I had the misfortune of going to a shopping centre today. It was new and white, crazy angles and not-there-glass, blue lights along the railings of escalators and lowered false ceilings. It dazzled and awed. It took a long time to open. All those low bass rumblings and the whining drill sounds take fruition in this thing so clean and ordered. With the area cordoned off like it was and the muffled sounds booming late into the night, you would think they were creating gargantuan life, a mad sci...

What was it like growing up as a Catholic? I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there. Someone who wasn’t me was there, a chemo patient who doesn’t recall who he was before the uncomfortably nameable started cannibalising him. If you believe in a soul, this situation is a distinct possibility. If you believe in the ability or possibility of losing one, then it becomes a certainty. I wouldn’t be the same person if I hadn’t left my soul at the atrium of a Church. I don’t believe in a diminished...

I never thought I would say this. I am sick to death of university. Sick to boredom, sick to anaemia, sick to wasting – sickly in every single way except in the way that could be diagnosed and classified, treated and cured. This is not to say that I am tired of knowledge, that I am exhausted with the art of accumulation. I am a prodigious collector of invisible things. An entomologist of transparent insects that are always interbreeding, always hidden and searched for in the darker and war...

The game in itself is unusual and parochial. You can tell by the name – Australian Rules. You just know its not going to have an international following and we aren’t as self-absorbed as the Americans as to concoct a World Series when it could only ever be us Vs the world and the world can’t, and wouldn’t, want to play. We play the Irish though. But they don’t play Australian Rules (or Aussie rules as we call it, in our nasal and kinda breathless way), they play Gaelic Football. We shi...

There is some small consolation in words when the times move in a quick succession of bloody acts, not words, just the silent sucking of air and the soul sucking rip of an explosion, each bomb blast with an eye, just like a storm, gathering itself inward, we breathe the fuel that kills us, and then a quickly expanding pupil of tree stump buildings and wretched, dead humanity. Some say that blood tastes like copper, and explosives too have a taste, plastic, almost domestic, death grows more po...

Not more than 5 days ago my dear brother decided to give up the vile carcinogens that we affectionately know as cigarettes. In doing so he turned into a vile carcinogen himself. As a smoker he was a mildly amusing, go lucky young man, full of life and aplomb, talkative and amicable to all and sundry – even to those he didn’t much care for. After his hasty and obscurely caused decision to quit and the resulting cessation of the habit he has turned into a malevolent, and dare I say it, vi...

I sit out here within my resplendent garden, or should I make that necessary correction – not my garden, my parents garden, a garden of one generation; the burial place of a duck, dog and countless collections of memories that linger under the new growth of vegetation. I sit here and carefully place words upon the screen of this laptop, and yet, I am still being bitten by this cold, this chill wind that resembles too closely the sensation that often runs the gauntlet of my spine. It seems tha...