One of my best friends- the one I used to call my best friend- has cut me out of his life.
I don't understand this. Not because I'm hurt or angry but because I don't understand how human beings who have spent so much time growing together, caring almost singularly for one another to the point nothing but their own shared reality mattered, and had been so very close to one another for a length of time such as this- I don't know how humans can cut that other person out. What replaces the parts of you that they had grown into, and only they could fit, Because you matched in one way or another, and it worked for as long as it did. I never want to forget the great things  we made together. I never want to forget all that he did for me. I am never going to make that cut.

Bravery

If you are searching for some sort of formula to carry on fighting, or for a sequence of numbers or symbols to decode bravery, there is no purpose to look any further. It’s not that you are close to it, or getting there, or that the concept itself of a bravery code is the first step towards deciphering the code, but you’ll never get the chance. There is no code. When you are trying to pull your parts together and make them work in concordance even though you have been unhinged an inch too far from the here and now, the currents of reality. For example, where is one of your hands? One is banging on the tabletop for attention while the other presses down on your trachea to crush it closed. You need to calm down one hand so you can use it to loosen the other from your own throat. There are no pretty ways- or any ways- to suture the open wounds that have been left on you. It feels filthy and confusing to speak, and it hurts because you know only yesterday your talk was free.

It is disturbing to smile and to hold your face without anything to express. All you want to do is release that scream that begs for freedom, just as speech. But you can’t go on like this, all torn apart- this is a body fighting itself, a war against its own shadow; it’s a mind murdering the body from inside. Think about that, if you can just about bear it, and then you’ll catch onto why there’s not a instruction manual waiting for you after your experience to lay out in bullet points the right way to feel. How to’s on coping with grief, guilt, disgust, dissociation, nightmares, the memory becoming part of your autobiography. There’s no manual or guide because there is no way to make peace with that.

No one ever taught you that bravery can be something other than clawed in eyes, sharpened nails, feral smiles. It doesn’t appear as the torn up hands of a wrecked clock or the veins filled with venom under poisoned skin. You can decide what your bravery looks like. Maybe it looks like smashed plates, slashed tires, the silver gleam along the edge of a bread knife that flashes as you make yourself a sandwich. Maybe it’s letting the shadows give you some comfort when the windows are jammmed and refuse to open. It’s framing pictures of yourself and your mother because you have a need for nostalgia almost as much. It’s changing the colour of your hair, it’s gin and tonic before noon or else only juice you drink from cartons. It’s taking out the rubbish bins whilst knowing they contain one or several things you ought to not throw away, but taking the words of Kerouac- Accept loss forever. It looks, perhaps, like trying to fix a clock but allowing for times ahead to weave in and out of an arbitrary linear path. No matter how many times you look at those hands on that face, you’ll never be able to turn back time or bypass a single moment on fast forward. It’s brave to try and invent a potential cure and to persist, but someday you’ll be thankful you couldn’t fix yourself by going back over time or denying the disappearing time.

It could be going to confession every Tuesday and Thursday, or visiting a shooting range, whether or not you end up firing a gun. It could be learning to bake your favourite cake, then baking dozens of small cakes and eating them alone. It could be a simple mouth to pillow scream. It could be the development of an entirely original and organic dream. It didn’t come from nowhere, nor from what you are trying to be brave for. A terrible event can be catastrophic and cataclysmic. The evidence in that is surely in all catastrophes and the associated ways in which the world shifts around it, accomodates is corners, and is changed even just by the wake left behind.

Most likely it is writing and it’s burning. It’s howling, visualising your head split in two against a wall. It’s bleeding to remember why you stopped drawing your own blood. It’s acting sinfully to forget. It’s undergoing an exorcism of your own by drawing a map of your body and marking out all the hiding places taken as territory by the spectres that haunt you. You’ll need your bravery to claim those spaces back, to conjure a monster frightening enough to scare the spectres themselves out.

If you try on lots of looks for bravery, be aware you’ll be black-night and blues and plum-colour bruised. Healing looks a lot like brutality, but it is the best home you’ve ever had. It is the first that you have built with your own hands and you owe no one for it.

Remember: Whatever has been done. Whatever you have done to survive.
Remember: the war is almost over.
Remember: you have always been home.

other-Word-ly Bank of Words

Included in the bank based on merits that may be phonetic, semantic, or idiosyncratic. The words are not lost words like I sometimes make lists of but are still existing in dictionaries to be used freely in our vernacular. The words I collect here I probably like due to the way they sound, how it feels to speak them, or for their meaning. Not alphabetical.


plosive
elbow
meretricious
clandestine
histrionic
obfuscate
olfactory
lagoon
imbued
palimpsest
harbinger
pauciloquent
veracity
spooling
ebullient
contrite
precocious
harangue
Kafkaesque
apolaustic
agelast
obelisk
persnickety
dilettante
soporific
somnambulist
trifecta
heuristic
interparietal
interstellar
caterwaul
catastrophic
ghost
knees
billows
ennui
mis/philanthropic
glockenspiel
pumpernickel
ingratiate
interrobang
inchoate
balloon
adumbrate
petrichor
elegiac
spoon
erudite
archaic
proletariat
astriferous
redolent
clatter
frickatives
sympathectomy

Love poem no ?? Life-love, other-love, a smidge of self-love

I may be half-way to decomposing but I'm whole-heartedly in love.
The past may still be decaying in the empty kitchen cupboards,
but these moments don't rot away, there's no expiration date
if you don't want one. Everything is founded on the influence
of the mind on matter, of what you mind and what matters to you.
My writing and my self both reek of decomposing dreams. 
I want to be fresh for when I am kissed, as a daisy ought to be.
But I'm not sunshine or stardust, I'm made of rust and loose roots
that wither and rot out of wet soil. But however I decay,
nothing has yet eaten away my capacity to blindly trust.

Love poem no ?

You are so so easy to love that you’re breaking the world’s heart;
the magnetism shifts beneath you like a sinking ship.
I want to flirt with your secrets. take evenings walks with your repressed rage,
laying kisses to your neuroses, from trembling lips to trembling knees.
I know my existing is only a clumsy effort at keeping the lights on
and twisting my bedsheets into rugs and curtains to live with myself,
but now I can live with myself I don't want to do it alone.
I never feared loneliness until you,
I want you when the candles die out.
I want you. like mercy on deathrow

In my mind

In my mind you will always be the person I wronged
and more than once, and I will always be sorry,
and in my mind you will always be the only person
who was more than a friend and a lover,
who I can thank for the music I would discover.
You'll be the person about whom I told lies.
You are the one who pointed out my laughing eyes.

You will always carry your heart on your sleeve,
pristine and unbruised, whatever blows it may receive.
The insensity of your eyes will shine even brighter
in a memory so abstract. Your knuckles do not know concrete.
The touch you give will always be far lighter.
In my mind, you are not anything close to deceit. 

You are not smoke tinted windows
or smoke screens, slight of hand magic shows.
You are the stages of sunlight as it glows
and on your way to the secret that nobody knows.

You will always be, in my mind, held far, far above.
Your face will always be beautiful and your voice will be love.
When you make music, it's love in breath and motion combined.
I think of you, and when I do, it is, like you, always kind.

Moments like this.

This is garbled and jumbled all over the place but I'm trying to make a point.

they sent postcards from all over the world,
strangers writing to the cancer ward /
you were swollen
and demanding / the reek of disinfectant
and the pastel colours and faded curtains /
do you remember the time
we promised to remember the time?
then we threw the ball into the sea
off that high rock in France
watched it float away?-
I do remember.
we promised we’d remember it together when we grew old
together, so for a while she held my hand
because there are no words for moments like this.

i didn’t know i was looking for you / but there you are
standing string-bean and tall and I imagined /
a skateboard, what your smile would be like,
and after a while
what it would be like to kiss you again?
or do something together that is uncommon
a second time
the Sufjan Stevens song comes to mind –
I’d do anything for you, everything for you -
you look beautiful when you sing, or when there’s
                     a cigarette filter between
                     a toothy smile,
even roughed up in the mornings
you look like something, like a concept without a word.
Here you are, and there are no words for people like you.

and to be touched by someone like that
and loved by someone like that, there are
absolutely no turns of phrase to express that you are
grateful, you are dreaming, you are lucky and so grateful /
it was you who got lucky / and when somebody
gives gives gives
and they inspire so much thought in you
for miracle-making of your own,
and they also happen to love you as well-
how can I ever thank him for that?
how can I thank you for something like that?
How can anybody find a way to say a thankyou like that?

you have a friend who is much older than you
and everything he’s been through / scarring invisible and not /
damaged everywhere and irrevocable.
But white turned black is not always just black
and you’ll see the flash of white
again and again, and the friendship is not blind
but when he sits with his eyes elsewhere and mind
somersaulting backwards / years of abuse and fights
and pain / waking up with a razor at your neck /
parents who didn’t want you /
foster parents who wanted to see you cry /
when he is reliving those past moments in my present
There is nothing to say because there are no words
for how to deal with memory,
deal with memories
hideous as those, painful in recall, sharp pieces
of a broken mirror
but clean as cut glass.
There are no words for moments like this.

There were no words for those moments,
      and there are no words for these moments
and still, there are no words.

Waste by Horatio James

Word Bowling

I had to use ten words in a ten sentence story. In a certain order, one word per sentence,


The weatherman predicted a tornado, I heard from the television buzzing in the kitchen next door. All day I’d been warned by radios and professors and by the end of the day, I’d turned childlike and bellicose, a little tantrum throwing itself about like leaves in a winter storm. That weatherman was trying to swindle me, my thoughts hissed, and my capacity to trust was emptying, as it did little by little each day. My threads of thought were tangled once, now unravelling somehow and their loose ends would swing when my headache stirred bone-deep whirlpools deeper and darker. I couldn’t stand the voice of my mother, who was in the kitchen, on the phone to some friend about the supposed tornado’s brooding presence, and her nasal tone of voice penetrated through walls, slid under doors, and tossed itself too far when she got overexcited. I couldn’t stand it, the bleat bleat, the cheep cheep, her playing mother hen in her nest which all but one one of her hatched eggs had flown. What would she do without me, I thought aloud because no one could hear me, and reached for my bag for a lighter and tobacco because she could probably smell me. Smell the smoke, at least, and either call the emergency services in a flight of hysteria or come to rap on my door with stale, baked knuckles, but as I lit up and waited for her thunderous approach, the bulb on my ceiling gave a pathetic flicker of light, yellow as a dying leaf, and then the room was dark. Outside the window, behind the blinds I kept low, the circular winds were furious and the television had gone quiet and my mother was screeching and that tornado had arrived, ripping up every geranium in the nearby gardens. My windowpanes were rattling with the force of lowering winds, and my headache roared nebulously, and my mother screamed more and more, before the room dissolved, taking the storm with it, and here I stand in a cornfield, warm and shimmering gold.

Then I tried one as a poem. 


I wake covered in powder, a blanket of white dust,
         not once like snow, just cold.
Yesterday’s rainfall had made the ink in my novel bleed
          and the inscription on the inside front cover
             is undecipherable now.
No apples in the fruit bowl, no milk in the fridge,
    no missed calls, just envelopes on the doormat
         and cat food in the cupboard, and coffee.
     Plastic crockery, styrofoam cups (How?
     Did I ask how I ended up here?)
Black coffee. black ink, and a black eye that I see
in my reflection, rippling water in a saucepan on the stove
   that slowly obfuscates my face with bubbles.
What a strange notion- everything turning to black and white
      and where would the shades of grey go?
Beyond the window, the streets are remote and bland until
          they are not, then they're boiling over.
I sit in my armchair to stop myself staring, to stop
   the scalding of my hands, and my cat curled at my feet
        as though I am royalty with coffee.
The sky is blinding white, like my memory, and seeing it
was the highlight of my day.
    Until I took a small handful of pills, washed down
     with black coffee.

Voices of the divided selves- a short experimental film

The book 'The Divided Self' by one of my favourite people of all time, R.D. Laing, explains psychosis in a way that allows the 'non-psychotic reader' to dip into the minds of some of Laing's patients and understand that madness is a concept that we constructed and then marginalised, put under the microscope, talk of as if those affected by it are entirely different from us. Madness, Laing posits, does not exist, for it's only a sane reaction to an insane environment. The book re-frames the psychotic minds that fill the pages with a lot of non-nonsense, which is to say, making a lot of sense. 

I went through the book and highlighted direct quotes spoken by psychotic patients. I then used them in the film above, which is just for eyes to feast on lights and colour behind the words that don't sound so mad after all. 

Go to your home that you don't call mine anymore

Go to your home. Your home isn't the same as mine anymore.
The place I've got is small but there are big empty spaces
shaped just like you and your guitar are shaped, and
they echo deep like catacombs, these hollowed corners,
this seat not taken, and the music you gave me
that part of me was broken. Not your fault
or my clumsiness, just a gift given for a short while
to borrow so I could shine. It always had to be returned,
or maybe it was caught by a morning bird.

It was beautiful
but I'm not a bird.
And you're not a cat.
You have a life,
just the one, and it's no rehearsal for another chance
to get it right. Get it right and when you do, what?
You got it right so many times. You were right for me,
then. But now, go to your home, to yourself.

Breathe in and out of balloons, just air
as if it's the kind lovers share. When you decide
to throw yourself down a K hole, be careful.
You aren't reborn when you come out. You aren't perfect.
Nothing ever is and ever was. We can't even
conceptualise that which is perfect. Only one thing
could possibly be- that's not existing or having been
at all. No circuit boards to switch you into the next life.
If you think you're there, and I'm holding you,
I am not there. If you are right and really are there,
we were worlds apart longer than I thought.

Let the vodka and beer trash your brain cells,
take hallucinogenics and make epiphanies of what you see.
Watch your fingers making trails, scooping the sky
and turn your hands into something mythological.
I'm sincere when I say you have made miracles with them
when your hands meet your mind and suddenly
there's music and I'm changing beat by beat,
skin shedding, extracellular activity, alterations
in neurological structures, cells turning over,
cells being regenerated or depleted or myelineated
or dying. Fundamental changes, but on the inside
you can't see glucorticoids and dopaminergic pathways
and you can't see the heart taking a beating either.

I can't remember seeing the changes. I just remember
the difference between being happy and being unhappy
and I hadn't been happy in enough time to remember
it was meant to be better. I needed to be better.

So when you are home with yourself, love  yourself
like you had the courage to do while I cower
at the thought of really knowing. And when someone
is at home with you, tell them what you told me-
those words that had been all I'd ever wanted to hear
my whole life, those words I believed.
This time, make sure it's the right person for them,
those words, and this time, mean them.
This time, don't ignore time passing until somehow,
someday, somehow, you are walking away.

Tell her that she's a wonderful human, not a witch
or alien or psychic. Tell her she amazes you
with her ability to love you too. It's not hard to do.
Now stop looking in K Dick books and biblical texts
and through song lyrics to find links. Stop baring
your inner hypocrite with a quote from the Old Testament
as if it means something for you now, as if it ever meant
anything to anyone but those who needed faith
and wanted miracles and a storybook was enough.
That was never enough for the you I knew,

It's a worldwide bestseller. It's the ultimate classic,
Contributions by people with wild William James, J.D. Ballard,
Lewis Carroll imaginations. Imagined themselves prophets.
Don't read between those lines.
Coincidences happen when you l a straight 6 each time
you're rolling for chance, rooting for fate,
relishing in conspiracy.

Go home to yourself and find yourself again,
the  one who was able to decide in Berlin to not forget
what he'd seen and learnt after swallowing seeds,
the one who let me go through
interactions with illusory voices
because he had strength enough to know the real from the unreal-
to know my unconscious mind from my waking one,
my own, the one that I was holding to tightly,
so tightly while holding tightly to you.

Maybe I held so tightly you needed to breathe
and all I could speak were whispers and tics
until I said my name and it sounded like an apology.
Maybe you held me so tightly I needed to breathe.
Maybe you needed to be with yourself, your love.
Maybe I needed to be with someone else, because
it let me remember again how it feels to be happy
and know you make someone else happy.

Go home and be emotional. Be as emotional as you are
in a way that reveals elevated emotional intelligence,
in a way that I could never be for  never knowing
how I feel or what it is making me feel whatever I do.
You'll soften eventually. Your sadness will balance-
our reliance on our own immune realism is unknown by most
but you're more resilient than you think,
you're more curious than you think,
you're the one- really, of us two- who wanted knowledge
and wanted to know what's beyond our boundaries.
You wanted more than I was able to help you procure
hemmed in neatly between the borders of my brain.

Go home and forget me if you must.
Go home and believe, if one thing only, this:
You are beyond compare. You are the stars, satellites,
celestial bodies. They fell out of my universe
into my hands after it all and they were still warm
like your night breaths and still shone like your eyes
when kept open while kissing. The cartographers
of outer space rewrote the maps and you were removed
from me topographically.
I can't warm my hands holding them anymore,

Sometimes I wish I'd lose my memory.
Anyway, it's late to say it now but go to your home
to yourself, find the relics of him,
make sense of the start of yourself again and then
you'll begin at the beginning, becoming yourself again.

more than one supposes

I decided to put a little melody in my head to some  lines I'd made up in my head.
For the hard of hearing:

There is more to be said 
in the wordless breaths of sleep
than one supposes

when the breaths are sharing space 
between two dreamers
touching noses

(inspired initially by Louis Macneice's Snow)

a line allows progress, a circle does not

i.
Who can really measure the length of a dream anyway?
One could particularly not theorise about dreams that don't belong to them,
those they never had. Yet I think somehow it's been decided
that dreams hold like a breath for a few seconds before waking.
But dreams and nightmares have purposes. What would their use be
if they threw up and pulled away the messages being sent
to you, head still on your pillow, from your unconscious mind
before you can say hippocampus. 

ii.
Hippocampus is a word that originated at seahorse
and now I can't adapt my belief to anything but thinking
that dreams are manufactured in a corner of
our complex neurological architecture- an undiscovered region,
and one that is shaped like a seahorse.

iii.
Uncharted territory. Here be dragons.

iv. I dream up cities upon cities upon cities
until the city lights are so plentiful that our planet
glows when seen from the red plains of Mars
or whichever of the dark or bright side
of the craggy silvery moon has the right view.

 v. Here be dragons, here be dreams and moons
and other-otherwordly things. There must be a god
of some sort. A higher power is far enough
out of this world to exist, certainly.

vi. Dear whatever is up there or wherever you are,
or whomever, I apologise for my ignorance.
I live a sheltered life but you probably know that already
if any of the rumours about you are true. Sorry
that we got carried away and called you omnipotent
if you're not, omniscient if you don't have to be anywhere at all,
and benevolent when you aren't even in the dangerous position
of playing God. Then I am sorry on behalf of the believers
who complain. Some people have a strange idea of faith,
I think. I have faith in few things right now, but
the faith others have in me is crucial to my existing.
Anyway, I have a request to ask of you. I am not
praying or seeking guidance. I am just tired of
waiting to become the someone that I am waiting to be.
Please, turn me into something else, something
that use could actually be made out of. Make me useful
but please above all make me unhurtful, inoffensive-
turn me into a white blank wall, for those never hurt anyone
who wasn't involved in it coming down. It's a harmless
blank slate and projectors can turn it into a screen
for you to see what you want to see on the blankness.
I want people to see what they want to see when they look at me,
not seeing the absences, the simplicity, and it will please
until the day I let my vigilance appear in my windows
and someone raises a fist and puts it right through
the wall you could have turned me into.

vii. I invent small  mercies that don't exist elsewhere
but in the cities I build in dreaming. They wouldn't be
measured- it is just mercy and it invariably loses
its popularity contest against justice.
The monster who had good intentions but whose pathways
were limited, obstructed; who hung around with
other monstrosities, a bad crowd; bad advice; poor decisions;
maybe he just never had anyone to help him out
of that monster suit.

viii. I invent new words for the city dwellers to include
in their vernacular. The language would be the same as this
and also the grammatical structure, but a difference in dialect
makes apparent the speaker is from the place where
they have words for what we need to say.

ix. a word for the opposite of  loneliness, and for the experience
and accompanying feeling that occur when one can hear sounds
through their wall. of people laughing and conversing, while
one is on the solitary side of the dividing wall.
a word for the opposite of becoming.
a word for the moment in time when you know that
the worst has happened and within seconds you will be told
formally, so you remain suspended where there are no wordss for either.

a word for the certainty that you have recently seen what you have lost.

a word for te inability to give up searching for a particular and 

not even necessary item and leave the house, the frantic search 

being often a cause for turning up late.

a word for the experience of seeing one's own hands 

as a pair of gloves, for when you look in the mirror and the face

reflected back to you is not your own.

a new word entirely for the moments when people catch sight

of themselves in mirrror and are shocked to see

what they have become, to see their blindspots blinkered

their vision to obfulscate the visible process of physical change.

a word for when the skin wrapped around you feels 

like a plastic casing or cling film or uncomfortable enough

to feel overwhelmed by the desire to claw it off.

a word for the way women open their mouths while applying

eye make-up, and for the way their faces change expressions

momentarily when they look at their reflections. 

And then a host of new words for variants in these

expressions that only appear fleetingly for mirrors.

a word for blushing caused by the presence of blushing.

a word for when you have loudly said what you didn't mean

that will allow fewer sunsets to occur over arguments.

a word for what you have said quietly and you did mean.

a word for the precursor to the stage at which a person contemplates

the real possibility of their imminent, unpreventable death-

a stage prior to that when a person has to contemplate

whether or not this is the moment to start the real contemplation.

a word for a dead person who keeps their form present

in a compliation of f evidence that they ever existed.

a word for the jelly-like sensation of one's legs that 

makes the oncoming of a common cold etc. seem probable.

a word for having empathy for several people in 

several different positions with several sets of attention at one time.

a word used to describe why you are affected by a painting.

a word used to describe why a piece of art leaves you not ambivalent

but noticeably unaffected. a word used to describe the process of

painbrushes hardening with paint and softening in water.

a word for the feeling one gets during moments of questioning

whether they are a good person and not knowing the answer.

a word for the punchline of a joke that you don't understand.

a word for the sigh people exhale into a  drink they are raising to sip.

a word for the expanse of knowledge you have that you wish you didn't.

a word for what can only be experienced by the individual 

who finds they can see very clearly something very important

by means of confusing circumstances or as a result of that confusion.

a word for faces people pull for the benefit of strangers.

a word for either a poem that has no concrete point but much content

or for the anticipation of its ending.

x. 

Finally I willl invent a  new way of saying, 'I will love better next time',

'I will be better next time', and despite the uncertainty behind those words

there is a steel-cast conviction that the words said can predict 

the future they describe. There will probably have to be a word for

the absence of a next time, and for promises made to reach

an end goal that exists only as a possibility, one of many.

typewritten pieces

Answer

I think I found one answer:

The good times lie between the James' 

I don't even know what the question is but I'm sure it has something to do with carrying on. There will be patterns in my life that repeat so that I can be sure I'm the common denominator. I make sure I always warn those in close proximity or potentially at risk about it, how I'm interesting and endearing, then suddenly preferably on opiates, asleep, or just not speaking about what I've been thinking over, just not moving, even. I guess people don't know what they want or will eventually want. Otherwise, several guys I know would be engaged to mannequins that look vaguely like me. Scarecrow girls, stuffed with straw so can stand, but lacking in cognitive functions pretty much across the board. The answer I figured out came from realising there are some left after staying longer than I expected, and there are some that might not follow patterns. In between those people, there's happy time to spend asking more questions.

Mad

Branches scratching at the glass in my window
on the streets outside, the spaces outside
this space on the inside where the mad ones go.

The wind howls in squalling breaths across
each chimney stack, along all rain gutters full
of broken stars, bits of teeth spit back,
about the spilt milk, losses of ours at sea,
when I was out on the tarmac ocean
waving in and out of inner consciousness
in streams, it's paving the stones
and now nothing is concrete. It looked all bones
but if you listen carefully you're  further gone
because the real crack is brain-deep.

Wind that can swing around, bring trees down,
it snatches you from sleep, it lifts latches
and goes flinging umber leaves savagely
to the ground. It comes alive where it attaches
between my clothing and skin, it comes alive
in the thin hairs on the back of my neck, they electrify.
I imagine what other spaces lie beyond the glass,
knowing that I once knew, hoping,
hoping for more than hope for absences of things
and for freedom, from my shadows
and the marionette strings. When I'm tying up
the loose ends before I go, the trees will be sighing
Goodbye, Pinocchio.

My photography

Take your own advice

Stop biting your tongue,
apologising for nothing
but existing,

breathe in, breathe out-

just don't let yourself become a half-hearted song.

Don't wait any longer for magic to make up your mind
or one day you'll find yourself standing at the roadside
waiting for your backbone to pick you up.