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