My friend

My friend came into my life by accident, it shouldn't have happened. But it did because accidents happen and because I open my door to strangers. We have known one another through several seasons,several disasters, and through to survival. I've known him through several unnatural disasters. I didn't know him through most of his lifetime and so many disasters. He came with long hair, with his sleeves full of tricks, and with no one to love. He was a very good criminal. His arms were camouflaged with tattoos, hiding a knife wound and showing the face of the Green Man god of paganism, He came full of untold stories and unspoken wreckage, ghosts from his past haunting his days and opiate-eyed nights. He was magnetic and missing teeth, scarred, and he didn't trust anything or anyone. He'd nearly died so many times I sometimes wonder if he really exists. He talks of a span of months during which his three friends- closest friends, without closeness- died one after the other. How many times could he come so close before he would become just another ghost? But I began calling him miracle man at the beginning when we waved our hands and signs and he a big painted daisy in the direction of one another's windows, when we both lived in the same block, and I suppose that's just what it is. Small miracles and unexplained things and what you'd never expect to happen- they all happen around him, He is a catalyst but the reactions he causes are not always miraculous or inspiring. He'd be the first to admit he's a catalyst for lost teeth and bloodshed. I wouldn't say it but by more than one I've been likened to chaos. We are both messy and we both like it. His abnormal mind began to grow out of him and stretch to places that can't be conceived of yet, and yet even more abnormal became obvious his evolving awareness of the changes. Many of those changes came about as a coin flips from one side to the other. Not too long ago, his whole life was critically altered. He escaped from an abusive alcoholic, a woman he'd lived with for fifteen years, and because of his absent parents and cruel foster families, she must have been his primary attachment figure. He didn't know about how other people lived, he didn't know a comfortable relationship, or a form of love that hadn't been twisted into something nefarious and destructive. He escaped and bought a boat. He was free for the first time, and his mind stretched out for more, beyond imagination. Before his escape, everything was making wreckage around him. I had grown so close with him, we spent time together just to while away the hours he needed to talk about what he had seen and done and how he managed to live on in bewilderment. The night before he had to move every trace of himself out of the place he'd been at a window's glance distance, we painted the walls all night and day. He painted enormous colourful, turbulent maelstroms in one corner. I painted on the wall the words; there are no words for moments like these. It was a warm-weather time, when wax melted in the trees and light t in through the blinds and seemed to move like sharks, carrying drifts of powders and pollen and the residue of paint on walls. Dust is invisible unless there is sunlight

I wasn't always there to help pull him out or give him shelter. I was brittle then, fresh from being mind-fractured, still healing. I now hold myself together and it makes him proud. I said 'forgiveness' to him one day and innumerable black echoes ceased, and everything was peaceful then. He forgave his birth mother and I managed to get her online, had the privilege of being there for their first conversation since he was put into foster care. He is not a criminal anymore. He is a one-man circus, a 5 star performance. He's also the standing ovation that you never expected you'd be so relieved to hear in all it's thunder. The roof beams raise high and the ground is shaking because you are getting stronger and your life is changing. He tells me that letting him into my life saved his. Knowing I had done something like that changed mine.

 He keeps a scrapbook now, as I do. He let me photograph some pages.

Unsure

Sometimes it's black marble, igneous rockets into endless dark and space.
and then sometimes it's an echo, resonating shades of black,
the frown on a clock's face, or the absent moon,
the illusory balloon, the ball that you chip away, also black,
while following the garden paths,
which don't meet but collide,
and the dice that are rolled ricochet,
echoing back the old days-

what could have been, what might have been?
the answers stand either side of the street,
face to face, but neither seen.

The clouds circle round you, windows blink in sunlight,
glaring, the obvious that hits you loud and with spite
and then the ground beneath you shakes,
the crowd are all staring when everything breaks,
you're a pile of glass, the same way everyone else is debris
of earthquakes: a fist of lost teeth, the split in twine after the fray,
the twist in time, and mistakes made by the billion everyday
on each lifetime's path, and every path at some point meets.
They may, for a time, treat you like hot sheets,
like what makes up their headaches. Be brave-
you may, for a time, forget all reasons to laugh.

Love knows no boundaries, they say. All of which I'm sure is
that it doesn't know how to say please, or any painless ways to go,
to find the exit sign, yet on the contrary, it enters with ease.
When you walk alongside it you cross every line.
It’s not the task that’s small as they tell us it will be.
You feel little and funny until you find yourself
more times than twice on the edge of a line
drawing rainbows that people saw from the ground,
like the light-shows of lightnings and applauding
rumbling sound, like bones and rocks and the
walls of Pompeii crumbling down all around.



you find yourself more than twice on edge of a line that drew
the rainbows you saw above the war,
you want to go elsewhere for more,
go back to before you forgot what love poems were about,
before the cats all got out, no need to lock the door.

Hitched a wagon to a star and fell off

Cabin fever, feverish dreamer, saw the northern lights
on one of those nights, or had they only seen her?
The gas that spirals into stars left a burn on my
elbow, when I was catching-what-I-can-before-I-go,
and I stretched for all I could reach but
I dropped back to earth, found a face full of sand
on the beach where I'd come to land with
an empty satchel. I tell myself, oh well, most days,
oh well, here's a bit of a green glass bottle,
and as well, here's a half broken shell, the same
colour as the one I only ever see when I dream.
Oh well, you never can tell with the northerners,
the lights, the stars. I had just been so sure
they were, for a long time, simply ours
for the taking. But it takes more effort than
one might suppose to visit the solar system
when most planets keep all doors closed.
I told my best friend I'd seen something or one
extraterrestrial, and she thought it was a story
I'd spun to be extra interesting. She was
right of course and I was faking, which I don't
do very well. Gut-full of anticipated remorse.

The process of neologofactisation (a word I made up for the process of making up words)

disidioconscity - (n.) a state of being separated from self-knowledge, or the denial of it
glottowart - (n.) a protector or guardian of language

abschronoparamatic- (adj.) pertaining to the feeling that there is no time

mensequential- (adj.) threatening, continuous and ongoing in nature
omnibiothermic- (adj.) related to or pertaining to all-consuming bodily heat
autocryptious- (adj.) characterised by secrets regarding the self
malpathajection- (n.) the casting away or rejection of negative emotions
nosomnifactism- (n.) a doctrine of belief that one should go without sleeping
antipugnist- (n.) someone who is against fighting
belliform- (adj.) resembling war
aesthangelicaster- (n.) a person who feigns the feelings of an angel

necrophyllization- (n.) the dying process of a leaf
intraponoublient- (adj.) having the tendency for forgetting the contents of thoughts
pseudoxenotude- (n.) a falsely foreign state or conditions
metamemorise- (v,) changing or altering one's memory

cryptoconfuge- (n.) escape from the knowledge of secrets
perphonogratious- (adj.)thoroughly pleasing in sound
chronomatosophic- (adj.) having or relating to knowledge concerning time and motion

Ophelia's writings

alliteration a-z

Apathetic, acataleptic, anthropomorphic abstractions aided an anorectic.
Biology and botany, both broad, but bellicose blossoms bring banality.
Considered communication can conceal certain capabilities- cruelty without causality.
Delirious dreams of divination dwindle during daytime's discontinuation.
Echoing and eerie, ecclesiastical ecstasy eclipses eccentric ebullience in extroverts.
Face-to-face farewells facilitate friendships & fatigue families, familiar in fantasies.
Grace goes gardening, garnishing and ghostwriting, good god, glistening a glittery glaze over.
High, hovering, hallucinating helps habits' hardening and hiding in hazy harmony.
Introduced ideologies, indeed, illustrate ingenuity in idiosyncratic individuals I impersonate.
Jumbled and juiced juxtaposition of jitterbug and jazz justifies jovial jumpiness- jeez.
Karaoke on ketamine, a kettleful of kerosene, kindling kisses, knocking knees.
Last but not least, the lawless laying low are liberated, later learning large life lessons.
Mainly markedly meticulous, maids manage the meagerness of mess, mollifying mothers.
Namely narcotics, not either naivety nor narrow-mindedness, necessitates a nosedive.
Obligations to obtain n occupation only obfuscates obvious obstacles, and oftentimes objectivity.
Pervasive paradoxes parody people's past perceptions, predominantly persistent patterns.
Quick-witted quarrelers query quantifiable qualities, quotations never quivering or quiet
Rickety, raggedly radios ring with ragtime, rainbows remain a rarity.
Sick, staggering students suddenly spill, saucer-eyed, onto streets and scatter.
Thrown together, the tank top, the trousers, tempted and tongue-tied them, totally.
Underestimation ultimately undid the understanding of ubiquitous underachieving underdogs.
Variability in validity and value variance violates the valuer's viewpoint very vividly.
Wandering war-torn wastelands, wayfarers weaken, wait for water, wearily wonder at weather
Xenophobic xylophonist's x-ray wouldn't show his xanthopsia, xeroxed in the xanthic Xs of his eyes.
Your yawning and yelling is yellowing your youthful yearnings for yesterdays.
Zigzagging, zany zookeepers zestfully zone out with zoom lenses, to see from A-Z.

Concept: a group of friends who are close for being as unstable as one another.

old and new

I found this while looking through old diaries

I wrote another poemx4 today. It can be read in 4 ways. Left to right and down line by line, or down the three separate columns. 

vibrance and translucence of stuff

we lay horizon-angle along aisles of the city,
its veneers bore the clouds as they idle awhile
in copper-bordered cobweb bundles

and rain is language, language is rain,
loosened from the tips of wine-stain tongues,
knuckle being blown or kissed by lip
lines; we trip over them all the time
or shoe-laces of feillemort-freckled boys,
never an umbrella, washed-out old news.

listen to the not-words we aren't speaking in a
shake of salt, a game of conkers, or get out of the city
and to the woodlands where, in a haze of petrichor,
you'll hear it all around on bark and leaf and then
the tinnitus of every caravan or shed.
A tin home with an iron lid to live in,
corrugated skin,

city life is wilderness but I know there is more
and wilder such, but I only half-dream of trees
carrying curses, stolen idols or heirlooms arising in
the anatomy of snakes wearing war-hoods
purely for the purpose of poetry/.

the storms that come can rattle the trees
round the courtyard into an epilepsy unflagging
and then sometimes

in my mind, flowers spit out embers petal-tooth
and lava spills onto tarmac streets.
the night knocks on the closely matched
blocks of paving stones. fireflies are out
but it looks like they'll die, their translucent wings
bring to mind an undressed volcano.

the cathartic outbreak of spiders that
that spread into a multiplication of landmines.

https://tablo.io/daisy-christabel/in-admurmuration

cat's cradle

We were playing cat’s cradle and my fingers were more entangled than I’d thought possible, and meanwhile the mornings of midwinter pass in smudges of light, and meanwhile the elevator in your building malfunctions and three people are stuck for an hour, and meanwhile he is counting how many cigarettes he gets through in a day, and meanwhile I am trying and failing to make sense of myself and coming across only the seeds of stories, and meanwhile the apartments next door have a powercut, and meanwhile she nods to sleep with a joint in her hand and the bedroom burns down, and meanwhile my hands seize up with perpetual frostbite, and meanwhile delusions are only exacerbated in this suspended reality, and meanwhile the nearby church shuts down and Sunday mass is another bus ride away, and meanwhile God is clipping his fingernails, and meanwhile no one is there to kiss you goodnight, and meanwhile words are used like keys to unlock the unsettling feelings of whomever hears them, and meanwhile the dictionaries are gathering dust, and meanwhile someone makes a joke because it’s brave and nobody laughs, and meanwhile someone writes a note that reads dear daddy, i’m sorry i had to do it this way… and meanwhile another person votes to invade a foreign country, and meanwhile a boy is raised for war and only war, and meanwhile a girl has lost her voice somewhere among the city streets and she’ll never find it, and meanwhile the birds chatter in empty trees and then somewhere, gunshots leave ripples in the air. The birdsong ceases and now there’s the sound of dead bodies hitting the ground. In the meantime, we are playing cat’s cradle still, and it’s comforting.

apocalyptic

In the shadow of the meteorite, we blink and we breathe
cradling our anxieties, humming what we believe
It doesn't look like it will happen today
but believe me, it's coming, the astral and angry,
the planet included then cast away.

The doctor says that the smoke is still there
and what he means really is that there's fire
ongoing, steadily it burns, somewhere.
Herr Doctor, Herr Professor, Herr To Whom it concerns,
I'm asking where I should search for the cinders
when there are flames everywhere.

Four men who had never ridden horses before
gather outside their headquarters in silence
and their lips are sore. One of them flicks
a cigarette butt to the floor, 'So let's end it then'
he says. Four clumsy riders out to tell the world
that it is no more, there will be no more.

A short story

She cut open my palm with a letter opener and blood dropped from my hand onto the carpet like a fistful of rubies. I thought I was going to be sick as she cut herself in the same place. Her motions were violent and had a force behind them that I didn't know how to cope with, and I couldn't stop staring at the jeweled blood that collected under our clasped hands. She grabbed my hand and held it tightly in hers, our bodies facing one another's, each an entity on its own but at the same time moving, changing, metamorphosing into one. We were two impoverished halves, adjacent. We'd be perfect as a whole.

That was the start of the summer.

And yeah, we whiled most of it away watching reruns of bad TV shows in her air conditioned living room, sitting on her sofa, wasting time. That's all. Her house was enormous and was more of a well-lit, central-heated, artfully decorated mausoleum than a home. Maybe that was just because there were still cardboard boxes out, half-emptied of possessions but still half-packed up, suspended in time. Even though it was big and open and deflated like dead lungs inside, it smelled strongly of dog. I remember how it smelt, and how much I hated it, and I hated how her dogs would roll at our feet, and I hated how there was hair everywhere. How it made my eyes sting and run with tears, my nose itch. I spent those months pretending that I had a cold so I could just stay there with her, in those moments. Imagine- we were licking ice-cream off each other's sticky arms, peeling ourselves off the garden furniture that stuck to our thighs, sweating into the blankets we shared at night, and the whole time I was pretending to have a cold. It was stupid. I know. Whatever.

It was the summer when everything was like everything else. The feeling that ran underneath us, underneath it all- I can't describe it. In retrospect those days and nights pool together into a spill of hot sun and it seems like it all happened at once, all at the same time. That sun was so hot my tennis teacher cancelled two of our classes because she was at home sick with sunstroke. I remember wondering why it's called sunstroke when it strikes with such violent malice, and ruthlessness. I can't put my finger on what it was. It was like a gas station at midnight in the dry nothingness of the Dust bowl, silent; it was a drum beat heard at a funeral, sombre, and something ominous. I don't know. It's stupid to say that about something you can barely even remember.

We were avoiding children at the lido when she suggested it. Or did I? I think it was her. I like to think it was her but that whole chunk of time is so blurry At some point, maybe the same moment she was cutting our hands open to close around one another's, she whispered in my ear, 'We're sisters.' I thought, 'But this isn't what sisters are like.' Still, I would have torn my whole arms off if that had been what she wanted so of course I said yes, yes, yes.

It started off with reasons. Then it was just people she decided she didn't like, or people who looked at her in a way she deemed wrong. I got better at it over time. It was quicker, quieter, cleaner. In between we went back to our long lazy days, our TV shows again, putting on stupid accents for one another, sharing ice cream cones and wrapping ourselves around one another while we nodded off trying to read the books on our reading list for the next year of school. We didn't wear anything at night because it was so humid, fabric clinging to skin was unbearable and suffocating. Mostly I just remember the monotony of the sluggish days. That's how I blocked out the rest.

Then it all went too far because she said it would be better if she were gone and I said yes, yes, yes, and then it was just her blood dripping onto the floor. Suddenly everything was noiseless and unmoving. I looked for my blood there too but it was just hers. I was alone, and I realised I could never be whole now. That was my completion.

And it was the end of summer.

the rarity of words

abulia 

the sky and walls are soft, the ground is spongy ~ nothing has an impact ~ i have a vague knowing 

that i must find a way to something solid ~ everything looks the same as I do and the same as everything else ~ blood pump, shuttering valves ~ stinging feelings from deepenings flinging up and catch in your eye, makes it cry ~ black hole spills out across the hazel of an iris ~ somatic signal ~ I can't find any here ~ here is a silent and interstitial, it's a concrete block, no ways in or out, and it's still ready to send rockets to space. 

{the inability to make decisions}

daltonism

You can dress the Christmas tree in festive colours, crystals and delicately blown glass baubles and ornaments all in emerald and ruby, as tradition tells you. But however many embellishments you pin to the days and nights from Advent's onset until that sad day in January when all the lights must come down, however many jewels you pin to your tree and to walls, ceilings, furnishings, your front door- it still all looks the same.

{the inability to see the difference between red and green}

crepuscle 

The moon is curled up with its knees to its chin, but the clouds obfuscate a london-road-human-eye-level view of what would most likely go unnoticed anyway. Maybe that's why it always seems the moon is getting smaller. Maybe it's just like the demons; the more you believe something is there, the more capable it is of actually being there, so by looking at it and responding to it you give it the power to affect you. If it's not scaring you like the demons scared me, and it's just a celestial body wasting away because nobody can be bothered anymore with moon phases and moon-manic behavioural changes, which were always a theory and never did have any empirical evidence corroborating. My thoughts are splitting, like strands of light, like thread. Sometimes there are needles. But how can I think about noxious cognition when the night is poised, ready to fall, and the cold of winter just feels close instead of cold, and feels like the promise of arms around you, because you know there are arms waiting to hold all of you, every vagrant thought, the spindrift rising upon the impact of daily sensations- and not too long ago, I was living like I"d no skin at all and like my blood was too much for the capacity of my body so if I were to be touched somehow, knocked even gently, the wound would be agony and I couldn't stop the bleeding. Now I have at least a year-thick layer strong enough wrapped around me to protect me from my own reflection or from my own oversensitivity to it. This is where so many of my thought threads end up, loose and all dropped. Stitches pulling closed with a neat gasp of satisfaction under the hospital lights that were tinted clinical and somehow made everything look septic, the nurses wily. Forearms lying there like dead fish. The harbor where the ugliest ideas were conceived and teenagers vomited on the rocks, drunken shouts drowned out by the roar of nearby waves. Someone's kitchen at night when everyone else is asleep. The moon has a lullaby but it grew deafening and all at once and for years now I haven't heard it at all.

bibliomancy

to be continued...

no gravity.

I've just come back from outer space,
a neverending, pinpricked place
where I was nothing and left no trace
but the flecks of stardust on your face.

Restlessness is the roots all dried out.

Restlessness pushes my heart around like an empty
shopping cart on a desert road,
a loose wheel, always veering off course.
Rattle rattle, underneath a scatter of stones.

My new method of survival is
to gather up all the dead pieces: the red dust and bile,
each papery smile that crumpled, a throbbing laugh,
the knocks of my knees, bad senses of direction,
Then I'll sew them together
to form something strange and alive again.
No more dried up roots, deserted lives.

"That thing you’re afraid of losing.
It’s already gone," said the shovel to the dirt
that covered its face.

"Worse," the dirt replied, "It never existed.
It wasn't there in the first place.’"

Me & You Vs the rest of the universe

EXHIBIT A:

The empty drawer where the cutlery used to be.
Half a glass of red wine left in a bottle,
wine stains in a ring around a ‘best boyfriend’ mug.
Another stain- my hand print on the wall,
and there’s no blood but something more urgent
and inevitable
like courage,
leaking away
in the wrong direction.

EXHIBIT B:

The pockets of your coat,
their contents.
An English to French phrasebook,
a packet of tobacco
mostly given away, a piece of paper on which
you keep notes on the smallest observations
imperceptible to any other eye.
If I had to choose a reason, it would be this one
Love, or the thing that staggers behind it,
undignified, pooling at our feet.

EXHIBIT C:

My hand in between both of yours.
You trying to get the blood back to my fingers.
The dog-eared pages of the book I’m reading.
You trying to hear me over train sounds,
other sounds,Band I am repeating myself
because I am too scared to speak up.
Is my voice lost somewhere? Did it drop
from my throat onto the winter roads,
is it wailing from inside a gutter
somewhere and should I go out looking,
to find it before it drowns?

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.