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Britney Spears releases a seminal initiative in which she will do an inspiring yoga pose each day to keep her fans’ spirits up.

Zach Braff from Scrubs is now singing a cover of Imagine in a harrowing piece-to-camera.

Jojo - no one knew where she went - but she’s back with a bespoke piece of viral songwriting.

Someone I went to high school with is roasting Jacinda for giving grants to people who should ‘get off their asses and work properly’. I think they sell Lamborghinis for a living.

Your exes decide it’s a good time to get in touch so you can see if they would still throw you overboard if the ship was sinking.

Everyone is left wondering if they still think they’re too good to work at Pak’N Save.

Killing time

I used to work in the yards with my dad in
a Panterra t-shirt and two-tone stubbies.

The truck drivers wouldn’t ever listen to me
when I told them how to reverse into the race.

We’ll just wait til he gets off the phone aye.

Fuck you, I’d say under my breath and put down
the rattle to go sip a lime Mizone in the ute.

When Corona virus hits I call my grandmother
and she says I’m sorry you have lost all your work. 

Perhaps you should go and help out on the farm
and learn how to kill sheep for a living instead.

Misfortune

I’m interviewing a woman with cancer.
She’s younger than me - I can tell because I remember walking around in a denim skirt like that when I was twenty-five.
I remember thinking I could go along with everything.
And I remember believing that I was immune to the unsuspecting horrors of misfortune.

She’s showing me around her house while our camera crew sets up outside. Her cat climbs into her arms and she’s wandering around telling me how she fell in love four months before it happened -

before she was stripped of the illusion that time would go on forever.

Don’t worry - she assures me, laughing. He’s at work, so we can talk about anything we want.

I want to tell her about something bad that’s happened to me so she knows I’m not just a dumb white girl waving a microphone around the place. But nothing tragic enough comes to mind. 

And so I find myself standing in this girl with cancer’s house fucking thinking about that scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary 2 when Bridget's in a Thai prison and realises her story of struggles pales in comparison to everybody else’s. 

It would be too far to make up a lie right now. I don’t but I want to. I say nothing instead.

We pass through her rooms that look like they’ve had the flu for a week; everything a bit unwashed, covered in cat hair and lopsidedly hanging everywhere. There's lots of pamphlets on the table. I try not to read them or think too much.

Sorry for the mess, she says, I’m so embarrassed, as though she can hear what I’m thinking.

And god, now not only am I now thinking of shitty pop culture references, I’m also judging the state of the house of a girl with cancer. I want to leave immediately and donate all my money to a good charity, write letters of apology to anyone I’ve ever said anything bad about, jump in a deep pool and start my life over completely. 

Instead I smile and say, are you kidding? It’s great.

Cancer makes you selfish like that. The same way weddings do - in the back of your mind you’re either thinking - why me? Or, why not me? It’s both embarrassing and difficult to reconcile.

Kitchen, bedroom, spare room. We get to the bathroom and the cat leaps from her arms and the girl slowly touches the grooves in the crystals she has on display, thinking out loud.

I was always spiritual but now I really feel things, she says,

picking up an amethyst and rolling it between her fingers. It catches the light. She turns and looks me in the eyes, her skin so translucent and white like a Dove ad from the early 2000s.

I've lost everything soft about myself, she says,

handing me the stone and running her hand over her head patched with baby hair and thin, spidery veins.

I’ve stopped caring because I can’t, she says. I don’t really remember what being beautiful feels like anymore.

My chest falls inwards. She goes on.

All this fucked up stuff has happened to my body and my life, but you know what the weirdest part about it all is? She asks, smiling.

I still feel like I have everything.

And I’m standing there, small and insignificant in her white bathroom in her shared house and

I have never seen anything more beautiful and doomed in my whole life.

Valey Day 7.0

If you fall for possibilities again you’re an idiot 

driving head-first into a pile-up northbound on SH1 before a long weekend.

Ashton Kutcher’s coming for you too -

he’s going to round the corner with his vanload of local fuckbois any minute now. They’ve been hiding out on a street nearby with satellites on the roof and TV screens installed behind the front seats, live-streaming the whole thing.

This gets them every time, they’ll say, cracking up over open cans of Mother.

The show ends and the bois go home to their girlfriends with clean hair and monogrammed helium balloons they bought from an ad off Instagram to make promises they’ll never be able to keep.

And you, after you’ve been Punk’d, you leave again. On the plane on your way to somewhere new you meet the woman in the seat across the aisle -

She looks you in the eyes and says - I know exactly where you’ve come from and I know exactly where you’re going. She won’t stop holding your gaze, grabbing your hands and pulling you in close so only you can hear –

Keep buying the tickets. Keep taking the rides. It’s the only thing we’ve got.

Simplicity

For Marous, Tapia de Casariego

I want to remember this day forever
where nothing happened at all.

We sit and eat white bread, our
legs stretched out on the rocks and

two 70 something women are runnning
in their blue togs into the sea ahead of us.

The sun’s so hot and I turn to you and say,
This could just be the best day of my life.

Leaving

Madrid

The plane lifts off and
my heart goes forward and
my body goes back.

Down there you're somewhere
insignificant, all disappeared,
wrapped up in cloud.

The yellow streets and their windows
and the moon moving through them -
I’ll miss everything about this city.

Only for a second - and then
it goes. The missing,
it comes back when I’m

driving. I turn the radio up and
go round the bend fast and
loud enough not to feel it -

at some point you have to
choose a life you want
before it leaves you and then

all you’re doing is leaving.
And all you have are memories
of all the people you have been.

Black angel on the Berkhamsted line

London

A man dressed in black stood next to me last night waiting for the Berkhamsted line to come, two hours late because they keep misplacing drivers and not finding new ones.

We didn’t talk because I was feeling tired and mysterious. But when I saw him I immediately knew that if we were both on a reality tv show we’d form an alliance and vote the annoying people off the island.

I was in the last warm clothes I owned and at the end of my road when it came to getting lost in foreign cities where no one knew my name or cared what I looked like.

He was carrying his bike home from a design consultation job he liked because he’d worked hard and well his whole life. His arms stretched in old tattoos, telling all his stories.

All this you can tell from a stranger if you’re listening hard enough.

The train finally came and everyone surged the same annoying way they do when the plane’s just landed and no one’s meant to be standing yet. The man in black stood back from the crowd so I could go in first,

looked at me and said, You need to get home faster than me - I can see it in your eyes. I asked him how he knew - You can just tell these things, sometimes. Without even needing to ask.

And then the train started moving
and he disappeared into the carriage and
I’ll never see him again.

Home List

New shorts - 
           one pair is never
enough.
Go to 
                        Auckland to find the small places I
                                                                  left some of those dreams.
Send invoice, 
             make money
                                      again.
Message 
             Charlotte, all three 
                                                            of them.
A dress for the wedding,
                                shoes, 
                                                 speech,
            eyelashes you can glue on and take off, Farmers
I guess.
Birkhamsted -
                         I wrote something when I was there, 
                                                            I thought it might be good,                                
          where is it?
Find a Justice 
                        of the Peace - there was that man with all the sculptures                                                                   
    outside his house -
                                                it’s Hawke’s Bay,
he must still be there.
Keep proof
             of everywhere I’ve been
                                    in case I forget. I need it for so many things                     for the application that
                                                                        needs signing.
Life -
            remember that too - the acupuncturist
                                    was good
                                                        at that.
The last words in my last journal;
                                                                                    consider
                                                                                                            changing.

- Heathrow Airport

Sadness

Sometimes you feel sadness like
the river never stops.

You do anything you can
to make it end,

run for as long as it takes
to forget about it. But

don’t
forget about it:

if you do it will all
be for nothing.

Sadness is the
water under your bridge, the

lake under your bed -
don’t go walking around

at night without it.
You might just

jump into a stranger’s car
and ride away with it for good.

Impossibilities

So far it’s
not working out for me
imagining you
in all the places I wish you could be.
This would feel like the opposite of aloneness
I just know it.

/

Watching you carry out your life alongside me -
separate (of course)
but together (still).
The light’s still alive between now and
where it would have been.

/

We have crossed seas with our words
and still
the impossibility of the air around us
remains.

/

How to translate these mis-stepped
opportunities into something that
would feel like fate all
along?
Not possible,
one of us must have concluded.

/

When I cannot hear you
calling across the clouds I know
something is wrong.
Too much time has passed.
Too much space has gone between.
The silence has been too long.