the grave digger's collection

I don't believe in ghosts
a collection of metaphysical particles
but I do believe in memories
so tangible
it physically moves you

I believe in what I see
and what I see are vestiges
they stain the air
they haunt me
I believe in howling women 
and weeping men
in absence that knits and writhes across faces
in scratch marks in the dirt from clawing nails

I am not a sentimental man
I am confronted with the fleeting nature of life so often it chokes me
but when you've been choking your whole life it starts to feel like breathing
soon, the ephemeral nature of life
seems like the only stoic constant in a man's heart.

I am not a sentimental man
I have seen enough
residual chaos, cold and clutching
I have heard every moribund dirge
every effusive eulogy

I have learnt to breathe.
and now I don't even blink
as I dig a hole to house
a rotting body
I don't blink as beneath me
flesh decays and curdles
as bodies cook in coffins

But every once in a while I do blink
in this labyrinth of finality and fatality
something will catch my eye
will eclipse my determined resiliance
and usurp my curiosity

a body part.
leg...arm...eye...viscera

I'll collect it
my eyes will work quickly
memorising details
texture, shape, dimension

Early one morning
when weak sunlight
bleeds trite anticipation into the sky...

I line up my collection
I take each part out and line them up before my eyes
I inspect them,
a purveyor, a curator 
of sacred items, shriveled and swollen
all rotten but preserved... pickled in my memory
in labeled specimen jars in my mind.


A desperate hand
a clenched fist
fingers wrapped tight

a gluttonous leg
swollen with apathy
distended by disuse
a tumour of anticipation unsatitated

a pirate smile
bright and brilliant
mirthful, mercurial and meretricious 
that dances even in death

the arm of a lover
curved gracefully in anticipation of embrace
nimble fingers poised
to seek, to search, to soothe

a pair of pious knees
aching and stiff with reverence
fecund, fertile faith
wearing holes in the carpet

the breasts of a mother
heavy with procreant urge
with intimacy, nourishment and comfort

the lips of an erudite storyteller 
warm with rambling wisdom and wit
tangential torrents

the feet of a strider
of swift stumbling gait
battered and bruised
but graceful footsteps
clumsy purposefulness

the eyes of an architect
diligent attention to detail
with patterns etched into irises
always seeing the world 
as potential space
delighted by angles and depth


what is this collection of mangled memories
and eviscerated eulogies?
I drag the pieces together, desperate for a sense of order, of purpose
they fit together oddly
with a sense and structure that runs deep into my heart
I am a curator. A collector. A purveyor.
I am Frankenstein.
and my creature, a patchwork of body parts
is my own collection of particles,
my own tangible memories
my own ghost.



(this is the poem I wrote for Liv and my second feast - with the theme of 'bodies')

The second feast: bodies

I approached this theme with confidence which quickly turned to trepidation which quickly turned to excitement.
I love writing about bodies. It's one of my favourite most fertile muses. It's infused with desire. Physical curiosity. But not necessarily sexual.
A delight, a craving for details. To seek and explore.
Angles, shapes, curves.....
It's very natural, very visceral, very intense.

But then I realised.... The point of feasts of fancy, what I want to get out of it is to explore NEW ways of writing. I always write about bodies in this way. So I should try to expand my limited field of inspiration.

I'd always wanted to write a haunting and intense country style ballad. Like Liz Stringer .... Beautiful and fearlessly intense. And I thought, maybe now is the chance.

I suddenly caught this idea ..... How a body part can represent a person. Or capture a moment, or a story, or a life. I had this idea of a list of body parts and what they mean to different people.
What if someone went around noticing people's body parts, and what they represent. And in their mind they collect them.
How beautiful and intense and haunting could it be if that collector was a gravedigger, who walks through this labrynth of rotting flesh, noticing a clutching hand, a curved arm, a swollen leg, seeking eyes, a warm belly...

That way I could try something different. Write about something familiar in a different way. In the frame of a style I've always wanted to try.
So I started 'the gravedigger's collection'.

the first feast - final thoughts and reflections

I've always been afraid of restrictions and requirements and expectations. I feel they mire my writing, hinder and shakle my creativity.

But lately I've been reading a lot of Dorothy Porter's poetry - and her style is very terse. She writes of a moment - a few words, a few lines.
It always seems so... truncated... but somehow, whole and complete
I found this was so evocative and suggestive.
Terseness and brevity imbued the few lines with intense energy. Her poetry was cloying and addictive, with a thick, dense, sporadic style.
like liquor. I found it intoxicating.
I felt that her poems were so full, they said so much in such a small space that they shuddered and burst.

We chose haiku as our first form because neither of us ever wrote with any attempt at confinement, at rules and restrictions. And thats what feasts of fancy is all about... trying new things with our writing and seeing how we respond.

Our endeavour thus shaped, we set off in pursuit of restrictions.

In my research about the haiku style I read a line that opined a similar thing.... brevity of expresson is suggestive: 'overtones, potentials and implications' (a note on haiku - garry eaton) And that this brevity fostered a relationship with writer and reader to be cooperative, respond, fill in the poem's empty spaces from their own experience and imagination. 'Elegant restraint' my research articulated - so that it was 'vibrantly alive with suggestive possibilities'.

this was something i was so drawn to about haiku. That unique, vivid energy from tersenss and brevity. the sporadic suggestive rhythm. It was new to both Liv and I... we both value freedom from restrictions so much that our writing is... effusive... torrentual. So i loved the new feeling of this new rhythm.

So, for the first official meeting of feasts of fancy, we met, underslept, not very organised, but with boundless energy for the endeavour. a meeting of minds in a shared pursuit... what could be more delicious!?
Liv was running a bit late, and then i was running a bit late... the usual. To Voyage we went, there was no question about it really. familiarity can be fertile and faithful inspiration.
Liv brought her notebook of sporadic scrawls and sat feverishly asterisking haikus riddled throughout the last months writing.
I had a bundle of scribbles and drafts, and pages haikus, written, re written and then grouped into vague categories, a little list of our 'agenda' (in the spirit of my new resolution of organisation) and a beautiful, large black book of thick, unlined pages... blank and inviting, for collecting, collating and recording all of our feasting.

over soy milk and scribbles, we talked through the journey of our thought process, interspersed with sharing poems.

because we chose a form, we left themes open... its so interesting to see what parts of our life bled into our writing. liv wrote a lot about physical connections, I wrote a lot about physical landscape, and we both wrote a lot about how it felt to write haikus.

something i noticed about liv's poems was how tangible her relationship with words is... i can see it and feel it through her writing and especially hear it when she reads her poems aloud.
its this beautiful delight in language and its uses. I especially noticed this in alliteration and sibilence ... it was very physically evocative.

We both noticed that paying attention to syllables made us paid a lot more attention to rhythm. Usually all i pay attention to when im writing is letting the words express wholistically all that is in me to be expressed of a moment, and that is the nature of my relationship with words.
But it was interesting and valuable to be forced to pay attention to how the words and poems sounded spoken, rather than just how they tasted in our minds.

What i found the most valuable about the endeavour was how it transformed my perspective on writing. I used to be so overwhelmed by what i wanted my writing to be that i missed so many moments that were worthy of unwravelling, worthy of being created with, worthy of expressing. because i didnt think they were important enough to write about.
but with haiku, every moment is a potential poem.
an abandoned tea... a potential haiku
eating watermelon... a potential haiku
writing haiku ... a potential haiku
and that was one of the things i wanted to get from feasts of fancy. seeking inspiration everywhere.
it was also made writing and creating so achievable. 3 lines... one moment.... and youve created. youve satiated your procreant urge. youve achieved. its all about fostering this feeling of creating comfortably.

so now we are ready to start recording and making our feasts of fancy book look beautiful, and launch into our next feast....
theme: body

haikus inspired by a picture of a boat

sturdy and supple
macchiato brown pine wood
i built us an ark

an anchor oscillated
swining loose and free
with an iron will

haikus about seeking

wine and dim lamplight
writing late into the night
a delighted hunter

collector, hoarder
of curious intricacies
things that catch my eye

thieving fingers clutch
inexhaustable resource
to delight myself

sometimes destructive,
sometimes ecstatic, sometimes
mereticious

what is this colour?
always learning and seeking
to know of myself

brazen seduction
a voracious feast of life's
delicious details

i can never be
fabricated or contrived
i am visceral

what i cultivate
ferments, grows and bursts from me
centrifugally

3 haikus of an infinite moment

open up to light
torrid sun scorching my back
burning to my bones

i painted myself with mud
wet and warm patterns on my body
staining my skin

usurped by rhythm
that i felt but could not hear
my hands danced wildly

Haikus about Pemberton

‘Open quirky den’

How could I say no?

Hoarder, wrangler, thief

Knees up on the couch

Here is where I pined for you

Sipping thick red wine

Morning breakfast feast

Teeth tearing at melon flesh 

Juice runs down my chin

Bright tawny orange 

Across azure blue sky

Freckled and dappled

Naked morning swim 

Together in the river

Bits in, nipples next

Sitting neglected

Steeped, acerbic, tepid

An abandoned tea

Walking down the stairs

Here is where I wanted to

Fuck you in the dirt

Golden like butter

Softly melting and dripping

The sky licks the sun

Night falls around us 

Our spirits swell within us

Hands pressed to my mouth

In the lake house bed

Tangled and tessellated

While the hammock groans

Thick white trees like ghosts

Withered and gnarled physique

Haunting the highway

Haikus about desire

I want you to want 

Me with the intensity

That I ache for you

For a while you were
Sweetest lover and poet 

My favourite muse

Licking at your ghost
In my belly lives a beast

Howling, hollering

A carrion crow
skirlish moribund dirge
circling above

I am scared to not
be for myself all I need
to be less than whole

I was so aware 

Was dying to hold your hand 

Warm leg against mine

Levels of desire
Moments of intimacy
It is what it is

Share with me your parts
Emerge me in your ether
Stain me with your breath

Haikus about haikus

Haiku entrenched form

Restrictions make me wilder
I burst from the lines

I never knew that

Brevity and terseness was
So damn delicious

Subtle syllables

Suggestive, evocative 

Sporadic rhythm

Every moment 

A potential haiku 

Of five and seven

The energy of terseness
Dense and sporadic rhythm
Words have so much worth

the first feast - haiku

Neither Liv nor I write with much attention to form or structure or rhyme. our writing is a manifestation of our fervent and frenzied minds, our ebullient vessels, our entrenched cacophony, disorder and delight.

which means our writing is an unyielding, unadulterated deluge of florid verbosity.

As much as we delight in this, as much as we strive to let our writing be free and rambunctious, a real part of us, in the pursuit of candid and raw writing….

we thought it could be fun to try and manifest this dynamic, colourful farrago into a form. with rules and requirements and restrictions. And see how we respond.

We decided to start with a form completely foreign to us both - haiku - but leave the theme free. For the next feast we will pick a theme and leave the form free, and continue to alternate in this way.

We both seek to expand our ambit of inspiration, perception and expression. We want to infuse our writing with new-ness. so using a prescribed form for the first time was a completely new experience. Especially one that is so different and so restrictive, like haiku.

It’s been such a positive and dynamic experience, I can’t wait to document my research, my thoughts, my response and some of my writing

a feast of fancy

My dear friend (and partner in life-desiring) Liv and I are hoping to overcome the combined ridiculousness of our chaotic but delightful lives, to create a space to be creative together.

We haven't thought much about details, I hope it will just unfold and unfurl in the way that it is meant to. be whatever deliciousness it can be. 

What we are thinking about so far, is something along the lines of a writing project every few weeks. A group of us are going down south to Pemberton for the weekend (to defiantly NOT celebrate invasion day) so Liv and I hope to find some time to kick off then. Our idea for the First Feast is 'haiku'. And I think from there we will alternate each time, one feast we can pick a form and leave the theme free, and then the next feast we can pick a theme and leave the form free.

I think this will be so valuable to me, in terms of seeking out new ways to be creative. To have some sort of structure to frame the ridiculous ebullient deluge. To have a way to manifest it into something meaningful, to feel like i am creating something tangible.