ABCB

Should somebody put me back in school?
I've forgotten things I used to know--
like how to leave someone behind,
and not looking back, just letting go.

Collage

Sum of your parts/words

Crying and praying

Eventually I figured out that tears can't make somebody who has died come alive again. Nor can they make somebody who doesn't love you anymore start to love you again. Praying is the same thing. People must waste so much of their lives praying to God and crying. The idea of the devil makes sense because it gives people someone to blame for their misdeeds. And the idea of God may make sense because people are afraid of these misdeeds, and if they believe in God and the devil there is this idea that both are playing a game of tug-of-war with them. They never know which side they are going to end up on, and that can explain how, even when people attempt to do something good, what they do turns out badly.

The OA

I made this because I think everyone should watch it. It was written and produced by the girl who plays the protagonist, and is pure imagination, pure beauty.

Birdsong blues

Lullabies are sung to me by the murmur
of autumn leaves in the trees
but my ears and heart are closed to them.
The night, twitching like a shadow,
is broken-winged with spindly legs
that crawl across my visual plane.
The birds used to be there, I heard them.
Now they are not, and all the time
spent writing poems, I am looking
for the end of a the tunnel.

Picture frames rattle as trains pass by.
Those travelers, so tired, I imagine,
look out of their windows at the blur
towards or away from home,
not knowing that they are heard,
hoping that someone, wherever they go,
is there waiting for them.

Once, there were words.
Now, there are none.
I meant it when I wrote 'lonely'.
And when I said 'some days'
I meant that it feels like
the whole world wants
my silence; my absence.

Missing

I still look for you, not as often as I used to,

but still, I do, mostly everywhere.

Don't worry, my heart only fractures -- 

   just the touch of a break -- 

half the time I cannot find you.

Once, a handful of years back now, 

I was troubled by the presence of absence.

Not only regarding the linguistic complications

dragged behind by that phrase. 

It was in the places where I could see --

  I could feel -- 

something was missing. 

Something that could exist but was not present,

an eternal secret, an unheard answer,

leaving behind a void, a pit in my stomach.

Now I feel the same blunt ache, less and less,

but time to time. I mourn her -- the girl 

I almost was. I mourn the life I could have lived 

that's nothing but nothing now.

But when it fit, it did so just right,

as if my body was built for your winters.

What good are hands if not for holding

and being there to keep us warm?

My head was pierced through, attempting

to recall the conclusion of a dream 

I almost had --

-- it's too late now. It's already tomorrow 

in all the places that count.

Scrappy words

Sharp Objects colour mood boards

Voices Without Faces

A pantoum

There will be voices that call themselves yours.
Without faces, they could belong to ghosts.
They may be your words; they may be an illusion.
I don’t know- language is my fortitude and fault.

They could be ghosts, whispering phantoms.
If I could ask them, I don’t think that I’d dare.
Because my language is faulty yet a fortune.
I spill all attempts to say something beautiful.

I don’t think I would dare ask who is speaking.
The quiet is a sort of kindness, anyway.
Spilling my attempts to say something beautiful
I would not want to hear. I do not want to hear.

Anyway, the quiet is a sort of kindness.
The words may be yours; you may be an illusion.
I do not want to hear. I do not want to hear them.
Voices without faces that call themselves mine.


Playlist // nostalgia

Love oddities

Only a few months ago my ivory-white skin was an atlas of bruises, a map marking the grip of something(someone) there to hurt me. I thought that I'd never trust a touch again. I'd never feel the warmth of leaning in for a kiss. Then you kissed me and all my bruises came undone, my purple-blue-yellow mottled skin turning from the darkest dust to the clearest dawn, still lilac but pale and dewy. I wonder how you managed to take so much away with your hands, inhale such pain with your kiss. How does one touch something and make it stop hurting- perhaps not completely, but far less than it used to? And why would you choose me to touch?

I should be out there thanking anyone who has ever loved me just for trying. I have been told that I am loved but that I'm just too much. Which is at odds with the all-vaulting feeling I've always had: that I've never been and never will be enough.

What a strange world

The world certainly is larger than one things,
and unfailingly split into sums of parts and parts of sums.
Plurality in the psychosphere. Sometimes,
do you wonder whether you are living in a dream?

Am I okay?

There is something about this darkness- it conceals the best of us and reveals the worst and maybe that’s why roads are always deserted during the little hours.

“Are you okay?“

Sometimes when I’m on the street my knees buckle, and my eyes start to loosen, and something is disturbing because strangers ask me if I need help.

Sometimes my breath gets caught in my throat for no reason other than because it doesn’t see the point in rising out of my lungs.

Sometimes I am making a point, talking about an issue I feel passionate about or want to debate, or am answering a question, until I realise I am living alone and I have been talking to empty spaces.

Sometimes I wonder if I were to swim far enough into the ocean, I would just let go and dream and get swept away by the waves.

Sometimes I am afraid to look at myself in any mirror or reflective surface, afraid to smile, afraid to be the girl I should be, surely.

Sometimes i stare at my hands and wonder about palm-reading, attempting to etch the lines in them- heart, love, life - but it’s all in the head, not the hands.

Sometimes I don’t know were I am or how I got there, what time or day it is, what the hell is going on, and whether I’m broken.

Sometimes it’s like the sky is scraping against my scalp and my fingers are rattling, meaning I’m nervous and over-tired, which is why I see glimpses of men in my peripheral vision, who were never there when I turn to look.

Sometimes there’s a ringing in my ears, the vestiges of some old argument, which makes me

wonder what I could have done.

Sometimes there’s just not enough. Sometimes there’s just too much.

Yet there’s something building, breaking and churning, roaring, shattering and collapsing,  tumbling amid the dust clouds rising, rising, rising, rising -

What did I do? What is defective in me and can I do anything about it and most importantly, will the people I care about worry too much or care too little? I don’t know, I can’t breathe, and oh god oh god oh god oh god what do i do what do i do what do -

“I'm fine, why do you ask?"

Honestly..

My imperfect scribbles are no more than that.
I am not talented. I only would like to be,
because the only way I can get by is finding
the right words, constructing the right sentence,
so that all the tangles in my mind finally loosen.
When I find a way to write it down, it is resolved.
I'm not a talented writer. It's just another need.

Poem written using strange associationss

The pavement and sky are cold, and my hands like birds.
Morning songs are more like the groan of a garbage truck.
Wheeling, wheeling, it all may be a rat race.
I never won a race. I never won anything.
Running breathlessly towards something old or new
And ripping holes through time and space
I realise I need it- my own time, my own space.
Nothing really belongs to me and I don’t belong to anyone
Or anything else. Possessions are sentiment incarnate.
Sentiment can bring me to my knees with tears.
There are bruises on my legs turning blue and purple.
Once in a blue moon, I’ll share the secret.
There's a dark side to everything. And a sea of tranquility.

A playlist of beautiul murmurs

The Act of Murmuring from daisy christabel on 8tracks Radio.

What I have....

I have a name.
I have a home.
I have a past.
I have hope.
I have been loved.
I have been resented.
I have been held.
I have been hurt.
I have believed.
I have belief still.

I have known those who do bad things.
I have known those who do good things.
I have been to boarding school.
I have cried in the shower to make it less painful.
I have seen the twin towers pierced by planes.
I have enjoyed examinations to keep my mind still.
I have never been resilient.
I have never been aggressive.
I have never spoken up for those I should have.

I have travelled to many faraway places.
I have taken a lot - too much- for granted.
I have cried at my mother’s wedding for joy.
I have cried at my mother’s words for shame.


I have spent months in hospitals, my families on holiday.
I have spent years recovering from what put me there.
I have scars that most likely will not ever fade on my wrists.
I have not have done that if I’d known the mess I’d make.
I have most likely done it anyway as I wanted to bleed.

I had someone who thought like me, who inspired me.
I have seen this person in a casket and read out a poem.
I have been refused the allowance to go anywhere alone to cry.
I have been beaten up by my larger yet younger sister.
I have also been slapped by her on that day.
I have wondered why grief could lead to violence.

I have grieved until my mind fell apart.
I have made assumptions, assumptions, etcetera.
I have fabricated a persona for myself.
I have torn that patchwork apart.
I have seen how little I know who I am.
I have questioned who I am, and if I am at all.
I have heard and seen non-existent enemies.
I have battled that which nobody can see exists.

I have won trophies before yet having won meant the world.
I have helped others until pieces of sanity were reassembled.
I said the wrong thing to the ‘right’ people.
I have said the perfect thing to the ‘wrong’ people.

I have shaken and stirred.
I have mended and made.
I have apologised countless times.
I have no idea whether I’ll truly be welcome.
I have a feeling that I am just like extra luggage.

I have no dissolution that this is not anyone’s fault but my own.

Innovation/Courage?

This poem ended up in a completely different place than I thought it would, but I like it like that, to just go with the proverbial/prosaic/poetic flow.

Thought: This is going to hurt me at the end but
I’m going to do it anyway- and so I could stop looking 

outside to place blame. With a rock in each hand,

I began beating them together repeatedly, saying- 

“This is how they discovered fire. This is how the world
really began as a place for us to thrive and develop all the

cultures, incredible scientific and technological advances,

the great movements within the circles of art and literature,

and music, and  the stock market, and the world we know."

It fascinates me.  The place that Something so suddenly 

exists where previouslythere  was Nothing. All as the result

of friction. I like how when you take two things that aren't

meant to fit together is the only way it works. 

Now, let’s smash our hearts together,  or grab onto the other's 

hand, but with vehemence, thinking of that rock, to see

if we, too, have the inspiration and spirit to change the tide-

o there is never a cessation of creativity or innovation,

be it scientific pr medical, linguistic and literate, 

mathematical or technological, and perhaps, even cultural.

So much has yet to be discovered and all I’ll never learn it.

I often wonder whether I will have the chance to witness

advances made by their innovators in years to come, and

that people in the years to come will also take for granted

finite and eventually arcane ways of doing things, because

after all ,we spend most of our lives working in the same way.

Maybe from this distance, it appears that what those people

in future generations will discover and innovate will seem 

small compared to what you once have done. It’s not. 

They are the same hard workers, within different parameters.

Self-destruction is easy and it is boring eventually. 

You could easily kill yourself right now, or you could

do it sitting right in this one place. 

I dare you to bite down on your own heart and look brave.

Repeat- I’m weak, I’m weak, I’m weak- whilst quietly

Feeling surer that you are strong and courageous enough

to chew up your heart and choke yourself. I mean, 

It’s not like it’s anything the world doesn’t do to us anyway,

Whatever- I might get some semblance of a poem out of this.

Cut up and amended Plath poem

Even the silence was silent, and it was you,
all up inside my head; I couldn’t quite make it out
that spring that came with a roar beyond and above
these figs, all looking so rusty, so ugly, the way
they plopped to the ground. some people getting less
and some more. I must not have always been like this.
There is something so demoralising about watching
the habits, gestures and behaviour of others;
I’d never once thought about it before.

But life is loneliness and one can never outrun it.
I am simply my own silence. I close my eyes
and hear the world in constant motion outside me,
happy, I have been inadequate all along.
I am my own silence. All I heard was the bray
of my heart- this is the song of a mad girl.

I need to fabricate an outgoing nature so
that I might gather the guts to want something.
There is so very much I want to learn, and
I came dangerously close to wanting nothing,
So from here and now, all that despair, the feeble parts,
every hellfire of every nightmare and each time
the blackness gallops in at night- I intend to live it,
feel it, and somehow find a happy home far from fire.

All the world I must have taken for granted,
viewing it through small cramped eyes, always so
introspectively passive and melancholy.
Now I’ve learnt more of it, I am not so easily fooled
by false faces dressed up and painted blue and red.

There is a way out and it’s not a constant, I know this.
From that despair and woe you can come ricocheting
towards a sense of fulfilment, laughter, and even hope.
The trouble is that we always boomerang back- but it’s
just a matter of time- for a time I believed in mermaids.

When you kissed me I felt my lungs fill like trees with
something beautiful but certainly annihilating.
Dying is arbitrary, Anyone can do it but why want to
even if there’s no meaning to be found and even if
madness itself takes you out on a moonlit waltz.

 A fellow student asked- who are you? I am. I am. I am.
A girl with horrible limitations, too many neuroses
and a desire for companionship, other than an illusory
feathered thing that sits on me nightly. She replied-
I don’t know who I am either, but why drives you?
I do it because it feels like hell, because it feels real.
Committing suicide is not creative expression, she replied,
and it’s not a statement, and you have a life to live, so why?
The words were released, held in since ten years old
when I first tried it; the words that I couldn’t explain.-

I guess you could say I’ve a call, I said. One moment
and she put her hand on mine, and lowered her voice
to a murmur, said, cut the telephone off at the root
so the voices won’t get through. I shut my eyes and
wondered if I had really made her up inside my head.

Not without trouble

Imagine: star-crossed, eyes crossed out.
That was the first time a thought came to me,
but so very short across my eyelids and while
you laugh backwards I only want to move forwards;
the poem will come but not without trouble.
I am always in trouble, Their favourite topic: my trouble.

Nightfall headfirst, wings rustling in the breeze,
feathers dripping fragrant in my hands; I begin to write.
Clipped wings, shining heroism; I continue to write.

Imagine: a girl leaving church and clicking her tongue
enticingly, telling me- bring yourself to speak and
take off on mountain climbs, feel the highest place
from where inevitably I will fall and scatter my heart,
my brain matter, having to piece matters back together.
A girl who didn’t easily take to being told what to do
by her own voice inside her head nobody else heard,
and it is asking: Why me? and Who are you?

Then, as soon as a glance, I’m a child on your knee,
freckles scattered out from underneath the floorboards,
tears dripping in ink onto the pages; I keep writing.

What I do want? A clear mind, a mighty pen, approval.
I do not want your castles unless there are flowers there
and I did not see a single petal, I had no sparkling drink
so wrote and watched the joy bubbling from your lips 
to the polished sound of a champagne flute.
What do I not want? To need as I need, to be as I am.
To know too little, to live too long. No, I don’t.

then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience

For you only know a heap of broken images

'Popularity Contest' is the name of the exercise

I have this book called Smash Poetry and it's got some very quirky exercises in it but because I've been a bit shaken up lately my attempts to be write from my scrambled mind have been futile, so this particular task attracted me. I don't need to explain what it is- you'll figure it out.

I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.
You're barking up the wrong tree.
Take a sad song and make it better.
He's got a chip on his shoulder.
Live and let live.
The play's the thing to catch the conscience of the king.
Dying is an art, like everything else.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond-
The flowers you planted, mama, in the backyard, all died when you went away.
This the stuff that dreams are are made on.
Two heads are better than one.
I think I made you up inside my head.
An eye for an eye and the world goes blind.
The lights are on and no one's home.
So the women come and go, talking of Michael Angelo.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed my madness.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
If I should die, think only this of me-
Catch 22.
Curiosity killed the cat.
I took the road less travelled.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
I carry your heart in my heart.

Home

The daisies on the heath are growing tall.
I walked through the grass, a thistle made me fall.

Maybe this is just how it goes.
The back and forth that life throws.
And maybe that's why I know
That I'm just starting to grow,
Just starting to learn to throw,
Until at long last I can show-

That I'm coming home.
I didn't think I would dare.
Didn't think I'd ever go home.
Thought I was already there.
With open eyes, I wasn't there.
With open eyes, too much, I care.

The love in your words makes my world warm.
When I wake up at six I think of you at dawn.

And you're not just my mother
And I've been such a bother.
I wouldn't debate what you say
If you wanted me to go away.
You're stronger than you portray
And I just hope that someday-

When I am truly home.
You will teach me how to cope.
You welcomed me back home.
I thought that I'd lost your hope.
I look at you and I'm there.
I look at you and I'm not scared.
I look at you and I'm cared.

When you came, wrapped me up and I felt your tears
I didn't expect you to forgive those unspoken years.

I do still need to heal and maybe it's not real.
But forgiveness is absolute
And that's saved me more than truth.
Now I'm welcome back home,
I don't foresee more hungry cold
Just a warmth and smile and glow-
So chaos, give me a throw.

I'm landing back home.
I've been away too long.
I feel the warmth at home.
Like an Otis Redding Song.
This is where I grew strong.
This is where I belong

I look at you and you care.
You look at me and I care.

I Need A Phone Call

Not poetry really, just something I just had to get off my chest before I go to bed.
Thank you, you know who you are.

There is that concept that they name 'stranger danger'
and of course, thunder can clap and the unfamiliar
can hurt you. Detectives examining bruises,
police stations in general; I'm blessed to have someone
there to hold me while I fell into a broken leaf.
But danger doesn't always come from storms
or from strangers. Sometimes it comes at the hands
of the familiar, of those who you thought loved you.
It's been a long time since the first stranger.
Even longer since the familiar.
People are good. They are basically good.
People are good. They are basically good.

A phone conversation today meant the world to me.
Reminded me of what happened, what I came out of.
Felt my heart breaking a little- the voice that spoke to me.
It's been over a decade since we knew each other,
and yet I want to hang on to every word,
and I want to speak of things I have so long buried.
Friendship works that way, I am sure of it.
People are good. They are basically good.

i'll never give up on that.

Haik-true

The fear I'll become
who I am most afraid of
keeps me up at night.

Free writing

The hours strike apart like broken plates because
my hands are familiar with the anxieities.
the best intentions of mine get tangled up
and I wonder if cutting myself open would help just to show
what’s true about what I really mean, underneath, inside.

The terror bleeds through without a sound or word.
It’s just a simple unravelling. But this is nothing
compared to the world, the television and sweet sweepers
and being bitten by memories of nightmares with eyes open.
Thousands upon thousands of circles, futility and reflection:
unchangeable. I wonder why he wrote that it’s April
that is he cruellest month when any of them, any month
or cycle of the moon, can be cruel and can be kind or both?

Will we see parts of the universe through a telescope?
Transcend, transport, escape? We can see patterns all over.
We’ll look for stars, even the dead ones staying on to carry time.

I have been betrayed before. Sometimes I ought to be wary of hoping.
At least I remember to breathe and look up at the city blocks
scraping the sky, instead of at my shoes  Reason clouds the heart,
or the other way around. At night it’s fragile evocations,
a mixing of memories and hallucinations of winter dawn.

Will it bloom this year? The broken gate from where words flow
without resoution? No answers. No reason, that only there with emotion.
There are answers but all answers are followed by doubts
and different answers to the same questions.

Eventually I will write about the history of fire escapes,
the mysteries of the two hemispheres together and apart
and how they lateralise when the words and visions overtake us.
And the forever-land of forgiveness I'll find without forgetting the path.
The delusion of freedom, and wanting to believe- I couldn’t count
all the things I’d like to believe. Then there’s. wondering what is real.
He says it’s nothing and everything is a hologram.
I don’t know much but I know I’m not hollow, and whether or not
I’m real or any of this is, I’m glad to see what I see as I see it.

In Berlin

In Berlin I hear the art on the brick walls is better
than you might find in a gallery, and everybody recycles
and they even dispense clean needles for the local junkies.
I’d like to go someday. Maybe I’d learn something.

At least it might be worth the weight, carrying names,
toting around the hundreds of faces I’ll never forget
and having to hold on to the ones that failed me,
or the ones that I failed.

Two- A Message; Not Today (both using the Gyrin/Burroughs cut up method to some extent, taking the new formations/juxtapositions/images not for the purpose of 'beating the machine' but to express newest felt truths by means of 'cutting up' the past)

I heard you were married and then
left behind and you were afflicted
and I never got to say I’m sorry-
never got to tell you about
the black echo, then floods of light
that all calls to the heart.
Never got to tell you the message
I should have when I did not answer
and pretended to be unafflicted:
you don’t dust it all off like cat hair-
it is the door you leave through.


Eventually, dusting off, the emptiness of eyes,
the time gathering in between the pages of books-
where had they gone, those mornings of smoke
and flower petals and fool’s gold? Why is it now
just choking and tiny wounds, turning white?
I can’t see them. I should be able to, I’ve known enough.
The door is broken. The alarm is ringing.
The wound from the old loneliness is one black hole
pooling my introverted silence into the floor,
a collection of stupid words and jumbled reveries.
Suddenly I’m on an edge and I can’t breathe.
Fear like that burns and folds into the clouds
until the even sky looks wrong. But still, I can’t do it-
I can’t bury every day as though somehow
my hands have become portals to places where
I was another me and I never had nightmares,
and to places where time to today didn’t happen,
not as I saw it through eyes wide and a halo of gold
sometimes, then sometimes through the shadows
carried by the hauntings. I started over once,
when my mind fell apart and when I pulled back the veil,
saw for the first time that I did not exist without it.
I started over but I do hold the memories in my luggage,
making my weak backbone buckle, but hauled up
on genuine shoulders. The kind you can cry and laugh on.
I can breathe now. Something as simple as speaking
has made me brave, and I am not broken, not today.

Six words, a la Hemingway

Things are very hard these days.

Pull pint, double shot, no time.

Twenty minutes to finally breathe again.

Can't make plans so don't look.

A relationship between personality and poetry?

I do prefer poetry to people.

(Really, pretty much to anything else.)

Gonna miss you when you're gone.

A field mouse disturbs the grass.

Climbing over the gap-toothed style.

There are never any happy endings.

There are always some happy endings.

Where did all the poetry go?

Regulars

There are a few things I like when it comes to my work. Overall, it's exhausting and mind-numbing but in some ways it's beneficial to be ground down and anaesthetised. But what I like the most is recognising people who visit regularly and remembering their drink orders.
There's a guy with white hair who looks like a cartoon character and drinks London Pride and works just upstairs from the Foyles where I once worked, and says that he hates it due to a culture of nepotism and 'cronyism' and talked with me about the power of social influence on one slow evening.
There's a wine connoseur who drinks ESB ale in a tankard and tells me about his visits to wine tastings and port tastings and whiskey tastings and God knows what else, and who fiddles with his phone and eventually falls asleep, without fail, over his dish of pork scratchings, but not before inviting me to accompany him to one of his many beverage tastings and I am too busy.
There's a guy who pops in early afternoon and always has the exact change for a pint of Guinness, who then disappears and reimerges with another order, who grabbed me to the backdrop of Save The Last Dance For Me and we danced together while my boss clapped, inebriated as she usually is.
There's an incredibly effeminate customer whose name is David and comes in every day, who drinks chardonnay with three ice cubes and stays for many hours, way past closing time, applying his make up while looking at himself in the mirrored wall.
There's an attractive man with a beard who wears pressed shirts and drinks lager, standing outside with friends or strangers to smoke, and who I would like very much to kiss, and when I let slip to my manager that I thought he was good-looking he made fun of me and told me my boyfriend would be jealous.
There's a woman who has a bespoke drink devised of vodka and a very small amount of orange juice with ice and a straw, who was there the other day at midday and again in the evening until midnight, but who won my affection despite her lingering after the last bell because she gave compliments about me to my boss.
There are two men in creased suits during after-work hours, one of whom looks a lot like an ex-boyfriend of mine and drinks Seafarer's Ale, who always rack up an expensive tab and want receipts so I wonder who is paying.
There is another man in a suit who always attends with a group of other men in suits and who showed me his phone, saying, 'Look who I had lunch with!', to which I replied, 'Nigel Farage!' and went into a brief soliloquy about his politics before kicking myself because I realised that they were actually friends.
There is another man in a suit who used to do what most people would gauge as flirting but has since given up and orders Guinness and asks for huge amount of cashback but mostly stays outside with Heineken Top, who is named after his drink order and because he's so tall he's always at the top, and always asks for a lager with a top, and during my first week I stupidly put soda water in the lager instead of lemonade.
There is a man who always sits in the same spot at the bar and slowly drinks his lager and occasionally asks me for help with the Evening Standard crossword.
There is another man whose voice gives me nightmares and who stands at the entrance to the bar so I keep having to squeeze past him and each time he says, 'Hi Daisy!' in a very strange squeaking voice, which I used to think was a joke but now realise is his real voice.
There is an Italian guy called Marco who had a birthday party the other day and gave me a slice of cake and many hugs and made my heart warm.
There is a couple- a long-haired blonde and man in a blazer- who come in and stay for hours until they are both more than tipsy and they are kissing and cuddling, and she drinks wine and he drinks lager, who had a conversation about becoming boyfriend and girlfriend on official terms, which I picked up from eavesdropping, but which worried me because I could have sworn I saw her with someone else a few weeks ago and when my manager and I were gossiping about them and I mentioned this, he said, 'I like her style.'
There is an attractive close-shaven man who drinks Amstel and sits alone, scribbling in a notebook, and when I asked him what he was focused on told me that he's drawing jellyfish because he is making illustrations for his friend's writing, so I have decided that I would like to be his friend.

May Hill

I’m with you on May Hill where bedsheets smell like tea and milk
I’m with you on May Hill where time stands still as if in a snow globe.
I’m with you on May Hill where I learnt the names of flowers.
I’m with you on May Hill where I waited for the morning birds.
I’m with you on May Hill where I am sorry I lost my mind.
I’m with you on May Hill where my grandfather died in his bed.
I’m with you on May Hill where all the stories began.
I’m with you on May Hill where quiet is heavier than sound but slower.
I’m with you on May Hill where what is thrown away burns in the garden.
I’m with you on May Hill where Christmas is redder and greener.
I’m with you on May Hill where green grow the rushes, oh.
I’m with you on May Hill where I first heard a lullaby.
I’m with you on May Hill where my grandmother broke a leg.
I’m with you on May Hill where I learnt to sing.
I’m with you on May Hill where we go out walking to Ella and back again.

Time

Time is an elastic band.
Time is a flat circle.
Time is precious, but truth more precious than time.
Time is item reorganised.
Time is too slow for those who wait.
Time is a human construct.
Time is too swift for those who fear.
Time is a frame for the masterpiece of experience.
Time is too long for those who grieve.
Time is a medicine.
Time is too short for those who rejoice.
Time is not on my side.
Time is the most precious element of human existence.
Time is our afternoons measured out in coffee spoons.
Time is more valuable than money.
Time is the sound of new leaves turning over.
Time is the most undefinable and yet paradoxical of things.
Time is a tapestry that weaves itself again and again.
Time is trying to put a limit on infinity.
Time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
Time is unkind.
Time is an illusion.
Time is all we have.
Time is the longest distance between two places.
Time is a game played beautifully by children.
Time is all your yesterdays and all your tomorrows.
Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.
Time is all it takes.
Time is taking it all.
Time is catching up to you.
Time is whether you want it to be or not.
Time is treasured, wasted, spent and bought.
Time is a greedy thing.
Time is stolen by punctuality.
Time is a slippery thing.
Time is mostly spent being dead.
Time is there to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
Time is not mine to take.
Time is not mine to give.
Time is in the tide.
Time is just a point of reference.
Time is not going to explain.
Time is clinging to me like cat hair.
Time is without meaning.
Time is the meaning.
Time is mine and it’s worthless.
Time is never on my side.
Time is nothing.
Time is all.

How many?

How many years before the fire? How many years still looking up at the sky at night and seeing nothing but black? How many years of imagining a mirror up there above you, something to gaze into all wide-eyed to see something that looks just like you staring back, to see creatures who have spent all the days in their lives looking up wondering whether someone else is out there? How many minutes spent hoping that maybe we aren't alone at all? How many hours did we dedicate to dreaming up these people, dressing them up in bodies like ours and lives like ours and words like ours, in names that fit comfortably around our tongues and then giving them our hands to shake? How many days did we wait for them to give a reply? How many times did we send out exploratory ships and crews on voyages into the big endless blue, navigating between the stars using a tape measure, looking for some small hint that there are others out there too? How many times will we come back, shaking our heads in disappointment but our eyes glimmering with resolve because we are not giving up yet? How many seconds will we waste away, raking through the galaxies, only to prove that we are not alone out there? Surely we are not alone out there.

Unfinished jigsaw

I am trying to learn over again lessons in love,
to teach myself how to be alone, without being
lost but I have never known how to be beautiful--

and I do not live anywhere but the room where
I sleep is so crammed with empty boxes and
all those empty corners I could build a nest in.

If I had the flesh for it and the energy for it
I could grow wings to pull myself up and then
fight a war with gravity and someday I'd win.

I could grow up if it weren't for a gap in the bed
that I am too small for and the gaps in memory
I am too big for, and for the emptiness of space.

Alone is a state of mind, in and out and between
and it's a place, a strange place I am and I'm not
and I've been here before but back then I didn't

notice the cold.

Memories in Motion and Finally, Meliorism

There’s a window and the night waltz comes, just a little too drunk,
so there’s nothing much to say but the words of the insomniac,
and secrets that cannot interact. The moon is quiet in the sky,
but like an egg uncracked.

Here is a story, made up inside my head.
Failure and glory, but it’s someone else instead.
Dirt under my fingers from digging in the night.
But beauty lingers, petals falling as I write.

In and out again, he floats as a cloud right by, made up of memory.
Hello stranger, may I ask why your greeting
is a just as good a goodbye? And your words of love
as concrete as the sky.

Here is another tale. I think this one may be true.
You were fractured on the inside and I took care of you.
I know those were your secrets and those I’ll always keep.
I know there will be sometime you’ll visit me in sleep.

So I’ve gathered the remnants of your stay,
thought of destroying them by May.
But no matter why you proved unkind,
you know the inside and out of my mind,
and I’d never give a moment or memory away, for I love blind.

Don't Think Twice about Love Letters

Love letters are the kinds of things I can only write at night. Hello moon, how do you like these lines? Insomniac sentences who always wear muddy hems, refuse to reveal more than absolutely necessary. And only what’s necessary counts. When I write them down, I want them dirty. Gritty. I want my recipient to find dirt under fingernails after reading. Maybe some behind the ear. Tongue coated in saliva. Do you need a bath, love? Your skin’s looking a little grimy. My love letters aren’t fluent in softness, sweetness, regret. They’ve a bitter edge, tartness. They only lift their dresses when they shouldn’t, are only addressed to who they can’t have. What, moon? Love and her letters aren’t always as pure as you and your Cheshire grin.

Meaning in Life Questionnaire Results

Conducted at Penn State University, I took this psychometric test. These were the results considering my Presence score was 21 and my Search score was 29:

If you scored below 24 on Presence and also above 24 on Search, you probably do not feel your life has a valued meaning and purpose, and you are actively searching for something or someone that will give your life meaning or purpose. You are probably not always satisfied with your life. You may not experience emotions like love and joy that often. You may occasionally, or even often, feel anxious, nervous, or sad and depressed. You are probably questioning the role of religion in your life, and may be working hard to figure out whether there is a God, what life on Earth is really about, and which, if any, religion is right for you. People who know you would probably describe you as liking to play things by ear, or “go with the flow” when it comes to plans, occasionally worried, and not particularly socially active.

Little stories

All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve contentment and simplicity with enormous effort. 

Reality prior to language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded the possession of silence.

Where does music go when it is not playing? - she asked herself. And, disarmed, she would answer: May they will make a harp out of my nerves when I die.

They often talk about falling, not floating or flying but falling. Falling up, falling down, falling all around like wishes or kisses or ash. What goes up, must come down. She falls over her own feet. He falls off rooftops for her and she waits at the bottom. She falls off faithfully for him but doesn’t always find him where she lands, if she does at all. Is this love?- she asks or herself- or self-destruction like the white-coats say, or hope, or blindness, or admiration? Maybe even madness. To face the possibility of falling everyday and always climbing up up up.

“Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.”

The story of a girl with the same diagnosis as me- BPD- played by Winona Ryder who is manipulated by a sociopath played by Angelina. Brilliant. Watch it.

Some time

Some hours, then, perhaps days, your bones were only my luggage.
I carried them and would have continued carrying them to the end of Forever-land.
How long would it have taken for your will to burn out, turning my truths to  lies=
Museums of tendons, ligaments, joints, bruised shoulders and a bag of fool’s gold.
We saw countless midnights but here comes another, the only one since
Before I can remember that the keyboard hasn’t been bearing it’s gap-toothed grin
In the shadows between one black hole and another. I wish now that the water
We had let take us downstream was fresh, not a wishing well of whisky.
A snow-globe storm of portals to other cyclical natures of our affections-
How we afflicted ourselves. I used to think cutting myself open to watch
Red petals bloom in the sink was my worst affliction. Or disappearing, day by day,
Suicide in slow motion. How silly to think that it was always my failure to
Accurately weighing the inequality sitting right in front of me. Once it’s too late,
Though, arguments go to dust. Internal, introverted silently bleeding,
and eventually, eventually dusting off and healing.

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.” 

Dear Higher Power

Dear Higher Power, Dear Higher Consciouness,
Please, make me useful? Make me unhurtful?
Turn me into a bare white wall so that I may be
vigilant and harmless, so that someone, someday,
may punch a hole right through the middle of me.

I dream up cities on top of cities on top of cities.
I invent mercies and miracles and monsters
and in my mind, everyone has good intentions,
perhaps just poor execution. I'm still trying
to invent a word that means: I will be better,
I will love better, I will prove myself better
next time. If there is a next time.

The future wants to kiss you on the lips.
The future wants to kill you in your sleep.
Everything that exists on this earth
is in equal measures both good and bad
depending on how brightly the light shines
or the angle at which we are tilting our heads.

a poem

Inspired by The Bard

These violent delights will have a violent end
For now is the winter that we contend.
With fire and powder, explosions resume
Which, when we kiss we will consume.

To die, to sleep, perchance to have dreams.
The stars shine darkly, shedding their beams.
In malignancy of fate, what dreams may come?
Slings and arrows and a coiled mortal thrum.

I cast a plague on both your homes
When the summer’s day counted my bones.
My conscience made me afraid to speak.
Not wise, nor slow, just stumbling and weak.

It must be ancient grudges, a new mutiny.
The way the stars cross with dignity.
Just the same, please alter me no more.
I have one foot in the sea and one on shore.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
Nothing is the love and all is the fear
That will strike once wound, the watch of wit.
This new world has such brave people in it.

Don’t know what we are, just what we may be.
Taking arms against the troubles of the sea.
Yet it is on this stuff that we build our dreams.
The good faces are the deadliest, it seems.

I’m a witty fool and I’m a foolish wit.
Some become mad, some are born into it.
Whatever piece of work is man?
We defy the stars whenever we can.

In forty thousands came all the brothers.
Though God gave me a face, I made up others.
Light will break from yonder window tomorrow.
Until then, goodbye is such sweet sorrow.

Beware the leader banging his war drums.
Something wicked this way comes.
This above all- just to yourself, be true
And doubt the stars are fire, not that I love you.

just a wish for someone I care about

You no longer tell tales tall as cliffs or mountain drops.
I think you want to speak true and yet each sentence stops.
Now I'm no marionette, pulled to 'must' or pushed to 'should'
because you are here learning what it means to be good-
not so that others find you magnetic or charming,
or that others find you to be a shock or alarming-
and there are no strings, I can't be pushed, pulled or led,
I will always tell you what's buried brow-deep in my head
though I know I'll never learn all the secrets you keep,
I wish you freedom and laughter and a beautiful sleep.

Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting.

As the people who know me well know, one of my favourite poets, possibly my favourie poet of all time, is Alice Oswald. In her anthology, Of Weeds and Wildflowers, are etchings and sketches of various plants, stems, petals, roots; some wild, some on display. On one of these pages there is included some lines from Hamlet, Act I, Scene III, taken from a conversation between Laertes and Ophelia. I printed the etching onto fabric. It's not so clear to read from the pictures below, but here are the lines:

LAERTES
        For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor,
        Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
        A violet in the youth of primy nature,
        Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
        The perfume and suppliance of a minute.
        No more.
OPHELIA
  No more but so?
LAERTES
  Think it no more.

No sleep, just time

I don’t have anybody to talk to about these things. Even if I did, I would never be capable of finding the words to fit the war that beats its drums out of rhythm with my own beat, beating back against myself as I push a path forward through the universe that only goes in circles anyway. It’s yet another feeling without a word. These not-yet-existent words lower and tremble with such loud violence they could bring down every library wall.  I leave notes in the condensation on taxi windows (‘I’m sorry’; not ‘am I there yet?’ But ‘will I ever make it far enough to know where that is?’). So I try to write it down, and out it comes like nonsense mumbled in sleep. When I first lived alone after so many years, I noticed that I had begin to talk to myself. It wasn’t thinking out loud or singing in the shower.  The voice was mine but not in my head like before, either. The words were spoken by me, and mostly to me, although sometimes to the absences that were bothering me, living alongside me and occasionally taking up more space in my cluttered world than that which I was in the presence of. I recovered from my preoccupation with absences several years ago. My brain was just trying to help, I suppose- the loss being not only emotional but perceptual, it could fill in some of those empty spaces. It didn’t help because I found no comfort in the hauntings, or the one-sided conversations. I’d rather go about stumbling into hollows than share my alone time with ghosts.

What is it that I can’t speak or effectively write about in this unavoidable life?  The ringing alarm and how it calls to mind histories of fire escapes. The broken door from when paramedics kicked it in. The little hours, the nights without the courage to close my eyes, the mornings coming so close, but my closeness becoming somehow a little less crippling every day. Clouds folding over, packaging up all the absolutes. The futility of some things, the sacred nature of others, like remembering to breathe, to stay in orbit, to let the anxieties bleed right through without pooling on the floor, and to let the city in and these new people in (though the city spits people out) and to let them meet the genuine person I had hated silently and fiercely for years until being left alone with her and realising that armfuls of her is not hopeless; I am at least worth something. My bus-stop mind will probably wait there indefinitely but I hope someday it will travel far enough away from the old loneliness that routinely follows me around and close to where the simplest words and the simple ways to love are enough.

The TV shows I watch are violent and strange and I like the ones without a resolution, where the questions remain unanswered and sit behind your brow as it faces the screen. Staring in when it’s over, my own face is shadowed back at me. I feel like a wide-eyed alien in a small godless world of grey and yellow, and I have no real name, just hundreds of books. My hands are unfamiliar and warm. Sometimes they touch a cheek and upon contact the light that floods into my mouth turns from lemon to something sweeter. The sky is dark as a fist whenever I manage to get out these non-specific words and jumbled reveries. Over the buildings across the street, the moon is a creamy gold and you could see all it’s contours- I would say edges, but circles and spheres don’t have them (or do they have infinite edges, or are they all just one edge?). It hums to me, I hum to myself. Sometimes I sing and look for stars that might be pricking our sky, leaving tiny wounds of white. I see them so seldom, but most frequently at bus stops.

Potentially

Like plums that bloom, or like a nebulous hush
of matches whispering as they scratch one another.
What I could be. What we could be, even, maybe.
What to make. What to do. What to change.
What to break. What to love and what to hate.
If I am really here, or rather, if I might have been
allowed to grow, permitted to show my willfulness
and human endurance, mirrored in my makers.
I am not going to become. I am mistaken and
I don't have the form or features to actually exist.
But in that moment, caught between the open and
closed box of Schrodinger, when I both am not
and I could be, I do exist, on one side of that gate,
as a concept. The potential. Would it matter
that it was a mistake that made my potential?

So many tiny alterations, side-steps, choices,
mistakes, actions with reactions with reactions
and causes with effects and knock-on effects
that ripple from one person to another
as if we are all touching fingertips.
This was never going to be- we see our decisions
altering the tides and never-oscillating certainty
of change, but we don't see the smaller steps,
or the missteps, or the chances or split-seconds
between one life and another, the box open
or closed. Still, if there were ever going to be
a potential in me- would I be caught on a tide,
or the tsunami that's caused by a moth's wings?
And if there were to be space for just the idea
of a person to bloom in this space, though empty,
what would it feel like, for he or for she or we?

Retrospect

Still, I recall, with cinnamon breaths
and a voice translucent,
you said you believed in me,
and that I helped you. In thoughts
like falling petals, I believed
you could help me too.
You knew I couldn't swim,
but you let me drown in my mind
and then in my tears, and I knew,
when I was in darkness and cold,
I should have wished for sunlight
instead of a candle. I just wanted
to make you happy. Swirling
dispute, conflicting conversation.
Was I lied to or did I learn
to tread water; did I do anything at all?