There are frozen birds in the garden,
trains stranded in the downpour,
flowers missing from the bouquet,
boots left standing by the door.
There are papers soaked on the front step,
well wishes clinging to the trees,
a sort of pleading in every word 'no'
and consent absent in every 'please'.
Friday, 5 May 2017
There's a lady in the curtains.
I told my mother what I had seen. Today I don't remember; it could be true, but it was a strange time, and times got stranger after my father was arrested and the house started to seep with foul smells from heavy-papered walls and every telephone receiver had tears and every letter had teeth. But Maria said she had seen something or someone too, a dead thing, or what wasn't really there. And one night my mother woke up to me sitting on the end of her bed.
Come here, she told me, but then I was gone.
I told my mother what I had seen. Today I don't remember; it could be true, but it was a strange time, and times got stranger after my father was arrested and the house started to seep with foul smells from heavy-papered walls and every telephone receiver had tears and every letter had teeth. But Maria said she had seen something or someone too, a dead thing, or what wasn't really there. And one night my mother woke up to me sitting on the end of her bed.
Come here, she told me, but then I was gone.
Nobody knows what they are for
The shopping centres turned into greenhouses, trapping light with façades of glass proving conducive to superficial tropical weather, sulking palm trees, even stars that looked grungy, feelings of self-deprecation that lingered like perfume after the weater has left the room, haunting the dressing tables, mirrors with their gilded corners and chipped wallpaper to rest on, the clothing racks. Cars converted to sofas. Nobody even knows what they are for, not when they realised being alone- being away from both people and plants- was a plague and these machines had since become useful only for suffocation or suicide. Metal went soft, as though it could feel the air changing. Finally it felt safe enough to put its guard down. Trees intertwined round traffic lights of all things, putting them to sleep. Trains whistled cradle songs through woodlands, this one sound for miles and miles unless you took into account the muted voices of small children trying to stroke big-eyed bambi or maybe a wolf, their feet heavy, dragging behind the rest in the hunt, itchy cloths around their necks that made them uniform, made them angry, some so angry they tore the legs off spiders. In the grander scheme of things, there had been two millennia and now, as though they have been admonished by someone or something not observable, not measurable, not even will a name to call, in rage or mockery, and without that, there was no way to make the scolding stop stinging. They have now become quiet.
Now it's worth the mess. What a puzzle.
Friday, 28 April 2017
And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others.
Eyes slipped past sleep. I have an ache in my gut. Not for anyone else but me, pointing a playful finger. It's derisive, clean and I don't like this thing, holding onto me. I don't like this place. The opinions of the others are law, and law isn't to be broken, but my thoughts and my gut don't work like that. They look down when others are looking up. They stargaze when other's avert their eyes to their shoes. Scuffling feet, darting eyes, someone told me my gaze moves like a ping-pong ball. Brings me back to those days in my childhood when I had to wear a patch over one of my spectacle lenses to correct my lazy eye. I would wear a patch, or any kind of silly accessory- a fez, a sombrero, clogs, Malvolio's yellow ribbons to the knees- anything to correct the scattering that scatters my gaze and misaligns my aspirations, intentions, points of view, too far out of the scope that's correct, too far a deviation from the standard. My heart rattles like a tin cup. My lungs are littered. When I do the things I'm meant to do, and by that I mean, what others do as if second nature, I feel bewildered. Sometimes I feel I've done a bad thing. The lights are going out, the sun sets in the east, the trees cry when the leaves fall and none of them are the beautiful bright colour that excites me in autumn. The last thing I want is the sunset lifted, the conversation extinguished, the eyes rolled behind turned backs, the eyelashes fluttering in front of my face in the pattern of some morse code I never learnt. The same code that the starlight spells out. The same one that is tapped out by cutlery at my family's dinner table. And when the digits on the clock read 4.00 and it's not the afternoon, the birds are starting to chatter, and I'm too afraid of my thoughts to stay alone with them in the dark and my pillow. A pillow is no desirable bedfellow. It brings no comfort. It just leaves prints on my cheek, still feels heavy with tears it caught, it's dented from the place I have hidden my face. Apprehension is not sudden anymore. Fight or flight is not a fight or a flight.
I have a crooked back, a crooked personality. I can't nod slowly, my head is buoyant in a sea of self-doubt, and God knows where my brains are. That worries me too because where is God in all this? Wings whistling over the skylines and the river, the weary water. Is there such a thing as understanding beyond thought? Where do these questions come from? They are just fooling with me, but violently, and when I embrace them I rattle like a train track, a can of spray paint. When will I carry my height, when will I measure up to my weight? When will I not be an embarrassment? Step one, find a way to stop quivering. The occasional and inexplicable seizures concern me, but not as much as they possibly should. I should be afraid that my neurons and synapses are revolting against me, twisted up and rearranging of their own accord. Maybe I don't think of that because, of all my component parts, my brain has been the most privileged. Given the best treatment. Hasn't it? Well, it did stop and speak to me for that stretch of horrific months. The most malevolent voices that sounded like me but omniscient, omnipotent, and mocking, echoing. The voices of my family that came from nowhere, always mocking. Wasn't that my brain rebelling too? Let's not think about the convulsions. Let's just try to stop the quivering. Then perhaps my heart will follow, put an end to its kicking. Then will my shoulders drop, will the frenetic pace of my life slow down to that of a conveyor belt, or a postman's trolley? Patience is a virtue I never learnt, not through anyone's fault but my inability to pick up certain things, like hitting a tennis ball, like holding back tears, like living without concerns I should not have had until I'd grown into the right age to be troubled by them. But it's only impatience with myself that I am talking about. With others, the standards are very different. Multiplied, not double as far as standards go. I don't listen much to myself, in part because I don't like what my mind tells me and in part because I seem to have the tendency to go against any well-directed intuitions. But I listen to others. I cannot even in this prose put into words the value I believe lies in the act of listening. Which, of course, is no act. It's what makes my world turn, really. It gives meaning. The minds of others. Perhaps that is what led me down the path of psychology in both my academic and personal life, in terms of what I study and read, and the company I keep, and the way things work outside of any learning arena.
Mind on repeat
I find a retreat
to no place that's neat
but can make it complete.
Wednesday, 26 April 2017
Chicago
I distintly remember hearing this on a car journey when my sister was playing with a beanie baby shaped as a frog. I think this cover is quite lovely. I hope you enjoy it.
Thursday, 20 April 2017
This poem is a magic roundabout without the magic
Rapidly the crows started circling under clouds,
the winter dropped it’s hemlines,
wind chimes started hanging bones and teeth
where feathers were now too fickle.
I whisper to you from a distance
who whispers to me from just below.
You went missing from my dreams.
I couldn’t recognise their forms, their frenetic
and frenzy, their motion and melancholy,
I drew the world in shades of cry, you cut me out
and walked away. The black and white figures
floating like paper planes or glued on snowflakes,
origami flowers, ornamental place settings.
You were always somehow both the paving stones
beneath my shoes and the endlessness of sky
rolled above my head, a canopy sprinkled with stars
blown from your knuckles like snow.
This is not a morning song because the sun isn’t going to rise
on this land anymore, it’s seen enough of daylight
and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This is called growing up. This is called a learning curve.
A wake up call. A character building exercise
that requires some demolition before you begin.
No one can tell you if the darkness has come to stay
or if there is an exit route. Is there anybody there,
treading the waves in this night-time sea.
I hear your voice, I hear the stars coughing
quietly at the back of heaven, I hear the lampshades sigh,
the picture frames, the paperweights, the rain gutters.
Were you up there with the birds, like you hoped you
someday might be, although I hope this doesn’t mean
that you are dead. There’s a finality to being dead,
everyone just accepting the empty space that holds
your shape, the vacuum you once breathed in,
trying to move on and trying to forget the presence
of that loss, trying to forget it ever happened
or you ever happened- that you never died,
so never lived. Nothing else quite has that same
brutal symmetry that is maddeningly unequal
on one side. Dark and light. You can’t have one without
the other, yet light is filled with shadows,
and war and peace. War is a permanent state of
losing when you are supposed to be winning but
with so much losing all the time, you accept some
victory wherever you can, and then peace becomes
an arbitrary thing, a concept, a Utopia, a fairytale,
and war both real life and the stuff of fiction,
both their problem and on your doorstep.
It won’t be war or darkness that kills us.
It will be the forgetting of things, letting them
drift away and not being able to remember
them being with you still. Parts of yourself
start getting chiseled away, you are whittled
down to slimmer sets of variables, the situation
tightening around you, the doors closing, more
dead ends, more walled up corridors,
and this time, only one escape, no trap doors,
to loopholes. Hands you used to hold, you forget
who they ever belonged to. Words you used to
speak sounding now just like silence.
Wishes you used to make greying the glow
of wishing entirely until you are left with
just bones, an empty bottle, a melted candle
and a broken fountain. Those little games
you used to play with yourself, those superstitions
and fantasies, the make believe, the Peter Pan,
they become cumbersome and painfully false,
the skin they are in hardening to cold plastic.
You are already an overexposed and underexposed
and wrongly exposed photograph and you
haven’t even grown up that far yet, you still
have further the go, nobody to show you the way.
No wonder I got lost. And I have never been good
at orientation. So I found a place for my head
in the sand, and listened to the sound of the sea
in shells, the glimmer of fish, the sea monkeys
we released into the Wiltshire stream. People
want to fill the world with silly love songs
and goldfish and miniature castles. Four seconds,
flash and it’s gone, it’s a whole new world.
The sand got in my eyes, in that dust bowl of
papery scratchy anxiety, attrition against my skin,
dry and eating away at the edges of me,
until I start to collapse on myself. I should have
worked on making my skin thicker, or growing
a stronger backbone. I brace myself with wishbones
and wish that you were here, or I was anywhere
with a star to point me in one way and the moon
to change the tide, for planets to align and the poets
to smile on my fortune, write me a perfect sonnet.
Where are you now? With a dagger and a pack of
sandwiches and sardonic smile, flint stone eyes,
shadows on your heels. Where did the time go,
is it under my pillow, and if I slept right through it
how am I or was I ever supposed to know?
The clocks hold hands, the faces slip just slightly
out of position, the hammer on the nail one more time,
the forest fire that used to be contained in an ashtray?
I hear you, are you out there somewhere
swimming. Quiet now. Was it you I heard, or me?
the winter dropped it’s hemlines,
wind chimes started hanging bones and teeth
where feathers were now too fickle.
I whisper to you from a distance
who whispers to me from just below.
You went missing from my dreams.
I couldn’t recognise their forms, their frenetic
and frenzy, their motion and melancholy,
I drew the world in shades of cry, you cut me out
and walked away. The black and white figures
floating like paper planes or glued on snowflakes,
origami flowers, ornamental place settings.
You were always somehow both the paving stones
beneath my shoes and the endlessness of sky
rolled above my head, a canopy sprinkled with stars
blown from your knuckles like snow.
This is not a morning song because the sun isn’t going to rise
on this land anymore, it’s seen enough of daylight
and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This is called growing up. This is called a learning curve.
A wake up call. A character building exercise
that requires some demolition before you begin.
No one can tell you if the darkness has come to stay
or if there is an exit route. Is there anybody there,
treading the waves in this night-time sea.
I hear your voice, I hear the stars coughing
quietly at the back of heaven, I hear the lampshades sigh,
the picture frames, the paperweights, the rain gutters.
Were you up there with the birds, like you hoped you
someday might be, although I hope this doesn’t mean
that you are dead. There’s a finality to being dead,
everyone just accepting the empty space that holds
your shape, the vacuum you once breathed in,
trying to move on and trying to forget the presence
of that loss, trying to forget it ever happened
or you ever happened- that you never died,
so never lived. Nothing else quite has that same
brutal symmetry that is maddeningly unequal
on one side. Dark and light. You can’t have one without
the other, yet light is filled with shadows,
and war and peace. War is a permanent state of
losing when you are supposed to be winning but
with so much losing all the time, you accept some
victory wherever you can, and then peace becomes
an arbitrary thing, a concept, a Utopia, a fairytale,
and war both real life and the stuff of fiction,
both their problem and on your doorstep.
It won’t be war or darkness that kills us.
It will be the forgetting of things, letting them
drift away and not being able to remember
them being with you still. Parts of yourself
start getting chiseled away, you are whittled
down to slimmer sets of variables, the situation
tightening around you, the doors closing, more
dead ends, more walled up corridors,
and this time, only one escape, no trap doors,
to loopholes. Hands you used to hold, you forget
who they ever belonged to. Words you used to
speak sounding now just like silence.
Wishes you used to make greying the glow
of wishing entirely until you are left with
just bones, an empty bottle, a melted candle
and a broken fountain. Those little games
you used to play with yourself, those superstitions
and fantasies, the make believe, the Peter Pan,
they become cumbersome and painfully false,
the skin they are in hardening to cold plastic.
You are already an overexposed and underexposed
and wrongly exposed photograph and you
haven’t even grown up that far yet, you still
have further the go, nobody to show you the way.
No wonder I got lost. And I have never been good
at orientation. So I found a place for my head
in the sand, and listened to the sound of the sea
in shells, the glimmer of fish, the sea monkeys
we released into the Wiltshire stream. People
want to fill the world with silly love songs
and goldfish and miniature castles. Four seconds,
flash and it’s gone, it’s a whole new world.
The sand got in my eyes, in that dust bowl of
papery scratchy anxiety, attrition against my skin,
dry and eating away at the edges of me,
until I start to collapse on myself. I should have
worked on making my skin thicker, or growing
a stronger backbone. I brace myself with wishbones
and wish that you were here, or I was anywhere
with a star to point me in one way and the moon
to change the tide, for planets to align and the poets
to smile on my fortune, write me a perfect sonnet.
Where are you now? With a dagger and a pack of
sandwiches and sardonic smile, flint stone eyes,
shadows on your heels. Where did the time go,
is it under my pillow, and if I slept right through it
how am I or was I ever supposed to know?
The clocks hold hands, the faces slip just slightly
out of position, the hammer on the nail one more time,
the forest fire that used to be contained in an ashtray?
I hear you, are you out there somewhere
swimming. Quiet now. Was it you I heard, or me?
Monday, 27 March 2017
we are (insert metaphor here)
she smells like honeyed storms –
meaning: we are all a mess of light,
we are bitter and raw; a drunk train,
a daring locomotive, a dream ship;
we are also summers and bedsheets
and nectarines and rain, old maps,
deep with creases, but also brittle,
paper like moth wings, easily torn;
we are fast like wax, lazy like roses,
full of madness and malice, of motion
like clockwork; we keep those faces
and hands because we are not in time;
we are in-understandable –
meaning: we are all in a mess of infinite,
we are limitless; an acceleration,
an unwinding expansion, a runaway,
a struggle; we are all in a mess;
we are the holy that you will not find
in a temple or church or stained glass
or ancient passage; you will not see us
in any book, or on walls or at windows
or along skylines or across seascapes;
no, we will not be findable at all –
meaning: perhaps, just this; perhaps,
that is the way of the metaphor.
meaning: we are all a mess of light,
we are bitter and raw; a drunk train,
a daring locomotive, a dream ship;
we are also summers and bedsheets
and nectarines and rain, old maps,
deep with creases, but also brittle,
paper like moth wings, easily torn;
we are fast like wax, lazy like roses,
full of madness and malice, of motion
like clockwork; we keep those faces
and hands because we are not in time;
we are in-understandable –
meaning: we are all in a mess of infinite,
we are limitless; an acceleration,
an unwinding expansion, a runaway,
a struggle; we are all in a mess;
we are the holy that you will not find
in a temple or church or stained glass
or ancient passage; you will not see us
in any book, or on walls or at windows
or along skylines or across seascapes;
no, we will not be findable at all –
meaning: perhaps, just this; perhaps,
that is the way of the metaphor.
Sunday, 26 March 2017
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.
Thursday, 23 March 2017
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.
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.
Saturday, 18 March 2017
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.
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?
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?
Monday, 13 February 2017
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?
Thursday, 9 February 2017
Monday, 6 February 2017
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, 4 February 2017
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.
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.
Saturday, 21 January 2017
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.
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.
Friday, 20 January 2017
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