Forever and ever it goes.

Forever and ever it goes.

Another lover – missed two, three, four – more, maybe. Time is a season, and you are the leaves that fall from the trees every single Autumn. I wonder – am I the fantasy you keep in parallel – with the life you chose, all those years ago? Or does my brain, or body, or curiosity, or past – draw you in and spit you out? Does it ever leave a bitter taste in your mouth? Do you sense the wall, wish to hollow it out, only then to say – I never meant it to be this way?

And so forever and ever it goes.

Forever and ever it goes.

January, another, to-be-lover. She was mine and I hers – a spark of a moment. Hot and heavy and alive – was it recognition? or remembrance? or the promise of passion pronounced from your mouth? You whispered – not everyone is like you. At all. And I often wonder – why do you like The Hour of the Star? And will we meet again, in another bar, on another plane – existing beyond the margins of a memory kept somewhere deep in the pages of our fragmented sleep?

But forever and ever it goes.

Forever and ever it goes.

There is the shape of a lover I am yet to know. Your heart, like every other, aches for an other – and I wonder – will the muscle expand to hold me too, firm and unending? Or is the fantasy a dream with no beginning, only a middle meandering through sloping mountains to a life adrift, walking amidst the dirt of your desire-path – your life to be lived. Today, I carved a fork in the road, took the one less travelled, and found – both sides led me back to the start, to the place where my heart longs to learn the language of loving you. No matter the geography, or proximity:

Forever and ever it goes.

Forever and ever it goes.

I always think I’m prepared. That I’ve ticked all the right boxes, sacrificed enough of the little I do make to cover the costs. But the fee is always greater than I anticipate. Maybe I’m doing my taxes wrong. Then I think of the years where I spent money I didn’t have, to see a specialist I couldn’t afford — someone wh…

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This is a love poem,
written for the twin feather
plucked from the same swan.
Divorced by timing,
the tale is one 
of longing,
of lust.
Of memories woven
into sacred wicker caskets,
of dawn and of dusk.
Of floating across rivers 
and craving what is lost.
Of infinite iterations
with finite futures,
and a narrator that says:

This is the story
of star cr…

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Things I eroticise:
Love.
Longing.
The desire for change.
Learning the language 
of a new lover 
that will never
– can never –
be a lover at all.

Eroticism opens the way
to death,
said Bataille.
I remember reading
Story of the Eye
and thinking:
the love I crave is dark,
and in stark
contrast to the love
I have held. 

Things I eroticise: 
The strength …

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I dream of you often.

Pseudo-memories cast shadows

that lengthen with

the rising sun -

just in time to eat

the darkness. Your

words - ascribed

now, from a different mother

tongue. Imagined syllables

roll off the brain into

an abyss of once knowing

what it is you would say.

But the body cannot

forget what the mind

tries to abridge.

And so it is on this day -

that the sl…

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The dream of a house:
A Manor built 
from Manna Gum –
Holy and infinite.
                                   Still,
                                   the echoes ricochet 
                                   in my mind.
There is no sense
of time
just the loop, loop, loop of
a dream, 		   
                                   intangible.
It is here: that 
relief and grief exist
in the same 
bated breath.

What bird is that?

Currawong,

you said.

Currawong.

You feel sacred.

And in your sanctity

there is knowing.

Lore calls you:

                          Harbinger of Truth, 
                          of change.

                          Gatekeeper 
                          of thresholds.

Are you mine?

Currawong.

Am I crossing between life

and another life,

or deat…

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Existence is not an individual affair.

A quote written by one of my favourite physicists, Karen Barad, from their book Meeting the Universe Halfway.

I loved this quote so much that I had my friend engrave it for me on a lighter. It’s a reminder that co-creation is ongoing, that existence always requires more than…

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Burden does not exist in 

our alphabet.

Syllables crafted 

in silent moments,

in handwritten notes,

book insignias.

In love that knows …

Our alphabet is a secret

			                	(language)

Passed from the hand of Self

To: the hand of Other.

Across time

		space	

			place 

				memory

					     millenia

					of

				every

			atom

		we

	have

ever

been.

Like Eve, I once asked:

e…

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I described to a friend very recently how I had been feeling content, that I had just been enjoying life even in its simplicity. They…

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As I have so often done, I turn to books for any form of solidarity and small threads of understanding. And the place I have landed is somewhere between the most good you can do (Peter Singer), and the absolute necessity of ritual (Byung-Chul Han).

We are living in a time of deep poverty of spirit. The very thing that makes us uniquely human is either dormant or dying, and the poverty exists because we are perpetually distracted.

We do not have attention spans anymore because we passively avoid and cannot sit with ourselves, our emotions, or the emotions of others presently. Everyone is afraid to face the truth of the world and the truth of the self. We use apparatuses like the phone to further isolate ourselves from meaningful, vulnerable, truly connected conversation, and even more so from community. The phone call itself is not the issue. But the phone as computer - as distraction - is the issue. Other apparatuses of distraction are work, production, substance - basically anything that can be pushed into excess.

Using ritual demands us to buy back our attention, and by extension, our time.

Buying back time from the system is a quiet revolution. And it is the only way to reject the system that creates more suffering - at the macro level, but also at the micro level. Time is our greatest currency.

For ritual to exist, there must be time. Time requires intention and intention requires attention. Attention is the thing that creates time. If we bring our attention - our awareness - to the present, time will immediately lengthen.

Like in spiritual practice, we must ground in order to connect into the greater flow of life - into personal and collective life force - and the way to ground into life is through ritualised connection. Through presence. Through consistently showing up and cultivating space for vulnerability, joy, love, pain and every other human experience to exist safely. It’s through the forging of community. I’m not talking big community events, I’m talking about 5 people sitting at a dining table. I’m talking about going for the same walk every week with the same person on the same day. Reading aloud with friends or your kids, or even just having a silent reading hour with them once a week or month. Dancing in a living room with the people you love every morning or night. Sitting in the same cafe every week with the same person and co-writing or just co-existing. These spaces allow for honest conversation to exist, for free thought to form, for small wins to be witnessed, for anger and hurt about the world to be heard, felt, seen. Smaller communities create greater impact because they reject the structures of a machine (society) dependent on isolation, and instead foster safe, reliable, consistent spaces for humanness to exist and distraction to fall away.

It’s an uncomfortable question to ask how we are showing up regularly with intention and connection in mind. Because the truth is, most of us aren’t. We’re using ‘social’ platforms to ‘connect’ through messaging and ‘interacting’, and then getting immediately sidetracked with mindless scrolling. Or we’re using AI to erase our connection to self and others by eradicating the need to use our brain and think. We’re stuck on the wheel of produce, produce, produce, instead of seeing the act of production and output as sacred and rooted in an opportunity for intentional creation. Whether it is connection to others, or connection to a deeper version of self, it all by extension is related to the interconnected collective - to everyone.

Love is a quiet currency in a world that champions endless production, consumption, and passivity. Being time poor is a way to prove worth in this system, but it is always at the cost of love. Because to love deeply, fully, honestly, requires presence and time. You don’t have to look far to realise this system is clearly fractured. But it is in those fractures that we see: the most Anarchist thing someone can do is remove distraction and commit to loving more.

I’m not saying you have to eradicate your phone or quit your job. But think about the current shape of rituals in your life, your phone being one of those rituals. How can you flip that mind-numbing, consumer-based ritual and create more space for meaningful, connected, honest ritual and by default, more life?

In my life:
The ritual of scrolling has now become a ritual of reading.
The ritual of stimulants has now become the ritual of stillness.
The ritual of messaging has now become the ritual of calling or voice noting.
The ritual of exercise I no longer enjoy has now become the ritual of intentional movement.
The ritual of typing notes on my phone has now become the ritual of taking pen to paper.
The ritual of streaming music has now become the ritual of selecting and listening to albums, CD’s, vinyl.

In a world where we are living in a crisis of spirit and heart-centred poverty, we collectively need to find ritual within our wider networks, too, it’s not all individual. Where are the spaces that we can come together and be honest about where we are at in our lives instead of pretending we’re thriving while we’re secretly drowning? Where are the human, face-to-face, embodied spaces where you can mourn and grieve for the state of hopelessness of the world, and in the same breath still find moments of joy and solidarity and love?

Community is the most important thing in this time.

The most good I can do right now is write an article that hopefully shares this solidarity and thought process with even just a couple of people in my community.

If, like me, you are feeling the heaviness of the human spirit as we watch global chaos unfold, perhaps there is a ritual in coming together with others and holding the emotional weight together. Do not be afraid to invite people in your life into the space of ritual. It is the only tangible, love-centred thing we can consistently bring forth right now. Love is the greatest form of Anarchism in this world.

There will forever be an ebb and a flow in life - moments of joy and moments of sorrow. Moments of ecstasy and moments of pain. Moving through these waves can be tiresome, arduous. A seemingly endless sea of back and forth that calls into regular question thoughts and feelings of existentialism. It’s a whiplash that is inconsistent and difficult to na…

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Before the trip, I came across a book at work: The Rites of When. Through images, essays and interviews, the book documents a film and sound w…

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I waited for you but you never arrived. Maybe I didn’t wait long enough. Maybe I didn’t yell from the valley loud enough, stro…

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I think it was Oscar Wilde who said life imitates art. Whoever said it, it is true — to a degree. Life can certainly imitate art, and in many ways it even craves it. It craves to be like art in its depth, in its expression, in its reflection of self and the wider world we exist in. And vice…

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Night turns to day,
day dissolves night —

the clinging to corners
of canvas that is skin,
inked with revelation
stained from temptation,
of moments once shared
and the ones that we lost.

M…

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The thought of this poem, one I wrote late last year, came to mind this morning. It is a poem that speaks of the fictions we tell ourselves. The ones that bring us both comfort and sorrow. The ones that, if…

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A lot of my personal work speaks to the ghosts held in the spaces we engage with. The poems I designed for this project pay tribute to the past, to the future, and to the overlapping of the two as they merge and co-exist in space/time.

Exploring the past of the sites, I looked at its links to Black Rock and the Barwon River Ovoid Aqueduct, specifically at the transitions of these sites from once fully working spaces. These sites went from being places of importance - of industrial significance and indicators of growth - to defunct and pushed out, a cycle that is evident across many cities in states of deindustrialisation. It was clear that at these specific sites, industrial components were laid to rest but nature had (over time) found a way to reclaim. It had found a way to overlay the industrial, creating a new one where the two worlds – industrial and natural – had the opportunity to converge. This journey is followed in the first poem.

The second poem explores the present and future of the space. In particular, it looks at an ethnographic concept known as the non-place. Essentially, it is the idea that there are spaces in our fast-paced, changing world that are places of transience. These are spaces that empower identity by way of connectivity, they are meeting points for people. Historically, at the beginning of modernity when the non-place was first introduced as a concept, it spoke to a threatening of slowness and the ways we previously connected in society. As we have continued to lean into the pace and shift of our society, the nature of connection has also changed. Places like the train station have become significant in new ways. They are the apex of change – the point at which we anonymously meet and converge as we make our journey to the places of significance to us as individuals. This is the journey of the second poem.

When reading them, they appear as two distinct poems but when they are read together they form a third poem as they overlap line-for-line. This third poem is the intersection of past and present converging. It speaks to the entangled and unfolding nature of time and the ways in which they overlap and create new narratives and meaning, and how they are forever connected.

The full poem can be read on the attribution plaque located at the entrance of Marshall train station in Geelong. Pieces of the poem have been sandblasted into the cement of the entry way leading into the station. The different depths of sandblasting represent the different poems each line was taken from. The lighter depth is representative of the past, the deeper depth is representative of the unfolding future.

More of my work can be found on my Instagram page @yasminmob

How many times are you willing to die in order to truly live? A question I have circled back to many times this week.

I have been on a journey: follow the wonder and let the story unfold. This is the concept for the novel I have found myself writing. Prophetic, literary dreams have permeated my reality for the past year. …

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