A box of old photos

In stor­age, one card­board box filled with photographs.
I know one grey envel­ope con­tains: Peppy, full name Peppermint,
Aged 2 or so, inspect­ing one minus­cule ball of black kitten fluff,
Two weeks old, soon to be Nemesis, by name if not by nature.

In stor­age, sev­en­teen wooden crates, marked by year, filled with:
Con­cert pro­grams; tick­ets; Neil Finn’s blue biro from the last
Split Enz con­cert in Sydney; diar­ies; a col­lage of my father and mother
From when I was five; a poster for the band Itchy Feet (star­ring one
Tim Freed­man), pink and black, pulled from a tele­graph pole
Near the Tivoli; high school essays about Trot­sky and the Cheka,
Mao Zedong and the cul­tural revolu­tion, and the float­ing of the dollar;
a blue folder covered in black pen and a blonde ser­i­ous moon­light David Bowie
Covered in con­tact; the ini­tial art­work for my first novel’, The Cat Lady,
By Ros­anne Ber­sten, aged 10 or so, the full draft of which
Nigel Wilby, teacher, never returned.

On an aban­doned Live­Journal, 4,799 com­ments on
who knows how many posts, broken links to pictures
once stored else­where, last post dated 2006, a poll
On what journ­als should con­tinue and where
Answered by pseud­onyms that echo ephemeral:
qamar, ozgenre, antho­lo­gie, azahru, daisynerd.
Prob­ably poems, def­in­itely stor­ies and tall tales,
Half-hearted attempts at essays and impas­sioned polemics
Rail­ing against cap­ital, class and corruption.

On a server whose domain name has expired:
Dir­ect­ory after dir­ect­ory of low-res JPEGs,
Ori­gin­als who knows where, and gifs with names like
Redball.gif for fancy lists; a two-part archived Hyper­Card stack —
Inter­act­ive pro­ject about Hyper­Text, writ­ten in 1993, couldn’t
Fit it onto one floppy, don’t ask; an essay about sites of resistance —
Spe­cific­ally, the WEF protest on Septem­ber 11, 2000, before
S11 became ⁹⁄₁₁, com­plete with: a list of all graf­fiti found on site,
Video inter­views with Afgh­ani anarch­ists and the first hints
Of the head­long dive I will later take into Mor­eiras and Zizek;
A hyper­text poem about min­strels and mis­chief, star­ted as
An exer­cise to show Mel­bourne Uni stu­dents how to code
And com­pleted as an ode to three people I’d fallen head over heels for:
A fire dancer, a mask-maker and an astro­phys­i­cist with a Ducati —
What can you do in the face of all that but write poetry?

In vari­ous boxes, scattered who knows where: video and audio tape,
Of, in no par­tic­u­lar order: me, on Good Morn­ing Aus­tralia, aged 17,
My first per­sonal revolu­tion; my voice, arrog­ant beyond belief, aged 8,
Review­ing a series of books on ABC Radio for the Year of the Child;
Me, wear­ing far too much make-up, step­ping off a purple Vespa
In Newry St, Fitzroy North, taking off a helmet and shak­ing my hair out
Like a parody of a sham­poo ad (inten­ded for a showreel pitch; tragic);
Me, in an ABC panel show, arguing for cyborgs and wings; me, uni student,
Occupy­ing the Vice-Chancellor’s office and my proud mother record­ing the news.

Some­where in all of this is a life. How you stitch it together into this now,
I have no idea. How do you col­lect it, lay it out, curate it into a seam­less self?

In stor­age, one card­board box. It is del­ic­ate. The neg­at­ives are fading.
Hurry.