120 Beats Per Minute [2017] by Robin Campillo

BPM offers a documentary-like glimpse into a very specific historic moment: the AIDS epidemic in the '90s and one group's attempts to take action to stop their friends from dying, ACT-UP Paris.

The most vividly recreated scenes are the heated group discussions in their regular meetings, the political details of activism and the urgency with which they are acting as people die. 

I found it less effective on a personal level; none of the characters seemed interesting or fleshed-out enough to engage me emotionally.  So when the film becomes intensely personal it feels like it's still just reinforcing the political urgency of the moment.

However, at a time when cinema is largely depicting sex, and specifically anal sex, as brutal and disconnected, or just being coy about sex, BPM offers a delightfully intimate and frank depiction of anal sex, that act so central to the spread of AIDS; with care, with tenderness, with communication and with condoms. 

Melbourne Cinémathèque: Paul Verhoeven's Starships Troopers [1997] and Robocop [1987]

I saw my first film on DCP in 2009, so it has only been ubiquitous a few years, but already 35mm feels evocative of an earlier analogue age. The imperfections on the print seem to smell like popcorn, though there was none in the cinema at ACMI for the Melbourne Cinémathèque screenings of Paul Verhoeven's films Starship Troopers and Robocop.

The films have similar intentions, depicting a militarised and propagandised society, with Starship Troopers being considerably more extreme and less subtle than its predecessor. 

Starship Troopers is set in a globally unified 2197 in which everyone has American accents and knows who the bad guys are: the bugs. Nationalistic propaganda is depicted with overstated irony and we seem to be in permanent war with the sub-human and sub-intelligent beasts, whose territory we may have arrogantly encroached upon. 

But no matter, because the battle against evil unifies us as a society and citizenship (as well as voting rights) is the exclusive privilege of those who have served in the military. Even as millions are slaughtered in futile battles, more are recruited in hope of serving the society that entirely encompasses and protects them. 

Despite all the political satire, the film is not to be taken too seriously. It wields Hollywood cliche, bad acting, elaborate special effects and video game-like violence to the purpose of pure movie fun and thrills, tensing up at the threat to our heroes as we laugh at how ridiculous it all is.  The film wants it both ways: to satirise American military chic and "freedom", as the ability to choose to die for your country (or planet), and to totally relish in the thrill of the Hollywood science fiction action war film, with its big budget, special effects, exciting music and editing and pretty actors, and it mostly succeeds.

Starship Troopers is a bit thin on the irony though, and Robocop is a more successful and satisfying film in every way.

Robocop is set in the nearer future, in which the Detroit Police department has been contracted to a private company with some pretty nefarious intentions.  Now that the Police have been privatised, the next step is to mechanise the cops themselves and so crime can be fought by programmed and emotionless machines without human error, but perhaps with the type of error that only machines, psychopathic corporations and fascism can offer.

Robocop can be interestingly compared to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) with very interesting implications.  I have already written about how Nolan's film supports the fascist notion that the masses are dumb and helpless and must be saved from evil by psychopaths in uniforms and masks.  Nolan's Interstellar (2014) also presents the idea that the masses must be lied to in order to save them from what they're not capable of understanding.  And Nolan's films are presented without irony or humour.  We must trust in our great institutions and we must not question them because we are ignorant to the complex manner in which they will save us.  This seems to be the ideology of the 21st century Hollywood machine.  The '80s and '90s were different.  Rewatching the four Batman films released between 1989 and 1997 there is an astonishing lack of any ideological underpinnings in all except one of them, Batman Returns (1992).  This film chooses Catwoman and Penguin as the villians, but in both cases the real villian is not even the dim, charming and manipulable mayor, but Max Shreck (a vampire?), the corrupt corporate executive who is responsible for traumatising both Catwoman and Penguin into the dangerous freaks they become.  The film is ultimately feminist and anti-corporate and causes us to question the powerful institutions that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart.  Quite contrary to Nolan's suggestion that we have blind faith in them to save us from evil because we are inherently ignorant.

Verhoeven, in Robocop, plays with both of these elements, fascistic violence overcoming crime, and the vapid money-obsessed corruption of our corporate class, with considerable wit and fun.  The technocratic violence is effective against crime, but only when it is combined with a human element, as in the half-human/half-robot, but it is ultimately doomed to failure because of the compromises of the perverted intentions of the executives running the institution.  And although the masses are not necessarily depicted as stupid in Verhoeven's film, they are saturated with an incessant and compellingly stupid media pumping them full of inanity as coke-driven criminals and coke-driven executives unleash violent crime on their vulnerable city.

It all sounds rather serious and intense the way I am describing it, but it is actually constantly fun and funny, thrilling and stupid, offering you the dumb thrills you learned to love as a child and the clever irony you need as a thinking adult.

Both of Verhoeven's films draw you into the dumb violence of Hollywood and its fascist ideology of redemptive violence led by all-powerful institutions, but they also ridicule its grotesque consequences and the ludicrous propaganda supposed to convince us of its efficacy.

But if you're in the right mood, they're just fun too.

Another day

Because the Queen chose to be born today 1000 years ago my local library was closed and I have had to cycle all the way into the city to be able to use a computer.  That could be potentially annoying.  As I cycle down Royal Parade through all the European trees dropping their yellow leaves on the street the reality of my environment strikes me.  I wait at the traffic lights and see a crazy filthy bird hopping all over the street.  I feel a sudden spell of appreciation for this bird's existence.  Amidst all this construction, abstraction, planning and post-human life there is a economically useless wild bird hopping about the city.  As unremarkable as the beautiful yellow leaves falling.

The world still exists.  The world has not ended.  There is still wilderness tentatively surviving the colonisation of concrete.  I have so much gratitude for the birds, trees, and wild animals inhabiting our city.  What a desolate world it would be if we really could eradicate the bats and rats.  How can I be angry at this extra ride into the city for some stupid public holiday when I am gifted the opportunity to appreciate my world.  I decided right then to acknowledge that bird - a pest? an invasive species? - as soon as I got to the library.

As I rode further some unseen bird shat on me from above.  It's black, white and translucent shit hit my hand and splashed onto my clothes.  I was not angry.  I figured I'd just go straight to the toilets and wash it off when I got to the library.  Where is my uncontrollable rage today?  The intensity of my fluctuating emotional state has lately caused the slightest disappointment, frustration or loneliness to send me into rage or despair.  But today I feel calm and focussed.  Are my emotions so arbitrary?  Are they moving through me with greater ease?

I feel peace, though my life is no more meaningful than it was yesterday.  My life is no more productive, successful or connected.  I have nothing to do and no one to meet today, nor tomorrow.  But my body is a smooth, unobstructed stream of energy, moving calmly towards the ocean.

I am prepared for further surges of the intense hopelessness that have been moving through me lately.  But today I rest in simple peace.  Today I love all the beings I share this earth with, human and non-human, plant and animal.  I will rage against the meaningless abstractions imposed upon this world another day.

Community

We gallop back and forth, all around the world, not knowing where we belong.  We follow the Rainbow, we follow the sun, we follow each other, ever-hopeful for the real life we feel in our hearts is possible; speaking about it, singing about it, visualising it, declaring it.  The world where we feel connected to those around us, alive, fulfilled.

We have a sacred role to play that is not separate from earning our living.  We make a contribution and in return, the appreciation of our community provides us food, shelter and love.  I simply need a home in which I can be naked and safe, alone and connected, with my lover and my housemates, a cosy nest in which I can wrap up warm and make love with the beautiful man who loves me.

I want to feel loved and appreciated, to make a contribution, joyously, spontaneously, from the best of myself, exactly what my people need, whether that’s performance poetry or a clean kitchen.  I am even happy to do mundane repetitive work for a busy capitalist in return for currency, but apparently the constellation of my being, as I have formed myself in this life, through which I can connect easily with diverse people, does not appeal to a utilitarian employer.

I offer the best of myself to the world.  Nothing is more fulling to me than to connect, to inspire, to serve.  To make the best contribution to the world I am capable of making, utilising my joy, my pain, my heartbreak, my sexuality, my creativity, my spontaneity, my unconventionality, my talent, my confidence, my arrogance, my empathy and my intelligence.  I will look to the world, see the job that needs doing, and do it.  I will ask the world what it needs and I will do my best to do what is asked of me. 

I love you and I give you full permission to offer me, in return, the love, the touch, the money or the home I need; whatever you feel capable of contributing I receive with the utmost gratitude.  I have needs too and I do not expect you to fulfil them, but I accept and appreciate your gifts when they come to me.

This is a spell I am passing out into the world.  I have needs right now that are not being fulfilled.  I need either money to pay rent or a home I don’t need to pay for.  I can contribute cleaning, cooking or gardening. 

I need loving touch that does not need to be sexual to satisfy the need in my soul for huwoman touch.  I need people to call me, message me, and visit me spontaneously.  In return I offer you nutritious meals, poetry, conversation and love. 

I am your Quinoa and you are my world.  Let us be a community.  Let us offer each other what we need.  I am always happy to talk to anyone about anything at any time, in real life, via message or voice call.  Assuming it is humble and not abusive, honest and gentle, I can listen, I can discuss and I can empathise.  I am not afraid of your emotions, I’m not afraid of your truth, your fears, your passions, your ideas, your shame, your joy, your sexuality or your trauma.  I only request you offer the same sensitivity and respect in return.  I can do my best to love you in whatever way you need if you would only ask. 

Please don’t be scared of me, my people.  I’m not a freak, I’m not better than you, you do not bore me.  Maybe sometimes I am awkward, intense or standoffish, but I so appreciate when people break through that veil to communicate or share with me.  I wonder sometimes if people are afraid of me or if I repel them.  I have so much love to give and so much love to receive.  I need you in my life, all of you, my locals and my distant friends, Melbourne, Facebook, the world!

Last night I performed my electronic spoken word masterpiece “My Very Nature” at a queer spoken word night at Hares & Hyenas on Johnston Street, Fitzroy.  It was a cosy, friendly place, I was given free drinks, but people would only speak to me long enough to thank me for my performance, no one allowing the conversation to develop beyond acclaim to a simple pleasant chat.  It felt like being famous.  What a peculiar hell that would be if people spoke to me like that all the time.

I am in this city now and I would like to stay if you’ll have me.  But I need real, daily, supportive community. 

Solidarity is the best tool we have in this world and community is the only way we can live, however we each choose to form these communities, wherever we choose to live.  We need each other and we deserve our freedom.  Our freedom of association, our freedom of interdependence, our freedom to live together, work together, eat together and sleep together with the utmost consent. 

I live in a society where everything is based on mutual consent.  There are sometimes coercive institutions interfering with our consensus decision making, but we have the power to defy and evade.  We have cracks to slip through and grow in, like a resilient dandelion. 

I want to live in a beautiful world populated by huwomans who love and support each other in all areas, even where there are taboos, such as money or touch.

Skyscrapers of bullshit

I dare you to challenge me in my intensity.  I dare you to penetrate my intensity with your reality.  I'm not talking about an aggressively emphatic positivity or cynicism or sophistication, I'm talking about the shamelessly awkward and the painfully beautiful and the mystery.

Cos I can do bullshit, I've done bullshit.  It takes a lot of energy but when it works it is wonderful.  But I can never sustain it.  My physical body communicates loudly and clearly with my bullshit body and consistently undermines my illusions.  My physical body is a living aspect of this living world and it flows and cycles with the rhythms of nature. 

I guess sometimes I'm in dream or in entheogenesis or between incarnate lifetimes and - who knows - maybe there I can project realities out into the world, but here I am on Earth, channelling soil and water and air as food through my metabolism, channelling the same food as all the other creatures in this world.

Yes, I live in this contrived world called City, but I'm not confident of its absolutism.  I'm not sure its existence is acknowledged throughout my entire body or throughout the rest of nature.  Are you real, City?  Or perhaps a more pertinent question, can I believe in you sufficiently?  At least sufficiently to participate, to belong, to have a career maybe?  Is it possible to believe that much?  Is it possible to defy what my body communicates in order to participate, to be a part of things? 

The real world calls out to me and my body yearns to dance barefoot on the naked earth and dive into cold rivers early in the morning and to make love under the midday sun until our bums are burned red.  But I am told the city is where it's all happening.  This is where history is unfolding and the future will be made.  This is where the hopeful and the hopeless people have congregated and where they pool their hope and hopelessness, trying to find some revolution or long-term relationship.  I guess this is where it's easiest to project our majestic and pathetic fantasies onto reality.

So why did I come here to City?  To create a beautiful fantasy of bullshit that I can not only believe in but live in?  Or to destroy illusion, break down my own rural bullshit, use the gifts of my primitivism to undermine your urban bullshit of media, entertainment, enforced civility and sterility.

Can we discover each other beyond the divide of our idiosyncratic unrealities?  Surely we're really here, manifest in the same tangible reality.  Can we touch each other in this reality?  Can we trust each other?  Are we brave enough to reveal the nakedness of our undeniably warm fleshy vulnerable bodies?

I don't know what happened.  I was disappointed, I was disillusioned, I was confronted.  I'm afraid my bullshit was penetrated by people with whom I shared trust and whose trust I betrayed.  And now I stand naked and alone, despite my friends and the real love we share, despite these absurd fabrics hanging off my body, despite this blessed opportunity to address you beautiful, gentle and intelligent people.

I don't know whether I'm trapped now in my own bubble of unreality or whether I'm wandering illicitly in the wilderness.  I'm searching for an oasis in the desert, I'm ready for a ray of sunlight to break through the dense foliage, or to come across a warm hut in the dark night, or a body whose scent reassures me and I can breathe in peace for a moment knowing that no fantasy is necessary to sustain a human embrace.

Freedom

I used to be free.

I guess that doesn't sound remarkable. We're all free, right?

Apart from being wage-slaves, debt-slaves, rent-slaves, apart from the violent and coercive state enforcing its arbitrary laws regardless of our consent, apart from generations of trauma making us terrified of each other, terrified of our own bodies and most terrified of all of being powerful and free.

So, what if that fear were to disappear, would we then be free, or more free? No. Not theoretically at all. Only in practice. It is utterly meaningless unless it is in practice.

What is freedom in our culture? A furniture store. A word abused by the Bush regime to justify imperialistic violence. Not slavery. A feeling of exhilaration and excitement. Ability to travel easily.

Janis Joplin said, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

And I was free. I had no home. I had no money. I was young and wandering around the stolen continent.

I didn't need money.  I slept outside.  I made friends easily, they invited me into their homes. I always brought food with me to share; dumpster-dived, shop-lifted; rich, healthy, expensive food in abundance for everyone.

You should've seen my body.  I was toned, slim, lithe and strong. I was brown all over from always being naked and my hair was bleached by the sun and swept back by the salty ocean breeze.

I was fiercely intelligent and my thoughts were uncluttered, clear and focussed, communicative. I was intensely present, I fell in love easily and felt everything profoundly and momentarily.

I had nothing but the pack on my back. I had everything I needed and I took what I needed with skill and confidence. I was not careless, I placed respect where respect was due.

As I said, I was free.

What happened? How did I become a clothed and respectable man, with a smart phone and a tram card, my feet sweating in shoes all day, supporting multi-national corporations?

Why am I living in the city, where freedom is at best naïve, at worst a cynical tool of political manipulation?

Why did I give up my values?

The life I was living previously maybe wasn't as free as the one I just described, but it was free enough. I was living on a farm in far-north Aotearoa, atop a hill overlooking the ocean, the harbour and the sandhills across the harbour. I had my own house right by the bush, living with an elderly couple, dogs, pigs, chickens and horses, as well as many wild birds, possums, hedgehogs, rabbits and rats. I didn't pay rent, but helped out around the property.  I could collect food from the ocean, tend the garden and gather from the local fruit trees. I could swim naked, I could invite friends to visit and I could come and go as I pleased. I could hitchhike everywhere easily and in this way meet the locals.  I could write in peace, but didn't, friends wouldn't visit often enough, and I would have love affairs with unwilling German teenage wwoofers. I had all the time in the world to entertain and educate myself with all the cinema, literature and pornography I wanted. I was pretty much free, though unbearably lonely and bored.

But wasn't this the life we were all dreaming of and talking about on the road when we were truly free? When we were wandering around, homeless and empty-handed, always together and always following the sun, weren't we talking about getting our own land; a garden, a supportive local community, clean, stable and predictable? Isn't that what we all wanted?

So, I had an opportunity, I pursued it and I lived that life. I invited others to join me. Some people would stay a week, some longer, but mostly people would say they were coming and never come.

Maybe I should have stayed out there on the road, on the beach, and of course I would be up in far-north Queensland right now, following the sun and my fellow sexy vagabonds. I would find some beauty and I would pursue that beauty. Someone who will let me fall in love with him, someone who will selflessly offer me the opportunity to give him all my love and all the gifts of my love and will accept them graciously.

Actually, that's what happened. Up in far-north Queensland I fell in love with a wildman, a Brazilian, a qualified psychologist interested in the I Ching and the Mayan Calendar. He was my equal, we were born on the same day, one year apart, with only the South Pacific Ocean between our baby bodies. We met at a tribal anarchist freedom gathering in the wilderness and were startled to discover each other, we travelled together for one month and though the separation was painful, our time together was complete and totally satisfying.

You should've seen me, naked and free, living my values instead of just talking about them like we all do now.

I followed my friends' invitation to live with them in a house near Nimbin for a few months. A friend came to visit and brought some other men with him. One of them was just 18 years old, I was 27, and I saw something in him that moved me deeply. I saw, within a scared, slumped and mousy exterior, a being of beauty and luminosity, a huge heart, a latent absorbent intelligence, a young body of infinite potential. And most of all, he had come. He had abandoned his life in Melbourne to come to Nimbin and whether he knew it or not he had come to my house and looked into my eyes and begged me to set him free.

And thus, my life had focus and I had the freedom of something to give. The world was making demands of me that I was precisely and joyously able to fulfil.

I am sick of apologising for my love. I am sick of cowards whose eyes beg me to liberate them with the revolutionary and chaotic impact of my love and who are then too scared to engage with me, who pull back in fear at the moment where they lose control or feel something real.

This one wasn't afraid of me, he wasn't afraid of life. He was nothing and nobody, a blank slate, he was open, he was engaged, he was ignorant, credulous and willing to learn. He was willing to be transformed, he was willing to be shaped. He was free in a way you don't have any concept of.

And I was in love with him. And I had something that he thought was valuable. And I was totally willing to give him everything.

We lived together in a remote valley with 100 people for a month where it was warm all day and night. Most people preferred to wear clothes most of the time, but he and I were perpetually naked, free to be human, to sleep outside curled up together, to make love beside the fire and to dance. We danced like my ancestors haven't danced in thousands of years.

I'm often overwhelmed with the beauty in this world, but nothing and no one compares in the living memory of my huge, hot, blood-pumping heart than the beauty of that man at that moment at that gathering, leaping around naked, in love with every little window of opportunity, his body channelling such incomprehensible beauty that I perceived rays of light emanating from every pore on the surface of his skin.

You should have seen us dance.

Why was he able to dance with such delicacy and elegance?

Because he was given the opportunity, the environment allowed it. Not only did we enter a space where nature accepted and welcomed us, but we accepted and welcomed each other. We created a temporary family of 100 lost souls and we expressed ourselves cos we felt safe to do so. We were free.

We had to leave this temporary paradise where a chaotic perfection is so easy and go back out into this world. I wanted to give him everything I had to facilitate the freedom I now knew he was capable of. I wanted to love him with every atom of my flesh. I wanted to lay my body down on his earth so his roots could consume all my minerals. I wanted to sacrifice myself on the altar of his beauty so the scent of my burning flesh would waft up and satisfy the Yahweh in his sky. I wanted to possess him, contain him, consume him so his essence would remain in my body for eternity.

I wanted to keep him for myself and share him with the world, but most of all I wanted him to be free.

I had finally found something... but he wasn't something, he was a person, he is a person.

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Were we free together and therefore more free, or did I now have something I didn't want to lose?

I couldn't believe I deserved such a rare and precious jewel, but I knew what I wanted, and I invited him to travel with me.

He said yes.

And then somehow the world changed. Everything I had grown up with that I was supposed to care about, everything I had invested my passion into that failed to satisfy me, everything I had rejected and no longer cared about, all the freedom I had discovered with such grace and ease, that the world really had nothing for me, except the ambient beauty and joy of life itself, all that was gone because now I had found something real.

Many times I had walked out of the stupormarket with a bag full of groceries without paying. I didn't feel guilty. Ever. I rationalised that I am a terrestrial being and like all terrestrial beings I am free to take sustenance from my environment. I did not care at all for the morality that forbade it. I took these gifts out into the wilderness to share with my friends, my lovers and my tribe.

But when I invited this luminous being out into the wilderness with me, and when he came with the same ease that my stolen bag of groceries came, I felt anxious.

I knew that he really is my equal, he is a person, he came willingly and my love for him is pure, as much of a gift as his graciousness and beauty. But also I felt something irrational. I knew I didn't possess him, I knew I hadn't stolen him from the museum, I knew he wasn't a precious diamond that was too valuable for me to get away with, but still I felt that anxiety. I've gone too far. Surely I'm too free. Surely this must be illegal. Surely the authorities are going to come and find us and take him away from me. Surely he will leave me. Surely I don't deserve him.

Freedom camping, hitchhiking, fare evasion and shoplifting are illegal, but it had never bothered me before, and I had never attracted Police attention for these activities before, but now I allowed the paranoia to overcome me, that I couldn't possibly get away with this. And the Police and quasi-police did harass us occasionally, to little effect of course, but still I allowed it to destroy me. I welcomed self-destruction. I demanded and facilitated the emotional breakdown I needed to leave me empty-handed again.

I am sick of apologising for my love. I'm sick of cowards whose eyes beg me to penetrate them with my love and then they're too scared to feel something real.

But he wasn't scared, was he. He let me love him. He accepted every invitation I offered him and then I freaked out cos neither of us had any boundaries and I didn't know how to stop.

How could I give up the only thing in the world worthy of my attention and go back to being lonely and free? Force him to reject me? A nervous breakdown?

I don't know. I have a powerful rational mind but I am fundamentally an irrational animal. I created my own debilitating paranoia that caused me to leave the country. He offered me the necessary lie that he would follow me across the Tasman at a later date but of course he never did.

And then I stepped out of the unreality of the airport into another land, disappointingly familiar, but as tangibly real as the one I'd left. Actually, I was still strong, actually I was still calm and resourceful and I guess I was still free.

Or was I more free now; now that I had nothing more to lose again?

I had homes in which I was welcome, I had a book to write and I had my hilltop paradise to return to. But was I free?

I gave up my hilltop paradise to come to Melbourne, to wear shoes, to engage with money, to write and perform my way into the hearts of the gentle and sophisticated.

Am I less free in this racist Police state, under the cult of Capitalism, surrounded by pollution? Or are we all secretly free in this mess cos we can gather in rooms together, choose how we want to communicate and how we want to interact?

My beautiful friend and lover and companion does not emanate light from his pores or dance like that anymore. He lives in the city and he goes to university. He wears underwear and shoes. He is studying filmmaking cos he wants to express himself like he did when he danced naked by the fire under the full moon with our tribe in the valley.

He chose all this? Is he scared of feeling all that freedom and strength again? Was it too much? Does he have to transform his passion into two-dimensional images now cos it's too much to contain in a body that's not free enough to dance like that?

What about me, transforming the best communication I can contrive into words, into paper, into little sounds I make with my mouth? Do these mouth-sounds make me free? Is this my technique for alienating and abstracting the intensity of experience into a contained and knowable form? Or is this a deeper freedom?

Have I carefully compromised a few superfluous values to be able to create something that communicates with as many people as possible with my utmost integrity? Or am I just going to start getting old now, and slowly withdraw from the world, the freedom, still just an arm's reach away?

I am a delicate flower, rich in colour and scent, and when the light of the sun shines on my body I will open my petals and shine back with everything I possess.

I guess I'm as free as any plant, to fling my seeds across the landscape, to attract birds and bees to my fruits and my flowers. I'm this bursting lunatic, somehow restrained in a human body as long as entropy will allow my heat to be contained in this delicate physical dimension.

I reach out to you in the darkness of incarnation.

I'm so far from free it used to be terrifying.

Come save me from my isolation for a moment and I'll do the same for you. I guess we can't expect much more than that from each other, but that's enough for now.

bursting intensity

There is a bursting intensity emanating from my soul.

What is my soul?  That which knows all.

What is my body?  That which is desirous of all.

My body lurches and throbs and pulsates.

It exalts in misery and joy.

And my mind?  It is anxiety; doubt.

In a room full of strangers,

in which we have shared proudly with honesty and openness,

I want to engage

but I am ignorant of how to chatter

and forget which face I'm supposed to be wearing.

I want to grasp you in my hands,

forcefully, gently, tenderly.

I want to look you in the eye.

Our arms wrap around, our chests move together, our eyes close

and the room does not exist.

Together we leave space-time and enter instead the aura of each other's bodies.

For an eternal moment we rest in the peace of togetherness.

This familiar feeling.

I know this smell.

Perhaps this is how it felt before we were incarcerated in our individual bodies.

Perhaps this remembrance of peace can only be fully experienced together.

Even two so-called strangers in a room full of people

can transcend time and space, anxiety and alienation,

for one imperfect moment that we can't entirely commit to,

but that we defiantly attempt and share.

Like every morning, we wake up in our own body

with the infinite potential of what to do,

who to be, how to move through space and time.

Alone in my body all day

I try to find ways to communicate,

to reach across the veil of my tortured intellect,

to reach humbly across my throbbing passion,

to step out of the divine moment, to look at it,

to calmly observe with my damaged, lonely and fierce mind,

to laboriously translate the keenest subtleties of my observations into something I can share,

to step into a pre-planned space, an organised moment,

overwhelmingly populated by stunning, terrifying, delicious, intoxicatingly intense, brittle, gentle and pretentious fellow humans,

and to re-enter that long-ago moment,

that I was too self-conscious and civilised to experience

but which I now recreate, as best I can,

inside out,

in which, this time, I am not alone, I am not isolated,

because every thought, every emotion, every vibration

is a word coming from my mouth

and these beautiful humans who I am too scared to talk to and touch

are listening to me, are hearing and understanding and appreciating.

Regardless of their clicks or lack-of-clicks I can feel them hearing me and knowing me and loving me

and I can beg them,

with all the desperation and desire that I'm too scared to express,

to violate me, to consume me, to desire me, to grasp for me.

I'm full of love and I know my stupid useless boundaries.  

I respect your boundaries all too well,

but I want to violate them.

I demand you confront me with your desperate intensity.

Maybe right outside the door there is concrete and carbon monoxide and paranoia and uniformed minions of institutionalised violence.

But we have found something,

flimsy and linguistic though it is,

and here we are,

another night,

having manifest another moment,

having emanated an atmosphere of safety and inclusion

amidst the unbearable pulverising insanity.

And here we are.

My god,

here we are

together.

We make sounds with our mouths and this somehow means something.

It’s not just cultural cues,

it is something else.

The world out there is made up of something,

something creating little prisons of meaning.

"You are under arrest," they tell us, and we are hypnotised.

We are hypnotised by the slogans of soft drinks, life insurance, socialists and multinational charity organisations.

We call it advertising and shrug it away.

In the past they called it black magic, the curses of petty tyrants, jealous witches and greedy merchants;

spells of weaving, spells of binding, spells of concealment and diversion.

So what the hell are we doing, gathering in rooms,

carefully composing and projecting delicate combinations of words?

Casting new and better spells to embed ourselves deeper into the illusion?

Surrounding ourselves in an unlikely new cushioned dogma to protect us from the world we refuse to understand?

Or are we spell-breakers?

Are we perhaps not creating a secular new age religion of inclusion and globalisation?

Are we instead destroying illusion,

undermining the pious and politically correct,

ridiculing each other's petty projections and then hugging each other's warm healthy bodies?

Are we destroying the linguistic and ideological infrastructure that caused our parents and our grandparents to give up in despair?

Is this real?

Am we really destroying the barriers that have divided us for centuries, since our villages were invaded and colonised?

Can I stand up here and speak to you and destroy the generations of violence that allowed us to invade and colonise this land?

Have we always been this powerful?

So we refuse the hypnotism, and then what?

We're still in this room, the weeds are only just pushing up through the concrete, only a few national economies have collapsed.

I found my rural paradise and I lived there in peace for years.

I understood; and I spat in the face of patriarchy.  I healed myself of paranoia and got bored of anger.

I stopped reading the news though I still cared deeply about the fate of our silly little species.

I lost faith not just in domesticity, authority and entertainment,

I lost faith in hope, I lost faith in startling global upheaval, I lost faith in the all levels of human organisation.

My mother died and of course I grieved the life of the human whose frail body formed the foundation of love my entire terrestrial existence is based on,

but then I found myself

fully present in my body.

I felt into my body and found it to be strong and beautiful.

I felt into this warm self-regulating masterpiece of sensitivity and strength.

I turned 30 and I found greys in my beard and I discovered I was hornier and more confident than ever.

I go to the best possible places, where the humans are loving and free, and I look around for one whose eyes engage my own, whose beauty calls out to me across the room, I approach him, I wrap my arms around him and together we transcend time and space for a wonderful imperfect moment.

Listen to audio recording of my performance of this poem at Voices in the Attic, Ferdyduke, Melbourne, 2015-05-12.

sexual predator

When I was sitting next to a strong young man this afternoon it was not just his thighs expose below his shorts, but the heat and indifference of his presence that made my penis drip, as if it was salivating.

What does a man do with such a passionate experience of life?  Smoke weed and eat until those feelings are veiled in a bloated detachment, a borderline infirmity?

That's what these drugs are for, otherwise us men would be fighting and fucking each other constantly, am I right?

Or am I peculiar?  Merely a horny faggot or perceptive in the depth and intensity of my masculinity?

I saw the best minds of my generation numbed by electronic media, unable to escape their culture or their parents' nagging faces on the other side of the planet; who for one full year experienced life in all its undiluted intensity of confusion and clarity, only to fly thousands of kilometres in mere hours to the same adolescent bedroom where they began.

I want to drag them away one by one, as they fearlessly approach me.  I want to take them, through the natural path of their curiosity and their tendency towards ecstasy, into a world where their beauty is their currency and their strength and love and need for self-expression is their vocation and where I abandon them to fend for themselves in a world they are strong enough to navigate.

I want to selfishly consume their semen and in the process provoke them with the unavoidable intensity of a love that expects nothing.  I want to take their mind on journeys through media fundamentally different in intention, an antidote to alienation and distraction.

I want them to lead me out of intellectual caverns into bright open wilderness where we rediscover the experience of the human body and the terrestrial environment.

I demand communication in full honesty, with its complexity, its rejection and its earned calm peace.

I don't know when it's safe to be brave in rooms shrouded in etiquette, chatter and electricity.

For the last year I have insulated myself in my private paradise, with food, with literature, with philosophy, with denial of life, denial of the intensity of life, denial of the imperative nature of this moment, that this moment demands to be confronted, that we know what to do in this moment.

I do not want to be entertained anymore.  I do not want to be distracted.  I do not want comfort or convenience.  I do not want to have my own space in which I can develop as an individual.

I want to be violated.  I want my body to be violated.  I want my space to be violated.  I want my persona, my ideology, my habits, to be violated.

I want to possess the confidence to violate the beautiful men who beg me silently to violate them, if only so they can push me away, reject me, make me realise I am safe in rejection because rejection is real and when I am rejected I know I must leave and find a place where I am valued.

I am not an individual and I never have been.  It is clear to me now that my life is meaningless except in relation to my tribe.

I feel strong and confident.  There are still barriers to be broken, but I am ready.  I have nothing further to wait for.  We know what to do, because here we are doing it.  We need each other, we cannot do it alone.

I experience this world only through the conduit of my body, because this is the extent to which I am manifest in this world.  My body is like a glove of total immersion in a world of total darkness.  In this darkness, as this form moving through space, I encounter warm bodies and realise that I too am a warm body.  Nothing is more compelling than this moment we discover each other in the darkness.

The moment overwhelms me with intensity and the scope of its possibility and I choose whether to eat myself out of this moment, or breathe into it.

I'm no monk.  I'm not citizen living in a constructed universe.

My universe is chaotic and divine.  The divinity of the universe I inhabit is blurred and messy and beyond my powers of comprehension.

From here I know anything is possible, but right now only the next thing is possible.

Only what is necessary and appropriate.

My undeniable hypocrisy and the closing limits of my ignorance draw me back into the real world from this linguistic world in which I can hope for perfect clarity.

Listen to an audio recording of my performance of this piece at Voices in the Attic, Ferdydurke, Melbourne, 2015-04-28.