Message to M. (III)

I can’t imagine how to manage the anxiety of watching political spin every day.  

Sorting out the truth would be like trying to find souls in puddles of blood.

Powerful Owl

I think I have a Powerful Owl roosting in my Robinia. I have heard its whooshing wings as it flies by my back door.  But I came home to find my resident ringtail decapitated, the top half of its carcass like a tiny ball of fluff on my drive.  Arriving home after 21:00 hours, after 25 hours on the road, meant I wasn’t in any state to scoop it up for a bin burial.  

The next day, however, my neighbour came by with my mail and said her mother couldn’t bear the sight of the possum.  I looked out and saw the top half of its little figure had moved a metre, and in its place fallen, from the talons of its replacement resident, lay the bottom half.  Open and disemboweled.  The green backs of busy flies evidence of the feast in its guts.  

Like some hideous abortion in my front yard I turned away sharply, not believing my repulse.  

She offered to clear the headless two halves when she saw my response, but in my family we clear our own mess and bury our own.  

She had handed me two deliveries of silks and lingerie.  It could be easy to lose myself in soft beauty and laces, but I took my keys to unlock the shed and found the shovel.  

On the way around the side of my house I stopped to find a tiny string of desiccated salami: the possum’s entrails.  Further on, the dried out stomach and larger intestines. 

I scooped them up, and the bottom half and the top, catching the leaf litter and the disembodied grey tufts.  

On the way back to the shed I found the kind of crap that didn’t belong.  Some overgrown cat or small dog that could jump a six foot fence … perhaps the regurgitated bones and blood that owls spit … I didn’t care to know.  

Then later, the back paw close to my puppy’s grave. Heinous sacrilege, but then he always kept the rats and possums at bay.  I fetched my keys, opened the shed, and took the shovel again.  

Today the flies chorus under the Robinia like the owl holds the next offering in its talons.  Tonight’s take-away.  That what they do.  

When one wild life is taken by the other, and it assumes the victim’s home.  

Analogy.  

Analgesic. 

Anaphora until the lesson is learnt or the story changes. 

Message to M.

 Last night they invaded our rooms with repeating sirens and announcements to “prepare to evacuate and await further instructions”.  In my various lines of work and the governments I have worked for, this can be anything from innocuous to Code Black.  

The disregarding, bumbling security man was probably qualified manage little more than an ID check at a nightclub.  As a result, I chased it up with the authorities and gave him a serve anonymously.  He was so useless and apathetic, that it rouses me so much.  This is how people die.  Especially after the people I had to meet this trip, being a soft target because of someone’s profound apathy and disregard riles me so much that I could blow everything.  

Anyway. That means I got about four hours sleep, maximum.  Driving on that is a pill for sleeping on the road.  That is not my idea of getting home early.  So I’ve stopped at Gundagai.  I hate stopping unnecessarily, but I owe it to someone. 

I cannot sleep during the day.  It’s 34° here, and there are cicada songs I haven’t heard before and strange rattling birds and a hollow dog’s call.  

I played Don’t Let Go over and over.  It slowed me right down so I could rest.  

That breaks the virulent anger I can harbour.  No-one ever sees it, but it’s so internally violent.  You can probably guess the pedigree and the potential. 

So thank you. 

I’m going to find a coffee and turn this into something good.