In June a friend asked me to write a poem featuring the word 'shawl' as one of five challenges, and I wrote this.

Talion

Let me explain the man
who appeared a month into the witchhunts,
while the fog was gathered on the barrows,
and you were in the hospice, engulfed in spasms.

I remember how he got everybody to reach for their shortwave radios
and the night became filled
with Morse clicks
and patriotic cantos

while the grasslands were swept of objects.

Jaw locked, you managed:
“how beautiful were its teeth before”
then merged again into turbulence.
I used your shawl
to swab the skerry of spittle from your chin
and admired from the window sill
the villagers assembling
a militia
on the paddocks below.

Then: a month of fires.

They prepared him a home
on the tallest mound,
rooms cut from blast rock and cedar,
where he sat with a flute of sherry
well fucked and plump
and commanding the hills and snow plains
all the way to the borderland shanties.

Posters of your delicate face
with the words
We Shall Avenge
fading on the roadsides
shuttereyed and pale.

The purple arc of dusk on the sierra
where they emptied the murdered
into canyons
and strung the raped by their throats, in trees
bald and bloated and eyeless.

O Girl, it’s darkness, and
I have run out of accustomed prayers.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

I've said too many times that it's been too long and that it would be a fresh start. I've promised change, I've painted frescos of radical rebirth. I've been boughed with good intentions, imbued with Sagittarian optimism. And no silence has been as extensive as this one. I almost let a year slip by! A year of my life! Discarded to mere memory! By design I should stand here prone and exposed, begging for absolution, constructing before you all a monumental stratagem of transformation.

But no.
I have almost killed this somnolent blog a couple of times through this year - quickly and painlessly, of course. This town I live in now hasn't exactly been forthcoming in inspiration, and my life (far more... adult? than I ever saw myself becoming) hasn't provided all that many quips and tales that I thought any of you would be all that interested in. I work for a government (I am not allowed to say which one, so guess)- I like my job, and think there is much to be interested in about it - but I don't think I've yet had a conversation about it with anyone outside the industry whose initial interest hasn't wavered within a few minutes. Thats cool, I understand it. I'm usually not interested in others' jobs either. But y'know, the reason I'm here in this town is the job, there aint no other reason. In this way its my life. And what a life. Just not so transferable into a blog. You can imagine.

But here I am, trying anew. No promises, but there is a new layout to distract you from the words. Pretty bears! So we'll see how this pans out. If nothing else, I will ensure there's a S.O.M.L.A on December eight. Maybe I'll start telling you about what I cook. Tonight it was Persian stew - lamb 'n' rhubarb, with rice. Recipe: Put the lamb in a pot with fried onion, pomegranate molasses, saffron and stock and slow cook that motherfucker. Some mint, parsley. Sit back with a Stones Alcoholic Ginger Beer (ch ch ch changes!) and watch some old episodes of the Wire, let the juices seep. Add rhubarb, watch it dissolve. Eat it. Shiiitchyeah. Bone fide Standard Line food blog, holmes.

So anyway, suddenly its summer nights here in the hill country and the cicadas are singing and I find myself adding iceblocks to everything and wearing wifebeaters. Most nights are spent up late, listening to J Tillman, engaging in hair removal, and combing Flickr for talent. Sometimes I bake bread in a machine, in my bathroom so that it doesn't annoy my housemate's boyfriend who sits up very straight as he writes essays at my dining table. Sometimes I fall asleep on a beanbag on my skinny balcony. Sometimes I engage my board game club friends in a German-designed board game with colourful playing pieces. I am the single one in the board game club but that's okay because most of the games are for maximum five players, so a lover'd just make board game club infeasible.

As for writing, lets just say I've been reading Borges, and when I sit down with fingers on keys I get lost immediately in the "feverish Library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity". It's a fucker, that infinity.