She cut open my palm with a letter opener and blood dropped from my hand onto the carpet like a fistful of rubies. I thought I was going to be sick as she cut herself in the same place. Her motions were violent and had a force behind them that I didn't know how to cope with, and I couldn't stop staring at the jeweled blood that collected under our clasped hands. She grabbed my hand and held it tightly in hers, our bodies facing one another's, each an entity on its own but at the same time moving, changing, metamorphosing into one. We were two impoverished halves, adjacent. We'd be perfect as a whole.
That was the start of the summer.
And yeah, we whiled most of it away watching reruns of bad TV shows in her air conditioned living room, sitting on her sofa, wasting time. That's all. Her house was enormous and was more of a well-lit, central-heated, artfully decorated mausoleum than a home. Maybe that was just because there were still cardboard boxes out, half-emptied of possessions but still half-packed up, suspended in time. Even though it was big and open and deflated like dead lungs inside, it smelled strongly of dog. I remember how it smelt, and how much I hated it, and I hated how her dogs would roll at our feet, and I hated how there was hair everywhere. How it made my eyes sting and run with tears, my nose itch. I spent those months pretending that I had a cold so I could just stay there with her, in those moments. Imagine- we were licking ice-cream off each other's sticky arms, peeling ourselves off the garden furniture that stuck to our thighs, sweating into the blankets we shared at night, and the whole time I was pretending to have a cold. It was stupid. I know. Whatever.
It was the summer when everything was like everything else. The feeling that ran underneath us, underneath it all- I can't describe it. In retrospect those days and nights pool together into a spill of hot sun and it seems like it all happened at once, all at the same time. That sun was so hot my tennis teacher cancelled two of our classes because she was at home sick with sunstroke. I remember wondering why it's called sunstroke when it strikes with such violent malice, and ruthlessness. I can't put my finger on what it was. It was like a gas station at midnight in the dry nothingness of the Dust bowl, silent; it was a drum beat heard at a funeral, sombre, and something ominous. I don't know. It's stupid to say that about something you can barely even remember.
We were avoiding children at the lido when she suggested it. Or did I? I think it was her. I like to think it was her but that whole chunk of time is so blurry At some point, maybe the same moment she was cutting our hands open to close around one another's, she whispered in my ear, 'We're sisters.' I thought, 'But this isn't what sisters are like.' Still, I would have torn my whole arms off if that had been what she wanted so of course I said yes, yes, yes.
It started off with reasons. Then it was just people she decided she didn't like, or people who looked at her in a way she deemed wrong. I got better at it over time. It was quicker, quieter, cleaner. In between we went back to our long lazy days, our TV shows again, putting on stupid accents for one another, sharing ice cream cones and wrapping ourselves around one another while we nodded off trying to read the books on our reading list for the next year of school. We didn't wear anything at night because it was so humid, fabric clinging to skin was unbearable and suffocating. Mostly I just remember the monotony of the sluggish days. That's how I blocked out the rest.
Then it all went too far because she said it would be better if she were gone and I said yes, yes, yes, and then it was just her blood dripping onto the floor. Suddenly everything was noiseless and unmoving. I looked for my blood there too but it was just hers. I was alone, and I realised I could never be whole now. That was my completion.
And it was the end of summer.
Tuesday, 29 December 2015
the rarity of words
abulia
the sky and walls are soft, the ground is spongy ~ nothing has an impact ~ i have a vague knowing
that i must find a way to something solid ~ everything looks the same as I do and the same as everything else ~ blood pump, shuttering valves ~ stinging feelings from deepenings flinging up and catch in your eye, makes it cry ~ black hole spills out across the hazel of an iris ~ somatic signal ~ I can't find any here ~ here is a silent and interstitial, it's a concrete block, no ways in or out, and it's still ready to send rockets to space.
{the inability to make decisions}
daltonism
You can dress the Christmas tree in festive colours, crystals and delicately blown glass baubles and ornaments all in emerald and ruby, as tradition tells you. But however many embellishments you pin to the days and nights from Advent's onset until that sad day in January when all the lights must come down, however many jewels you pin to your tree and to walls, ceilings, furnishings, your front door- it still all looks the same.
{the inability to see the difference between red and green}
crepuscle
The moon is curled up with its knees to its chin, but the clouds obfuscate a london-road-human-eye-level view of what would most likely go unnoticed anyway. Maybe that's why it always seems the moon is getting smaller. Maybe it's just like the demons; the more you believe something is there, the more capable it is of actually being there, so by looking at it and responding to it you give it the power to affect you. If it's not scaring you like the demons scared me, and it's just a celestial body wasting away because nobody can be bothered anymore with moon phases and moon-manic behavioural changes, which were always a theory and never did have any empirical evidence corroborating. My thoughts are splitting, like strands of light, like thread. Sometimes there are needles. But how can I think about noxious cognition when the night is poised, ready to fall, and the cold of winter just feels close instead of cold, and feels like the promise of arms around you, because you know there are arms waiting to hold all of you, every vagrant thought, the spindrift rising upon the impact of daily sensations- and not too long ago, I was living like I"d no skin at all and like my blood was too much for the capacity of my body so if I were to be touched somehow, knocked even gently, the wound would be agony and I couldn't stop the bleeding. Now I have at least a year-thick layer strong enough wrapped around me to protect me from my own reflection or from my own oversensitivity to it. This is where so many of my thought threads end up, loose and all dropped. Stitches pulling closed with a neat gasp of satisfaction under the hospital lights that were tinted clinical and somehow made everything look septic, the nurses wily. Forearms lying there like dead fish. The harbor where the ugliest ideas were conceived and teenagers vomited on the rocks, drunken shouts drowned out by the roar of nearby waves. Someone's kitchen at night when everyone else is asleep. The moon has a lullaby but it grew deafening and all at once and for years now I haven't heard it at all.
bibliomancy
to be continued...
Friday, 25 December 2015
no gravity.
I've just come back from outer space,
a neverending, pinpricked place
where I was nothing and left no trace
but the flecks of stardust on your face.
Saturday, 19 December 2015
Restlessness is the roots all dried out.
Restlessness pushes my heart around like an empty
shopping cart on a desert road,
a loose wheel, always veering off course.
Rattle rattle, underneath a scatter of stones.
My new method of survival is
to gather up all the dead pieces: the red dust and bile,
each papery smile that crumpled, a throbbing laugh,
the knocks of my knees, bad senses of direction,
Then I'll sew them together
to form something strange and alive again.
No more dried up roots, deserted lives.
"That thing you’re afraid of losing.
It’s already gone," said the shovel to the dirt
that covered its face.
"Worse," the dirt replied, "It never existed.
It wasn't there in the first place.’"
shopping cart on a desert road,
a loose wheel, always veering off course.
Rattle rattle, underneath a scatter of stones.
My new method of survival is
to gather up all the dead pieces: the red dust and bile,
each papery smile that crumpled, a throbbing laugh,
the knocks of my knees, bad senses of direction,
Then I'll sew them together
to form something strange and alive again.
No more dried up roots, deserted lives.
"That thing you’re afraid of losing.
It’s already gone," said the shovel to the dirt
that covered its face.
"Worse," the dirt replied, "It never existed.
It wasn't there in the first place.’"
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Me & You Vs the rest of the universe
EXHIBIT A:
The empty drawer where the cutlery used to be.
Half a glass of red wine left in a bottle,
wine stains in a ring around a ‘best boyfriend’ mug.
Another stain- my hand print on the wall,
and there’s no blood but something more urgent
and inevitable
like courage,
leaking away
in the wrong direction.
EXHIBIT B:
The pockets of your coat,
their contents.
An English to French phrasebook,
a packet of tobacco
mostly given away, a piece of paper on which
you keep notes on the smallest observations
imperceptible to any other eye.
If I had to choose a reason, it would be this one
Love, or the thing that staggers behind it,
undignified, pooling at our feet.
EXHIBIT C:
My hand in between both of yours.
You trying to get the blood back to my fingers.
The dog-eared pages of the book I’m reading.
You trying to hear me over train sounds,
other sounds,Band I am repeating myself
because I am too scared to speak up.
Is my voice lost somewhere? Did it drop
from my throat onto the winter roads,
is it wailing from inside a gutter
somewhere and should I go out looking,
to find it before it drowns?
The empty drawer where the cutlery used to be.
Half a glass of red wine left in a bottle,
wine stains in a ring around a ‘best boyfriend’ mug.
Another stain- my hand print on the wall,
and there’s no blood but something more urgent
and inevitable
like courage,
leaking away
in the wrong direction.
EXHIBIT B:
The pockets of your coat,
their contents.
An English to French phrasebook,
a packet of tobacco
mostly given away, a piece of paper on which
you keep notes on the smallest observations
imperceptible to any other eye.
If I had to choose a reason, it would be this one
Love, or the thing that staggers behind it,
undignified, pooling at our feet.
EXHIBIT C:
My hand in between both of yours.
You trying to get the blood back to my fingers.
The dog-eared pages of the book I’m reading.
You trying to hear me over train sounds,
other sounds,Band I am repeating myself
because I am too scared to speak up.
Is my voice lost somewhere? Did it drop
from my throat onto the winter roads,
is it wailing from inside a gutter
somewhere and should I go out looking,
to find it before it drowns?
Thursday, 3 December 2015
One of my best friends- the one I used to call my best friend- has cut me out of his life.
I don't understand this. Not because I'm hurt or angry but because I don't understand how human beings who have spent so much time growing together, caring almost singularly for one another to the point nothing but their own shared reality mattered, and had been so very close to one another for a length of time such as this- I don't know how humans can cut that other person out. What replaces the parts of you that they had grown into, and only they could fit, Because you matched in one way or another, and it worked for as long as it did. I never want to forget the great things we made together. I never want to forget all that he did for me. I am never going to make that cut.
I don't understand this. Not because I'm hurt or angry but because I don't understand how human beings who have spent so much time growing together, caring almost singularly for one another to the point nothing but their own shared reality mattered, and had been so very close to one another for a length of time such as this- I don't know how humans can cut that other person out. What replaces the parts of you that they had grown into, and only they could fit, Because you matched in one way or another, and it worked for as long as it did. I never want to forget the great things we made together. I never want to forget all that he did for me. I am never going to make that cut.
Bravery
If you are searching for some sort of formula to carry on fighting, or for a sequence of numbers or symbols to decode bravery, there is no purpose to look any further. It’s not that you are close to it, or getting there, or that the concept itself of a bravery code is the first step towards deciphering the code, but you’ll never get the chance. There is no code. When you are trying to pull your parts together and make them work in concordance even though you have been unhinged an inch too far from the here and now, the currents of reality. For example, where is one of your hands? One is banging on the tabletop for attention while the other presses down on your trachea to crush it closed. You need to calm down one hand so you can use it to loosen the other from your own throat. There are no pretty ways- or any ways- to suture the open wounds that have been left on you. It feels filthy and confusing to speak, and it hurts because you know only yesterday your talk was free.
It is disturbing to smile and to hold your face without anything to express. All you want to do is release that scream that begs for freedom, just as speech. But you can’t go on like this, all torn apart- this is a body fighting itself, a war against its own shadow; it’s a mind murdering the body from inside. Think about that, if you can just about bear it, and then you’ll catch onto why there’s not a instruction manual waiting for you after your experience to lay out in bullet points the right way to feel. How to’s on coping with grief, guilt, disgust, dissociation, nightmares, the memory becoming part of your autobiography. There’s no manual or guide because there is no way to make peace with that.
No one ever taught you that bravery can be something other than clawed in eyes, sharpened nails, feral smiles. It doesn’t appear as the torn up hands of a wrecked clock or the veins filled with venom under poisoned skin. You can decide what your bravery looks like. Maybe it looks like smashed plates, slashed tires, the silver gleam along the edge of a bread knife that flashes as you make yourself a sandwich. Maybe it’s letting the shadows give you some comfort when the windows are jammmed and refuse to open. It’s framing pictures of yourself and your mother because you have a need for nostalgia almost as much. It’s changing the colour of your hair, it’s gin and tonic before noon or else only juice you drink from cartons. It’s taking out the rubbish bins whilst knowing they contain one or several things you ought to not throw away, but taking the words of Kerouac- Accept loss forever. It looks, perhaps, like trying to fix a clock but allowing for times ahead to weave in and out of an arbitrary linear path. No matter how many times you look at those hands on that face, you’ll never be able to turn back time or bypass a single moment on fast forward. It’s brave to try and invent a potential cure and to persist, but someday you’ll be thankful you couldn’t fix yourself by going back over time or denying the disappearing time.
It could be going to confession every Tuesday and Thursday, or visiting a shooting range, whether or not you end up firing a gun. It could be learning to bake your favourite cake, then baking dozens of small cakes and eating them alone. It could be a simple mouth to pillow scream. It could be the development of an entirely original and organic dream. It didn’t come from nowhere, nor from what you are trying to be brave for. A terrible event can be catastrophic and cataclysmic. The evidence in that is surely in all catastrophes and the associated ways in which the world shifts around it, accomodates is corners, and is changed even just by the wake left behind.
Most likely it is writing and it’s burning. It’s howling, visualising your head split in two against a wall. It’s bleeding to remember why you stopped drawing your own blood. It’s acting sinfully to forget. It’s undergoing an exorcism of your own by drawing a map of your body and marking out all the hiding places taken as territory by the spectres that haunt you. You’ll need your bravery to claim those spaces back, to conjure a monster frightening enough to scare the spectres themselves out.
If you try on lots of looks for bravery, be aware you’ll be black-night and blues and plum-colour bruised. Healing looks a lot like brutality, but it is the best home you’ve ever had. It is the first that you have built with your own hands and you owe no one for it.
Remember: Whatever has been done. Whatever you have done to survive.
Remember: the war is almost over.
Remember: you have always been home.
It is disturbing to smile and to hold your face without anything to express. All you want to do is release that scream that begs for freedom, just as speech. But you can’t go on like this, all torn apart- this is a body fighting itself, a war against its own shadow; it’s a mind murdering the body from inside. Think about that, if you can just about bear it, and then you’ll catch onto why there’s not a instruction manual waiting for you after your experience to lay out in bullet points the right way to feel. How to’s on coping with grief, guilt, disgust, dissociation, nightmares, the memory becoming part of your autobiography. There’s no manual or guide because there is no way to make peace with that.
No one ever taught you that bravery can be something other than clawed in eyes, sharpened nails, feral smiles. It doesn’t appear as the torn up hands of a wrecked clock or the veins filled with venom under poisoned skin. You can decide what your bravery looks like. Maybe it looks like smashed plates, slashed tires, the silver gleam along the edge of a bread knife that flashes as you make yourself a sandwich. Maybe it’s letting the shadows give you some comfort when the windows are jammmed and refuse to open. It’s framing pictures of yourself and your mother because you have a need for nostalgia almost as much. It’s changing the colour of your hair, it’s gin and tonic before noon or else only juice you drink from cartons. It’s taking out the rubbish bins whilst knowing they contain one or several things you ought to not throw away, but taking the words of Kerouac- Accept loss forever. It looks, perhaps, like trying to fix a clock but allowing for times ahead to weave in and out of an arbitrary linear path. No matter how many times you look at those hands on that face, you’ll never be able to turn back time or bypass a single moment on fast forward. It’s brave to try and invent a potential cure and to persist, but someday you’ll be thankful you couldn’t fix yourself by going back over time or denying the disappearing time.
It could be going to confession every Tuesday and Thursday, or visiting a shooting range, whether or not you end up firing a gun. It could be learning to bake your favourite cake, then baking dozens of small cakes and eating them alone. It could be a simple mouth to pillow scream. It could be the development of an entirely original and organic dream. It didn’t come from nowhere, nor from what you are trying to be brave for. A terrible event can be catastrophic and cataclysmic. The evidence in that is surely in all catastrophes and the associated ways in which the world shifts around it, accomodates is corners, and is changed even just by the wake left behind.
Most likely it is writing and it’s burning. It’s howling, visualising your head split in two against a wall. It’s bleeding to remember why you stopped drawing your own blood. It’s acting sinfully to forget. It’s undergoing an exorcism of your own by drawing a map of your body and marking out all the hiding places taken as territory by the spectres that haunt you. You’ll need your bravery to claim those spaces back, to conjure a monster frightening enough to scare the spectres themselves out.
If you try on lots of looks for bravery, be aware you’ll be black-night and blues and plum-colour bruised. Healing looks a lot like brutality, but it is the best home you’ve ever had. It is the first that you have built with your own hands and you owe no one for it.
Remember: Whatever has been done. Whatever you have done to survive.
Remember: the war is almost over.
Remember: you have always been home.
Sunday, 29 November 2015
other-Word-ly Bank of Words
Included in the bank based on merits that may be phonetic, semantic, or idiosyncratic. The words are not lost words like I sometimes make lists of but are still existing in dictionaries to be used freely in our vernacular. The words I collect here I probably like due to the way they sound, how it feels to speak them, or for their meaning. Not alphabetical.
plosive
elbow
meretricious
clandestine
histrionic
obfuscate
olfactory
lagoon
imbued
palimpsest
harbinger
pauciloquent
veracity
spooling
ebullient
contrite
precocious
harangue
Kafkaesque
apolaustic
agelast
obelisk
persnickety
dilettante
soporific
somnambulist
trifecta
heuristic
interparietal
interstellar
caterwaul
catastrophic
ghost
knees
billows
ennui
mis/philanthropic
glockenspiel
pumpernickel
ingratiate
interrobang
inchoate
balloon
adumbrate
petrichor
elegiac
spoon
erudite
archaic
proletariat
astriferous
redolent
clatter
frickatives
sympathectomy
plosive
elbow
meretricious
clandestine
histrionic
obfuscate
olfactory
lagoon
imbued
palimpsest
harbinger
pauciloquent
veracity
spooling
ebullient
contrite
precocious
harangue
Kafkaesque
apolaustic
agelast
obelisk
persnickety
dilettante
soporific
somnambulist
trifecta
heuristic
interparietal
interstellar
caterwaul
catastrophic
ghost
knees
billows
ennui
mis/philanthropic
glockenspiel
pumpernickel
ingratiate
interrobang
inchoate
balloon
adumbrate
petrichor
elegiac
spoon
erudite
archaic
proletariat
astriferous
redolent
clatter
frickatives
sympathectomy
Friday, 27 November 2015
Love poem no ?? Life-love, other-love, a smidge of self-love
I may be half-way to decomposing but I'm whole-heartedly in love.
The past may still be decaying in the empty kitchen cupboards,
but these moments don't rot away, there's no expiration date
if you don't want one. Everything is founded on the influence
of the mind on matter, of what you mind and what matters to you.
My writing and my self both reek of decomposing dreams.
I want to be fresh for when I am kissed, as a daisy ought to be.
But I'm not sunshine or stardust, I'm made of rust and loose roots
that wither and rot out of wet soil. But however I decay,
nothing has yet eaten away my capacity to blindly trust.
The past may still be decaying in the empty kitchen cupboards,
but these moments don't rot away, there's no expiration date
if you don't want one. Everything is founded on the influence
of the mind on matter, of what you mind and what matters to you.
My writing and my self both reek of decomposing dreams.
I want to be fresh for when I am kissed, as a daisy ought to be.
But I'm not sunshine or stardust, I'm made of rust and loose roots
that wither and rot out of wet soil. But however I decay,
nothing has yet eaten away my capacity to blindly trust.
Love poem no ?
You are so so easy to love that you’re breaking the world’s heart;
the magnetism shifts beneath you like a sinking ship.
I want to flirt with your secrets. take evenings walks with your repressed rage,
laying kisses to your neuroses, from trembling lips to trembling knees.
I know my existing is only a clumsy effort at keeping the lights on
and twisting my bedsheets into rugs and curtains to live with myself,
but now I can live with myself I don't want to do it alone.
I never feared loneliness until you,
I want you when the candles die out.
I want you. like mercy on deathrow
the magnetism shifts beneath you like a sinking ship.
I want to flirt with your secrets. take evenings walks with your repressed rage,
laying kisses to your neuroses, from trembling lips to trembling knees.
I know my existing is only a clumsy effort at keeping the lights on
and twisting my bedsheets into rugs and curtains to live with myself,
but now I can live with myself I don't want to do it alone.
I never feared loneliness until you,
I want you when the candles die out.
I want you. like mercy on deathrow
Wednesday, 25 November 2015
In my mind
In my mind you will always be the person I wronged
and more than once, and I will always be sorry,
and in my mind you will always be the only person
who was more than a friend and a lover,
who I can thank for the music I would discover.
You'll be the person about whom I told lies.
You are the one who pointed out my laughing eyes.
You will always carry your heart on your sleeve,
pristine and unbruised, whatever blows it may receive.
The insensity of your eyes will shine even brighter
in a memory so abstract. Your knuckles do not know concrete.
The touch you give will always be far lighter.
In my mind, you are not anything close to deceit.
You are not smoke tinted windows
or smoke screens, slight of hand magic shows.
You are the stages of sunlight as it glows
and on your way to the secret that nobody knows.
You will always be, in my mind, held far, far above.
Your face will always be beautiful and your voice will be love.
When you make music, it's love in breath and motion combined.
I think of you, and when I do, it is, like you, always kind.
and more than once, and I will always be sorry,
and in my mind you will always be the only person
who was more than a friend and a lover,
who I can thank for the music I would discover.
You'll be the person about whom I told lies.
You are the one who pointed out my laughing eyes.
You will always carry your heart on your sleeve,
pristine and unbruised, whatever blows it may receive.
The insensity of your eyes will shine even brighter
in a memory so abstract. Your knuckles do not know concrete.
The touch you give will always be far lighter.
In my mind, you are not anything close to deceit.
You are not smoke tinted windows
or smoke screens, slight of hand magic shows.
You are the stages of sunlight as it glows
and on your way to the secret that nobody knows.
You will always be, in my mind, held far, far above.
Your face will always be beautiful and your voice will be love.
When you make music, it's love in breath and motion combined.
I think of you, and when I do, it is, like you, always kind.
Monday, 23 November 2015
Moments like this.
This is garbled and jumbled all over the place but I'm trying to make a point.
they sent postcards from all over the world,
strangers writing to the cancer ward /
you were swollen
and demanding / the reek of disinfectant
and the pastel colours and faded curtains /
do you remember the time
we promised to remember the time?
then we threw the ball into the sea
off that high rock in France
watched it float away?-
I do remember.
we promised we’d remember it together when we grew old
together, so for a while she held my hand
because there are no words for moments like this.
i didn’t know i was looking for you / but there you are
standing string-bean and tall and I imagined /
a skateboard, what your smile would be like,
and after a while
what it would be like to kiss you again?
or do something together that is uncommon
a second time
the Sufjan Stevens song comes to mind –
I’d do anything for you, everything for you -
you look beautiful when you sing, or when there’s
a cigarette filter between
a toothy smile,
even roughed up in the mornings
you look like something, like a concept without a word.
Here you are, and there are no words for people like you.
and to be touched by someone like that
and loved by someone like that, there are
absolutely no turns of phrase to express that you are
grateful, you are dreaming, you are lucky and so grateful /
it was you who got lucky / and when somebody
gives gives gives
and they inspire so much thought in you
for miracle-making of your own,
and they also happen to love you as well-
how can I ever thank him for that?
how can I thank you for something like that?
How can anybody find a way to say a thankyou like that?
you have a friend who is much older than you
and everything he’s been through / scarring invisible and not /
damaged everywhere and irrevocable.
But white turned black is not always just black
and you’ll see the flash of white
again and again, and the friendship is not blind
but when he sits with his eyes elsewhere and mind
somersaulting backwards / years of abuse and fights
and pain / waking up with a razor at your neck /
parents who didn’t want you /
foster parents who wanted to see you cry /
when he is reliving those past moments in my present
There is nothing to say because there are no words
for how to deal with memory,
deal with memories
hideous as those, painful in recall, sharp pieces
of a broken mirror
but clean as cut glass.
There are no words for moments like this.
There were no words for those moments,
and there are no words for these moments
and still, there are no words.
they sent postcards from all over the world,
strangers writing to the cancer ward /
you were swollen
and demanding / the reek of disinfectant
and the pastel colours and faded curtains /
do you remember the time
we promised to remember the time?
then we threw the ball into the sea
off that high rock in France
watched it float away?-
I do remember.
we promised we’d remember it together when we grew old
together, so for a while she held my hand
because there are no words for moments like this.
i didn’t know i was looking for you / but there you are
standing string-bean and tall and I imagined /
a skateboard, what your smile would be like,
and after a while
what it would be like to kiss you again?
or do something together that is uncommon
a second time
the Sufjan Stevens song comes to mind –
I’d do anything for you, everything for you -
you look beautiful when you sing, or when there’s
a cigarette filter between
a toothy smile,
even roughed up in the mornings
you look like something, like a concept without a word.
Here you are, and there are no words for people like you.
and to be touched by someone like that
and loved by someone like that, there are
absolutely no turns of phrase to express that you are
grateful, you are dreaming, you are lucky and so grateful /
it was you who got lucky / and when somebody
gives gives gives
and they inspire so much thought in you
for miracle-making of your own,
and they also happen to love you as well-
how can I ever thank him for that?
how can I thank you for something like that?
How can anybody find a way to say a thankyou like that?
you have a friend who is much older than you
and everything he’s been through / scarring invisible and not /
damaged everywhere and irrevocable.
But white turned black is not always just black
and you’ll see the flash of white
again and again, and the friendship is not blind
but when he sits with his eyes elsewhere and mind
somersaulting backwards / years of abuse and fights
and pain / waking up with a razor at your neck /
parents who didn’t want you /
foster parents who wanted to see you cry /
when he is reliving those past moments in my present
There is nothing to say because there are no words
for how to deal with memory,
deal with memories
hideous as those, painful in recall, sharp pieces
of a broken mirror
but clean as cut glass.
There are no words for moments like this.
There were no words for those moments,
and there are no words for these moments
and still, there are no words.
Thursday, 12 November 2015
Word Bowling
I had to use ten words in a ten sentence story. In a certain order, one word per sentence,
The weatherman predicted a tornado, I heard from the television buzzing in the kitchen next door. All day I’d been warned by radios and professors and by the end of the day, I’d turned childlike and bellicose, a little tantrum throwing itself about like leaves in a winter storm. That weatherman was trying to swindle me, my thoughts hissed, and my capacity to trust was emptying, as it did little by little each day. My threads of thought were tangled once, now unravelling somehow and their loose ends would swing when my headache stirred bone-deep whirlpools deeper and darker. I couldn’t stand the voice of my mother, who was in the kitchen, on the phone to some friend about the supposed tornado’s brooding presence, and her nasal tone of voice penetrated through walls, slid under doors, and tossed itself too far when she got overexcited. I couldn’t stand it, the bleat bleat, the cheep cheep, her playing mother hen in her nest which all but one one of her hatched eggs had flown. What would she do without me, I thought aloud because no one could hear me, and reached for my bag for a lighter and tobacco because she could probably smell me. Smell the smoke, at least, and either call the emergency services in a flight of hysteria or come to rap on my door with stale, baked knuckles, but as I lit up and waited for her thunderous approach, the bulb on my ceiling gave a pathetic flicker of light, yellow as a dying leaf, and then the room was dark. Outside the window, behind the blinds I kept low, the circular winds were furious and the television had gone quiet and my mother was screeching and that tornado had arrived, ripping up every geranium in the nearby gardens. My windowpanes were rattling with the force of lowering winds, and my headache roared nebulously, and my mother screamed more and more, before the room dissolved, taking the storm with it, and here I stand in a cornfield, warm and shimmering gold.
Then I tried one as a poem.
I wake covered in powder, a blanket of white dust,
not once like snow, just cold.
Yesterday’s rainfall had made the ink in my novel bleed
and the inscription on the inside front cover
is undecipherable now.
No apples in the fruit bowl, no milk in the fridge,
no missed calls, just envelopes on the doormat
and cat food in the cupboard, and coffee.
Plastic crockery, styrofoam cups (How?
Did I ask how I ended up here?)
Black coffee. black ink, and a black eye that I see
in my reflection, rippling water in a saucepan on the stove
that slowly obfuscates my face with bubbles.
What a strange notion- everything turning to black and white
and where would the shades of grey go?
Beyond the window, the streets are remote and bland until
they are not, then they're boiling over.
I sit in my armchair to stop myself staring, to stop
the scalding of my hands, and my cat curled at my feet
as though I am royalty with coffee.
The sky is blinding white, like my memory, and seeing it
was the highlight of my day.
Until I took a small handful of pills, washed down
with black coffee.
The weatherman predicted a tornado, I heard from the television buzzing in the kitchen next door. All day I’d been warned by radios and professors and by the end of the day, I’d turned childlike and bellicose, a little tantrum throwing itself about like leaves in a winter storm. That weatherman was trying to swindle me, my thoughts hissed, and my capacity to trust was emptying, as it did little by little each day. My threads of thought were tangled once, now unravelling somehow and their loose ends would swing when my headache stirred bone-deep whirlpools deeper and darker. I couldn’t stand the voice of my mother, who was in the kitchen, on the phone to some friend about the supposed tornado’s brooding presence, and her nasal tone of voice penetrated through walls, slid under doors, and tossed itself too far when she got overexcited. I couldn’t stand it, the bleat bleat, the cheep cheep, her playing mother hen in her nest which all but one one of her hatched eggs had flown. What would she do without me, I thought aloud because no one could hear me, and reached for my bag for a lighter and tobacco because she could probably smell me. Smell the smoke, at least, and either call the emergency services in a flight of hysteria or come to rap on my door with stale, baked knuckles, but as I lit up and waited for her thunderous approach, the bulb on my ceiling gave a pathetic flicker of light, yellow as a dying leaf, and then the room was dark. Outside the window, behind the blinds I kept low, the circular winds were furious and the television had gone quiet and my mother was screeching and that tornado had arrived, ripping up every geranium in the nearby gardens. My windowpanes were rattling with the force of lowering winds, and my headache roared nebulously, and my mother screamed more and more, before the room dissolved, taking the storm with it, and here I stand in a cornfield, warm and shimmering gold.
I wake covered in powder, a blanket of white dust,
not once like snow, just cold.
Yesterday’s rainfall had made the ink in my novel bleed
and the inscription on the inside front cover
is undecipherable now.
No apples in the fruit bowl, no milk in the fridge,
no missed calls, just envelopes on the doormat
and cat food in the cupboard, and coffee.
Plastic crockery, styrofoam cups (How?
Did I ask how I ended up here?)
Black coffee. black ink, and a black eye that I see
in my reflection, rippling water in a saucepan on the stove
that slowly obfuscates my face with bubbles.
What a strange notion- everything turning to black and white
and where would the shades of grey go?
Beyond the window, the streets are remote and bland until
they are not, then they're boiling over.
I sit in my armchair to stop myself staring, to stop
the scalding of my hands, and my cat curled at my feet
as though I am royalty with coffee.
The sky is blinding white, like my memory, and seeing it
was the highlight of my day.
Until I took a small handful of pills, washed down
with black coffee.
Saturday, 7 November 2015
Voices of the divided selves- a short experimental film
The book 'The Divided Self' by one of my favourite people of all time, R.D. Laing, explains psychosis in a way that allows the 'non-psychotic reader' to dip into the minds of some of Laing's patients and understand that madness is a concept that we constructed and then marginalised, put under the microscope, talk of as if those affected by it are entirely different from us. Madness, Laing posits, does not exist, for it's only a sane reaction to an insane environment. The book re-frames the psychotic minds that fill the pages with a lot of non-nonsense, which is to say, making a lot of sense.
I went through the book and highlighted direct quotes spoken by psychotic patients. I then used them in the film above, which is just for eyes to feast on lights and colour behind the words that don't sound so mad after all.
Wednesday, 4 November 2015
Go to your home that you don't call mine anymore
Go to your home. Your home isn't the same as mine anymore.
The place I've got is small but there are big empty spaces
shaped just like you and your guitar are shaped, and
they echo deep like catacombs, these hollowed corners,
this seat not taken, and the music you gave me
that part of me was broken. Not your fault
or my clumsiness, just a gift given for a short while
to borrow so I could shine. It always had to be returned,
or maybe it was caught by a morning bird.
It was beautiful
but I'm not a bird.
And you're not a cat.
You have a life,
just the one, and it's no rehearsal for another chance
to get it right. Get it right and when you do, what?
You got it right so many times. You were right for me,
then. But now, go to your home, to yourself.
Breathe in and out of balloons, just air
as if it's the kind lovers share. When you decide
to throw yourself down a K hole, be careful.
You aren't reborn when you come out. You aren't perfect.
Nothing ever is and ever was. We can't even
conceptualise that which is perfect. Only one thing
could possibly be- that's not existing or having been
at all. No circuit boards to switch you into the next life.
If you think you're there, and I'm holding you,
I am not there. If you are right and really are there,
we were worlds apart longer than I thought.
Let the vodka and beer trash your brain cells,
take hallucinogenics and make epiphanies of what you see.
Watch your fingers making trails, scooping the sky
and turn your hands into something mythological.
I'm sincere when I say you have made miracles with them
when your hands meet your mind and suddenly
there's music and I'm changing beat by beat,
skin shedding, extracellular activity, alterations
in neurological structures, cells turning over,
cells being regenerated or depleted or myelineated
or dying. Fundamental changes, but on the inside
you can't see glucorticoids and dopaminergic pathways
and you can't see the heart taking a beating either.
I can't remember seeing the changes. I just remember
the difference between being happy and being unhappy
and I hadn't been happy in enough time to remember
it was meant to be better. I needed to be better.
So when you are home with yourself, love yourself
like you had the courage to do while I cower
at the thought of really knowing. And when someone
is at home with you, tell them what you told me-
those words that had been all I'd ever wanted to hear
my whole life, those words I believed.
This time, make sure it's the right person for them,
those words, and this time, mean them.
This time, don't ignore time passing until somehow,
someday, somehow, you are walking away.
Tell her that she's a wonderful human, not a witch
or alien or psychic. Tell her she amazes you
with her ability to love you too. It's not hard to do.
Now stop looking in K Dick books and biblical texts
and through song lyrics to find links. Stop baring
your inner hypocrite with a quote from the Old Testament
as if it means something for you now, as if it ever meant
anything to anyone but those who needed faith
and wanted miracles and a storybook was enough.
That was never enough for the you I knew,
It's a worldwide bestseller. It's the ultimate classic,
Contributions by people with wild William James, J.D. Ballard,
Lewis Carroll imaginations. Imagined themselves prophets.
Don't read between those lines.
Coincidences happen when you l a straight 6 each time
you're rolling for chance, rooting for fate,
relishing in conspiracy.
Go home to yourself and find yourself again,
the one who was able to decide in Berlin to not forget
what he'd seen and learnt after swallowing seeds,
the one who let me go through
interactions with illusory voices
because he had strength enough to know the real from the unreal-
to know my unconscious mind from my waking one,
my own, the one that I was holding to tightly,
so tightly while holding tightly to you.
Maybe I held so tightly you needed to breathe
and all I could speak were whispers and tics
until I said my name and it sounded like an apology.
Maybe you held me so tightly I needed to breathe.
Maybe you needed to be with yourself, your love.
Maybe I needed to be with someone else, because
it let me remember again how it feels to be happy
and know you make someone else happy.
Go home and be emotional. Be as emotional as you are
in a way that reveals elevated emotional intelligence,
in a way that I could never be for never knowing
how I feel or what it is making me feel whatever I do.
You'll soften eventually. Your sadness will balance-
our reliance on our own immune realism is unknown by most
but you're more resilient than you think,
you're more curious than you think,
you're the one- really, of us two- who wanted knowledge
and wanted to know what's beyond our boundaries.
You wanted more than I was able to help you procure
hemmed in neatly between the borders of my brain.
Go home and forget me if you must.
Go home and believe, if one thing only, this:
You are beyond compare. You are the stars, satellites,
celestial bodies. They fell out of my universe
into my hands after it all and they were still warm
like your night breaths and still shone like your eyes
when kept open while kissing. The cartographers
of outer space rewrote the maps and you were removed
from me topographically.
I can't warm my hands holding them anymore,
Sometimes I wish I'd lose my memory.
Anyway, it's late to say it now but go to your home
to yourself, find the relics of him,
make sense of the start of yourself again and then
you'll begin at the beginning, becoming yourself again.
The place I've got is small but there are big empty spaces
shaped just like you and your guitar are shaped, and
they echo deep like catacombs, these hollowed corners,
this seat not taken, and the music you gave me
that part of me was broken. Not your fault
or my clumsiness, just a gift given for a short while
to borrow so I could shine. It always had to be returned,
or maybe it was caught by a morning bird.
It was beautiful
but I'm not a bird.
And you're not a cat.
You have a life,
just the one, and it's no rehearsal for another chance
to get it right. Get it right and when you do, what?
You got it right so many times. You were right for me,
then. But now, go to your home, to yourself.
Breathe in and out of balloons, just air
as if it's the kind lovers share. When you decide
to throw yourself down a K hole, be careful.
You aren't reborn when you come out. You aren't perfect.
Nothing ever is and ever was. We can't even
conceptualise that which is perfect. Only one thing
could possibly be- that's not existing or having been
at all. No circuit boards to switch you into the next life.
If you think you're there, and I'm holding you,
I am not there. If you are right and really are there,
we were worlds apart longer than I thought.
Let the vodka and beer trash your brain cells,
take hallucinogenics and make epiphanies of what you see.
Watch your fingers making trails, scooping the sky
and turn your hands into something mythological.
I'm sincere when I say you have made miracles with them
when your hands meet your mind and suddenly
there's music and I'm changing beat by beat,
skin shedding, extracellular activity, alterations
in neurological structures, cells turning over,
cells being regenerated or depleted or myelineated
or dying. Fundamental changes, but on the inside
you can't see glucorticoids and dopaminergic pathways
and you can't see the heart taking a beating either.
I can't remember seeing the changes. I just remember
the difference between being happy and being unhappy
and I hadn't been happy in enough time to remember
it was meant to be better. I needed to be better.
So when you are home with yourself, love yourself
like you had the courage to do while I cower
at the thought of really knowing. And when someone
is at home with you, tell them what you told me-
those words that had been all I'd ever wanted to hear
my whole life, those words I believed.
This time, make sure it's the right person for them,
those words, and this time, mean them.
This time, don't ignore time passing until somehow,
someday, somehow, you are walking away.
Tell her that she's a wonderful human, not a witch
or alien or psychic. Tell her she amazes you
with her ability to love you too. It's not hard to do.
Now stop looking in K Dick books and biblical texts
and through song lyrics to find links. Stop baring
your inner hypocrite with a quote from the Old Testament
as if it means something for you now, as if it ever meant
anything to anyone but those who needed faith
and wanted miracles and a storybook was enough.
That was never enough for the you I knew,
It's a worldwide bestseller. It's the ultimate classic,
Contributions by people with wild William James, J.D. Ballard,
Lewis Carroll imaginations. Imagined themselves prophets.
Don't read between those lines.
Coincidences happen when you l a straight 6 each time
you're rolling for chance, rooting for fate,
relishing in conspiracy.
Go home to yourself and find yourself again,
the one who was able to decide in Berlin to not forget
what he'd seen and learnt after swallowing seeds,
the one who let me go through
interactions with illusory voices
because he had strength enough to know the real from the unreal-
to know my unconscious mind from my waking one,
my own, the one that I was holding to tightly,
so tightly while holding tightly to you.
Maybe I held so tightly you needed to breathe
and all I could speak were whispers and tics
until I said my name and it sounded like an apology.
Maybe you held me so tightly I needed to breathe.
Maybe you needed to be with yourself, your love.
Maybe I needed to be with someone else, because
it let me remember again how it feels to be happy
and know you make someone else happy.
Go home and be emotional. Be as emotional as you are
in a way that reveals elevated emotional intelligence,
in a way that I could never be for never knowing
how I feel or what it is making me feel whatever I do.
You'll soften eventually. Your sadness will balance-
our reliance on our own immune realism is unknown by most
but you're more resilient than you think,
you're more curious than you think,
you're the one- really, of us two- who wanted knowledge
and wanted to know what's beyond our boundaries.
You wanted more than I was able to help you procure
hemmed in neatly between the borders of my brain.
Go home and forget me if you must.
Go home and believe, if one thing only, this:
You are beyond compare. You are the stars, satellites,
celestial bodies. They fell out of my universe
into my hands after it all and they were still warm
like your night breaths and still shone like your eyes
when kept open while kissing. The cartographers
of outer space rewrote the maps and you were removed
from me topographically.
I can't warm my hands holding them anymore,
Sometimes I wish I'd lose my memory.
Anyway, it's late to say it now but go to your home
to yourself, find the relics of him,
make sense of the start of yourself again and then
you'll begin at the beginning, becoming yourself again.
more than one supposes
I decided to put a little melody in my head to some lines I'd made up in my head.
For the hard of hearing:
There is more to be said
in the wordless breaths of sleep
than one supposes
when the breaths are sharing space
between two dreamers
touching noses
(inspired initially by Louis Macneice's Snow)
Monday, 28 September 2015
a line allows progress, a circle does not
Who can really measure the length of a dream anyway?
One could particularly not theorise about dreams that don't belong to them,
those they never had. Yet I think somehow it's been decided
that dreams hold like a breath for a few seconds before waking.
But dreams and nightmares have purposes. What would their use be
if they threw up and pulled away the messages being sent
to you, head still on your pillow, from your unconscious mind
before you can say hippocampus.
ii.
Hippocampus is a word that originated at seahorse
and now I can't adapt my belief to anything but thinking
that dreams are manufactured in a corner of
our complex neurological architecture- an undiscovered region,
and one that is shaped like a seahorse.
iii.
Uncharted territory. Here be dragons.
iv. I dream up cities upon cities upon cities
until the city lights are so plentiful that our planet
glows when seen from the red plains of Mars
or whichever of the dark or bright side
of the craggy silvery moon has the right view.
v. Here be dragons, here be dreams and moons
and other-otherwordly things. There must be a god
of some sort. A higher power is far enough
out of this world to exist, certainly.
vi. Dear whatever is up there or wherever you are,
or whomever, I apologise for my ignorance.
I live a sheltered life but you probably know that already
if any of the rumours about you are true. Sorry
that we got carried away and called you omnipotent
if you're not, omniscient if you don't have to be anywhere at all,
and benevolent when you aren't even in the dangerous position
of playing God. Then I am sorry on behalf of the believers
who complain. Some people have a strange idea of faith,
I think. I have faith in few things right now, but
the faith others have in me is crucial to my existing.
Anyway, I have a request to ask of you. I am not
praying or seeking guidance. I am just tired of
waiting to become the someone that I am waiting to be.
Please, turn me into something else, something
that use could actually be made out of. Make me useful
but please above all make me unhurtful, inoffensive-
turn me into a white blank wall, for those never hurt anyone
who wasn't involved in it coming down. It's a harmless
blank slate and projectors can turn it into a screen
for you to see what you want to see on the blankness.
I want people to see what they want to see when they look at me,
not seeing the absences, the simplicity, and it will please
until the day I let my vigilance appear in my windows
and someone raises a fist and puts it right through
the wall you could have turned me into.
vii. I invent small mercies that don't exist elsewhere
but in the cities I build in dreaming. They wouldn't be
measured- it is just mercy and it invariably loses
its popularity contest against justice.
The monster who had good intentions but whose pathways
were limited, obstructed; who hung around with
other monstrosities, a bad crowd; bad advice; poor decisions;
maybe he just never had anyone to help him out
of that monster suit.
viii. I invent new words for the city dwellers to include
in their vernacular. The language would be the same as this
and also the grammatical structure, but a difference in dialect
makes apparent the speaker is from the place where
they have words for what we need to say.
ix. a word for the opposite of loneliness, and for the experience
and accompanying feeling that occur when one can hear sounds
through their wall. of people laughing and conversing, while
one is on the solitary side of the dividing wall.
a word for the opposite of becoming.
a word for the moment in time when you know that
the worst has happened and within seconds you will be told
formally, so you remain suspended where there are no wordss for either.
a word for the certainty that you have recently seen what you have lost.
a word for te inability to give up searching for a particular and
not even necessary item and leave the house, the frantic search
being often a cause for turning up late.
a word for the experience of seeing one's own hands
as a pair of gloves, for when you look in the mirror and the face
reflected back to you is not your own.
a new word entirely for the moments when people catch sight
of themselves in mirrror and are shocked to see
what they have become, to see their blindspots blinkered
their vision to obfulscate the visible process of physical change.
a word for when the skin wrapped around you feels
like a plastic casing or cling film or uncomfortable enough
to feel overwhelmed by the desire to claw it off.
a word for the way women open their mouths while applying
eye make-up, and for the way their faces change expressions
momentarily when they look at their reflections.
And then a host of new words for variants in these
expressions that only appear fleetingly for mirrors.
a word for blushing caused by the presence of blushing.
a word for when you have loudly said what you didn't mean
that will allow fewer sunsets to occur over arguments.
a word for what you have said quietly and you did mean.
a word for the precursor to the stage at which a person contemplates
the real possibility of their imminent, unpreventable death-
a stage prior to that when a person has to contemplate
whether or not this is the moment to start the real contemplation.
a word for a dead person who keeps their form present
in a compliation of f evidence that they ever existed.
a word for the jelly-like sensation of one's legs that
makes the oncoming of a common cold etc. seem probable.
a word for having empathy for several people in
several different positions with several sets of attention at one time.
a word used to describe why you are affected by a painting.
a word used to describe why a piece of art leaves you not ambivalent
but noticeably unaffected. a word used to describe the process of
painbrushes hardening with paint and softening in water.
a word for the feeling one gets during moments of questioning
whether they are a good person and not knowing the answer.
a word for the punchline of a joke that you don't understand.
a word for the sigh people exhale into a drink they are raising to sip.
a word for the expanse of knowledge you have that you wish you didn't.
a word for what can only be experienced by the individual
who finds they can see very clearly something very important
by means of confusing circumstances or as a result of that confusion.
a word for faces people pull for the benefit of strangers.
a word for either a poem that has no concrete point but much content
or for the anticipation of its ending.
x.
Finally I willl invent a new way of saying, 'I will love better next time',
'I will be better next time', and despite the uncertainty behind those words
there is a steel-cast conviction that the words said can predict
the future they describe. There will probably have to be a word for
the absence of a next time, and for promises made to reach
an end goal that exists only as a possibility, one of many.
Tuesday, 22 September 2015
Monday, 21 September 2015
Answer
I think I found one answer:
I don't even know what the question is but I'm sure it has something to do with carrying on. There will be patterns in my life that repeat so that I can be sure I'm the common denominator. I make sure I always warn those in close proximity or potentially at risk about it, how I'm interesting and endearing, then suddenly preferably on opiates, asleep, or just not speaking about what I've been thinking over, just not moving, even. I guess people don't know what they want or will eventually want. Otherwise, several guys I know would be engaged to mannequins that look vaguely like me. Scarecrow girls, stuffed with straw so can stand, but lacking in cognitive functions pretty much across the board. The answer I figured out came from realising there are some left after staying longer than I expected, and there are some that might not follow patterns. In between those people, there's happy time to spend asking more questions.
Sunday, 20 September 2015
Mad
Branches scratching at the glass in my window
on the streets outside, the spaces outside
this space on the inside where the mad ones go.
The wind howls in squalling breaths across
each chimney stack, along all rain gutters full
of broken stars, bits of teeth spit back,
about the spilt milk, losses of ours at sea,
when I was out on the tarmac ocean
waving in and out of inner consciousness
in streams, it's paving the stones
and now nothing is concrete. It looked all bones
but if you listen carefully you're further gone
because the real crack is brain-deep.
Wind that can swing around, bring trees down,
it snatches you from sleep, it lifts latches
and goes flinging umber leaves savagely
to the ground. It comes alive where it attaches
between my clothing and skin, it comes alive
in the thin hairs on the back of my neck, they electrify.
I imagine what other spaces lie beyond the glass,
knowing that I once knew, hoping,
hoping for more than hope for absences of things
and for freedom, from my shadows
and the marionette strings. When I'm tying up
the loose ends before I go, the trees will be sighing
Goodbye, Pinocchio.
on the streets outside, the spaces outside
this space on the inside where the mad ones go.
The wind howls in squalling breaths across
each chimney stack, along all rain gutters full
of broken stars, bits of teeth spit back,
about the spilt milk, losses of ours at sea,
when I was out on the tarmac ocean
waving in and out of inner consciousness
in streams, it's paving the stones
and now nothing is concrete. It looked all bones
but if you listen carefully you're further gone
because the real crack is brain-deep.
Wind that can swing around, bring trees down,
it snatches you from sleep, it lifts latches
and goes flinging umber leaves savagely
to the ground. It comes alive where it attaches
between my clothing and skin, it comes alive
in the thin hairs on the back of my neck, they electrify.
I imagine what other spaces lie beyond the glass,
knowing that I once knew, hoping,
hoping for more than hope for absences of things
and for freedom, from my shadows
and the marionette strings. When I'm tying up
the loose ends before I go, the trees will be sighing
Goodbye, Pinocchio.
Saturday, 12 September 2015
Take your own advice
Stop biting your tongue,
apologising for nothing
but existing,
breathe in, breathe out-
just don't let yourself become a half-hearted song.
Don't wait any longer for magic to make up your mind
or one day you'll find yourself standing at the roadside
waiting for your backbone to pick you up.
apologising for nothing
but existing,
breathe in, breathe out-
just don't let yourself become a half-hearted song.
Don't wait any longer for magic to make up your mind
or one day you'll find yourself standing at the roadside
waiting for your backbone to pick you up.
Thursday, 20 August 2015
?
I got a Valentine's Day in the post
a letter from the one I loved the most
but the words of love that this day has planned
were replaced with symbols. I couldn't understand
and the card fell from my hands to the floor
because I don't know what love is anymore.
Sockets and bones and brain unhinged
just too short a distance away to unlock by
music box mouth, tip jar mouth,
ashtray mouth, spilled milk mouth.
Saturday, 8 August 2015
VII-IX
VII. Skies stretch out to the bluest places you've ever seen if you are prepared to stay up all night and watch. Watch out, what's coming? There are endless insurmountable places that make a jigsaw puzzle out of the edges of what you think you know is coming, and the natural reaction is to prepare for the circumstances that seem to be inevitable, but the sand beneath the car tyres has become so soft, almost like flour, and you are pushing forward on puffs of air. You sneeze when the flowers open out their petals for bumblebees to make visits. It's much more scheduled than you'd imagine. These bees are probably better planners than human beings be.
VIII. In the road the space for a person is quickly accounted for. The person who felt their feet on the road for the last time on earth will not disrupt the data input. No transformations needed for this particular anomalie.
IX. People disappear and reappear and it might be personal and it might not be. That's what the road so far has taught me. You get from it what you put whole-heartedly into it. You listen so you learn. You help so you are held. The sky is bashful. I must stay here quietly for a while/
VIII. In the road the space for a person is quickly accounted for. The person who felt their feet on the road for the last time on earth will not disrupt the data input. No transformations needed for this particular anomalie.
IX. People disappear and reappear and it might be personal and it might not be. That's what the road so far has taught me. You get from it what you put whole-heartedly into it. You listen so you learn. You help so you are held. The sky is bashful. I must stay here quietly for a while/
Tuesday, 21 July 2015
A pagan poem for a miracle man / a violent nature
You were high as the hill you climbed in the night
up to the dog that's a tree, all bark. The birds bite-
there's a murder of crows- don't stop to stare
Take and make bows from those that billow in my hair.
Do you know the question marks that follow all you say
can be bent into arrows? You fire away.
You never meant to be kind but your eyes shot stars
out into the skies. We both are shooting blind,
The answers we find were never ours.
There's been a murder of crows- feather as blade.
We put away the arrows for I was afraid
I can't say for sure whether birds died in the dark
but the pure Green Man's song was in the dog tree's bark.
As the trees protect you, Green Man folds in your arm
The birds respect you. They sing, 'do no harm'.
up to the dog that's a tree, all bark. The birds bite-
there's a murder of crows- don't stop to stare
Take and make bows from those that billow in my hair.
Do you know the question marks that follow all you say
can be bent into arrows? You fire away.
You never meant to be kind but your eyes shot stars
out into the skies. We both are shooting blind,
The answers we find were never ours.
There's been a murder of crows- feather as blade.
We put away the arrows for I was afraid
I can't say for sure whether birds died in the dark
but the pure Green Man's song was in the dog tree's bark.
As the trees protect you, Green Man folds in your arm
The birds respect you. They sing, 'do no harm'.
Taking Time
Tumbling words of children became conversations
more slowly than we became two people to see as one.
The cheetah can run up to 70 miles an hour,
but we promised that time wouldn’t have a say in this.
We were inspired by the lack of syllables it took us
to understand the flawed or stormy attempts to explain-
my failings, the big empties, more and more obvious
that there can be conjured a mirage of seduction.
There isn’t room anymore for interrogation,
time doesn’t get a say in this.
But the scrambling words of a child are clearer than my second sight,
and even the cheetah must slow down to breathe.
We pride ourselves in the hurry but I need time.
I didn't get a say in why.
There's nothing anyone can say but I.
more slowly than we became two people to see as one.
The cheetah can run up to 70 miles an hour,
but we promised that time wouldn’t have a say in this.
We were inspired by the lack of syllables it took us
to understand the flawed or stormy attempts to explain-
my failings, the big empties, more and more obvious
that there can be conjured a mirage of seduction.
There isn’t room anymore for interrogation,
time doesn’t get a say in this.
But the scrambling words of a child are clearer than my second sight,
and even the cheetah must slow down to breathe.
We pride ourselves in the hurry but I need time.
I didn't get a say in why.
There's nothing anyone can say but I.
Thursday, 16 July 2015
Haikus
I love Baby Green.
Petits pois, petits fois, gras?
Non, don't stuff the ducks.
Major attraction
Mediocre and at sea.
My colonel sweetheart.
Nice to me, biscuits
and tea and jam and cake
sugar-coated sips..
So many emails.
There's an army of women
in chains, male ordered
There's a wedding soon
Peggy Sue getting married
holly in her hair
Library of peace
A tedious quiet place
where nothing happens.
The beach map from hell
Treasure buried with lost souls,
bad souls, flaming sand.
Petits pois, petits fois, gras?
Non, don't stuff the ducks.
Major attraction
Mediocre and at sea.
My colonel sweetheart.
Nice to me, biscuits
and tea and jam and cake
sugar-coated sips..
So many emails.
There's an army of women
in chains, male ordered
There's a wedding soon
Peggy Sue getting married
holly in her hair
Library of peace
A tedious quiet place
where nothing happens.
The beach map from hell
Treasure buried with lost souls,
bad souls, flaming sand.
Lean on me when you're not strong
I can’t remember the last time I had faith enough
to lean on something without having misjudged, or misunderstood.
I can’t remember a time I was not the cause of the walls coming down,
railings shattering and shoulders breaking.
Am I one in a long sequence of actions and reactions?
The event of a fall and the consequential fall of something else.
Cause and effect. Action and reaction.
Am I one link in a chain reaction,
a chain linked only by being broken?
Tuesday, 14 July 2015
Hmmmmm
When you consider someone as trustworthy does it mean they are worthy of your trust
or are you commenting on the extent to which you can trust them and what it's worth?
I made this and stuck it in the main hallway of the building where I live. Next time I saw it a couple of tears had been made.
or are you commenting on the extent to which you can trust them and what it's worth?
I made this and stuck it in the main hallway of the building where I live. Next time I saw it a couple of tears had been made.
Monday, 6 July 2015
I-VI
I. You forget your childhood with its bright yellow cassette player, dressed up as a Disney princess. You forget what your nightmares used to be back then, the smell of your school uniform, how long it took to drive to Cornwall at night-time. The quiet of your colouring pens, trying to draw inside the lines.
II. You forget what it was you once said you felt passionate about. Beneath your skin, under your hair, layers of your mind are being peeled away, You are breathless, trying to be who you are by saying you are and trying to be someone other than who you are. You never forget the numbers that tilt you into pride or despair each morning. Spend too much attention on the bones that appear when your skin shrinks back into them.
III. Life has been stretched out in front of you and it's a fresh paved road. Dizzying, the smell of so many asphalt miles, the thought of all those that you can't allow to be empty miles. The road stretches out in front of you.
IV. There is a girl with a wilting name who carries pink half moons in her palms, birdlike and blue. You tried at first, but you could not cry for her while your fingers were a gun down her throat. Not a girl with eyes used to be open clearly, curious blinks, now turned into confusion and bitterness and so, so much pain. You don't know her pain, only yours, and hers is yours as well. She never asked for this. She never asked to wear so many costumes.
V. You are in a car and the road is nothing like it used to be. Your pedal is too close to the floor. The girl whose name was wilting has no name anymore. She is shrinking out of sight, reflected in your rear-view mirror. A month ago, perhaps, she would have tried to run after you, begging you, do not leave yourself behind. Now, those eyes were violent and hateful and she was defiant. Thumb stuck out, disappearing into the distance. You forget her but she will be back because she took all the vengeance you had in the backseat away with her.
VI. The road stretches out ahead of you.
Sunday, 21 June 2015
gig 2
I'm about to head off to perform my second gig.
I hope I'm this relaxed, but I'm so anxious my heart is humming loud enough to accompany a vocal solo. Update later
'
I hope I'm this relaxed, but I'm so anxious my heart is humming loud enough to accompany a vocal solo. Update later
'
teaching domestic studies in the 21st century: a must-have list
curtains so heavy
they black it all out
(I will cut my own stars in them
but it was all dark, so
I made myself bleed)
a spine
or an ancient tree
(I will climb it above the too-loud world
and make-believe I'll never grow up)
flower petal teacups
that are infinite, evergreen
(you will bring them out
for Christmas and the first days
of spring, leave lip marks on them)
a quiet lion living in a world
that has far too much pride
(predatory protection, this city
is a roaring desert)
a jar filled with riddles, mysteries,
other words for secrets
(later you will smash it against
the rock that conquers fear-
Love)
an updated map of our solar system
and a model of Pluto and its moons, in detail
(sometimes I'm small and seem
far away but I still have my own gravity
if even a handful, so don't let go)
they black it all out
(I will cut my own stars in them
but it was all dark, so
I made myself bleed)
a spine
or an ancient tree
(I will climb it above the too-loud world
and make-believe I'll never grow up)
flower petal teacups
that are infinite, evergreen
(you will bring them out
for Christmas and the first days
of spring, leave lip marks on them)
a quiet lion living in a world
that has far too much pride
(predatory protection, this city
is a roaring desert)
a jar filled with riddles, mysteries,
other words for secrets
(later you will smash it against
the rock that conquers fear-
Love)
an updated map of our solar system
and a model of Pluto and its moons, in detail
(sometimes I'm small and seem
far away but I still have my own gravity
if even a handful, so don't let go)
Tuesday, 16 June 2015
Shortened version of Psychosis article
Voice 1: Why? How do I get rid of you?
Voice 2: To get rid of us you have to get rid of yourself.
Voice 3: If anyone knew what was going on in your head…
Voice 4: Look who’s really crazy now?
Voice 5: Help me.
My mother said in an email, ‘You’re right. Most people don’t know what happened to you with Ella’s death.’ I haven’t cried such tears of relief, ever. After the worst of it was over, I did not know enough to cry tears of relief because I was so busy gathering scraps of my sanity back. That sounds like a cliche or a silly metaphor but I will begin my explanation of what really did happen that left me gathering sanity scraps. This silly image is annoyingly as accurate as language gets to depict how I felt after the initial destructive event- the scattering agent. It was my mind, once intact, now unrecognisable and in pieces and it wouldn't work cohesively unless I found new ways to assemble the pieces and assemble myself all over again. In doing so, I reassembled an entire person out of the wreckage of someone who, though supposedly sane before, is also unrecognisable when I look back on her.
For a while, I experienced what my doctors explained was a ‘transient episode of psychosis as response to extreme emotional stress’. I had no sense of self as soon as it began, because prior to the episode I had put so much emphasis on the importance of my mind. ‘It’s my most treasured possession’ I would say, and in the most horrific hours I would be taunted by my own cackles at just how funny it was, how I’d practically asked for it because that treasured mind of mine was now gone.
Voice 1: I don’t want my body.
Voice 2: I want my mind.
Voice 3: Your mind is a long way-away-away-away-away…..
Doctors had recently diagnosed me with Borderline Personality Disorder and I had been reluctant to fully accept this diagnostic label until they explained that transient psychosis is actually symptomatic of BPD. I will never be able to credit my therapists and doctors enough for their endless reassurance that I had not lost my mind, that it would come back, and that there was an end to what was happening.
The psychosis was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s also probably the thing (no, definitely) I’m most proud of going through. No one will ever give me a cheer or a pat on the back or congratulate me for battling a war with my own shadow and winning. I have to be proud of what I’ve done totally on my own, and I thank my fucked up little patched-together brain for teaching me through utterly going to pieces and only being reassembled to function with endless painstaking almost excruciating (no, excruciating) effort and time and working against horrible forces that only existed inside of me- invisible enemies only I could see because they were a part of me and still are- that sometimes the greatest things you’ll do aren’t about being evaluated by other people. I’ve learnt there are some victories you can enjoy even if nobody will cheer for you and there are some accomplishments that only you will be able to appreciate, and that is not a bad thing.
Now I can weirdly, proudly, semi-cryptically, and strangely say without the least bit of genuine profundity that I fought the demons and voices my own split evil brain created for me after throwing me into a Kafkaesque horror carnival parody movie-like hell, and I beat them by outwitting them
(You can only beat your own mind with your own mind) and it’s the best thing I’ve ever accomplished. The least enjoyable.
I heard mostly my own voice, but fragmented into many different Daisys. It began with family’s voices (mocking, mostly, by my sister and her boyfriend, my cousin, my grandma, aunt, other cousins, and mother).and graduated into my brain going off on wild loops, thoughts as if heard from outside that I never put there and rhapsodising poems without my consent, speaking in dialects, letting me in on the voices of social realisms I didn’t even know I was aware of. This content of the voices shows that my unconsious mind, beneath the level of awareness, was aware of and considering things I'd never consciously thought about. My unconscious mind was split from me, it was angry, it got powerful the more scared I became, and it hated me. It had it in for me and wanted me to die. It told me I had to end my life if I wanted the voices to go away. They told me I could save my cousin through suicide. When you’re sad, you can get very superstitious.
As it worsened and my life was terrorised by the voices, I would see things and hear things and the world became inescapably violent and unpredictable until it was impossible to maintain a façade of sanity. I remember covering my ears on a train platform and crouching down yelling because I heard all the trains cackling at me,
My evil unconscious mind, somewhat ingenious despite being Machiavellian- would jump into speakers and amplifiers on tube and in supermarkets and broadcast across whole shop/train carriage with my own voice saying, “Look what I can do.”
Of course, the doctors were right. It did end, when I began to listen. The least dreadful voice(s) were the last to go, and the ones that stayed latest at night, and the quietest. They were small voices asking ‘why?’ and saying ‘help me’. I heard ‘listen to me’. It wasn't until I started listening to them that I began getting over them. I see them now as being the angry fragmented voices of the angry fragmented person I had stamped all over and dressed up in different identities and denied, denied, denied. The person I really was got so sick of being mistreated- I wasn't even drinking water or sleeping, that’s the extent to which I was denying and neglecting myself basic care without even thinking- that she got a voice, then she got more voices, then she got louder, then she went on a power trip to punish me for what a mess I’d made of whatever it was I organically was meant to be, by pretending to be a whole load of other things and never letting myself be happy and making people around me sad too.
But I’m so lucky I never quite believed the voices totally. If I had I wouldn’t be here to talk about it. I knew from the start, perhaps because the nature of the voices and my unconscious mind with all the tricks it played on me was purely and exclusively Machiavellian, that they weren’t words I could believe or trust, if I wanted to get out of it alive (no hyperbole), and if I wanted a future. It’s very hard to tell yourself not to trust the things you find inside your own head. Usually you assume your thoughts are your own and therefore true to you. I had to continuously believe that my mind was not to my own- the things I heard were not my thoughts. Often they were the things, I discovered, that I was afraid of thinking or feeling, or afraid that other people thought I felt or thought, or the things that I absolutely did not believe or think or feel.The voices made me conscious of what I was doing, what I was afraid of really, what I was becoming, what I was losing, what I was missing out on that I could have but was so busy being wasteful and harmful and in denial that I couldn’t even see it was being wasted. There is nothing I've experienced more terrifying than hearing a voice in your head you know did not come from the outside world but sounds like it did, but actually shocks you because it’s not your own thought.Not an inner voice or imagined. A shocking, surprising, horrible thought in spoken word- a voice probably recognised- that you did not put there yourself and you do not want to be there.
I won’t write anymore about this now but listen to this recording
and it will give you a short insight into how some of it sounds. It’s like this and it doesn’t stop.
Altogether, it has now. I'm better for it.
The voices were there for a reason, and even though my unconscious mind went above and beyond to show me how much it hated me, I hope I’ve gained some of its respect back, at least enough to start talking in entirely the first person and continue on in my life as a whole person rather than the scraps of someone I don’t know and don’t care about enough to look after in the most basic way. Since the psychosis, I’ve been reluctantly able to accept that I am deserving (of water etc.) and sometimes need to be listened to, because there’s nothing to be that is ever going to work if its fiction and not fact. The scraps I’ve collected are structured day-to-day, moment-to-moment, and it can be ugly. They are demanding little bitches, those voices. Still, whether they meant it all along or I somehow managed to salvage the tiny speck of good leftover from the hellish experience, those voices gave me insights and taught me lessons that have been invaluable, and though they destroyed me for a while what they destroyed was not a real self, just a costume, or many costumes, and in retrospect I see that they saved me, the real one, the invisible self disappearing under so many costumes I lost any recognition of who I really was. I guess I have to thank the worst parts of my mind for helping me rescue what can now become the best parts.
Saturday, 13 June 2015
jumbled
Jumbled jam jars lined up on the windowsill,
which seeds are your own? You planted them yourself
in a bed of cotton wool and watch the days go by
while roots grow further and stretch until they stop,
when they have found their place.
I never set my roots down in school or at home,
grew them to the toe-ends of black patent
pumps, propelled from then into a well-made madness.
They let me go stale and I have no roots to go back to.
The root of all whatever-
Gold star blisters, stickers, bird names
assigned to school houses in yellow-blue-green-red.
Between the houses the walls went up- 1, 2, 3....
go- without direction, without waiting,
the soles of both my feet will not wait for me
to find joy in the older years to come.
Clean out of the nesting place, I go cuckoo,
other thoughts audible to me, and I want to go back.
Run at the speed of light then faster
so you can make me a time machine. I'll go back
and pick up all the scattered sticks, brush away
weeds, budding with hooks, clinging on
to follow you from nettle gardens.
Dead bees litter the lawn. I see them when
the ascent becomes illuminated.
The belief that only that which can be observed
and measured can be known- positivists agree.
I would be one of them if I didn't feel excited
about the other things that do exist and we can't see
so just don't know about yet. Things yet to conceive of:
I am cutting clean through whatever roots I managed
and I'm another uprooted Daisy.
There are no signposts, just dreams
and those I can follow. I can almost remember
the song that I can almost hear them singing.
Imaginary trumpets, blues bars,
up the sleeve trump cards for safekeeping.
Summer has come and I'm old now,
and in retrospect, I pay myself more respect.
.
Normality is something that is transient
and arbitrary.
Melancholy and happiness too,
but I'm happy, and it's arbitrariness doesn't make a difference.
which seeds are your own? You planted them yourself
in a bed of cotton wool and watch the days go by
while roots grow further and stretch until they stop,
when they have found their place.
I never set my roots down in school or at home,
grew them to the toe-ends of black patent
pumps, propelled from then into a well-made madness.
They let me go stale and I have no roots to go back to.
The root of all whatever-
Gold star blisters, stickers, bird names
assigned to school houses in yellow-blue-green-red.
Between the houses the walls went up- 1, 2, 3....
go- without direction, without waiting,
the soles of both my feet will not wait for me
to find joy in the older years to come.
Clean out of the nesting place, I go cuckoo,
other thoughts audible to me, and I want to go back.
Run at the speed of light then faster
so you can make me a time machine. I'll go back
and pick up all the scattered sticks, brush away
weeds, budding with hooks, clinging on
to follow you from nettle gardens.
Dead bees litter the lawn. I see them when
the ascent becomes illuminated.
The belief that only that which can be observed
and measured can be known- positivists agree.
I would be one of them if I didn't feel excited
about the other things that do exist and we can't see
so just don't know about yet. Things yet to conceive of:
I am cutting clean through whatever roots I managed
and I'm another uprooted Daisy.
There are no signposts, just dreams
and those I can follow. I can almost remember
the song that I can almost hear them singing.
Imaginary trumpets, blues bars,
up the sleeve trump cards for safekeeping.
Summer has come and I'm old now,
and in retrospect, I pay myself more respect.
.
Normality is something that is transient
Melancholy and happiness too,
but I'm happy, and it's arbitrariness doesn't make a difference.
Friday, 12 June 2015
Sunday, 7 June 2015
Here be dragons
When I was a small dragon, winters ago,
it was always winter. I spat fire and ash,
my skin sagged like a coat on a cold blue hanger.
It was summer's ending when the voices came,
and clinic bathrooms,
a coyote hungry stare,
the silence of September.
For thousands of days I ha not felt my body.
I did not even photosynthesise, and in my mouth
grew ulcers, and teeth died.
When I looked at the sun reflected
in the mirror, stared at the skull-head there,
it looked less and less like a dragon's everyday.
Slowly becoming human,
a mouth still charred. I began to drink water again.
There are the bones of a dragon
gravely buried inside me.
There are phantom limbs attached too, but not mine.
They belong to soldiers who shared beers
in Vietnamese hideouts. They belong to the widows
who lose their wedding rings
down the garbage disposal.
it was always winter. I spat fire and ash,
my skin sagged like a coat on a cold blue hanger.
It was summer's ending when the voices came,
and clinic bathrooms,
a coyote hungry stare,
the silence of September.
For thousands of days I ha not felt my body.
I did not even photosynthesise, and in my mouth
grew ulcers, and teeth died.
When I looked at the sun reflected
in the mirror, stared at the skull-head there,
it looked less and less like a dragon's everyday.
Slowly becoming human,
a mouth still charred. I began to drink water again.
There are the bones of a dragon
gravely buried inside me.
There are phantom limbs attached too, but not mine.
They belong to soldiers who shared beers
in Vietnamese hideouts. They belong to the widows
who lose their wedding rings
down the garbage disposal.
Dreams/Nightmares
We don’t dream of cities
but name our children after them. I had a dream
about a family, not my own. A girl called Virginia
who could tie cherry stems with her tongue
even though they were sour and had dark hair
gathered with the long grasses in the field when I saw her
standing out there under a demonic-tasting night sky.
I think she was looking for her sisters.
We give our children elegant names
then cut them down. Alex. Ella. I had a dream
about a family and in the dream I took hope-
it was shaped like a wire weathervane-
and turned it into a thing of misdiagnosis.
Deer from the field died in still water, lungs emptied,
secrets drew blood and I drew life
from the skin of the sisters in the family, with elegant names
In another dream I went to visit my father's grave-
he was just another soldier on the list of those remembered
after the first world war. In uniform,
in a picture on the stone memorial someone put there,
decorated in medals, gleaming sepia ribbons and coins.
There were poppies all over my feet, for Armistice,and the tall grass
in that field where he lay had grown gold, glowing, shimmering,
so it could not have been November. Maybe May,
My cousin was dressed as a princess when she arrived
to beckon me back into the shuttle bus home.
My sister stood by the window, squinting blindly out.
Then suddenly my cousin had jumped off the bus into the grass/
I lost sight of her glowing hair amid all that glow harvest.
Gold horizon, medals on war heroes,
the plastic crown part of her princess costume.
but name our children after them. I had a dream
about a family, not my own. A girl called Virginia
who could tie cherry stems with her tongue
even though they were sour and had dark hair
gathered with the long grasses in the field when I saw her
standing out there under a demonic-tasting night sky.
We give our children elegant names
then cut them down. Alex. Ella. I had a dream
about a family and in the dream I took hope-
it was shaped like a wire weathervane-
and turned it into a thing of misdiagnosis.
Deer from the field died in still water, lungs emptied,
secrets drew blood and I drew life
from the skin of the sisters in the family, with elegant names
In another dream I went to visit my father's grave-
he was just another soldier on the list of those remembered
after the first world war. In uniform,
in a picture on the stone memorial someone put there,
decorated in medals, gleaming sepia ribbons and coins.
There were poppies all over my feet, for Armistice,and the tall grass
in that field where he lay had grown gold, glowing, shimmering,
so it could not have been November. Maybe May,
My cousin was dressed as a princess when she arrived
to beckon me back into the shuttle bus home.
My sister stood by the window, squinting blindly out.
Then suddenly my cousin had jumped off the bus into the grass/
I lost sight of her glowing hair amid all that glow harvest.
Gold horizon, medals on war heroes,
the plastic crown part of her princess costume.
Friday, 5 June 2015
Monday, 1 June 2015
Looking tired again, and that's not always loneliness or sad.
It's like student's eyelids before that stampede of letter-writing,
expectations and predictions and the old aching of not knowing
where your letters will send you. Holding onto a past,
a present you aren't sure you want, a pair of spectacles,
a lucky pencil, the blueprints to those important smiles.
It all comes down to the architecture of your face and
a dream you have that you know you can’t say aloud.
It's like student's eyelids before that stampede of letter-writing,
expectations and predictions and the old aching of not knowing
where your letters will send you. Holding onto a past,
a present you aren't sure you want, a pair of spectacles,
a lucky pencil, the blueprints to those important smiles.
It all comes down to the architecture of your face and
a dream you have that you know you can’t say aloud.
Friday, 29 May 2015
Wednesday, 20 May 2015
Burnt-out
Days are landlocked, minds divided and expanding
burning the edges in
photographs of nebulae, of burn-out humans
starred and scarred faces in the sky.
It doesn't matter that I don't know the answer to the question that is being asked:
there will be answers to come, but we haven't even conceived
of something anywhere like close to
whatever those will be. What answers do you need from me?
In Old English, a second ago was a second minute ago
and in Latin there is not a word for yes or no
and did you know that the hippocampus is a Latin word for seahorse?
The seahorse in your brain where memories make you,
photograph by photograph, it keeps your mind together.
Still, you're asking. What happened to that face?
He has stars in his eyes, I thought, while Will held a flame
to a discarded photograph and the paper seared gold
and the people pictured there became galaxies
and stars of jewel-bed colors in night and cities and in trees.
burning the edges in
photographs of nebulae, of burn-out humans
starred and scarred faces in the sky.
It doesn't matter that I don't know the answer to the question that is being asked:
there will be answers to come, but we haven't even conceived
of something anywhere like close to
whatever those will be. What answers do you need from me?
In Old English, a second ago was a second minute ago
and in Latin there is not a word for yes or no
and did you know that the hippocampus is a Latin word for seahorse?
The seahorse in your brain where memories make you,
photograph by photograph, it keeps your mind together.
Still, you're asking. What happened to that face?
He has stars in his eyes, I thought, while Will held a flame
to a discarded photograph and the paper seared gold
and the people pictured there became galaxies
and stars of jewel-bed colors in night and cities and in trees.
I don't understand myself right now. My poems are not good. My writing is not happening
but my mind somehow overtook all else and my synapses might burn-out too
like some William voodoo
Monday, 11 May 2015
The 150 Friends Club
Oh my golly what a great song
Oh my golly listen to this band
Oh my golly I couldn't be more jolly
That they use my helping hand.
Saturday, 9 May 2015
I lost him long before the fog rolled in,
the sound that sound cracks make
the glass would break
when I would be framed-
if I had known, I would have not missed handwritten notes,
the small signs amongst the hollering
and the erosion- the brick walls and the attrition
of something I counted up
brick by brick, counting myself safe
and if I knew he wasn't waving anymore
maybe I would have left the lighthouse and gone somewhere alone
but I am lonely
I miss him, I miss the swing of the lighthouse beam
calling out for him
i will find a way back to you
I had only one light shining and it was for him.
I lost him long before the rocks came apart
and the lighthouse fell into the sea.
come back to me
I would say, but who am I talking to?
Myself, I guess.
Myself, I guess.
Friday, 24 April 2015
Waterstones
So some people posit that people aren't afraid of dying, just dying before they have the chance to leave some imprint or mark upon the existing world that will remain in their absence as a reminder, or as evidence to show, that they ever existed themselves. I got to write some book reviews for Waterstones so I guess if that theory holds true I can die happy now.
An Anthropologist On Mars- Oliver Sacks
A surgeon with Tourettes' that gives him uncontrollable tics that magically cease during surgery; the amnesiac who can't recall anything since the 60's; a painter whose colour-blindness doesn't stop him from painting (pictures included); a blind man who regains his sight after 51 years, with frightening consequences; among other abnormalities of the human condition, Sacks writes the stories of his patients and their amazing idiosyncratic experiences.
Virgin Suicides- Jeffrey Eugenides
A breathtakingly beautiful confusing and one-of-a-kind novel, absolutely incredibly unmissable
While the story keeps you riveted, the language will inspire.
Proust Was A Neuroscientist- Jonah Lerner
Long before the 20 and 21st century advances in neuroscience and neuroimaging technology the pathways to what we now take as scientific truths about how the brain experiences the world were already being paved y Proust, George Eliot, Cezanne, and Woolf, among others.
Brimming with knowledge tracing concepts of female mental illness back through melancholy, hysteria, mania, nerves, desire, contrariness and 'Freudian problems'- contains case studies detailing the afflictions of women from 1800 to today and the rapidly changing understanding that accompanied elapsing time.
Friday, 3 April 2015
Inspired by No.5 of Charles Bernstein's experiments
You are still too young for how old you're getting,
You're so young in your head that you speak to yourself
in poems
in second persons,
in your own voice
sounds
in your head
sound
like voices in my head.
You, I think I lost your mind.
You are not yourself.
I am mistaken, so are you.
I am mistaken, for who?
You.
You got me.
You get me.
I've got you.
I (for)get you.
Love is never enough. You know that
I know you.
I love you, you know.
You know I love you.
You're so young in your head that you speak to yourself
in poems
in second persons,
in your own voice
sounds
in your head
sound
like voices in my head.
You, I think I lost your mind.
You are not yourself.
I am mistaken, so are you.
I am mistaken, for who?
You.
You got me.
You get me.
I've got you.
I (for)get you.
Love is never enough. You know that
I know you.
I love you, you know.
You know I love you.
another fictional diary entry of sorts/fictional mind and its fictional thoughts
I've got a few characters in my mind that have developed over time, some of which are extensions of myself, others characteristically standing in dramatic opposition with every fairly well-established characteristic or trait that I have learnt from others that I possess (it's no secret that all my self-knowledge comes from other people, specifically the reflections of how or what or who I am informing me of how or what or whom that is). I did a thought experiment and tried to adapt to fit the mindset of one of these characters, and began to write.
4.37 am
We're the oldest living crusaders
in a war
we can't remember,
I can't remember-
10.58 am
my dreams last night were stranger than usual. but these days dreams are no stranger than reality and that's unusual. I found my mother sitting on the front porch. Her nightdress wet from the sprinklers and she was wearing socks but no shoes, so the soggy lawn soaked right through, turning them grey. If it was still 5 or whenever I woke up and started trying to write my dreams down I would not have realised I was awake, she'd just be another part of the dream.I wish I could This is a nightmare and I can't It's pointless to wish you could wake up from I feel sick with guilt about
I am aware of how seem only to myself writing this, and I'm not strong enough to see that hateful wicked part of myself that I know exists and is undeniably present, not subtle,
I just don't want to see it.
And she was drumming her fingers on the decking, picking at the paint. I wish we could whitewash ourselves, all of this, us. I need to get out of here without feeling immediately like the most terrible living creature to ever own a beating heart. She's so helpless. Her little pointed eyes turned on me, her little pointed teeth seeming to get smaller the more she refrained from speaking so she could listen to her voices. They are hers because nobody else hears them and they are also hers, she says. She says she has been split off like light refracting from a prism. Sliced into little rainbow bits and fragmented and now her soul is in ribbons, her brain slivers, her central nervous system, her senses, speech.
I need to close the conversation, she was nodding and saying when I found her, not looking at anything, I need to bring it to a close.
Your clothes, I extended my arms to pull her up, as if she was my younger sister and not my mother, I imagine what haunts her, if I'm correct and have listened as hard as I have she is hampered bythe feeling the knowledge that she's been cut up and dispersed. She's not a person anymore, and not many people. Something that once was and is now fractured, spread too thin has no central nucleus for the rest of her feral electrons to spin around. She is spinning around everywhere and without somewhere to go or to belong then you are nothing. You have nothing, and that usually means there is nothing of you because someone always has something. I fixate on the fragments themselves. Those tiny pieces of her. I think about how they are shaped. I imagine holding them in my palms, feeling their angles and even venture as far as picturing what it would be to reassemble her like a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Like a jenga backwards, without the falling bricks. I can never fully imagine getting close to completing it because the image itself is impoverished, which to me usually means it won't be possible. Things aren't possible if they'e not yet conceived of.
Someone will, though, somewhere.
She howls in the night because she sees faces in everything, They are beyond human, she says. They are never warm or kind. The world I'm in hates me, she cries again and again, what have I done? As if someone is going to answer. Even I know that her voices don't have one. If they did would she want it?
I need to get out of here and anesthetise my conscience. Or else give myself a lobotomy. I'll be mad like her if I don't get out. I'm going to go to confession tomorrow. I would go today but I need to iron Mass dress. I have enough guilt for a handful of Christians but I guess I leave the repentance for someone else.I wish I was I wish she could God, please help us.
4.37 am
We're the oldest living crusaders
in a war
we can't remember,
I can't remember-
10.58 am
my dreams last night were stranger than usual. but these days dreams are no stranger than reality and that's unusual. I found my mother sitting on the front porch. Her nightdress wet from the sprinklers and she was wearing socks but no shoes, so the soggy lawn soaked right through, turning them grey. If it was still 5 or whenever I woke up and started trying to write my dreams down I would not have realised I was awake, she'd just be another part of the dream.
I am aware of how seem only to myself writing this,
I just don't want to see it.
And she was drumming her fingers on the decking, picking at the paint. I wish we could whitewash ourselves, all of this, us. I need to get out of here without feeling immediately like the most terrible living creature to ever own a beating heart. She's so helpless. Her little pointed eyes turned on me, her little pointed teeth seeming to get smaller the more she refrained from speaking so she could listen to her voices. They are hers because nobody else hears them and they are also hers, she says. She says she has been split off like light refracting from a prism. Sliced into little rainbow bits and fragmented and now her soul is in ribbons, her brain slivers, her central nervous system, her senses, speech.
I need to close the conversation, she was nodding and saying when I found her, not looking at anything, I need to bring it to a close.
Your clothes, I extended my arms to pull her up, as if she was my younger sister and not my mother, I imagine what haunts her, if I'm correct and have listened as hard as I have she is hampered by
Someone will, though, somewhere.
She howls in the night because she sees faces in everything, They are beyond human, she says. They are never warm or kind. The world I'm in hates me, she cries again and again, what have I done? As if someone is going to answer. Even I know that her voices don't have one. If they did would she want it?
I need to get out of here and anesthetise my conscience. Or else give myself a lobotomy. I'll be mad like her if I don't get out. I'm going to go to confession tomorrow. I would go today but I need to iron Mass dress. I have enough guilt for a handful of Christians but I guess I leave the repentance for someone else.
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