izzy

It wasn’t an easy choice, exactly, but the cancer meds were expensive and you said you didn’t want to lose your hair. I shaved mine off anyway, but I agreed with you and it was just to look badass. I spent hours at the printers, looking at different paper stock and embossed covers while you scouted locations in South America and put together a team. I wrote my Great Australian Novel or something like it while you filmed an epic across three countries. Then we swapped spots. Your novel was like nothing I’ve ever read, but I like to think my film had a bit more…je ne sais quois. I penned an opera while you photographed nuclear fallout zones. I designed a line of menswear while you produced your first album. You designed the stage for our tour where I burnt the mic with my rhythm and rhyme. You designed and built a gallery to house our work, with a secret tomb beneath. I scratched poetry into the walls. The sculpture island was last, even though I’d never tried my hand at so much as a pottery mug. We designed it together but with our own sense of style. It was almost like each half of the island was in opposition to the other, but magnetically attached. When visitors walk down the path in the middle of the island, they will be struck by the weird beauty of our design and our clashing colour schemes. When they reach the jetty on the other side of the island, ready to leave, they will have to pass through the one sculpture that joins the two sides, they will have to clamber over the fingers of these two massive and tangled hands.

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sarah

I stood with a camera round my neck
And you said ‘sit. stay. stay. no, sit. sit. stay. bone? sit. bone? sit. stay. sit. sit. bone? sit.’
And the marbly black dog at your feet whined and fretted
I watched as her floppy wet brain tried to process the fact
That never in her four-legged life had her paws ever set foot on paper
And as trust and mistrust collided behind her eyes
With you wheeling overhead like a great breasted gull
I watched as certainty fled her small world
And all the power cut out

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