Someday. One Day, Any Day Now

And one day you will wake up into a life completely different from that which you are living now.

And one day you will wake up and not remember your nightmares because sleep will not be a battlefield. 

And one day you will wake up to realize you have forgotten his name. 

And one day you will wake up and recognise the face in the mirror. 

And one day you will wake up and the day will not threaten you, time will not drown you, existing will not frighten you. 

And one day you will wake up and see that you are free.

Tarantula Hill

We never told anyone about the dead dog in the driveway or what happened the day that Cole was admitted to hospital after being found somewhere at the foot of Tarantula Hill, bleeding on the insides. It was the summer of 1998 and I'd forgotten everything I’d loved because during the stretch of weeks before our summer holidays, I had met Michael Trent. Everyone at school looked up to him and he knew it. His girlfriend Marianne knew it. And she had a cluster of pretty friends who would move around as if in an orbit with Michael’s prettier friends. They didn’t talk to me the year before. It wasn’t because I’m poor. introverted and painfully inept when it comes to social interactions, or even because I was on the debating team and enjoyed time in the library and playing the flute. They simply didn’t see I was there, blended into the backdrop of their lives. They looked right through me, as if I was just the air they were breathing. Something changed when the season’s did and autumn came, and it had something to do with a house party. 

I won’t go into it, but a girl- one of Marianne’s friends- was drunk and she’d found her way to a high window, opened it, and was sitting. swaying on the sill. She was crying and saying she was ready to jump. I only happened to be in the vicinity because I had gone upstairs to the top floor bathroom to vomit the beer I’d been endlessly gulping just to calm myself down. In the cabinet over the sink I looked for some mouthwash so I could rinse the stench of regurgitated alcohol off my tongue but instead found a prescription pill bottle with the name ‘Steiner, Janet’ printed on the label. I figured out that it must have been the mother of Garrett Steiner, whose house it was, and he was Marianne’s ex-boyfriend. I swallowed the pills  and went out of the bathroom and that’s when I saw this girl I recognised from mental images I had of Michael surrounded by a crowd of faces at school- faces heavy with ennui but somehow shimmering in the light of his halo. People got wind of it very quickly and started to freak out, making it worse. She had crossed the threshold of drunk into something horrible and worse, something familiar to me, but then and there I told myself- whatever- I’d  always imagined this kind of over-emotional yet totally empty dramatic performance as a regular occurrence within this social circle. I talked to her and I don’t really remember the specifics because the pills had kicked in, interacting with the beer in my stomach, and everything in my memory is wrapped in this filmy glaze. I must have said something coincidentally and exactly right or just what she needed to hear or maybe I said a bunch of things, but she literally stepped down, weeping mascara all over my t-shirt, and held onto my unsteady shoulder, suffocating and tight. She went on to spread the word to her friends, including Marianne and Michael, and said I’d saved her life, which isn’t technically true or true in any other respect as I’m not sure it was ever in danger. After that, back at school, it was instant. They saw me, they waved me over to their table at lunch, they chatted to me behind the backs of teachers in classes we shared and suggested hanging out on Tarantula Hill when school was over for the summer. 

They were very interesting people, it seemed,  and all very special. I was only just getting to know them and spend time in their orbit and everything was different. I’d known Cole for at least eight years and he wasn’t even in the same solar system. I guess we used to be what you’d call best friends, but so much changed. I wanted to change with it. Marianne was a hand model and her family owned half the property in Prague or something. The suicidal roof girl was involved in countless activities and clubs- her list of interests would be pages long-but she apparently wrote a lot. Poetry, prose, creative non-fiction, and all that. She just didn’t show it off or let anyone read it, which I could understand. Her boyfriend, Joey, was from a family whose house could contain at least five the size of the one I live in, and he collected various athletic trophies. Garrett was the drummer in a band with one girl and two other guys, and they performed live every so often at a local venue where I occasionally bought coffee. These people- it was as if they were so distant and different compared to me, like they weren’t even human, but something that transcended me and everything about life as I knew it. So enviable, so enigmatic; they were extraordinary people in my eyes, and when they glanced my way and beckoned me over, I felt special too. Or at least like I could be, someday. 

 Then there was Michael. I fell in love with Michael Trent last summer. He stood at six feet and two inches, just one inch short of me, with chestnut-coloured hair and shoulders strong enough to hold up the sky and shrug at the same time. Even the lilt of his voice was mesmerising. I was captivated by the cadence of his words, regardless of what he was saying, and when he spoke it was sometimes with  lopsided lips, smiling; sometimes from behind a heavy frown, his features turned inwards as if to protect him from affection. Back then, I barely knew him but I knew I was in love. I came to know him so well and he came to know me too. Realistically I was more eager to learn about him than he was to learn about me, so maybe he didn’t really know me at all. Whatever, the love is still there. We just never talked about some of the things that happened last summer because it wasn’t worth discussing anyway, and I can’t remember most of it. Not accurately, anyway. We smoked a lot of weed and drank a lot of anything with alcohol in it so I’m hardly a reliable eyewitness to the series of events that nonetheless leave me with a cold chill that rushes like sweat down my back and then my head starts to hurt. Maybe I need glasses.

I think there was a time that Cole reached out to me specifically, around the time I was getting to know all these new people. I don’t remember what it was about exactly. It might have been that he was going through some family matter- at the start we had bonded because my mother is a recovering addict and his father is a functioning alcoholic, but his parents are still together, unlike mine. It wasn’t the one thing that made us close for a time but I used to be able to tell him about what was going on in my head or at my house, and he could tell me about his parents and how all he wanted was for them to get a divorce. We shared other interests but, like I said, things change and people change and I was spending my time trying to get to know Michael and his friends. Cole and I didn’t speak for a long time but not because I didn’t want to. He stopped smiling at me, stopped all interaction eventually. Looking back, I think he got the impression that I wanted new social experiences. I did, but not at the expense of our friendship- I just never told him that. It was easier to fit in with a new crowd without him being there, having to fit him in there with me. 

It wasn’t just Cole. During the summer I neglected everything else I used to do just to be around Michael. I never wanted to wash my clothes when they held the scent of Michael’s sweat and spliff and hair wax, mixed in with Marianne’s body spray. I remember the day after the thing happened with Cole on Tarantula Hill, I was in his bedroom, lying on his stinking, dirty carpet and loving it. I remember that we’d just shared a spliff and I was being dramatic, sprawling on the floor and asking him to take my pulse because I thought I was dying. The crazy thing was, I did really think I was dying sometimes, when I was around him. The pain of being around him was slow and gradually worsening- my mind felt like it was collapsing, deteriorating, the longer our bodies were kept apart, but I knew I could only be close to him by keeping just the right distance. He was laughing- he didn’t take my pulse, but he told me not to be a coward and then said, “Remember that time you said God works in mysterious ways?”He shot me this look, a sidelong flicker of his eyes, and it’s hard to explain but with every look he gave me, there were volumes of words unspoken, and there was no way of knowing what those words were. But he was always saying cryptic little sentences, some of them platitudinous, or throwing rhetorical questions into the ether. Though if written  his words would carry little weight, if any at all, it was the way he looked at me when he said them. There was no way of knowing there were any words at all  behind his eyes. All those glances could have been empty. The language of his body and his facial expressions down to the most inscrutable movement could have been completely meaningless, or simply random, and I filled in those empty spaces with only my own interpretations, my skewed and desirous perceptions. When he looked at me, every glance bestowed me with worth and importance; carried with it a secret ciphered message that not I nor anyone else could ever decode. When he spoke to me, it all sounded like serendipity. He could deliver those words with his eyes, the language of his body, and make them sound like everything you wanted to hear. In response to his comment on God’s mystery, whether or not it was laden with innuendo, all I could say was yeah and something else about how everything with a halo looked like him. He lapped it up. He loved it. and he knew we were his ever-loving, ever-learning disciples. 

He knew he could get a kick out of describing his sex life with Marianne to me because I’d try not to show how upset it made me, and the attempts I made to adjust the look on my face, trying various expressions of nonchalance, were futile. I could not fake it. I was transparent, so much so that my pretences themselves were  complete giveaway, my genuine feelings and reactions utterly obvious. It was a pretence that backfired. He knew I wanted him but I’m not sure if he knew that in the same way that I really did love him, to some extent he must have also loved me- we went through too much together. Michael knew that his followers, friends and me had collectively handed him our puppet strings and that we had to be grateful because none of us would ever have known what it feels like to shatter the speed limit in the suburbs after a house party; or spray paint the facades of empty buildings under a dome of stars; or share in a memory, a moment between just you and him that can be shared all over again with only a flicker of his eyes; or to completely abandon oneself and throw every caution and thought of consequence to the wind, if it wasn’t for him. Before the night we talked about halos, I remember visiting Cole in hospital and telling him that I didn’t know about the plan, I hadn’t known. He looked at me with tears blurring his eyes and an expression that made me feel like I was going to throw up. A machine attached to him released another beep. and he said, “Why is Michael so cruel”- and it wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer him either way and must have walked around with stars in my eyes for weeks afterwards, thinking singularly about God’s mysterious ways and divinity. 

About two weeks later, or maybe less, there was a house party at Julia Doherty’s because her parents were away at a conference in the south of France that had something to do with wine. Their house had an enormous wine cellar- when the claustrophobia of crowded rooms set in, and this other unnamed, unidentified fear that creeps up on me more lately than ever before, I ducked into the cellar to get away from all the people. I saw all their racks of wine bottles, untouched and unopened. some even blanketed with a layer of dust, I imagined what it would be like to have something you believed was so precious, you could obtain it and keep it for decades, and simply owning it would be enough. I wondered if my memories of Michael and all those precious feelings would store themselves somewhere in the corners of my mind, collecting dust yet still of such value. 

Michael brought pack upon pack of beer bottles to Julia’s and for a moment I wished that Cole could be there just so there was one person to turn to who didn’t completely confound me, but I smacked that thought away. I hadn’t thought about him at previous parties or on other days or during those evenings I spent staring at Michael’s ceiling as if I was looking at heaven. But after that night on Tarantula Hill, the thought kept intruding, pushing its way in. Finding something to sniff or swallow always helped. No one had asked Michael or me about the scratches on our hands that looked to me like the cracked paving stones leftover after a little but brutal earthquake hit the towns north of ours- there was some structural damage but no fatalities. I kind of liked the way those streets looked in the wake of it- a small-scale disaster, fracturing the stone and rattling the steel, cracking the earth underneath open like an egg.

Michael and I both cut through the rest of the summer with our hands in our pockets. In the bathroom I found Julia’s grandmother’s pills. I’d learnt that older people are often holding prescription pills that they never use, either from ailments in the past or because they don’t find in them the same recreational or mind-numbing value that myself and some of my peers  did. It’s become a habit- foraging for other people’s pharmaceuticals. I can’t stop myself from taking them if they are there, and now I always look. I guess I take after my mother that way. She didn’t go to any AA meetings during that summer and I didnt even notice. I’m ashamed to admit that. I know it’s not my fault she’s drinking again but I could have paid more attention and now we are living in our own worlds, our own addictions, mine being Michael, and I didn’t want sobriety. Without him, I would have nowhere to look to find purpose, to find perfection. My mother probably feels the same way about whiskey. I go home as rarely as I can to avoid my guilty conscience.  It tangles itself into knots before I can blink and the world suddenly becomes so overwhelmingly loud, and so unbearably close.

But anyway, at that party, Michael didn’t say a word to me all night. I don’t know why and he never explained it but it was unbearable. It got to about 2am and Michael was too drunk to stand or speak coherently, but he put his arm around me and was slurring about what a cool guy he thinks I am, and I didn’t care that he was so drunk he’d never remember that he had no intention of kissing me because then I’d have to think about it. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I remember being excited because we were going to leave the party alone but together and go back to Tarantula Hill. I was behind the wheel and as we pulled out of the driveway I saw something small flash across my rear view mirror and then heard the thump. Julia stood there crying and picking at her manicure; she wailed, “What did you do?” Michael was abruptly sober and his eyes looked like magic eight balls, with huge black pupils, his irises gold. I was saying it was an accident and he yelled at me to shut up and so I did. Then we reversed back over the dog- I threw up violently into my lap but it was likely the beer and Vicodin- because there was nowhere else to go. In the end I wrote Julia a note- I’m sorry, I’m sorry- and put it through her letterbox a couple of days later. That was when I found out that Cole was home, because he lived just opposite Julia’s house where we’d run wheels twice over the dog. He’d gotten out of hospital and I hadn’t seen him. 

Nobody saw much of him for the rest of the summer or asked any questions, but I think he knew. The headaches and insomnia became so unbearable that I asked Garrett's bandmate to hook me up with some oxycodone. I could afford it at first, but after a while I learnt that there are certain compromises that have to be made to get what I need, and I also learnt how to shut off my thoughts with their sharp peaks and descending spirals and do what needs to be done, as if I can operate my body from the outside, like a piece of machinery. All I do is imagine I'm with Michael. I remember that Cole and I used to be close and spend time together but I can't remember why or what we did. I don't know much these days except that I'm in love and in pain at the same time, and that I did a terrible thing. That terrible thing happened not because I was in love but if I hadn't been, maybe it wouldn't have happened. I can't think about that- all those other possible consequences and outcomes, the butterfly effect. I've taught myself not to look at my hands and wonder whether something took control of them, or whether they are weapons. I needed to teach myself to think in certain routes because the truth will never be spoken of.

That was, of course, the first fear. That Cole would tell. He had no loyalty to me anymore, so he could have. He was probably encouraged to, demanded to. We waited with our hands in our pockets, nails cutting crescent moons into our palms, but nothing happened. Nobody knocked, nobody called, nobody said anything, not even us. Cole never said anything, not to anyone at all. But every time I drive down that street I get the feeling that someone is watching me. 

The Song Challenge

 A song I discovered this month is Mary by Big Thief 

A song that always makes me smile is Electric Dreams by Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder

A song that makes me cry is Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits

A song that proves I have good taste is Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles

An underrated song is Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches

A song title with three words is Easy/Lucky/Free

A song from my childhood is Mamma Mia by ABBA

A song that reminds me of summer is 1234 by Feist

A song I feel embarrassed listening to is Feel by Robbie Williams

The first song that plays on shuffle is The Scientist by Coldplay

A song that someone showed me is Landslide by Fleetwood Mac

A song from a movie soundtrack is Worried Shoes by Karen O and the Kids

A song with no words is Gymnopedie No. 1 by Eric Satie

A song about being 17 is I'm Not Okay by My Chemical Romance 

A song that reminds me of somebody is Another Brick In The Wall by Pink Floyd

A song to drive to would be Halfway Home by TV on the Radio

A song with a number in the title is 99 Problems by Jay-Z

A song that I listen to at 3am is All In The Stream by S Carey

A song with a long title is Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh by Bright Eyes

A song with a colour in the title is Blue Suede Shoes by Elvis Presley

A song that I've had stuck in my head is Sticks 'N Stones by Jamie T

A song in a different language is , "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" by Édith Piaf 

Loose threads of thought

i. Phosphorus; atomic number 15, essential for life yet never found as a free element on Earth. It was given its name for Lucifer, for light-giver; surrounded by the oxygen we breathe, it glows.

ii. You and the colour blue have a lot in common, although I’ll always associate you with red. The cliché of an ocean, of a river that meanders smoothly through my blood and feels like it’s always been there, running that river, so I don’t realise until it’s too late. I’m empty. I’ve got no more tears, no more tides. The cliché of a spreading bruise and your voice a hum, the rest just spindrift. 

iii. Am I more like a swarm than a girl? I feel buzzing under my nails and tongue, my skin a hive of nervous bees. I feel dizzy in crowds and on train platforms because what if this body decides to jump? I picture bad moments so vividly; they never happen, the person under a train, a contagion of fire, a sudden silence and inexplicable emptiness. I count and count again what could go wrong and weigh it against the fragile goodness that I try to sew, but my calculations are always erroneous and nothing can put a leash on chaos.

iv. Combustible, relating to combustion; able to catch fire and burn easily.

v. We are brittle eyelashes and frostbitten edges, oxymorons and poor translations; our hearts are begging with each beat to escape this burning orbit, to crawl away and find somewhere beyond our atmosphere, where the constellations will have a place for each of them.

vi. Touch me and you will feel it- me as electricity. the blush of my cheeks and how my hair is always messy. In this simplicity, I catch myself wordless and that makes no sense. I  don’t have words for the burning- burns that left scars before, burns that won’t leave them now or do any damage at all because it’s not a real brand, it’s not the white-hot heat I try every day to forget I know the feel of or know of at all. It’s just the feeling that comes when you’ve so long been isolated and the touch of another burns so beautifully, so warm. There’s me and not just me and a switch flicking, no noise, no static, no unbecoming. I know I’m shaky, it’s been that way for years. But maybe now it’s just the shock of falling into something good. Something safe again.

vii. Melting, to melt: to thaw when exposed to heat. To become more tender, to become more loving.

Habits

I keep writing apologies, elegies, static frames with my palms facing up or framing a face without touching it. The same songs spin in loops on the intangible record player lodged in my brain. Then there are the poems, the verses. They are not the same. I sometimes wish they would return on a loop like a record on repeat so that I could put pen to paper, but my thoughts are racing ahead of me, riding gusts of wind or whistling through leaves or between the wheels of cars without having to pause for breath, because they don't run on lungfuls of air. I sleep when I can, as well as I can, but I seem to have taken up sleepwalking. That's the only explanation for why I was jolted awake between my bedroom and kitchen with my forehead slammed against a jutting wall. I rarely dream but when I do I am always either running away from or running towards something, or someone, frantically, and it's a terrifying threat that I'm escaping. I'm always cold even though it is summer. I was very lonely, but this is beginning to change. Among my apologies and lists of wrongdoings, I also keep writing litanies of questions to myself I still struggle to answer. I have stopped writing excuses but they still linger in my mind like an itch. 

Today I trailed my fingertips against the walls in my hallway so that I had something to focus on. I sleep with my cardigan and eyeliner on. I can't ever seem to get enough air when I breathe and I am terrified of seeing my reflection in a mirror or shop window. I still want to disappear but I guess I've become accustomed to living that way, and now I'm trying to make it work regardless.

Mistaken mind, hapless heart

Teeth marks leftover from half-eaten memories 

on my shoulders and among the knuckles of my fists 

feel infected, like some septic reaction I'll always have. 

I had given my heart- no romance but compassion, 

understanding, tolerance. That mistake was my greatest, 

wanting to help, waiting to heal, wishing to understand. 

All that trust, all those beatings with the words he knew 

would make me cry, make me hurt. It's a fault right here

in my heart, hoping for and trying for someone 

who left me most terrified, most sick and shaken, 

even more so because he knew it was my nightmare.  

He shoved me back in time so I had to see it, 

feel it, be it, be in it and there for it, all over again.

“Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?”- Sigmund Freud

 

A love poem to life's little threats

You are an organ recently removed
leaving the chest a gaping chasm.

An apparition you see in the mirror;
it should be you, but it’s an impostor.

The pattern of scars badly hidden
on the arm of the girl sharing your bus.

You are the service, now  interrupted
suddenly by the ‘person under a train’,

the acid you put on your tongue to see,
expand, discover, but all you could see

were ways to die and nowhere  to hide,
no one to trust and no reason for it,

no reason for any of it, none at all.
You know where my skin is thinnest,

and where my backbone is weakest
but above all, you know how I trust.

Whatever you are, no need to disguise it.
I will trust you until it’s too late.

You are my ignorance. You can use it
how you wish. I’d rather stay open

to people, to strangers, to experiences.
I’ve looked into the eyes of threat,

I have seen it’s face. It has only  one face.
Those I trust with ease do not all share it.

You are the screams of an ambulance siren,
the screams of people you can’t see or save,

realising that nobody even knows your name,
nobody will remember you when you’re gone.

You are the door that closes with a click
when the one you love the most walks away.

You are a smile, poised to mask indifference,
you are words you’re too weak to say aloud,

the dead pigeon among a thousand others,
and among commuters in Trafalgar Square,

the slow forgetting of who you once were.
The time, the torture, the terrors at night.

You are arriving too early, we need time.
We are not ready and this terrifies us

because when you whispered words to us
it was not from behind a veil, was it?

I bite down on memories of feeling safe
and ready my eyes to face you once more.

Other worlds

How strange, she says, among those better worlds underwater
where the ocean, deep and wide as an infinity we can comprehend,
where the cold of swimming is no different than the clear of looking.
As the horizon begins to burn gold when the day breaks open
there are people still going about their work
like they do everyday, though  nothing new to catch,
unfurling sails and loosening knots,
un-moored, carried on the wind, the hunt, the home bound.
It is as if they don’t know they were drowned.
They say it’s one of the nicer ways to go.

Back to the future

In Japanese, there are no modal verbs for the future tense such as "will", "shall" or "be going to". All Japanese verbs in the basic form are present and future tense at the same time.



Tomorrow when I came back home
I was written better- the story of myself.
Please, thank you, oopsy daisy fall from
my tongue and into stories of me feeling
everything I didn’t understand, always
trying to be liked, to get a perfect ten,
to make sure they knew my gratitude,
my hugs and smiles  were not pretend-
I love you Mama and it’s not contrived-
always please and thank you and
always how do you do? Always trying.
But never learning how to have faith,
how to find the key to confidence,
how to feel all kinds of things that
I could not understand Still trying.

With a pencil, I scratched a star on the top
of a chestnut-coloured piano I couldn't play
unless I memorised the placement of fingers,
their movement, and the sound to go with it.
I did want to be a star when I was little,
but not because I wanted to be on screens
or in magazines. Not because I wanted fame.
I wanted to make people laugh. Aged nine
and Nanny is crying into the telephone,
Mama forgot to pick us up from school,
every letter that fell on the doormat
made Mama cry. Sometimes I said something
and then-- laughing. I repeat the words --
more laughing. Repeat and repeat until
those tears have changed to those of joy.
If there is a way to make people laugh
when they need to. That was the star,
the glow I saw in those people I  loved
when they would laugh. Now, with teeth
I strip the skin from words that I’ve known
since I could talk. They don’t recognise me.

The words are heavy pebbles on my tongue,
salt-white, from the wrong ocean. Now I see
a girl staring back from where I should be.
The face in the mirror is meant to be mine.
Is that right? Am I right, or she? Are we?
There are some problems I never solve
like calculation or non-verbal reasoning.
Usually I am good at tests with words.
With people too. They see how I'm scared.
I really can’t tell whether or not it’s me.
Not a body that does not belong to me.

Maybe it's neither of us. Maybe a ghost.
Their reflected voices are dropping  stones.
I should have left some space to forget
before all that I was unlearning. I wonder
of the antecedent to provoke my first exit
When I was younger, I could float, float
above myself and look down on the girl.

After the first flight, I did it frequently,
I was often on the ceiling of the room,
sometimes out of choice or in a dream,
sometimes  it was the safest place to be.
I pull ribbon from cassette tapes and
unravel it as if I too am going backwards,
rewinding, tracing ribbons like pathways
to follow them to where it all started,
look underneath all the consequences,
find a cause, or a hundred, or none at all.

Then one day I stepped out to look down.
I did not like the girl I saw, I hated her.
I had always known it was myself looking down
from the outside; harmless, like a mirror.
But from the day I started hating her, always
we have been at odds, remaining strangers,
living in conflict. At one time, in the past,
we were locked in a battle to only exist-
a struggle for power to the death- her or me.
Today we live alongside each other.
There will never be peace, but I will live.

I still see myself from above sometimes.
I see an eyesore, an inconvenience, and others
moving around me exchanging looks of disgust,
resentment for the space I am taking up,
embittered by my existence alone. I know
this is irrational thinking, I’ve learnt that.
I know it will not go away, I’ve learnt that.
But I have also learnt that I can live with it,
reassuring myself that these thoughts
are nothing but assumptions and likely
to be untrue, and the only way to be sure
is to ask. In a single sentence- these beliefs,
assumptions, thoughts, they are illusions,
and you cannot read minds, not be certain
of the thoughts that belong to anyone else.
I’m a bundle of unravelled assumptions.
I am a metaphor for lost cause, gossamer,
wrecking ball, thunderstorms in teacups.
At least that is who they say I am, was.

The world is captive, the universe messy.
Yesterday we were blind. It’s no surprise.
When I lift my hand before my eyes
I can barely see its shape. When I try
to envision a day beyond this one,
a dark tidal wave of fog rolls in, so thick
I can’t believe in anything but today.
or that there will be any more tomorrows
that I will be alive to see. Yet each day,
I wake up, time’s tapestry is woven into
yet another loop, tangling threads of time.

I may not recognise myself but others,
even strangers, leave their faces as imprints
in my memory. The way their eyes become
illuminated when speaking of their passions,
that which gives their life joy and purpose-
whether it’s satanism or quantum physics-
the way others’ faces glow, sharing with you
what thrills them; I never forget that.
And others, I forgive. I forgive again and again.
I hand out second chances like the balloon man
at the zoo, even if each time I’m disappointed.
But myself, or whomever my impostor may be,
stubbornly refuse to forgive one another.

I am afraid of tomorrows. I fear the future
lest it be an echo of the past, a deja vu.
a circle we follow to everywhere we have been,
everything we have seen, nothing new at all.
I forget who to be, who I am; but I do hope
that tomorrow remember me, even if I don’t.

Amends

I want to tell all in my family that I am stuck in a quicksand 

of grief, of growing, of growing into something 

you never wanted for me, 

these unfulfilled dreams --

and the cassette tape thats plays underneath my pillow 

will be unspooled, and burnt - the words deserve it.

I want to tell all in my family that I have a mask, a second skin

and it will not be pried off, with roots so deep --

memories drill into the earth so

dredge them up, more take their place.

I want to tell all in my family that guilt has long been my keeper

secrets, rationalisations,excuses, manipulations,

but there are no escape routes now 

and she is water-boarded with regret.

I want to tell all in my family that I have learnt my lessons

and I may always labour when it comes to love 

and even though I’ve every reason not to 

I believe there is so much love in the world.

As a daughter, sister, granddaughter niece, surrogate father and brother--

It is like you built your worlds around me.

This is my gratitude, my apology, my repentance, my amends and my remorse.

It is also my love, which I do not deserve but will make myself worthy.

Dictionary Poetry

https://issuu.com/daisychristabelking/docs/astrum_photography__4_

It's a collection of words, each beginning one letter of the alphabet, and its associations- ones that origiated in my experiece or imagination, others that were inspired by those I have adored lengthily and known only briefly, and sometimes a word simply evokes memories in you that cannot be explained. So, click on the above link and see xxx

Open Book // haiku

Prologue: crack my spine,
read my lips, inside and out,
and between the lines.

Human

When people mess up, fail, disappoint others or themselves, or make mistakes, you hear them say, "I'm only human." Why is it that when people perform acts of philanthropy or heroism or do good in the world, you never hear them say, "I'm only human"?

Storm

Sleep is like a cat- it only comes when you ignore it.
Realisations hit me like raindrops, splashing,
a spatter on the windowpanes as the storm
goes on lowering, nebulous and bellicose.
I am unformed, I am broken. Maybe hopeful.
I am gnarled tree bark, two hundred years old,
but I wear the skin of a child and my eyes sink
into my face; yellowing light, thunder inside.

ABCB

Should somebody put me back in school?
I've forgotten things I used to know--
like how to leave someone behind,
and not looking back, just letting go.

Collage

Sum of your parts/words

Crying and praying

Eventually I figured out that tears can't make somebody who has died come alive again. Nor can they make somebody who doesn't love you anymore start to love you again. Praying is the same thing. People must waste so much of their lives praying to God and crying. The idea of the devil makes sense because it gives people someone to blame for their misdeeds. And the idea of God may make sense because people are afraid of these misdeeds, and if they believe in God and the devil there is this idea that both are playing a game of tug-of-war with them. They never know which side they are going to end up on, and that can explain how, even when people attempt to do something good, what they do turns out badly.

The OA

I made this because I think everyone should watch it. It was written and produced by the girl who plays the protagonist, and is pure imagination, pure beauty.