I went for my health check on Jan 2nd 2025, something which I had been planning to do for a while now due to starting to feel more like the old man I am becoming.
This thought was getting me down a little bit last night, especially as I spent the last week, at first, dizzy and at the end, nauseous. Amy was talking about ‘finding herself’ again by going to live in the UK for a while. I’m happy for her to do this but it made me think about myself and my current drive and enthusiasm. Have I already ‘found myself’? If that is so, then what next?
Anyway, the health check all reported well which is good to know but at the same time has me thinking about what it is that is wrong with me, in the way that I am often just feeling under the weather.
As I have been writing blog entries from all across my life I can see that this has been consistent since my youth. Could it all be in my head? Am I a hypochondriac? What made me this way?
I notice that I am mostly happy, upbeat and positive when I’m at school and when I have that routine of having to be at certain places at certain times. When I have the freedom to choose, I take the lazy option and cannot find the drive I need.
Am I being too hard on myself? Am I a high achiever, or just never quite satisfied?
The health check that came back positive seems to have more questions than it might have answered. Perhaps that’s what I am waiting for. The answer.
As I’m still having a little trouble peeing, often having to milk out the last drops, I have a rectal examination to look forward to in a couple of weeks’ time. With any cancer seemingly already ruled out from the health check is this just the first sign of my body’s decline that I have to look forward to?
I guess I have to make some things to look forward to and in some ways I already have, they are just not in focus for me at this time.
I think I’m slowly talking my way out of whatever this little funk is. Everything will be ok. Or at least, everything will be.
I hope that you are looking after yourself. Love, me.
I might be mistaken but you were the very first (at least as I remember), the one who would awaken the child, underrehearsed, as a repeat customer.
The twelve turns swung around me for the third time; the damage by my own accord. With my eyes kept to the ground, these dirty hands of mine would be a blemish on her otherwise pristine record.
Since then, the decline in the quality of dates was evident on either side of the tracks. A shiny attractor at one time soon became as inelegant as another zombie lurking in the depths of my phone contacts.
That ghoul revived; dead friends with benefits and decorated with unseasonal flowers; the shiny patch on her nose survived and the black dress she still tightly fits gleamed in the light of the setting sun’s golden hours.
All neat lines, sharp angles, and overlapping layers; sliding like the glass elevators inside the chromium tangles; her face halted her betrayers; tinged red like the clouds and their orchestrators.
A moment of sudden uncertainty, pursuing fame and profit, wasn’t completely meaningless either; the lowest rung is always so dirty. And unable to stop it, in the arranged dating marketplace, at the hands of my deceiver.
Existing together somewhere beyond the family, outside the home, the lawn turned from green to black, then orange under the light’s care, cycling back through time’s blown; the abrasions of the rainy season had marked the surface of the stack;
Brand new, or a decaying shell on the point of collapse, the red pylons of the distant Yangpu Bridge mapped out all the city’s positions well; like two sticks of incense, perhaps, glowing at each tip and releasing all their smoky courage.
Illuminating everything that could see them and everything that could not, she could have been an actor, or a time traveller (from way back) then; sparks were cast down, sparkling hot glittering waves that tumbled forth and entrapped her.
Amber street lights, black roads, mauve tights, like a game restarting in something of a trance; like two fish trapped in a weir; stuck in the reddish neon nights, she disappeared down one hole, by chance, and from another she’d reappear.
The reflections gleamed , neither the air nor the water had changed with the years; the two incense sticks seemed crimson, solemn, and brought her indifferent to the blazing headlights of a thousand volunteers.
The surface of the river was calm, and the sky was broad; it felt like I had left my room behind and was standing with her arm-in-arm, a simple reward, together in the midnight street I might be mistaken and I may be so inclined.
This poem is an exercise of my own invention. I took a short story (Goodbye, Bridge of the East by Wang Zhanhei) that I wanted to read but hadn’t yet, and ran it through DeepSeek to extract whatever lines it found of a poetic nature, of which there were thirty-three. Without reading the story, I reworked all the lines, in order, into the poem you see here now.
I’m not sure how successful it is and I’m off to read the story now, wondering how similar it might be to what I came up with.
I’ll try this again but perhaps be a bit more selective with the extracted phrases, as this poem is way longer than anything I would normally write.
The following is a letter from December 31st, 2024, delivered today from the past
Dear FutureMe,
It’s December 31st 2024. Just another day as far as I feel. I’ve not invested much into important dates. So long as I remember Hayden’s birthday, Amy’s birthday and our wedding anniversary, that’s pretty much all I need for dates.
Of course, circumstances also dictate I must go to Thai immigration every 90 days and renew my visa every year. Boring but important duties.
Tomorrow I have to collect a stool sample and then on Jan 2nd, I go and do a health check at the hospital. In general, I’ve been feeling the best and healthiest that I have since I was a teenager (physically, at least). My problems all seem to be ‘old man’ related and I am a little bit concerned about my prostate, hence the need for a health check.
I’ve managed to keep posting a poem every day on my blog and feel that my writing has improved a little. I’ve also managed to keep an online diary every day that will get posted to the blog at some point. This is mostly interesting to me, to look back and reflect on how I’ve changed.
At this stage, I anticipate continuing with this writing as it keeps me grounded and also tests my abilities.
I’m still enjoying school and teaching – maybe too much! I guess I’m comfortable with everything and sometimes that reminds me that I may be taking things for granted.
It is also a little exhausting and doesn’t leave me with much energy and enthusiasm for other things. I am quite easily satisfied with my life but also have to remember that Amy is here and we could be doing things together. These days I let her take the lead as she is more aware of things happening around that we could go to together. I don’t really know about new restaurants or interesting events to check out. I’m just not looking around in those circles. I know that I’m a little wrapped up in myself and, as mentioned above, don’t want to take things for granted.
Tonight we will go to Mum and Dad’s for a NYE dinner, though I hope that we don’t end up staying until midnight. Amy’s brother has moved back from Bangkok now and Amy and I are both preparing our minds for the family dramas that this might bring.
I think that I will write another letter here after I get my health check results. Let’s see where life takes me.
I walked down the old, sandy wooden steps to the beach I had been here decades before everything looked different but the smell was the same a salt that cleared the nose and spits in your face time and time again
I remembered the flashing lights reflected on the water all the good cheer the dream that this day will never end up before the sun patiently impatient the horizons are soon to reveal the truth
…but this Christmas I wanna die I’ve seen Satan and Jesus in a crimson-bloodied sky angel wings pummeling the city to dust
Shared with an AllPoetry.com contest by Bad Jonny, who gave us the italicised lines as starters. I decided to use both and link them.
Warrane’s children watched the tall ships come; now towers rise where the songlines hum, unbroken This scarred earth breathes beneath the city’s beat: a heart they couldn’t silence, slow, deep and true This earth remembers every footfall: songs of Gadigal sorrow and steel unspoken Lasting months or more, a communal, visible crying, the place always bound by grief
Two centuries of silence could not bury their song; they still sing their harbour home Images and names, kept memories – unseen, unsaid – the spirit safely travels through All these years of bleeding, the harbour knows; the rocks remember the cry of every stone Unresolved collective and intergenerational mourning, still seeking relief
Grief continues because the causes have never been fully acknowledged or repaired Death manifests through mass dispossession, disease, violence, and murder malevolent All the sorries are never finished, the deeper losses are continuously shared Peoples excluded from decision-making about their culture, heritage and land
Deep historical culture, reduced to plaques, acknowledgements, and museum displays Bulldozed by infrastructure and development; damaged or erased without consent The least I owe is attention, some respect; The least I owe is to not look away Protection laws weaker than commercial interests; consultation, a token hand
What my ancestors named discovery, the land remembers as interruption still I inherit the language of arrival without having paid the cost of entry I stand here in admiration, aware that the ground knows more than I ever will Just two centuries is but a heartbeat to a people who measure time undeclared Grief, which demands absolution, is only another way of asking to be spared
For a longette: The theme is social commentary (usually critical of the status quo and reaching towards a better/longer future) The title of a longette is long; 40 syllables The poem consists of 21 long lines—of 20 syllables each A longette has an ACAB rhyme scheme, with a final rhyming couplet: ACAB/acab/a’c’a’b’/A-C-A-B-/A’C’A’B’B’ The poem can be separated into 4 stanzas of 4 lines each, with a final stanza of 5 lines, or set without stanza breaks, at the poet’s discretion. Use of emojis is encouraged. The same emoji may be repeated throughout the poem, but if you want to use more than one emoji or symbol, you must conform to a 1312 scheme Emojis and other symbols are not counted as syllables. Collaboration is encouraged.
I couldn’t comprehend using emojis in a poem, though Catherin’s sample poem uses them well. And on re-reading the rules, I see that I actually used 21-syllable lines instead of 20! Perhaps I can claim to be the creator of this form now! Either way, I don’t think that I will be attempting it again soon!
I initially struggled to find a topic but as I discovered that Catherin is based near Sydney, a place I became very familiar with for 20 years, my mind kept coming back to Gadigal country. The Gadigal people being part of the Aboriginal owners of the land on which Sydney is built. The only problem? I knew next to nothing about the topic beyond the fact that my ancestors have completely fucked them over time and time again.
So I turned to AI for help. Here is the process I went through:
Prompt (Deepseek): I want to write a poem about the struggle of the Aboriginal people in Gadigal over time and need a 40-syllable title for it. What can you come up with?
I was hoping that a title would help trigger further ideas, which it did. I haven’t had much luck with syllable counts with Deepseek but it did come up with a set of phrases that I noted down before switching to Chat-GPT5 from here on out. I soon discovered that Chat-GPT could identify syllables per word correctly but then couldn’t add up the simple math totals correctly. Don’t trust AI with your maths!
Prompt: Can you give me information on how the Gadigal people mourn and also how they still struggle to be recognised?
Prompt: Can you suggest language that avoids appropriation while remaining powerful?
Prompt: What about some ideas around ‘white guilt’ for the deeds of our ancestors and how to think about that in the context of the Aboriginal people?
Prompt: I need to find some more poetic lines that deal with this perspective and issue – they need to be fairly long sentences. Ideas?
Prompt: Tell me more about this: “Many Gadigal people speak of ‘sorry that never finished’ “?
This poem is my selection of phrases taken from the various outputs of these prompts and then manipulated (by myself, not AI) to meet the form requirements. When I had finished, I asked AI to give me feedback on rhythm and flow and did a little more tweaking. At this point, though, I had been working on this poem for more than 5 hours and I know that I could improve it more with another 5 hours but….that’s enough. 5 hours is often 4 hours and 59 minutes longer than it takes me to write some poems!
I learned a lot through doing this exercise but tomorrow I’ll be aiming for something a little simpler!
“Do not touch me…” “Seriously,” I said. I’m not just the next generation: I’m a real survivor. Hard as old bread.
Quicker than grandma’s slippers thrown with boomerang precision. At the age of five, I could already “read” my mother’s mood to avoid collision;
At seven, I had a set of keys and instructions: “You can find food in the fridge.” And, from there, were all deductions.
At nine, I was my own chef, discovering my own taste. I knew what I liked, what I was and exactly the future I faced.
Spending days outside, without a phone, with just a well-planned route: the hill, the river, returning home at night, perhaps minus one mud-stuck boot.
Real maps made of these small battles that I survived. Scratches treated with saliva and leaves, medicines contrived.
If it hurt, we just laughed and sought distraction from the pain, because further adventures beckoned so there was no reason to complain.
Eating bread with sugar on top, drinking from the garden hose; microbiomes that yoghurt would dream of. Allergies? What are those?
I know fifteen tricks to remove stains from grass, fat, blood or ink, because we only had one set of clothes and wore them til they’d stink.
Transistor radios, black and white TV, gramophones, vinyl and cassettes, carrying CDs and a Discman, singing songs no one forgets.
Tightening tapes with a pencil means little to an MP3 soon with a driver’s license, there was a wider world to see.
Travelling the country in a rusty old car, without hotels, air conditioning or GPS, just with a tatty, discoloured car atlas and an old beer mat with a barely legible address
Always arriving safely, maybe late, but with a smile. The last generation to live without the internet, and revolution was all about style.
I had no backup batteries, or worries of a dead phone. The landline hung on the hallway wall, unanswered if there was no one home.
Believing that any missed calls meant: “I’m fine, I’ll call you back.” I read books while I was waiting or fixed myself a sneaky snack.
I fixed everything with tape or a clip; I rarely bought anything new. With only one TV channel to watch There was always something else to do.
Made of “emotional asbestos,” flowing easily from the back of the duck. With the reflexes of an urban ninja They were the times of making my own luck.
Carrying a menthol candy older than your child in my pocket. I survived without sunscreen and a helmet Or seatbelts in my rocket.
Schooling without computers, youth without multiple screens. Encyclopaedias had all the answers once you’d deciphered what it means.
I had to trust my instincts and say what I thought aloud. Now I have more memories than you have photos in the cloud.
So “Don’t touch me,” I say again Though I’m not sure you could anyway. Here’s my number, call my landline and make sure you’ve got something to say.
An epic poem for me! This one is inspired and paraphrases an article that I, frustratingly, neglected to note the origin. I’m annoyed with myself about that! I’d also like to add that I don’t particularly agree with much of the thought within this piece. Of course, everyone reminisces about their past, their childhoods, etc, but that doesn’t make it better than now – just different. I’ve never subscribed to the ‘things were better in my day’ philosophy. Congratulations if you read this poem to the end! I know that I might not have!
1994ever 