Altruistic Apples

James T took this, popping up from between steel bars of his staircase, turning the camera around on me, making me see. I think he can do that without realising it. Can someone be an accidental hero? Can you be an oblivious lifesaver? Maybe helping someone, hearing someone, seeing someone, showing them something they didn’t even know they needed to see so that they can know what they need to know- maybe those are acts of altruism that do not need to be motivated by intention. Because if someone sets out to do something that good, and that important, the moment they encounter the realisation of what it is, that altruism- that immeasurable, unfalsifiable and arguably non-existent thing- which had until then kept its shape, undisturbed, suddenly falls away like ashes do when you touch them, soft but now not even the silhouette of what it used to be. I don’t pick friends for their good qualities, to fill some sort of quota, to tick boxes, or to admire them, or to surround myself with good things. It just so happens that one of mine happens to have shown me empirical evidence that altruism exists. So thank you, Herr Professor. Thank you, I will come down from your shoulders now. I have my own apples. How do you like them apples? Anyway, I didn’t pick them. I think they picked me.

every reason to wonder

i. If nostalgia were tangible, it would not be in receipts or borrowed sweatshirts but in decorations that embellish memories out of moth-eaten blankets, floorboards, framed paintings and lampshades; the props list of your past.

ii. colours: pink for the pajamas and floral print leggings, yellow for the middle of a daisy and the guest bedroom and for learning sacrifice, blue days when I was calmer and then white days when I was not there at all, like blinding light broke a way out of a broken brain and finally the many hues the sky goes through night to day- it is never the same colour when you look at it.

iii. there are roads and restaurants marked with muscle memory, just like studying books and the piano my fingers alone learnt to play. In some places the heartbeats come faster and faster because your heart and lungs recognise where you have been.

iv. then there are the names that, if spoken, fill my mouth with shame, regret, wanting, wishes, with hope, with love, with missing, with space.

The Desert

Figure I.
The first time you see the desert. That first time will be too much. You will be looking from the passenger window of a car the colour of sea-glass while there is someone you care about talking in the backseat about something you no longer want to hear. Mostly because the world seems to be losing its music and it’s mostly because the people in it aren’t listening. Not the way they used to, not the people you know. We know. Further down the road, everything else will be too loud or too distractingly important and there will be no music. Fearing this deafness you see in the people you grew up with, people at the same point on the road, with the same shoulders, the same bus passes, the same alarm clock calls- they don’t have to be the same any more than being in the same place- this makes people think sometimes in words that are not kind but they are true. You would give up three years of your life to be the desert.

Figure II.
Someone says thank you for being here. You turn back your head and swallow the paper ball, swallow it like it’s prayer when god isn’t watching.

Figure III.
Well sometimes it’s okay I mean they said I was too destructive too sensitive but I mean how can one person be both, if we are really just one person each? It won’t be forever no not the rest of my life but it is then I need to get over it if I am ever going to do anything or be anything or is that the same thing too? I’m sorry to bother you- go to sleep you are my favourite person I’m okay.

Conclusion.
It’s all terribly loud. Did you sleep last night? Are you comfortable? Would you like to leave with me? Stay with me? You are enough for me. The desert doesn’t care if I am not enough when there is so much space to exist.

This isle is full of noises

Tender and illusive, thirty thousand beams of light.
She had a cherry pit heart and the bitter-sweetest bite.
Pinpricks and clumsy kicks and a head just like a cave.
Sleep so thin and far too steep collects all it can save.
Nothing made of sound that’s real; ideas grow absurd.
From the seeds of perception- what is seen or heard?
Or how does it feel to hold on tight to the hems of mad?
Suffocation becoming softness and good becoming bad.
No one ever speaks of him, the prodigal son’s brother.
Who else gets forgotten in the shadows of each other?
If the streets were to empty and all people to disappear
How long would it take for loneliness, after relief from fear?

Morning Sun by Lee Endres

Bone-deep cold, inside and outside, standing at the window, smoke rising from the glass towers, South of the River backdrop, a big camera lens, a song on repeat, goosebumps and no giggles, look straight into the lens, thinking about the words dissolved the urge to giggle, one take- a few of them- shadows falling where they fall, the drop would be lethal if they fell from the wall where they sat in the night and I stood in the light and this is what they made and I look at it and wonder- who is she?

An article I wrote {on linguistics & etymology with some poetic license taken}

Why We Need To Invent New Words

I hope you read and enjoy it!

Girl Born Of Crystal

Enough now, about all the boys and men whose hearts you stole,
how flowers sprouted from their chests before you swallowed them whole.
Tell me about ghosts trapped in amber, about how you can take flight
driving down an empty road with your eyes closed, at night.
I want to hear about summer lightnings recorded on cassettes,
and personal but dangerous mythologies, and winsome regrets,
and if you ever sleep to dream, if they hurt more than waking
 because either way you’re driving, your voice is still shaking.
You were a girl born of crystals, you grew into a shell.
I think you could love, or kill, but you hide it all so well.
Red and blue lights like a prayer ending, an exit night gave you.
You are calling ‘catch me’- will they find you or will they save you?
Aren’t you going to live forever? Aren’t you named after a hero?
Aren’t you a modern Joan of Arc, a Titan, Michelangelo?
Swerving into traffic, smiling more with every turn.
Tell me you are racing for someone, not imagining how to burn.
I want to ask what happened to you, but I’m not strong enough to face
what I can’t predict to hear, or to see you fall from grace.
I’ll tell you that I love you, to remind you that it’s there
yet I wonder if it’s love itself that put hatred in your stare.
Don’t tell me with such pride that you never stick around
and how he loved you more, and it razed her to the ground.
I know that girl, I am that girl, and you’ll move on and forget her.
She’ll hear the echoes forever- I’m like you, but I do it better.

Mistflowers, mile-a-minute, minionette vines and mugwort

There’s nothing wrong with mistflower or mile-a-minute
or minionette vine or mugwort, she didn’t think,
but she knew something was wrong when she began
to blossom into hysteria. A garden overgrown,
bones of a home she’d outgrown, and she could have,
she should have, known- the careless ghosts, the
unbreakable chair, the absence of frantic arcs, swallowed
by morning and never magic. She knew one thing certain,
but it was like the weeds that she didn’t mind so much
taking over her garden, tying knots she’d never untangle-
or she could spend a summer trying, and still, the mugwort
and mignonette vine, would keep growing, mile-a-minute,
then she’d be trapped with night-time regrets hiding
between the folds of her pillows, shaped just like the roses
she could have spent the summer watching, open, close.
What she had known, she kept hidden in the garden
that grew bone-deep behind her eyes, the place in the brain
where dreams are manufactured in that little cabinet
that looks like a seahorse. She knew that she could have,
should have, been there, when she felt the promise of
something magic, a feeling she didn’t realise one day
she’d be unable to recall, and with the feeling went the promise.
She had dreams of traffic accidents, she saw houses rotting
from the inside out, and everything she watched at night
was a spectacle, clearer cut and more colourful than waking.
It made her wonder whether she existed mostly in sleep.
That was a thought she could live with. Because then perhaps
the promise wasn’t real, or if it was, her reality was apart,
and his, perhaps, always had been. Still, even if that were true,
she heard a voice in her dream the night that she heard
about the suicide of her neighbour. It was her own voice,
she thought, but from another place- it was a voice that knew
and was not afraid to know, or to tell her. You could have,
you should have, let him see you, before you gave up on magic.

Maybe you know

Maybe you know the feeling- maybe it's with a boy
or not a boy. You're alone and then something
roars past and suddenly you can't get out of here,
and the roof is burning, or the floor is opening
and you can't get out of here. You are crying
over that mistake that didn't feel hideous until
you were already burned. The one where you
didn't turn away fast enough. The radio is on
somewhere and nobody is listening, and in your head,
a bicycle gets stolen from behind someone's shed,
and it's halloween, and he's kissing you in the dark,
and dragging you to that lake, back home, and now
you are laughing, trying to understand, and trying
to figure out why you thought you could understand,
and this is stupid, this is so so stupid, and it's
the roman empire, and the northern lights, and
and it's the ship that finally made it across
the widest of oceans, and it's so far beyond you.

Untitled.

Waiting for long hours, a promised paradise
with aching feet put
to soft-pillow sand,
serenity seems far out of reach.

Now we sit at home across from the fireplace,
not speaking,
remembering-

we went to the sea and expected
what was never really there.

Clear water, gentle sun,
hands entwined and worries gone.
While ocean spray cleansed
or at least, made us forget-

but dead things get buried on the shore
cracked, imperfect shells,
a fish, gasping,
blood rusting the water.

I cry on the way home.
You cry on the way home
I cry before I go to bed.
I cry and I watch you sleep.

Years ago this would not have been so hard.
We would have smiled just as
our mother had wanted.

I would’ve watched the fireworks, you know.

In a dream I returned to an island once called home
I danced, I swam, I prayed to
a god in which I don't believe
and an uncovered history was poised over me.

I am awake and I cannot hear the ocean.
I cannot sense your eyes anymore,
as you promised, watching me from
the terrace, or that happiness
I meant in everything I have said.
Please don't tell me that I made it up
all inside my head.

this is existing

a girl wakes up and finds
she has been dislocated, there is
something in her place,
something shivering.

her lungs become bellows, breaths
become gasping, her mind
creaking and swelling like
an old house flooded with water.

she spends her days with
an opening in her chest,
a door wrenched from hinges.

it is easy to forget herself, and she
does. a goldfish memory. a sight
of the moon, a balloon drifting
full in the sky. she dreams
that it gets caught in her throat

some days, she does not wake up at all.
a door without hinges to swing open
is not really a door
anymore.

the female voice

Be Good or Be Gone (into a time machine)

This is a single simple moment that brought me much happiness

I have been needing happiness lately. It's been impossible to shake the weight of the shadow on my back, a constant reminder that I am, too, a shadow- without worth, without use- but also there is the frustration that is carried alongside that melancholy. The words that are mine, not that of my malicious bedfellows. You don't know me. You do not know me. In the company of those who do know me, there is no shadow. I am someone worth something. There is something worthwhile here.

Leonard Cohen Tribute

I didn't listen to a vast quantity of Leonard Cohen songs while he was alive, nor have I listened to that nany more since I heard the news of his passing, but I have for a few years owned a book of his written word- poems and songs written as poems- that was a gift from my stepbrother one Christmas (accompanied by two other books of poetry- I remember being incredibly happy with such an amazing and well-suited present). But the other night, with James and his younger brother Tristan, both of whom are quite devoted fans of Leonard Cohen, I recorded his 'Hallelujah' and here it is.

Lyrics

Meditations in the Longest Morning

If I could only stay unseen as if I were a ceiling. My shell is broken now, like gutters eroded by acid rainwater. Burning a moon on a bed-sheet, heaven is sharp with flickering stars.
It is the same patterns keeping a momentum, pumped in afraid and snow-thirsty. We have been doing this mirage or magpie store or measures upon measures or medicine for a while now, it has become blunt-toothed, spurious, darker. I hear bells, and attacks and frays. I have tried make-believe, telling arguably horrible lies. I can spare static and its landmine explosions, though they provide amputation of the most trouble. There, the closed window. Here, the wind. Transparent, haphazardly tenuous.
I am not right. No. I am a pile of bridges, dislocated a few inches too far away to touch. I do not think I want to feel connected, not to this world if it makes me shudder like this without any warning. When it won’t even show me it’s face, that monster. I don’t want to be stitched into the armour and chain-mail and bones. I have the only one I need here, his eyes fold around my unfounded sunbeams.
The engines get enough nowhere as it is and even they continue to poison. Do they know what they're flitting ? I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shoulder and my unformed radios. I'll be back, I'll lose, gap-toothed, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any strawberries. I distance on the screen and the stairwell turns.

T.S. Eliot Mirrored initially

A poem intentionally written to mirror T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock', but it didn't precisely achieve what I'd hoped, yet something else appeared:

We'll stay at home, together but alone
but for the mornings that crumple on the floor,
like waste paper printing headlines on the ceiling.
We'll stay behind the door, afraid to wander
in uncertainty, parallel to busy roads,
the voiceless excursions,
the plans for long soporific days in expensive homes
and fresh-aired kitchens filled with frying pans.
Without direction, the answers all lie behind.
Ask me the question; I'll try and make up my mind.

Elsewhere the city men all crowd together,
either not talking or talking about the weather.

The clarity in eyes that bless the walls,
The understanding in a dull gaze on the walls,
sprawling time packed up into a box or a fist,
hurrying on tiptoes everywhere the sunlight falls,
tripped up in the garden, an inevitable descent,
and oblivious to the clock-face, the crimson crepuscule,
disappeared again into the rushes. No one knows where it went.

But it doesn't matter what's been done.
The eyes, still and still clear, don't recognise time passed,
don't realise what they may have missed.
It will end in the same place that it had begun,
nerves tight around the second try as tight as the last,
no space for thoughts of new starts or possible debris,
not one thought for broken hearts, for the people we cannot be.
We'll share this absent-mindedness, between
the clutter of conviction and certainty,
and practicality and potentiality,
and other matters on which we can agree

Elsewhere the city men, all crowded together,
are not talking, or talking about the weather.

And if we are going to fall apart, then we will do.
Our facades will fracture, our fallen faces,
our lost grip on graces, our black and our blue, our lost places
in the queue. We create words for the fears we cannot name.
And although our landscape erodes with the years,
the cage is the same. The scenery is new,
but what we call history will happen again,
so how can there be anyone but ourselves to blame?
Break and build, create and burn,
the pride follows the fall when pride has taken its turn.

What's in a gaze?

But when they spoke, their eyes couldn’t come together.
You never know who is looking at you in the dark.

For how long can I continue to watch the tips of my shoes,
and the floor beneath them, and worry wordlessly about home?

It’s all peachy, really, it’s Video Killed the Radio Star.
Then again, it’s an unlit candle, an unmarked calendar,
or Ginsberg burning dollar bills in a bin, grinning behind
a grisly beard, or a man you only know vaguely from some talk
of a reality TV show becoming America’s next President.

People are incapable of concealing their latent resentments
When they are looking at something else, but at you?
What’s in a gaze anyway? What are you looking at, for whom?

If there was somebody, they have left already. Prior appointments
available only to high flyers, PowerPoint presenters, success stories.
Not available to you. You who are so aware that in a single minute
everything could be different. You who says goodbye but
never knowing how to leave. These moments are split, a smile
Splitting open a face that once scared you. See? See how different it is?

It’s different to be seen by different people, but are you ever seen?
If you are, you really shouldn’t be. Not on any road, in any doorway,
at any bus stop. But you have to get there somehow.

There are good people everywhere, doing terrible things,
and if I’m not going to be one of the good people, I don’t mind so much
being a terrible thing. If it means I’ll be looked for, used,
needed for whatever, even if I know that needs are fulfilled
and the things you think you need are usually what you want, actually,
or what you want to need. But probably the last thing you really need.

You really need to get that appointment. It isn’t enough
to put out the fires. Damage control- how sad, if it’s what you do best.
What you really do best is what other people tell you that you do best.

It doesn’t alter the experience, even one moment’s fragment of it,
if you know from the start how it’s going to end.

The thing that never happened

They never spoke about it but it happened, and thoughts
of what happened pushed into the soil only grew heavier and dirtier
when they pretended to strip the past of its indelible importance
and pretended that their early nights were the product
of productive days and not prescriptions, but they never had dreams
and they never took flight and they never felt the rush of wind
on their faces and their faces did not even feel theirs.
They stilled in their silence until silence sounded like a soundtrack.
If they had thought about it, they might have seen the faintest promise
of closure, enough to try for, enough to cry for. Cold and concrete
and the cure perhaps as painful as the poison itself but to come to a close
nonetheless. Instead they chose to tell themselves no closure was needed
for no wounds had been left open for nothing had wounded them,
and saw this as stoicism, as strength but it was strength mistaken,
in actuality it was slavery, and the bad guys got away,
and the robbers got rich, and what went around never would come back around
with some comeuppance. Their paths redirected, their plans and aspirations
and passions scribbled beneath a blanket of white noise they thought
was safety. They never again would take off their shoes to dance
or light candles in the summer or make someone's day by offering a smile
or offer anything much at all. Why would they, when they got nothing back?
A tombstone in every doorway, a bitterness in every bite,
a listlessness in every kiss and in that listless life, one big lie-
I am whole, I can be what I want to be because this never happened to me.
They throw their heads back and then they laugh. They watch Forrest Gump
with dry faces. They sometimes have nightmares like those of children,
of crocodiles and claws under the bed. When they wake, that means it's a new day
and that means nothing now. Tell me you know I exist, says the smallest voice,
a whisper, an echo, from somewhere buried so immeasurably deep under stones,
a voice that had been stoned to death. Tell me you'll save me, that
you'll pull me out of here, that you will give me a chance to survive,
I'm all bloodied up and broken but because of that I'm stronger now.
I know the meaning of strong, and I know that it all means something.
If they ever catch a breath of that small voice, they turn up the radio,
take another pill and swallow, change the channel to a game show,
check their phones and when the curtains are drawn, throw more stones.