focal on my Re-learn your Alphabet for the Twenty-First Century drawings (some of which are collaborations with my children), my robot series, as well as many other drawings undertaken over the period 2013-2021.