Lost in Intertext

In my ear. ‘La puce à l’oreille.’ It’s a buzz. A flea. A fleet. A fleeting. Les Puces. Paris. An antique stepchair to my library. I’m short, you see. I can’t reach the grand books that are over the top. Would they were ZZ. Bottom shelf. Reachable. But even ZZ is beyond my grasp. Hey, she even made it onto the cover of Poets & Writers, or was it the Best of New Yorker Magazine?

Priscilla, was puce really the colour of queer? You were the true Queen of the desert. No matter if you, too, loved Diana. That shade of lime yellow, warmer.

“Warmer”. “Er ist ein Warmer.” “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Gay, yes, but never queer, always masculine. Ernest. It’s never She.

She was the Queen of the Jungle. And, my God, my Goddess, is the dd correct? I can reach that, can live with it. But the jungle of lingua franca, that moronic ox of multilingualism, what do I do about that?

Would the French say "ecrivaine" where I just say “writer”? Do they hit it right on with the "vain". Vain is what a writer must be. Slit a vein. Wannabe. Wannado. Wanadoo is my email, but the vowel doubles up where the consonant can’t. Is not allowed to. Just like “weekend”?

Doo-bee-doo. To be. Da bee stings. The flea bites. They both leave a throbbing red halo on my skin. An ache before the swelling subsides as I reach for meaning within the multicultural images of my mind.

Stuff wax in my ears. Let it melt down in the heat of my Ozspeak ‘brine’.

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Published online in 2004 in Splatter Magazine (Australia) and in Lit Up (UNSW Union).