We were saying goodbye at my door. We’d had one of our arguments- not the more serious kind that bores a trench so deep between us that I don’t even try to reach over it, and he can’t for he is too occupied with the pain he later describes to me that he feels in my absence, the inability to grasp my words and enter my thoughts (‘i just love you’ he says, ‘i miss you’) causes him to hurt all over, and no matter how many drugs he takes and new friends he makes for one night alone, never a fling or romantic dalliance but only a drunk and desperate attempt to make a connection and feel liked, feel loved. I understand it all, everything he does, even if it’s harmful or exceeds the breadth of my imagination, in which case I usually find myself in a storm of tears until he reassures me there will be no harm done. I understand and even though my visceral responses to some of his anecdotes from the past or contemplations of the present suggest that my morals stand so strongly against them; despite the fact that I feel such actions, negotiations, schemes and pure means of survival are reprehensible, I understand why he has done what he has done. I don’t know the extent to which he is involved in that world of violence and cold blood, all in pursuit of money and for every individual involved, perhaps, something else such as an ongoing need for vengeance that can’t be vanquished because the object of their revenge is someone they cannot reach, leaving them only to try and satisfy their need for it through exacting it on strangers; or some other need, for respect, for power, for the thrill of it, for the desire to live on the very edge of being human and being another thing entirely. That other thing is either dead to the world without anything to show it love and therefore no way of feeling love at all, or it is a monster who stands above humanity because it has no capacity to love. The parts of its brain implicated in loving of any kind, and the network that allows people to see and feel the pain of others, to experience guilt, to struggle with conscience, to refrain from inflicting pain- that part, long deteriorated, and at this level of damage, the monster can feel no connection to a human, though it was probably human once.
No, he is no monster. Even in his monstrous past, he was human, feeling pain almost perpetually. Drinking his guilt into oblivion. Suffering behind bars. Traumatised by the ways the world he grew up hating threw hatred back at him, even threw evil- abuse, lies that confused and misdirected him, or forms of terrorism- the cellmate who woke him at night with a razor blade to his throat. He still has dreams about that cell. His old girlfriend told me he would wake up violent and yelling at her and with threats meant for this someone else. I have seen him cry in his sleep.
I understand because of what the world turned him into. I understand that parts of him are still steeped in what he came to embody. I also feel from him the deep-seated hatred of the world and everything in it, rotting at his core. But I feel it is unravelling as he is surprised by acts of kindness, when  he realise people will accept and not turn away from him, when he finds to his immense shock that he can trust somebody, for that’s one thing he’d never been able to do. He trusts me, he says, nobody else, and that is why our arguments can be so painful for him I won’t ever leave him behind, and there’s a resolution after every argument, but he believes in those times he can’t reach out for me and find me there for him with a smile and open door that I must be harbouring hate or I shall never be his friend again.
But we’d resolved this argument almost as rapidly as it had fired up, and it’s usually me who ignites the match. In something he says, or a repeated discrimination I disagree with, or due to the contradictions in his convictions that I shouldn’t get angry about but confuse me, and I am upset when he tells me to put it to rest immediately  (a sort of shut up) or when he won’t explain the truth behind what he says. Because he tries to forge an armour around him that reflects the importance of truth. He is impenetrable because he speaks the truth, he hates lies, he only knows the truth. This is of course an illusory armour and he is, of course, not protected when he gets caught in his own lies, lies to himself, or tells them, as we all do. As I said before, he is human, he is not a monster. But with his ideals of how he wants the world to see him breaking down when he blunders over matters of honesty, I feel myself sparked to challenge him for the truth. The arguments often start there. We haven’t had many, we’ve had about three quite big ones that were less argumentative and more silence and distance. He explains this is torture. I tell him he makes me feel guilty by implying I torture him in this way, for I never would want to hurt him. I am just for some reason— since I was about 21 I think I have been— strongly averse to being witness to, bing asked to entertain, or personal experiences of self-deception. The ways we delude ourselves are ingenious. They are also dangerous. If I see it in him, I feel close enough now to point it out, which often ends in conflict, which often ends in his slow contemplation and realisation of what I’d alerted him to. Though I hate arguments, especially with him because he finds it hard to let go of the memories they seem to leave him with, the invisible scars (but the kind that fade, unlike the others that criss-cross every inch of his body that will never go away), these conflicts have somehow changed something about his way of thinking. He challenges himself, he doubts his own convictions, and he said to me fairly recently that due to my presence in his life his view of humankind had actually been altered, and I believed him, and it was a moment I can’t describe because it existed only between us- two very different people who are connected in so many ways  that cannot be made with other people.
So we stood at my doorway, and James waved goodbye from the sofa, and I said goodbye, come back soon, and he put his arm around my shoulders, squeezed me tightly and kissed the top of my head.
I can’t put into words what happened next. It wasn’t a vision or a memory. It wasn’t anything tangible either like a pain or a somatic marker. All I can offer is a metaphor, or a picture i’ve constructed in my mind to somehow communicate what I experienced as I closed the door behind him after that hug and immediately began to cry. Imagine a big empty space, the kind that exists in a person, an absence of something that can be filled up with other things, but will always feel something like that cup that was a touch too empty. Imagine a chasm in the ground. The word ‘Daddy’ echoing from inside the place where it’s dark.
His reassuring shoulder squeeze, his paternal loving kiss where my hair parts at the crown of my head, the tears in his eyes, and the gentle knowing that everything was going to be okay between us even when it wasn’t. I felt my father there. The stranger I never liked and certainly never loved. Who had never given me a hug with a squeeze that was reassuring. Who never gave an impromptu kiss because his affections were calculations, or impulses. The ones I was given in that moment of goodbye were heartfelt in their entirety, they were honest, they were what he did when the meaning was love, and protectiveness, and the tenderness felt towards something or someone precious, irreplaceable, someone or something you have come to need and love, in equal measures or not, but that isn’t important.
I climbed into James’ lap and I cried on his t-shirt for a while and I didn’t understand it or rather, I didn’t know how to vocalise it, or if I could vocalise it, or if I even wanted to. Because my father isn’t a part of my life and that has been a blessing not a loss. Eventually I said that I’d felt my father. I realise in retrospect that I hadn’t felt my father in my friend, but I’d been reminded of everything I had never had from a father, and to have it then, for one moment, was too overwhelming for me to explain. Even this explanation falls far from being a clarified, comprehensible explanation.
But how can you explain a feeling you have for a moment that you have never had before, and cannot compare to any other feeling or thought or event; something that is so new that you don’t have the language to give it an explanation, as you’ve never needed to use that language before.
How does one describe a feeling like that? Poetry can’t even do it for me and I can’t write the words that make sense of it because they never make sense. I will give up trying to explain it. I just will always remember it, and try to keep reassuring myself I am not damaged by this chasm being there, that I have and always have had enough. Because I do believe that. I just for a moment saw the other side of that.
I’m going to call my friend today to ask him to be my counter-signatory for my passport application. He’d be very happy to do that, I think, and when I get my passport he’s taking me to Ireland where my family live. He says that I put his family back together. Though his mother is still distant, I found her and was there during their first conversation in years. I communicate with her through emails and ask about her life. He is afraid, I think, and has every reason to be. I will protect him from any more disappointments as far as I can. He says that among his family in Ireland I am famous. I tell him often that to be famous is my worst nightmare (or one of my many terrible nightmares), but I know he needs me there to reunite with them, and I am happy to be there for him when it happens.

not all goings on

Everything is wrong until it's not.

Pretty different from my usual style but I wanted to try and make it work. I hope it does.

Everything is wrong until it’s not.

With your temperament, the world around you 

and all that you’ve got invested in this life,

it is all going to rot, and the more

worms eat away the more you detest

so busily detesting that you forgot

that everything is wrong until it’s not. 

Everything is wrong until it’s not.

People queuing to put their voting slip

into the ballot slot are inwardly complaining,

about whomever and what are they plan

to do and how they’ll explain, nothing is plain,

and thinking in plain terms, you forgot

that everything is wrong until it’s not.

A heart fails to start, no cry in the operation room.

Occupied by just I, this is less a home than tomb.

Maledictions in the curtain, heard from the floor.

Contradictions make uncertain what I knew before. 

They pass away, pass us by, the past is left unresolved.

They disappear and go missing, cases still unsolved.

Everything is wrong until it’s not.

You thought you had it under control but now

you’ve lost the plot, you’ve lost your map and

X marks the spot and you’re selling out,

dropping out, ready to snap, you snap

at the world, it snaps back, and you forgot

that everything is wrong until it’s not.

Nothing is alright. 

Life’s an endless fight.

It’s that or flight

but you have to sit tight,

hold onto what’s right,

until you see the light.

It gives you a fright-

it’s not black and white

the colours are bright

and the war was all around you

but the last gunfire is shot.

The bullet goes right through.

So you just keep on going too

and now somehow, despite

that on your back there’s a spot

you swear was put there: targeted 

and misled and kept up all night

with voices in your head blaming you 

aiming for you when you’re in full sight-

This war will all seem so contrite

When you stop placing blame,

and everything is alright.

In the operation room, the baby cries.

Anticipating doom, you told yourself lies.

You won in the end, after so many tries

You begun, in the end, to see the sunrise.

There are some things we’ve yet to realise.

Each realisation brings a surprise-

You fought so long and took on a lot  

Everything was wrong until it was not.

In other news, the old character of Cassie from Skins which I never actually watched until later has become quite fascinating to me. She starts off as a sympathetically strange character, but soon the heartbreak that befalls her turns her into a monstrous almost psychopathic antagonist. I could relate to her in many ways when she was introduced but her response to being in love and her obvious aversion to attachments is alien and interesting to me. She said before the show began on a promo that there was something to love in everything. In the second series, which is where her character trajectory ends alongside all the others she was cast with, to be replaced by a new generation, she says that something makes her 'hate everything, everything'. 

If anyone wants to be play a significant part and be inexplicably helpful as part of the rapidly growing body of research in the realm of psychometrics and the study of intelligences,


or if anyone wants to be philanthropic and kind and giving to spare a little time

I'm conducting research on the construct of trait-social intelligence, and all you have to do is fill out a few questionnaires that are all related to your social intelligence, except for the last, which is a short version of the Big Five personality test. The questions can at time seem like they are repeated, but they are all in fact different and so please complete it and I will owe you so much in a cosmic, karmic sort of way, or if I am likely to see you, I will reward you somehow. Thank you. Just click below and begin!


Daisy's Research- Questionnaires

Tristan's Song

my wide-eyed trains, this drug addled beyond,
never lets me walk smoothly,
in your smiling blues are things that give up on me
or that I’ll surely run away from,

but look, i have come to life and been a catalyst,
i have seen creation reveal itself at open sesame.

i indulge in the charming clues
and aspirations you admired always.
how your observations were made,
bird by bird, mistake by mistake

so is your extremism in existence to fix me?
my rebellion and I will eat fearlessly
and fail to find a balance,
when the cigarette falls from this shrug
and the accident is sudden,
blindingly everywhere

thinking of nothing, the wonder in this ambulance
strums to the solitude, the wordlessness,
the lines on the empty pages of my notebook..
Relate to me the food of its scribbles, I’m hungry.
Tell me its smoke and its scribbles and tattoos
each time sighing

and i gather experiences like strawberries
both in changing and static, yet I only know
I have let go of something,
of the synchrony of trains,
and bumbling

i come up all in laughter,
a symphony with my brother.

for Horatio James

a thick and wide ocean made of shadows, with the thrum of  rhythmic wave rolling breathlessly through; a hundred pairs of feet levitating just an inch from the ground, dangling and disjointed just one hinge from the reality known before exposure to these corners of it, and it transforms around them; or being there as the one voice shakes you to the edges, the pace and force that propels it, the illuminated vision of this performance: variation in movement and the strange idea you are not just witnessing but exhuming something that this is like nothing you’ve known before. The elements of this alchemy all come from their hiding places and come together, meeting, then an eruption of this thing- bewildering, beguiling, rampant, unstoppable, beautiful.

behind the glare of stage lights there isn't an ocean made of darkness but of people and their collective motion, their collected breath, and in the shadow, like celestial bodies clearly glowing in a midwinter night sky, in every eye gazing up at the stage, ebullient and star-cross;d, there glimmers scintilla.

The song // i'm just afraid of the things I love the most // do you think you miss the things you love, or love the things you miss? for I fear missing the person i love, i fear i’m missing out on moments, i fear the moments i might miss.i don't fear the things i love, but i fear losing them, if they are not already gone missing. i fear this loss so much that it can feel more integral than anticipatory, and when you love and admire a thing or a person or a movement or an idea, it's threatening in its capacity to make you weak. it threatens you in its transience, your lack of control over it alongside your dependence on it. If something has the power to lead you to making sacrifices, to give away what is purely your own, to give time and thought and perpetual dreaming; if it can turn your knees weak, raise goosebumps on your skin; if it thrills you just to rest your cheek upon it, and the pain of its absence is almost as potent as the thrill. yes, I'm afraid of hearing Unchained Melody on the radio  somewhere public because I'd surely cry. So it's not a fear of the love object itself, but the power it has to drain the love from you, take up so much of your thought power, or disappoint you, or disappear.
The song // it's hard to get some rest when the kitchen feels like it's sinking // walls have little work to do when windows and doors are open for they protect us from nothing but the hallway. i wonder if we are being fossilised into some stillness, drowning as the kitchen and whole courtyard and all the rooms are sinking too, melting as though left out in the sun but really growing colder by the snowfall that washes over us. the sky opened with a flurry of snowflakes, and dropped so much water on our roof and around it that in not long we will be submerged. i wonder again if we are now breathlessly caught in time, suspended in a snow globe. airless and still, we stay together- we are just a hum at the bottom of an ocean. I can still dream but thoughts can’t reach too far. i can dream of Ocean bed orchestra, singing swan ghost songs
 And the words to the song // the river isn’t mine, it moves on just like // time is an enemy of mine, never working with me or giving itself to me, always racing ahead or dragging out or slipping away as if through fingers or clinging as if it’s cat hair. I take time to have a cigarette in the nearby park and watch the graceful swans circling and guiding their signets, always ducking and always un-swanlike and fluffy brown. Ugly duckling turning into a swan. Did you ever hear about the ugly duckling who grew up and was a ducking then too? I didn’t think so.
The song // In the summer, in your psycho weather // he thought it might have something to do with the weather, like i was a pathetic fallacy, or maybe seasonally affected, and then he went as far as ruminating on whether the stars had any part to play in this, and certainly the moon when it was full if nothing else. This was all, of course, when he found me exciting,  and something about me enticed him. I think he liked putting his mind up against mine. I know he liked me because I was different, and he seemed different from most, but he was trying very hard to be. That summer I lost my Aunt Ellen who had practically raised me after my mother died having her pacemaker replacement operation, which happened when I was seven, and my father, Aunt Ellen’s brother, wanted to disappear to the other side of the world and forget his ties to where I was. Most people can only dream about that, whereas he actually did disappear without a goodbye, although he left a letter, an eviction notice, and a spare key to Aunt Ellen’s. In June, aged 76, Aunt Ellen’s cancer got into her brain and then it was everywhere and it killed her. The passing wasn’t poignant or worthy of pathos or even worth writing about, but purely for the purpose of explaining the otherworldly events that followed, I had to tell its story. I started taking prescription pills and a mixture of other drug compounds, not caring what was in them, to help me sleep. I said it was insomnia but it was just fear, being scared of what was hiding in the dark that I had yet to even conceive of yet. To put it plainly, a world without Aunt Ellen was a world plunged into perpetual night and there was no one there to guide me. So I gave up and did all I could to escape, kicked every self-destructive box almost systematically, and nothing worked. That summer I lost my mind to the gentle hum of bees, the smell of marijuana smoke that seemed into my carpet; to the clothes I sweated into as I oscillated through my illusory environment, walking the steps that made a figure eight and went on and on and ; to the buzzing air conditioner in my friend’s house and the sounds of kids screaming and running and splashing at the Lido ; I lost my mind to the ghost of Aunt Ellen. I became mesmerised by unremarkable things such as a rolling pin or by quite abstract concepts, like a picture of a girl holding a picture of a girl holding a picture and a girl holding a picture…to the nth power. Infinity. But also banality. I went through irrelevant job vacancies in the local paper and imagined myself in every job. I spent so much time imagining that I don’t remember breaking his heart. I would occasionally find myself in places quite far from home with no recollection but also no inquisitiveness about what the time was or how I got there and that it could be dangerous. I got a job at McDonalds but found myself by the patty grill tearing my palm open like a letter with the sharpest knife they must have had. They fired me then declared me dangerous, so I finished off the summer in a mental health ward.  It was monsoon season. He seemed to find this very fitting. What he couldn’t fit were meanings to what I was doing. It made him feel lacking in sense because he tried to translate my nonsense into something that made some semblance of sense. While the rain dropped from the sky in tidal waves, I drew pictures of what I saw whenever I had a migraine. Distortions, colours, rearrangements, a glowing slash that sucked my field of vision right into it. I had terrible nightmares. He’d always enjoyed interpreting my dreams but after two visits to the ward I was told by a tactless acquaintance on messenger that he was going round calling me a psycho. I laughed  and then cried, and then I just went on laughing until I was hysterical enough to warrant nurse attention, and I didn’t mind that because they gave me good pills that felt like blankets wrapping you up and floating you down a stream of silken, fluffy clouds and cushions. Falling asleep with a smile my face. I’m better now and out of hospital but I’m thankful. No one ever knows how they’re going to manage such grief until they are faced with it, and making assumptions about how you are likely to act is redundant because a part of your mind that is to you unfamiliar but that knows you inside out, every unconscious thought or fear or worry or excitement that didn’t make it above the level of your awareness; that part of your mind can escape you, or take control of you, or care for you if you are lucky. Because one certainty is that the grief will make you primitive and incapable of proper conscious thought. Primal shrieks in the endless wilderness of night. Visceral pain and anger but nothing to blame. Confusion and tossed about in your own overgrown nightmares or slowly developing rituals or hardening heart or silencing of voice. The last time I saw him, anyway, was a summer later. I was in a bookshop with ceiling fans looking at books on linguistics and he happened to be searching for some historical biography. The weather was perfectly sunny and almost dusty in its dryness, the light formed a crust on your warm skin, pooled into mirages on the sizzling roads, and poured in almost immediately after you’d declared it night-time. I was holding a fan I’d brought back from a holiday to Venice with Aunt Ellen and my cousins. It’s gentle flutter as I batted it kept my face feeling cool and avoided the sensation of being something stagnant while the sun rotted me away. We didn’t speak, but I did pick up the book American Psycho and almost flirtatiously placed it on the shelf he was looking at, face forward, peering at him with effete yes over the frills of my fan. I did the flourish and I left, feeling a summer younger //
The song // and we’re all just children // we are, we are small, we are not sensible. There are bankers and executive accountants but they’re not us. There are professionals wearing our shoes and being serious. We pose as them sometimes, but other times we overfeed the fish, or tangle our shoelaces,trip over, get grazes, pick the scabs, feel so hungry we hate the world for a moment or two until we get some food, have recurring dreams about baddies surrounding you or dark shadows looming over you, and doodle our names on our papers and folders, doodle everything. We are all just children acting like adults but it’s okay, we don’t have to do this anymore. We can drop the act and start doodling, start adventures, weave imaginary paths into real life ones because we know that more is possible than an adult would know. We can all step out of the roles we were playing and act like children instead, then it won’t be acting. I’ve checked- no one is watching!

quick poem

eyes closed / armed, poisoned,

thigh- tense: present.

think: hallway hollow, got to go,

no, wait, stop and think.

jaw/crack. think. 

the tide draws back, 

waves and weeds in hushed tones

are muttering,’Did you see 

that eyesore I just saw in the sea.’

ignorance still sits on the how

and the why my existing

is shaped the same as 

whatever it is that causes

turbulence in aeroplanes,

white knuckle grips

while my fingers wither blue

translucent. There was one moment

I remember in which I truly felt

electricity in my hands, and

believed it was there, That moment

is long gone, though memory traces

a distinct pattern of madness

over the blueprints of life so far.

Still, I can feel the lighting 

ignorant as to why or how.

It’s lightning,

belonging to me, and it’s

driving the engine. It’s a

closed circuit. 

a vision of today