patchwork person

I have found parts of myself in fiction, and in song lyrics, and here are some of them patched together to by no means create a whole self-portrait, but to demonstrate elements of one.

My Last Mistake- a song

tapestry

9 Ballad Stanza Quatrains- collaboration with Kerouac

[I thought I'd take the beautiful words of my favourite author/person in history and use them to inspire quatrains, all using the simple abxb ballad rhyming scheme.]

As I see stars falling I run
between them as they drop,
confused about which to catch,
too caught up in it to stop.

Let your nerve ends drop and listen
until you hear it clear and loud-
the lesson you forgot you learnt
in immense milky way soft cloud.

When the mountains crumble
what will be left behind?
The vast emptiness of space.
Eternal ecstacy of mind.

It was filled with fears of failure
and memories too terrible to mend,
and yet, in the way of things, somehow
complete and shining in the end.

Dark Matter

Anger is...

Anger is one of the five primary human emotions.
Anger is what lies under activism and protests for social change.
Anger is made manifest in many different ways.
Anger is initially learnt from one’s parents in how they express it.
Anger is seeing red, tunnel vision, abandoning of reason.
Anger is an anagram of range.
Anger is not the opposite of peace of mind.
Anger is a significant component in passion.
Anger is what motivates most violent crime.
Anger is best dealt with when another is willing to listen.
Anger is stifled by some people, for they fear their own rage.
Anger is worn like armour by some people, for their own protection.
Anger is sometimes born out of the smallest resentments.
Anger is associated with activity in the amygdala, in expression and recognition.
Anger is sometimes directed at ourselves.
Anger is throwing a tantrum at time.

I wonder..

For This You Have No Reason

I’ll never go to Antarctica

I think of how I’ll never go to Antarctica,
mainly because I don’t much want to.
But I should want to. I should be the girl
with a raft on her back. When I think
of all the mountains and monuments
and skylines and seascapes I haven’t seen,
all the trains I haven't taken, all the road trips
I haven't gone on or mopeds I haven't ridden,
all the long wanderings through foreign cities
and along silver glaciers, and climbs to
altitudes so high I should nearly die, I press
my body down, down into the vast mattress.
If I step out the door, the infinity
of what I’ve missed will slap me across
the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes
I glance at pedestrians, their rushes and
concerns in their warm orbits, and have to
steady myself, my rattled heart unseated. 
See—even my awe is weak and withered.
But I’m so tired of the small steps—
the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer
hoarding, the one exquisite sentence
in a forest of exquisite sentences.
There is a globe welling up inside of me.
Galaxies flecking light onto my skin,
oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still
long enough, I could become my own world.
If I get the courage someday, I could
get out of this one, and find adventure there.

Writings On The Wall

Cars hummed past and above as if their wheels were wings, sending cyclonic vibrations through the tiles that lined the walls and arches of the tunnel; and the sound of ambulance sirens, all distant, like background noise, white, soothing as static along the hemlines of sleep. In the tunnel the light was yellowing. A solitary man sat cross-legged against the opposite wall with a guitar and a harmonica brace, in silence, and he had the face of someone sickening for something. This underground passageway was not as sombre as I’d expected it to be, not even at this hour of night, not even when completely desolate, with the exception of the musician who wasn’t playing. He only had me to play to anyway, and I had begun to let my eyes follow the graffiti that looped and scrawled, indistinct shapes; I was trying to forge them into signs with some structure or meaning so I could say that I’d read what was written on the subway wall. Except it was black and maroon and bruise-coloured and dirty white, not aglow with neon. Then I noticed that there were words to be read amid the tangles of spray-painted trails, which covered the inner surface of the tunnel branching out in all directions like a huge spider web. ‘You are all sheep,’ was one almost illegible message. Another was written besides a picture that at first glance looked like pools of colour and different shapes in a scattered arrangement, but looking at it again it seemed to be a painting of what looked like an angel surrounded by exploding stars, or some celestial matter, or just illumination, or glory. The words read, ‘The Kingdom Is Coming.’ Suddenly I felt a digging sensation in my stomach- a sadness. These empty sentiments, I realised, really did carry importance for those who left them there to be read. The words I’d instinctively judged as foolish and irrelevant, nonsensical, after I’d actually figured out they were words at all, were the opposite of this to the believers. Though I had begun to preoccupy myself with this assumption, painting their portraits in my mind, picturing their psyches, trying to annotate, to wonder, I was pulled back by the rebuttal. They could just as easily be offhanded and devoid of any personal philosophy, they could be messages as cryptic as Morse code to a synaesthesiac. I was on my way out of the tunnel when I read another few lines in chalky white script, large lettering, ‘Suffering is not bad. Suffering is not the cause of suffering. Evil is the cause of suffering.’ Was it unfinished? I emptied my pockets of change into the musician’s open guitar case next to him without making eye contact and left quickly, feeling unsteady, uneasy, and still sad. The feeling followed me for two days, until finally the concrete that I felt had hardened around my feet dissolved into dust and I was no longer drowning in those drawings- profundity, prophecy or pure vandalism.

Ideography

So this is where we stand. Estranged from our own bodies,
and we rummage through fragile tissue, tangles of forgeries.
We become mere onlookers, detached from ideals of our own destruction.
So she tells me about the dream.
About the night she slit her tongue on broken glass.
About the ratchet of the wind and the lullabies she whispered
The 3AM rush of a wild pilgrimage to nowhere.
The conception of hunger in a cavalcade.

Now, I’ve kissed the mouths of many mechanisms.
Now I’ve decoded coping, the subliminal pleas of tea-stained wisdom.

These days all I want is to pry the sword out of the stone and wear it in my hair.
All I want is to engrave your shadow into my skin, bone and soul, if I have one.
All I want is, perhaps, impossible and childish.

A whirlpool of sunswept secrets on the living room floor.
Pale evenings, effortless and numb.
Call an ambulance, call an army.

The battlefield in your eyes. How it eats you from the inside.
You are blooming in its truest form: carnal, chaotic. Cracking floors.
What’s worse than shame? you ask
I don’t know, I’ve been unlearning my own history lately.
Posing questions to nobody.

Just a daydream

Inherently messy

Let's not talk about the insomnia or shaking, stuttering. I want to explain it better but there's no point to it, as there is no point to listening out for the inconceivable chorus that explains the meaning in all this. Pretending and trying to imagine being different someday whilst circling this dark drain of autumnal months, praying for courage by picturing it but each image grows progressively more whitewashed and my fears rattle at my skin like poltergeists. Unsettling and intricate in all the wrong ways again. Ceramic abrasions of sky, dismantling of bones, the stale symmetry of a calendar and finally whatever it takes to cut through the restless anaesthetic and disappear into the whirlpool at my feet. No defence, no preservation. Always inherently messy. Always a crumpled moon.
I won’t talk about the worry or the nights I've felt ghost wings at the back of my throat, fluttering static, nervous in my mouth. Or the way my skeleton under its layers of flesh spawns hideous thoughts about self-destruction and demolition and the way my eyes used to appear possessed. The tripwire only stretches so far, and we have miles to go. The confusion spreads, and it locks itself around me, a silence, an obscurity, weighing a universe. We can have soft conversations about the hunger, about the shadows that linger beneath our bedsheets like revenants from the fairytales we read as children. I've tried to explain mourning with no place to call home. What happens when this however-long-it-will-be epoch ends, when I am not any lesser of a disaster, when we all become  intangible iterations of our parents, the swimming pools flood and the birds come to live in our chests and we forget the words to express what we need? What happens when we become nothing but dead air on an old radio? Let's not think about it. Let's talk about schools of philosophical thought and musical arrangements and faraway horizons instead.

He says don’t be so afraid, write five truths down.

Personal post

But have you ever known a night with an unabashed grin, with a laughter that emerges from your chest in delicate bubbles to catch the red-green-yellow of the streetlights or the neon marquee flashing bright and lovely; the velvet maroon of new dark wraps around you and your hands rise above you as if they know no gravity and the kick of the bass electrifies the marrow inside you, something reaching out, kicking back? Have you ever known a night that slips over you quietly like a gentle suffocation, or like a small mercy, and births you fresh and quick like stars so when morning comes you remember the simple miracle of light?

So there are the clouds, forgetting to make rain. So there is the sky and its unseeing eye. I can’t remember the good things, because I like to let the plosive and melodious words slip through my loose fists like dust. Vicious, I peel back my eyelids and my skin, fevered with nightmare sweat. I am afraid. Maybe there is a white-eyed truth inside me, a blank-faced truth, a truth cool and slight as smoke, but I worship a god made of too much gravity and of mirrors that stretch and skew and laugh at me. My reflection is a cruel parody and I know enough to know she's not truth. She's the Descartesian malicious demon, pushing me to doubt. Pushing me off into a sea of unanswered questions chasing answers around the circles of whirlpools until I'm drowning in uncertainty. When I'm coughed back up, in the mirror is me looking into a mirror in which I am looking into a mirror in which I am looking into a mirror and ad infinitum. Thoughts like that make me queasy.

A circle's round- it has no end; that's how long I want to be your friend. 

Remember that rhyme and the never ending cycles of infinity get squeezed into a pocket sized poem. Rhetoric for recovery. Still, there's not any kind of truth in word play or following the sentence down the garden path, and nothing to find when you get to the end either. If I could decide that my truths would only have to be abstractions, I could roll up the map, call an end to the search. But regardless, I'd still be seeking out more, surreptitiously, in the corners of bus stops, between the volumes in bookshops, underneath bronzing leaves. We're all doing it. We're all hungry for something to bite down on. A concrete thing. It's probably why we developed our own metrics for measuring truth and decided upon its parameters- what is and what isn't; what's good and what's bad; what's right and what's wrong; what's worthwhile and what is not. True, false- we say we can tell you which, with our measurements and our observations. Nobody ever reads the footnotes to you. I just figured it out later- these measurements were designed and constructed entirely by humans to determine the standards by which we can determine the truth. But if we made the rulers, aren't we making up the answers?

Fighting with thoughts like this, about the whole psychosphere of human certainty and scientific knowledge. Scientists are hungry because they know it too. They know nothing can be empirically proven, because they decided in the first place that it could be. They know that all they have decided is significant or factual to this day could easily be dismembered in the same way that faith can, if they were just to alter their scales a little more. Adjust the standard deviation cut-off point. Temper with the p value by only 0.01 percent. If that were to happen, nothing we had shown to be conclusive even with the most robust findings could suddenly be- what? A fabrication? An illusion? Scientists know they will never get to the end on their quest for answers, but they keep questioning and keep doubting, and the circle returns again.

Mirror, mirror on the wall- tell me something true about it all?

Mirrors, windows, the doors of perception,

an elaborate ruse or means of deception, 

but one simple thing a person understands

is the truth they see when looking at their hands. 

Whether we are illusions or shadows that fall

as Plato saw reality upon his cave wall 

or whether something else, you'll truly find

you think and you are: your body and your mind.

Hungry for still glass and bright lights, my truth is my body, heavy as a gravestone. This petrifies. Would I find more comfort in believing what I fall back into doing so, frequently- that my body and mind are not connected and my body is just a vessel for my mind to float around in. When I feel for my body, all I want to do is get rid of it.
Snap my neck down, chin to chest. Sew my eyes shut.
Give me a nameless face. Give me a sickness of anonymity.

Paper Bag

I thought it was a bird but it was just a paper bag.


I've loved this song since my late adolescence. Because I can relate so much to the words.
Recording proved difficult with malfunctioning equipment but I think it was okay.
Inspired by Bob Dylan's 'I'm not here', I'm not here, certainly anyway.
I thought it was a girl but it was a just no one.

For A Fire Escape

Death is (not) the end

First singing I've done in some time. I felt shy and breathless and heart going bang bang bang while doing it and I think it sounds that way but I'm happy to be trying again. Trying to get my voice back. Everything I give voice to is just a hiccup in the back of a classroom or an echo in an empty lecture hall or hospital ward or a telephone ringing somewhere beyond wall after wall after wall.

Scribbles

Routines of arbitrary stillness

Love like a butcher knife. carved out, and blindly awake
as the star alive in the sky. pointing north.
A cadillac with a massacred paint job, bad orchestras,
hollow at the heart. Good riddance. you hear that?
We can cultivate careful flowers and preserve hands
like clay or lake water; delineate what I know -
all the missed calls, together trying to suspend grief.
I liked that version best. On the day before the war I woke
to forget safe, forget someday, to forget all I have done or can do.

Take memory of us as children, pale backs to the open air,,
unhinged and split down to the unsolved sum of their parts.
Language is out of whispers, out of dental floss, out of spines
and I want it gone. the gossip of eyes. Your face healing,
becoming wider, slicker, something peculiar, mystifying.
Chipped paint, my broken toes- here, eeriness is terrifying
and irresistible. We’re made into animals, into streets
then shadows, our ghosts finally unravelling in gilded seams.
The sun creeps down haunting myself from within,
heart yawning open, wider with each passing moment,
your empty promises of bones or something like that.
and your hands open, larger each time twisting away.
shuddering yellow as butter, as wheat field sadness,
right there in a parallel universe where this isn’t quite natural.

We were sheltered in spiderwebs, rundown by motels
with blasted neon. My brain has become a fuzzy blank.
I am sick of cries from the mouths of birds being poached,
colossal grief in the sky, grey slabs of meat, banality, lawyers,
a gesture, a mouth bruised for air, the thing you feel
teasing at the sutures, the faraway planet. We never get it,
maybe something close, but always something else:
a variable, some otherworldly energy blast from a hero’s eyes
and the high sinister jagged moon looking down on night
demanding that it hides different versions of itself.

We recited stories of dragons everyone knows and pretends not to.
The only thing I know is to be gentle, to be flaky, and too quiet.
There's floral wallpaper in a steamed up bathroom
and this sadness - the kind of fear of seclusion, window
on a ruinous heart, carrion catcher, sleep in the pits of reddened 
eyes.
contaminating poetry about love and bicycles, that 1920’s echo
in your empric mouth. I remember the laughter of people long gone,
an old whisper to an old friend, “Shhh, don’t spook them."

Fear is not one to reason with. Time zones in clumsy prayer.
How the mondays folded in on  birds, my willingness to spill blood
at every opportunity. Don't think about faraway fragile nests
and the whole dizzying unfair gentleness of it all.
It's 5 AM and what’s left is the delirium to pry dawn open.
An evanescence of being. Short-lived, sweaty. a shadow to carry
though it's smitten loud and an endless maw of your affection.
Suddenly, it’s summer. Suddenly, I’m unremarkable.
My heart getting weighty with the demolition of stars.

my own nursery rhyme

The way we were

Monster Love

My first attempt at stop motion (well, not strictly my first, but I have only tried a few times and this I actually did with a camera and tripod). Sadly I don't think I have the dispositional patience to make stop motion films as a passtime. 

Good touch, good night, good light.

I am trying to make a decision happy enough. Hello, you, welcome home. I am called this girl, I have not been deceived by myself this time, but the light is almost gone. It is black honey. We have tears, it is not a picture. Dead mountains, clean roads, all lovers in the shape of stars reducing their path through that of the least resistance. Night's girlfriend brings the radio- it carries a little song and tells stories that look like grace. We are thinking of loving and losing and forever and forevers. Balance killed us and left us, but Hope stayed. Good touch, good night, good light, kiss. Tonight, on the highway, you eat a fruitcake with a knife like a boy's face on the universe wall. I want to be like this, when someone said that a failure was accepted, even in a statement so far out of context. I will try not to think of my hands anymore. I miss them, but that story is over. At the beginning of the story someone says that. Christmas stockings, ice cold Cornish spindrift, everything hidden in hidden letters. There are many names in history, but none are going to be ours. There is no accident when the room is empty. Everyone needs everyone. Everyone goes where they must go. Those people think about the meaning of war. What can you learn from your enemies? Do you think this love will lead you where you are meant to go? If anything is meant at all. Love is a bad word, maybe. I am sorry but I don't know where our enemies are. Are you worried about getting up to the microphone? The story you know is just paradise. If you hear a phone call in your head, your eyes have only partly open. Your heart looks like car parts in your head. Seasonal falling is causing laws and explosions and Human failing is cause for the dead. As you understand, I take what I think, what you say, and when I still love it I will do it again. I do not really know what to do, but in this version it is a bit brighter, yet not bad for the black sky. We speak whispers in wooden houses, in low words like tents. I cannot cancel them out. Valentine's been destroyed. For forgiveness, I'd give it all away. We know that we have problems and we have to ask a lot of things. I am seeking further help.

Practice in editing- a short film

We're hoping to cover this song soon so should have an original version in not too long, but I thought I'd practice my editing and The Leftovers seemed like the perfect television programme to draw from because the cinematography is so beautiful and I hoped to make something captivating.

Bury the Junk

Basement

Tucked under a stack of dusty shelves next to a broken xylophone,
where I don’t have to avoid you. I thought I might see you
when the party moved to the garage, girls with red wine mouths
and men all dressed the same, their eyes shiny and lifeless
as marbles. I don’t want to be a broken faucet or the future of
electromagnetics. Just set on the idea of being clearly understood
and uncomplex. There are old carcasses grimacing in the sink.
I am happy because at least we are both alive, even though,
one day not long ago though I couldn’t say when, I petrified.
Ineedmoreofwhathelpsmethink. I need not to think of you at all.
All the leaves blown up from the pavements pile on the bed.
We’re all working hard on our dreams. Life didn’t meet the grade
last year, but I felt free, even if I was free just to realise
that I will never fit in. That everything changes with expectations
I’ll never meet and expensive wine I’ll never tell apart from
the cheap stuff and seeing clearly that some people have it simple
and that’s enviable because I don’t, but it’s also not obtainable.
Sometimes I know it would be better if I were a scarecrow
with hay bails for brains and good posture, a fastened-on face,
a purpose that everybody is sure of. I know for certain
a scarecrow would be preferred to me. I wonder what it’s like
to always think that your life is what everyone sees as just right.

Alfred J's Song

You and I then, let us go
when the evening starts to glow
and there’s no one else about.
You and I, then, let’s go out.
When the streets are all deserted.
Let us not be disconcerted.
Let's try this time to prevent
the ever-looming argument.
When no resolution can be found
Our talks and walks go round and round.
A circle's round without an end.
That's how long I want to be your friend.
Something’s sleeping on the floor
and I would much like to say more
but instead I chew a peach
and walk all lonely on the beach.
Wondering how to part my hair,
wondering how much I should care
when the one I love sits over there
at the window with a vacant stare.
Screw up the stars in a fist,
thinking of lips I should have kissed,
watching lonely people wait
for life to be served on a plate.
Evening growling like a dog
and yellowing in winter fog.
I hear mermaids calling me
from the reaches of the sea.
Maybe that's all in my head
and all the mermaids here are dead
but I hear their distant song
and when I walk here I sing along.
Do I dare, I have to wonder.
Double trouble boils like thunder.
I hide behind my smart attire.
I hide because I am a liar.
Knowing I am just the same
as everyone else who has a name.
Knowing a life built of fear
feeling far from what is near.
This I think is a love lament
though most of my days are spent
growing into my cold shoulder,
growing colder getting older.
I sometimes think what could have been
if I’d let myself be seen
but mediocre is my shield
and politeness keeps my truth concealed.
I am not a special man.
I have always done what I can
but what I can do is not enough.
I wish I was made of stronger stuff.
Wishes are frivolous to keep
and tend to keep you from your sleep.
I try not to think into the deep.
I cannot take the faithful leap.
It’s not quite lonely, but not otherwise
wearing always this disguise
and finding safety in solitude.
No wonder that they call me prude.
I know they laugh behind my back.
I know very well all that I lack.
I should have been a go getter.
I should have been so much better
but that’s just flight and fancy talking.
I would rather spend time walking
on the sand not wearing shoes.
If you don’t compete you cannot lose.
They call me Prufrock, sometimes J.
To them, I'm fine, that I'm okay.
All I am is what they say.
But I know I'm the one that will stay
come the hell or when water's high,
even though I know I'm shy.
I know happiness is best when shared.
If they only knew how much I've cared.

wordswordswords

And two poems, one very personal, the other very not.

Moments

What Didn't Flash Before Her Eyes

When she understood her first game of chess.
When she was runner up.
When she swam in the sea fearlessly.
When she heard the words I Love You struggle from his mouth.
When she landed on the ice and didn’t fall.
When she shut the door and was brave.
When she was sad because someone else was sad.
When she was happy because someone else was happy.
When she fell asleep on the train and travelled far beyond what she knew.
When she went elsewhere and came back.
When she learnt to identify fox gloves and two distinct birds.
When she read what Katy Did because she’d been told to, what Katy Did Next because she wanted to.
When she felt beautiful and invisible and good at his birthday party.
When she got an upgrade on an aeroplane and fell asleep with all the leg room.
When she broke a bone in a playground at night.
When she protested for peace.
When she photographed them smiling.
When she walked calmly across a stage.
When she made a statement about double standards.
When she was eloquent at the dinner table.
When she decided to let it go.
When she said goodbye and looked back.
When she said no and meant no.

I'm back with Knees, Fists & Teeth, Bookcases & Bathrooms

Sorry for my enforced 'hiatus'- I hadn't renewed my domain name and it took me a very long time to figure out how to manage the whole 'DNS' business but it's done now.

A few photographs from the latest Horatio James gig.

Visiting a friend who is staying at the same place I did for a few weeks quite a while ago, during the period of my transient psychosis that I cannot define from start to finish or ever quite grasp the chronology of, but remember otherwise so clearly. He has to remain there for a lot longer than I did and it's not voluntary whereas I volunteered to be there for the time that I was, due to being unable to trust myself and realising that I was 'disappearing', amongst doctors referred to as 'dissociating' or 'fugue states', and while I was 'gone', wherever I was 'gone', I was a threat to myself- the deciding incident was 'reappearing' into the present having very badly cut into my wrists with a razor blade, blood soaking my bed, my flatmate having to hold me down and use his hands to stop the bleeding while my other called an ambulance, and having no memory of doing it at all- not knowing why, not knowing how it happened, and worst of all, coming back in a 'flashback' mentality, which was very disturbing, leaving me unable to recognise my flatmate and ending up screaming and crying and thinking some horror of the past was being re-lived. It was traumatic for everyone and so I was safer being watched, and it turned out that being under the care of psychiatrists who were not focusing on my food behaviours and my weight was the best thing that could have happened- it was not the first time someone had suggested BPD, but it was the first time it was written in my notes as a serious consideration, which turned into a diagnosis, which in turn actually improved my quality of life- it gave me the opportunity for the right treatment, it gave me an education about the maladaptive ways my brain had been working or not working for as long as I could remember but had never been able to understand, and it gave me the support and insight and guidance I needed to improve. Inherent in the diagnosis is the idea that one can never recover, or 'get well', but I think this just means I'll possibly have to work alongside these dysfunctional cognitions and symptomatic proclivities every day for the rest of my life being aware of them and managing them. The difference is between now and then is that I'm not suffering anymore.
Visiting my friend was a lot of fun. I got to walk back through Dartmouth Park again. Perhaps next time I'll see if I can revisit Highgate Cemetary.

Her New Currency

So I have conceptualised this new character, and this poem is from her perspective- it's purely fiction and nothing personal and another life and I don't usually write like that. Anyway, she's squatting after running away from home in a place alongside some No-Good-Guys but she starts to live that lifestyle, even if it should be a frightening path to take, because to her what she has run away from- the alternative to this scary road she's going down- is far worse.

Shelter I. Gutted Building. A Whole New Currency.

People sit cross-legged on hardwood floors, leaning on one another,
relying on the ground to rest their heads upon-
some look like they are sleeping. The spell is broken.
Others look as if they are in anticipation-
I know what they are waiting for and I still half hope for that too
sometimes, but it’s never again like the first time. The spell is broken.
Disappointing and irresistible, like so much that came before this.

Watching shadows bounce off the walls like the apparitions
of giddy children, watching the walls dissolve to let in the tide
of the blue streets and radio tides. New bodies washed up yesterday.
Maybe that’s why we are here, having to face what we thought
we were eternally free of. Being caught. Between one colour
and another, between a belt and a tap and a needle, between
the incisors of death. It’s just another windless evening.
Even the lighthouse that I occasionally think I see is in my head.
It’s safer in the wasteland. We sleep with the lights on.

I stroke his face, because it’s close. The partygoers’ ghosts
piling up in a sanguinary of star trails. We won’t be found
and that’s what I am really here for.

Here is the memory of mercury in retrograde,
of falling backwards and letting go but never shifting the clasp
on your elbow, pulling you back. Here the rooms are smeared
with red, crowded with developing photographs, not real people
or real faces. Instead, just their underexposed, wrongly-exposed
after-images. After the windchimes shatter, after the sky turns
into something molten and time becomes a revolving door.

I feel my thoughts dropping like pennies in a fountain,
a currency nobody uses anymore. Somewhere I think of doors,
and of an undreamt summer, but I can demolish that from here,
from the middle of nowhere, and if I can’t, I’ll run away again
for the last time into the breathless night. Remember,
things are known and not known and between are doors.

Dream Sequences

The Contents of Pandora's Box

Edie, I feel dizzy

Edie's feeling dizzy from the carousel.

Leant so far over the railings that she almost fell.

It's nice to hear her laughing 

without that screaming sound

that, even when she's silent,

seems to follow her around.

Edie, I feel dizzy, it's those pills I took.

The sun is such a colour, I find it hard to look

at something so beautiful, 

yet just unspeakable. 

So much that I need to say

is just unspeakable.

Edie becomes busy and changes face.

Becomes something else to take her own place.

She's running so very fast

to keep up this pace.

Becoming breathless but still

rushes with grace.

Edie I feel needy, can you just slow down.

I need somebody to put my arms around.

But she doesn't stop for me,

I didn't expect her to.

I have to stop, I think.

Someone needs to protect me too.

Edie now feels sleepy, and she's slipping away

heavy-lidded, limp, and there she will lay

I hope she wakes and thinks

I'm going to stop today

I'm never going to keep this up,

there is no way. 

We can find somewhere to sit together.

Sit and fold like wings, soft as feather.

Edie is more needy than her faces show.

I don't know much about her

but that much, I know. And that she likes

the ride on the carousel.

The way the world spins under a magic spell.

The way you can stay on and not feel well

but that's the best place to be because no one can tell.

We are unable to hear you

Going to and from somewhere not far,
I pass a couple of children on scooters
shouting, Ice Cream!
from across the street.

When I dare to raise my eyes to look out
instead of down at my shoes as I walk
I instantly see faces of strangers,
crying- Eyesore. I know they are right.

But nobody is selling what I want.
It does not seem producible.

It is not a house on a corner, the size and charm
of a dormitory, with window treatments.
It is not those shoes my sister likes with the red soles
or sunglasses my mother likes with the diamonds
or the endorphins or the caffeine or the career ladder.
I do not covet Ice Cream, the biggest or best thing,
and I don’t have romance for pipe dreams either.

That is someone's else’s dream,
unexceptional, formless, but probably fulfilling.
I hope I am never fulfilled.

In my hand there’s a digital map that orients me
in a roundabout. I am a breathing oscillating blue dot.
I can’t get anywhere from here.

Why do I not want Ice Cream or summer dresses?
Why do I not want to be out on the town, meeting new people?
Why do I not participate?

I watch people on television, traveling.
I am so scared.

I listen to Neil Armstrong radioing from the moon.

I scan the transcripts over and over of
Earhart circling Howland Island:
We are unable to hear you
to take a bearing.

Intermittent despair- what can you make from that?

I look up to see the sun caught in the tail end trail
of a jet. I wave:
Do you hear my signals.
Please acknowledge.

And then all my thoughts are frostwork and blue
with parachutes and windows on walls
and I am filled with clouds and I can’t see.

We cannot hear you.
We cannot see you.

Now I know I begin and end with images,
how far across this field can my voice spread out,
extend and reach in singing, in screaming?

Mumblingthoughts

August breathing down my neck // tap tap tap // nervous hands // firecracker vision // soft shallow breath // life is stop motion inside a cardboard box // knock knock knock on the front door is the cue to be still, hold it, pretend nobody is home, pray he doesn't come to the window // life in a fishbowl, tables got turned, and there was never going to be any pleasure to be taken in that because I let it go, someday long ago, and decided upon forgiveness and endless chances and accepting the risk that I'll be made a fool or get knocked about // that's what life does, it rattles you and it's all you can do to keep yourself together // but now I'm mumbling // don't make a fuss // speak up, nobody can hear you, say it again // what if I don't believe it this time around because words can just be the cement to fill empty spaces with no real meaning, no real language // there are no words in this language to communicate what I feel, how I think // thinking hurts, sometimes, it actually hurts // flowers withering in a vase, don't know where I got that vase // spine feels cracked and brittle like an old atlas // everyone is sleeping but you and me and words here flow efforlessly and they aren't light, they are heavy, and that means they matter // i'm so uneasy, i'm so undone, everywhere but here among my books and my mess // like Neely O'Hara, swallowing my sleep, time no longer works in a forward-moving line, it jumps back and leaps forward and turns over on itself and you weren't even asleep by then // the first few bars of Fur Elise on the keyboard // two more of us are gone and that sickness must have been right there growing inside him while he was making his speech at his daughter's wedding and I was watching and laughing and angry at my mother for being an impolite audience // just listen listen // you will learn so much more about the world when you are listening than when you are battling and clamouring, waiting your turn to be heard.

Voices II

Lorelei 

To keep him in my memory hurts. He locks himself in a room and how his loneliness and his fear rattles my brain like an electric current. He changes the matter around the concrete parts of my life because he wants a safe place, he wants a deeper blanket in a confined space and in such a space the only way to create distance is to be small, inconsolable.
Glowing and desperate, somewhere still inside me, come out where I can speak to you and tell you that I love you without blame. You dear disease, I will show you the big empty house we live in together and what has filled the spaces and the spaces of you that will never be filled.
It can be wonderful until I can't stand it and now I can't stand it, and I am still living. You must be too, wherever you are. You believe me, disturbed by your own unbearable position in nature, nowhere and yet everywhere, at least for me. I have given it so much thought, more so than anything else I ought to be thinking about. The youth and dark gravity, the memory and how it stutters, sobs, shatters, shines its refractions. The future is uncertain. Uncertain future has arrived, by default, and I work to perceive your absence, constantly, tenderly.

Sadie

It happened when I was thirteen. It was taken care of, no questions asked, no disagreements or agreements or any words really at all. Once I was in a position to put it behind me and could easily go on believing it never happened, I still felt there was something wrong. Something fundamentally wrong with me. Maybe it had nothing to do with that mistake. Maybe it had everything to do with it. Sometimes it’s painful to look at Sal because he’s my mirror image, except he’s a boy and I’m a girl. We ought to have turned out the same, at least as equals. We shared a house, an upbringing, an environment, an education. He wasn’t the favourite. I think I might even have been. But now, I look at him and he moves about effortlessly. He doesn’t need to try, to smile or to get serious. He’s got this strange crowd at school. They are like his disciples. While he’s out sitting on the hood of Colby’s car drinking beers and talking about nothing too important, I’m counting the pills I’ve still got left in the shoebox under my bed. I’m crawling up walls, staring out of windows with every urge to climb out and not come back, counting down from one hundred backwards in my head, or wondering how long it would take someone to recognise my absence if I just disappeared. I’m fundamentally malfunctioning. Sal is running smoothly. Perhaps it’s the difference between boys and girls. I’ve tried to fit into so many costumes I couldn’t tell you what really exists underneath them, what I’m really like, or was like before finding that seamless image and the ability to wear it as your own skin became such a priority, such an arduous task. He’s never been anyone but Sal. I have to love him, but at the same time, I hate him- it’s so easy for him and he doesn’t even know it.

Rudy

Sometimes I think my father a deranged glassblower because of all the fragile he builds. If he sits with me at breakfast he’ll make mountains out of salt and pepper across his eggs. He’ll fold a pile of laundry lint into a dollhouse. He’ll build a rocking chair from straw on the front yard. I like to think no one’s scolded his hands yet. No one’s bruised his palms or crushed his fingers out of anger, out of sadness. And I think to myself, why did I not learn that, how to create beautiful and delicate out of nothing. I want to puncture a hole through my stomach and use the air to fill a hot air balloon. My body is a series of sharp angles and overexposed photographs, left in some solution for quite too long. My body regurgitates everything, chewing driftwood, swallowing a mixture of cinnamon and sand. How can someone create something so beautiful? How is it that there are people who try to vomit new, vibrant land into the ocean, but only end up leave a hot oil spill in their wake? And out of some nondescript frustration, I ran away once. And left my father a paper animal at the foot of the shed door before disappearing into the woods behind our house. But he, with his inventor’s hands, created a hundred of my little paper animals to leave a trail through the woods, ushering me home.

Oliver

Milk teeth and coffee powdered nose. Birds scraping seeds off the small carved table just beyond the window. Sometimes the air is so thick at night I’m afraid to breathe it in. It’s like asking my lungs to swallow all these secrets that aren’t mine, these unspoken words that don’t belong to me. They look my way strangely, quizzically, as if they want answers to questions they’ll never ask. I know what happened here before I came. Or at least I know why people are looking at me and my parents and the house and its windows and doorsteps and rooftop the way that they do, even if what happened didn’t happen between these walls. I mean, if it had, someone would have found evidence. Someone would have found motive. Someone would have found the solution, the key that locks the door behind us, a means of closure. Nobody has that. I didn’t even know him or know the events that surrounded when it happened or know his family or friends, yet it feels like they know me, because here I am, sleeping in his bed, walking in his hallway, sitting watching the birds at his window, while he’s not quite there but not quite gone either. I have a sickening feeling that unless this ghost, this echo of a person, the shape they left behind that sits like a vacuum right beside me- until it’s exorcised, there won’t be room for the both of us.

Lorelei

Too much self on the small slice of a voice, all falling off. We looked at onion skin under a microscope and it looked like everything up close. Do you remember when we did that kind of thing for school. and everyone did it, all of us in a room and then the next class and the people next year, this was what they did. If that was there it makes me shake. Maybe we should go home now, let’s get out of this room and go home. There is something tender that holds me by my elbow and lets my head fall down but i’m still moving clumsy as someone that doesn’t know yet. I don’t know yet. I was a kid and I thought i was the same as every kid but a little more scared. You can only be a little more when you have a little body but i grew out like the rings of a tree. I don’t like the metaphor of trees. I like looking at the places dark birds fly over in pairs. They move in and out. They are the air. We look at them and think they are ribbons. We are wrong. We think it sticks. We are wrong.

Edie

Voices

Matilda

A boy just moved in across the street- his name is Oliver but he looks just like Ben Willoughby who has been missing for two years now. His family packed up and relocated seven months ago. I remember the day I saw them fit their entire family home life- or what was left of it in the absence of one of the four family members who once shared that life- into the back of a moving van, I remember it so well because the same day I stepped on a bee and saw hundreds of dead bees littering the lawn. I've had a dreamcatcher above my bed since before I met Ben even. Ever since Oliver moved in there with his stepmother and father and their cinnamon-coloured dog whose name I don't know because I've never cared to ask, ever since then, I've stared at the feathers and beads dangling from the dreamcatcher before I close my eyes to sleep, fixed my eyes on their slow rotation until I felt dragged by the tides into dreamless slumber. Last night I made the mistake of looking at it before I lay down. I saw right through it's middle and out of my bedroom window. I saw Ben Willoughby, standing on the lawn. He was dripping wet and his eyes were glowing amber and he was watching me. He was accusing me. His eyes said, I know. Oliver is in my class at school and even sits close to me just like Ben did, because my name is Wittenstein and his is White, but I can't look at him. He might know something too.

Bernadette

I died falling headfirst over the banisters of my stairwell at home. My life, the way they tell you it will, flickered in the forefront of my vision as the floor grew closer. I watched my boyfriend's shoulders slowly rise and fall with his snores in sleep, I watched and felt him kiss me, the sensation warm on my lips, I watched him shave from my perspective standing in the shower, and falling I felt the hot water falling with me too. I saw my mother applauding from the eighth row of the audience as I collected by Doctorate degree. I saw my cousin holding her newborn baby in her arms in a room crammed with flowers so thickly I could smell them, I had a tickle in my nostrils. I saw my father bandaging my foot after I'd injured it while rollerblading  and the floor was so close my eyes already shut. When I opened them I was sittting on the bench, poured all over with sun, in the park where daffodils swarmed, spreading like yellow oceans. A sea of light-petals to swim in. And my father was taking pictures of them with his black and white film. I didn't understand that at all. My ankle was smarting and my father was bald on the top of his head as he dropped to squat and meet my eyes, said, 'Ready to go again' and he pulled me up by the hand. I began to rollerblade again and this time I didn't fall.

Dalton

I always watch people, feeling slightly out of place. There is something so fascinating about people and their wooden hinges, metal teeth, and leaking eyes. They lay with lovers in cold beds and they catch their children, cradling him or her in their arms. They push shopping carts and purse their lips. When it is cold, they tuck their arms into sleeves. They are much like me, and that is why I feel out of place, for I am watching a ticking reel of browned and borrowed film. It is passing my eyes and plugging the cracked basins somewhere inside or underneath but that I can't locate, I just know it's part of me. My strip of film is scratched and I don't belong and nobody wants to see what I have accumulated on my reels. Damage just doesn't work for people, even if they pretend to be okay with the idea of it. It took me a while to reconcile with the actuality that the episodes of my life are just as worth watching as theirs, my scrolls of film just as valuable. Not even in spite of the scratches. Because of them. Not many others see it that way, but it's okay now I do.

Lorelei

Benjamin is weary from being missing, from nobody looking. He's brooding and cracking his knuckles in the house and in the woods on the walk to the lake and behind the shed where the bikes are locked. His eyes might be dark, reminiscent of a cult, which worries me so I daydream of bringing him soup and berries and The Jungle Book. We sit together on the roof not eating or reading but looking off to the past first days of spring when it was better. He pushed the hair out of my eyes, said the valley was vague and gaping like a nightmare. I had hoped he wouldn't say things like that. Every night afterwards I took to tucking a pill under my tongue and pretending I didn't know what he meant, but I knew. I had thought it first. Body bent in half and voice blank. One day is harder than most to leave behind, I know the date, it doesn't need marking on my calendar but comes by every year, as he comes by everyday without being here at all. He comes with red eyes and won't look away. Darkness overtakes the room. Inside of myself a flower blooms in illusory blood with wet heavy petals one by one falling into what I understood in the language of the empty, but have no translation.

The phenomenon of lost words- new favourites

As some of you may be aware, one of my favourite things in the world to think about, to talk about, to read about and to know exists is the phenomenon of lost words. Or should I say- the words that have been lost from our vernacular with the elapsing of time, the changes in our cultures, the amalgamations of different and foreign nations giving rise to new amendments to our native tongues- are among my favourite things: the contemplation of their once-existence. I have before written posts that have included some of these lost words but I have recently come across some new ones that captured my attention, so I thought I would not only list them but attempt to use them in sentences.

My 66th collage by Daisy King at Voilà!Collage – desing multimedia collage online

apanthropinization (n.)- withdrawal from human concerns or the human world
Once he’d passed the age of thirty, he retreated into a closed-mindedness and didn’t try to conceal his increasing apanthropinization.

archiloquy (n.)- first part of a speech
The assemblies always began with the Headmistress’s archiloquy, but today was different.

artigrapher (n.)- writer or composer of a grammar; a grammarian
My dream job is to become a professional artigrapher.

autexousious (adj.)- exercising or possessing free will
Those devoted to their God argue that it is only because humans were created as autexousious beings that sin exists in the world.

boscaresque (adj.)- picturesque; scenically wooded
Hansel and Gretel fell asleep under a tree in boscaresque and unfamiliar surroundings.

brochity (n.)- projecting or crooked quality of teeth
It was actually her idiosyncratic brochity that made her such a successful fashion model.

caprizant (adj.)- of the pulse, uneven or irregular
With a finger to my inner wrist, I felt the caprizant rhythm of my panic.

circumbilivagination (n.)- going around in a circular motion; circumambulation
When she recited aloud the dates she needed to memorise for her history examination, she was prone to circumbilivagination around the common room whilst muttering them to herself.

citharize (v.)- to play the harp
I have never seen someone citharize as effortlessly, the sound so mesmerising. 

coherentific (adj.)- causing to become coherent; causing cohesion
A daily dosage of risperidone eventually had coherentific effects on his thought processes. 

cosmogyral (adj.)-  whirling round the universe
In the waiting room of the psychiatric hospital, I met a woman who claimed she'd been on cosmogyral excursions, which seemed serious until she told me it had been 4 days of inpatient care, and I'd been there six months.

essomenic (adj.)- showing things as they will be in the future
She feared that her first son's failed marrage was essomenic with regards to how his own's son's nuptuals would transpire. 

eveniency (n.)- coming to pass
Even though he waited for the signal every night and it failed to make an appearance, he was certain of the eveniency of his last beacon of hope.

excutient (adj.)- shaking off
When someone deliberately tries to hurt you, try to be excutient the bitterness as soon as you can, or you'll carry it around with you and it will just weigh heavier.

fallaciloquence (n.)- deceitful speech
I've always hated politics, especially discussions about politics at parties, possibly because I believe that inherent in the political profession is the aptitude for fallaciloquence. 

hecatologue (n.)- code consisting of 100 rules
Sherlock Holmes was the sole creator of this task in deductive logic, but he'd cleverly set it out as a game with a hecatologue to adhere to. 

hirquitalliency (n.)- strength of voice
She didn't possess the hirquitalliency to get anybody's attention, so that is why she broke her glass tapping her knife against itt. 

icasm (n.)- figurative expression
He assured his lawyer that the death threat he had penned to his neighbour was an icasm and nothing more.

inocciduous (adj.)- of a star, never setting
I don't believe much of what goes on in the Bible but the imagery is quite lovely, especially that of the inocciduous and singular star that led the way to Bethlehem. 

inobligality (n.)- quality of not being obligatory
She didn't turn up to work wearing the uniform because her co-worker had said uniform was an inobligality but she ought to have trusted her instincts. 

interfation (n.)- act of interrupting another while speaking
His incessant interaftion was symptomatic of Tourette's Syndrome, and his family were accustomed to surprise obscenties being bellowed without warning after twenty-five years of it, but he still couldn't ride the bus or underground train for fear of the abuse from strangers, for to them it was intrusive and impolite.

kalotypography (n.)- beautiful printing
There is one room in the museum that is hung with work featuring kalotypography, and whenever I visit I come away with the after-image 'read me' intricately emblazoned behind my eyelids.

keleusmatically (adv.)- imperatively; in an imperative mood
One legislation that was keleusmatically passed in Parliament was the new NHS privatisation bill, which was so loathed by many yet such a relief to move discussion away from.

latibule (n.)- hiding place
His father built a wooden cabin for someone just his heigh up in the sycamore tree visible from the kitchen window, and it became his latibule and sanctum when he heard his parents' voices begin to grow more malevolent in tone, and louder in decibels. 

lococession (n.)- place for giving
In thar corner we have set up another lococession because there isn't enough space for all these gifts under our tree. 

logarithmotechny (n.)- the art of calculating logarithms
So avid was he about logarithmotechny that he sought that spiral everywhere he looked, he dreamt of his life spun out as the golden ratio, a perfect galaxy. 

montivagant (adj.)- wandering over hills and mountains
For days the Von Trapp family had to stay montivagant in order to cross the border from Austria to Switzerland. 

murklins (adv.)- in the dark
I was staggering murklins after that bottle of wine by the time I got the key out of my bag, only to find I was at someone else's door.

namelings (n., pl.)- persons bearing the same name
They weren't just sworn enemies, they were namelings, and there could only be one Esmerelda on this Earth, they agreed. 

nequient (adj.)- not being able
These days I am nequient when it comes to social arrangements and find myself wringing my hands and longing for an invisiblity cloak. 

nubivagant (adj.)- moving throughout or among clouds
When she left her physical body, she felt what could have only been her mind, as something else not physical but definitely there within the atmosphere, nubivagant and far above everything earth-bound.

parepochism (n.)- error in dating or assigning time period
It was a parepochism on his part, not mine, and that's why I was absent for the lecture. 

patration (n.)- perfection or completion of something
In pursuit of the patration of his newest piece, the playwright sat at his keyboard all day and then from twilight through until the following dawn, for three days, until hallucinations made him take to his bed. 

phlyarologist (n.)- one who talks nonsense
He isn't just a phlyarologist, even though he is a paranoid schizophrenic- there is method in madness, like Hamlet said, and there is sense to his speech if you listen.

phylactology (n.)- science of counter-espionage
If I'd had the option to study phylactology, it would have been at the top of my list, but I don't know where I'd even start should I ever go looking for a way in to that field of work. 

pocilliform (adj.)- shaped like a little cup
I imagine my mind, pocilliform, tornadoes swirling and nebulous within it, storming but not spilling, yet, and stifled. 

radicarian (adj.)- pertaining to the roots of words
A radicarian knowledge of Latin is definitely an advantage when making educated guesses about the etymological origins of words.

recineration (n.)- second reduction to ashes
Once was enough, he did not think he could withstand waching the recineration of his home, for he'd only just put his heart back there where his first loved walls once stood. 

roomthily (adj.)- spatially; with respect to space
Perhaps you should re-evaluate how you have funished the room, but in thinking roomthily, because feng shui really does work for some. 

sospital (adj.)- keeping safe and healthy; preserving from danger
The bald bearded man had sospital duties he took on with honour and humility, and he would have died for them, should the bullet have come from somewhere he may have been able to see it approach, instead of from a 46-storey skyscraper window across the busy road. 

sparsile (adj.)- of a star, not included in any constellation
You say you don't fit in, but I see you as sparsile in an otherwised predictably decorated sky. 

starrify (v.)- to decorate with stars; to make into a star
After deciding to putting on his Ziggy Stardust costume, he could barely contain his excitement, his hand shaking as he tried to starrify his face with Bowie's iconolastic make-up.

stiricide (n.)- falling of icicles from a house
It wasn't the weather that caused the stiricide, it was your snowmobile and your inability to drive it smoothly on his terrain. 

succisive (adj.)- of time, spare or in excess
Between revision each scene in Hamlet, they took succisive rests to eat fish fingers for fuelling brainf food and to swallow caffiene pills to keep their all-nighter plans on track.
.
tortiloquy (n.) - crooked speech
This is my courtroom and I do not permit such tortiloquy here, or anywhere else in my presence.

tremefy (v.)- to cause to tremble
There is nothing that can make me tremefy like the sound of the footsteps up the corridor, the janging of heavy keys, and the anticipation of the figure that had become the one constant in my ongoing varaition of nightmares with every sleep, all the details disparate enough to bring me a new reason for cold sweats upon ewaking but never varied enough veer back into the realm of remotely pleasant dreams.

tristifical (adj.)- causing to be sad or mournful
The attendants at my funeral all dressed in black will be too tristifical, and I didn't live that way so I won't die that way either, and everyone will wear sequins, striped socks, rainbow-coloured suits and sideways caps. 

veprecose (adj.)- full of brambles
Over time, the garden I'd kept knowledge of to myself grew so veprecose, the next time I went through that hidden door and tried to cross it to the bench where I had found more than just somewhere to sit outside but a sactuary to recline and write,  my tights and skirt were shredded and tangled as I fought a path to get to it, but every thorn's pinch was worth it when I at length put up my legs and wrote in my notebook under the warm afternoon sun. 

viduifical (adj.)- widow-making
The nickname 'man-eater' was not fitting, because she did not devour the men and make them disappear, but was convicted for her viduifical crimes by means of the poison she could put in any dish, but usually chose breakfast. 

xenization (n.)- fact of travelling as a stranger
This was to me my life now and as for how long, I cannot tell. Characterised by xenization, will I be given many opportunities to find friends along the way as I make my journey? 

Stranger words

Stabbing likeness, purple light-bulb, chewing glass, as if the entire planet were to sing three fine songs and the deepest canyons would swell, inside out, touch face, slip a hand in yours, say, all poetry is made up of overly metaphorical sentences; touch face, now safe, a blue blanket in the rain, shrunken over her frame, "You're going to kill me," she says into her hands, and unintelligent nonsense could sound better if only it were coming from someone different, someone close, but away, someone strange who is strange and often alone. Stranger gloves in winter, found beneath the car seat; hands so cold, no one should have to bear that, but I know, regardless, some do.

A Not-So-Lovely Love Story: The Tragedy of Infatuation Meeting Indifference

PART I.

PART II.

PART III.

Drawing and writing- and all that makes me happy

The first pages of my new scrapbook/notebook/diary/keepsake/evidence that I existed.

Things That Went Unspoken; What They Wished They Had Said; What Should Have Been Said

"I would be happy doing anything with you."

"You remind me of thoughts I've unintentionally left behind."

"Keep breaking your heart until it opens."

"If I could take away your insecurities, I would, but I can't so for now, I'll love you enough for the both of us."

"Don't ever go."

"You need to learn how to care, that's the problem."

"There are people, and then there is you."

"You make me think, even just for a second, that I can do anything."

"Will you please get the fuck out of my head, thank you."

"I've never found the words to say what I mean, and body language fails me- you will never know."

"No, I don't think about you anymore, but I don't think about you any less."

"I really hope someday you find someone to help and heal you, but it's not going to be me."

"I'm not worthless, I'm afraid you are just feeble-minded."

"Please don't look at me like that, because I will fall apart if I see you cry."

"Please don't ask this of me, because I know I am going to hurt you."

"You're braver than people give you credit for, but you're brave enough not to need that credibility."

"I thought I was her."

"If I loved you, I should have let you go."

"I'm scared, every day, all the time. Please tell me the truth, if you ever feel that way."

"I'm the word your lips forgot."

"Happen, with me."

(Footnote- these are from fictional sources, some drawn from personal experience but none are actually personal.)

Other Lives (Reincarnation Imagined)

TRANSCRIPT:

I don't know if I can tell you this: that there's something sinister waiting to happen. It's a rattlesnake beneath the floorboards type of feeling. A falling to your death just before you wake up because you've been dreaming type of feeling.

Do you believe in past lives because I never have, but if I did, I'd like to make them up for myself the way I make up the meaning of this whole universe, just because I know there isn't going to be a big reveal at the end or at any point, and nobody is going to let me in on the secret.

In one past life, I'm sitting on a porch and the evening is humid, I'm looking out over a creek, hearing but not listening to a cacophony of crickets and insects' monotonous drone, and splashing. I think I'm somewhere in the dustbowl I've read about in all the books about the American Dream. Or the shattering of that Dream. Or the illusion of that Dream. Or a dream of a Dream. But in this dream, or past life, there are two boys throwing punches at each other and they are in the water.
On one side of the creek, there's a pile of clothes. I know that there's a pistol hidden in it. On the other side of the creek, there's only warm darkness, hot night.

Another life now. I am a we. There's a you and a me, but he isn't my you and I can't be his me, or her- we are just somebodys. We are trying to find out what our insides look like using only words. His handwriting is messy, messier than mine is in this life. I mistake his scribbled hearts for small butterflies tacked to the end of a message he penned in a card. Anniversary. Valentines. Birthday.
It's another life. A harvest moon means something in this life. A heartbeat like an insect hitting the window pane. Again. Again. Again.

I'm in a car taking a moonlit drive with Jim Morisson. He's feeding me pieces of heaven. We are midnight heroes. This is another life entirely. But he bites his fingernails, and above his bed is a ceiling fan that whines like a dog in pain, and I hate myself in this life.
The mornings are ugly and my lips look like something I've fallen on. I am cold all the time. I am not introspective, and I do not know why I want to end my life, but I do, so it doesn't last long.

Next life, I chew the inside of my cheek when I am angry or nervous, or both, which is often, and in this life a man is yelling at me in Japanese but I know what he is telling me- you are not worthy. I want to tell him- yes I am- but I do not lift my eyes.
I think I made a long life in Japan but never spoke back. It wasn't the right time, not the right life. But this one, this could be the one.

I'm missing three fingers. I'm probably going to lose half of my nose. My skin is turning to the colour of chrome, it glows amongst all the white. I'm at the top of the world. I made it to the top of the highest mountain in the world.
We may not make it back down alive, but we got here, and this is a feeling I want to package, to put away in a bottle or small box and bring back with me to this real life.

But that was another life, that never happened, forever ago, never ago, and there were many and there were none and I was so special in some and so insignificant in others. See- it doesn't really matter. You can say it's a dream- you can take that pistol out and shoot a bird, you can let the warm dark swallow you, you can put your hands into his chest, you can take your last breath in a dimly lit bathroom, you can say nothing, you can say everything, you can be brilliant, or you can be worthless, but in the end it means exactly the same thing.