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
Sunday, 29 November 2015
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)
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