.

Slow Motion

I was told of a crocodile

that kept human bodies in a grotto

and picked away at them over months, or years

taking only what it needed

It wasn't the gore that had me, as a kid –

a slow and bloody dissolution of boundaries,

but the crocodile's restraint

I once described myself, to a girl, as

self depreciating

when I meant

self deprecating

She asked, laughing:

What's your market value now, then?

I had no luck with her

I had an after-school job at a petrol station

cleaning toilets and rotating the hot dogs

whenever I kicked open the cubicle door

I wished for a lifeless body

slumped over the bowl

so I could go home early

and maybe even

miss the next few shifts

for the trauma

Often

I start talking

sure that I have something to say

only to find

that I'm suddenly dyslexic

and pretty ambivalent

about language in the first place

In my first and only fight

against James Barlow, 1994

I discovered, with horror,

that I threw punches

in underwater slow motion

like the punches

in my dreams

Finally

And I know sustain this one

by recalling it often

I adjust the climate and tweak the colours,

turning up the mid frequencies

so the water

rushes through my head

with perfect fidelity

A river,

fed by a mountain spring.

Before this river, I didn't know

what freshwater was capable of –

I thought it had to be stained yellow,

or tan,

or brown,

or else churning and soiled

by leaves or fallen trees

I walked up this river

picking out the best spots to jump in:

a sheer rock-wall pocked with foot holes

giving a few good seconds of free fall

rocks, warmed by the sun,

perfectly formed

to take the curve of my spine

waterholes, these waterholes

with manifold, intersecting currents

that'd carry you along

to a different bank each time

I sat at the water's edge

eating kiwi fruit, skin and all,

flicking the gnarled ends

into the flow and thinking

of people in my life

and that

in a moment of happiness, or equanimity, maybe

is a tightly bound knot

of lack

I understood this, for a moment

as in felt it

like the cool water on my skin

Two things:

I wasn't going to live by this river

and my dog

would have to settle

for the murky rivers of home

her frantic skinny legs

obscured

by mud and tannin