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