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.

?

I got a Valentine's Day in the post

a letter from the one I loved the most

but the words of love that this day has planned

were replaced with symbols. I couldn't understand

and the card fell from my hands to the floor

because I don't know what love is anymore.

I don't know what love feels like anymore. In the name of love I've been intimidated and confined, I've cried and begged, and all in the name of love gave it all because I thought this was it. That I wouldn't need it anymore, because someone loved me. Meanwhile, my mother and I argue on the phone and when we hang up she must love me a little less. Meanwhile, a neighbour is falling in love with me in a very strange display of actions and words. And the one I loved somehow as time elapsed spoke to me things that distorted love. The comfort of it was twisted out of shape, the dislocation of all its  component parts that I went out of my way to find again were scattered.


Sockets and bones and brain unhinged
just too short a distance away to unlock by
music box mouth, tip jar mouth,
ashtray mouth, spilled milk mouth.

VII-IX

VII. Skies stretch out to the bluest places you've ever seen if you are prepared to stay up all night and watch. Watch out, what's coming? There are endless insurmountable places that make a jigsaw puzzle out of the edges of what you think you know is coming, and the natural reaction is to prepare for the circumstances that seem to be inevitable, but the sand beneath the car tyres has become so soft, almost like flour, and you are pushing forward on puffs of air. You sneeze when the flowers open out their petals for bumblebees to make visits. It's much more scheduled than you'd imagine. These bees are probably better planners than human beings be.

VIII. In the road the space for a person is quickly accounted for. The person who felt their feet on the road for the last time on earth will not disrupt the data input. No transformations needed for this particular anomalie.

IX. People disappear and reappear and it might be personal and it might not be. That's what the road so far has taught me. You get from it what you put whole-heartedly into it. You listen so you learn. You help so you are held. The sky is bashful. I must stay here quietly for a while/

A pagan poem for a miracle man / a violent nature

You were high as the hill you climbed in the night
up to the dog that's a tree, all bark. The birds bite-
there's a murder of crows- don't stop to stare
Take and make bows from those that billow in my hair.
Do you know the question marks that follow all you say
can be bent into arrows? You fire away.
You never meant to be kind but your eyes shot stars
out into the skies. We both are shooting blind,
The answers we find were never ours.
There's been a murder of crows- feather as blade.
We put away the arrows for I was afraid
I can't say for sure whether birds died in the dark
but the pure Green Man's song was in the dog tree's bark.
As the trees protect you, Green Man folds in your arm
The birds respect you. They sing, 'do no harm'.

magnetic

Taking Time

Tumbling words of children became conversations
more slowly than we became two people to see as one.

The cheetah can run up to 70 miles an hour,
but we promised that time wouldn’t have a say in this.

We were inspired by the lack of syllables it took us
to understand the flawed or stormy attempts to explain-

my failings, the big empties, more and more obvious
that there can be conjured a mirage of seduction.

 There isn’t room anymore for interrogation,
time doesn’t get a say in this.

But the scrambling words of a child are clearer than my second sight,
and even the cheetah must slow down to breathe.

We pride ourselves in the hurry but I need time.
I didn't get a say in why.
There's nothing anyone can say but I.

Haikus

I love Baby Green.
Petits pois, petits fois, gras?
Non, don't stuff the ducks.

Major attraction
Mediocre and at sea.
My colonel sweetheart.

Nice to me, biscuits
and tea and jam and cake
sugar-coated sips..

So many emails.
There's an army of women
in chains, male ordered

There's a wedding soon
Peggy Sue getting married
holly in her hair

Library of peace
A tedious quiet place
where nothing happens.

The beach map from hell
Treasure buried with lost souls,
bad souls, flaming sand.

Lean on me when you're not strong

I can’t remember the last time I had faith enough
to lean on something without having misjudged, or misunderstood.
I can’t remember  a time I was not the cause of the walls coming down,
railings shattering and shoulders breaking.

Am I one in a long sequence of actions and reactions?
The event of a fall and the consequential fall of something else.
Cause and effect. Action and reaction.
Am I one link in a chain reaction,
a chain linked only by being broken?

Hmmmmm

When you consider someone as trustworthy does it mean they are worthy of your trust
or are you commenting on the extent to which you can trust them and what it's worth?

I made this and stuck it in the main hallway of the building where I live. Next time I saw it a couple of tears had been made.

I-VI

I. You forget your childhood with its bright yellow cassette player, dressed up as a Disney princess. You forget what your nightmares used to be back then, the smell of your school uniform, how long it took to drive to Cornwall at night-time. The quiet of your colouring pens, trying to draw inside the lines.

II. You forget what it was you once said you felt passionate about. Beneath your skin, under your hair, layers of your mind are being peeled away, You are breathless, trying to be who you are by saying you are and trying to be someone other than who you are. You never forget the numbers that tilt you into pride or despair each morning. Spend too much attention on the bones that appear when your skin shrinks back into them.

III. Life has been stretched out in front of you and it's a fresh paved road. Dizzying, the smell of so many asphalt miles, the thought of all those that you can't allow to be empty miles. The road stretches out in front of you.

IV. There is a girl with a wilting name who carries pink half moons in her palms, birdlike and blue. You tried at first, but you could not cry for her while your fingers were a gun down her throat. Not a girl with eyes used to be open clearly, curious blinks, now turned into confusion and bitterness and so, so much pain. You don't know her pain, only yours, and hers is yours as well. She never asked for this. She never asked to wear so many costumes.

V. You are in a car and the road is nothing like it used to be. Your pedal is too close to the floor. The girl whose name was wilting has no name anymore. She is shrinking out of sight, reflected in your rear-view mirror. A month ago, perhaps, she would have tried to run after you, begging you, do not leave yourself behind. Now, those eyes were violent and hateful and she was defiant. Thumb stuck out, disappearing into the distance. You forget her but she will be back because she took all the vengeance you had in the backseat away with her.

VI. The road stretches out ahead of you.

gig 2

I'm about to head off to perform my second gig.
I hope I'm this relaxed, but I'm so anxious my heart is humming loud enough to accompany a vocal solo. Update later

'

teaching domestic studies in the 21st century: a must-have list

curtains so heavy
they black it all out
           (I will cut my own stars in them
            but it was all dark, so 
            I made myself bleed)

a spine
or an ancient tree
            (I will climb it above the too-loud world
            and make-believe I'll never grow up)

flower petal teacups
that are infinite, evergreen
               (you will bring them out
              for Christmas and the first days
              of spring, leave lip marks on them)

a quiet lion living in a world
that has far too much pride
              (predatory protection, this city
               is a roaring desert)

 a jar filled with riddles, mysteries,
other words for secrets
           (later you will smash it against 
            the rock that conquers fear-
                Love)

an updated map of our solar system
and a model of Pluto and its moons, in detail
              (sometimes I'm small and seem
               far away but I still have my own gravity
                if even a handful, so don't let go)

Shortened version of Psychosis article

Voice 1: Why? How do I get rid of you?
Voice 2: To get rid of us you have to get rid of yourself.
Voice 3: If anyone knew what was going on in your head…
Voice 4: Look who’s really crazy now?
Voice 5: Help me.

My mother said in an email, ‘You’re right. Most people don’t know what happened to you with Ella’s death.’ I haven’t cried such tears of relief, ever. After the worst of it was over, I did not know enough to cry tears of relief because I was so busy gathering scraps of my sanity back. That sounds like a cliche or a silly metaphor but I will begin my explanation of what really did happen that left me gathering sanity scraps. This silly image is annoyingly as accurate as language gets to depict how I felt after the initial destructive event- the scattering agent. It was my mind, once intact, now unrecognisable and in pieces and it wouldn't work cohesively unless I found new ways to assemble the pieces and assemble myself all over again. In doing so, I reassembled an entire person out of the wreckage of someone who, though supposedly sane before, is also unrecognisable when I look back on her.

For a while, I experienced what my doctors explained was a ‘transient episode of psychosis as response to extreme emotional stress’. I had no sense of self as soon as it began, because prior to the episode I had put so much emphasis on the importance of my mind. ‘It’s my most treasured possession’ I would say, and in the most horrific hours I would be taunted by my own cackles at just how funny it was, how I’d practically asked for it because that treasured mind of mine was now gone.

Voice 1: I don’t want my body.
Voice 2: I want my mind.
Voice 3: Your mind is a long way-away-away-away-away…..

Doctors had recently diagnosed me with Borderline Personality Disorder and I had been reluctant to fully accept this diagnostic label until they explained that transient psychosis is actually symptomatic of BPD. I will never be able to credit my therapists and doctors enough for their endless reassurance that I had not lost my mind, that it would come back, and that there was an end to what was happening.

The psychosis was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s also probably the thing (no, definitely) I’m most proud of going through. No one will ever give me a cheer or a pat on the back or congratulate me for battling a war with my own shadow and winning. I have to be proud of what I’ve done totally on my own, and I thank my fucked up little patched-together brain for teaching me through utterly going to pieces and only being reassembled to function with endless painstaking almost excruciating (no, excruciating) effort and time and working against horrible forces that only existed inside of me- invisible enemies only I could see because they were a part of me and still are- that sometimes the greatest things you’ll do aren’t about being evaluated by other people. I’ve learnt there are some victories you can enjoy even if nobody will cheer for you and there are some accomplishments that only you will be able to appreciate, and that is not a bad thing.

Now I can weirdly, proudly, semi-cryptically, and strangely say without the least bit of genuine profundity that I fought the demons and voices my own split evil brain created for me after throwing me into a Kafkaesque horror carnival parody movie-like hell, and I beat them by outwitting them
(You can only beat your own mind with your own mind) and it’s the best thing I’ve ever accomplished. The least enjoyable.

I heard mostly my own voice, but fragmented into many different Daisys. It began with family’s voices (mocking, mostly, by my sister and her boyfriend, my cousin, my grandma, aunt, other cousins, and mother).and graduated into my brain going off on wild loops, thoughts as if heard from outside that I never put there and rhapsodising poems without my consent, speaking in dialects, letting me in on the voices of social realisms I didn’t even know I was aware of. This content of the voices shows that my unconsious mind, beneath the level of awareness, was aware of and considering things I'd never consciously thought about. My unconscious mind was split from me, it was angry, it got powerful the more scared I became, and it hated me. It had it in for me and wanted me to die. It told me I had to end my life if I wanted the voices to go away. They told me I could save my cousin through suicide. When you’re sad, you can get very superstitious.

As it worsened and my life was terrorised by the voices, I would see things and hear things and the world became inescapably violent and unpredictable until it was impossible to maintain a façade of sanity. I remember covering my ears on a train platform and crouching down yelling because I heard all the trains cackling at me,

My evil unconscious mind, somewhat ingenious despite being Machiavellian- would jump into speakers and amplifiers on tube and in supermarkets and broadcast across whole shop/train carriage with my own voice saying, “Look what I can do.”

Of course, the doctors were right. It did end, when I began to listen. The least dreadful voice(s) were the last to go, and the ones that stayed latest at night, and the quietest. They were small voices asking ‘why?’ and saying ‘help me’. I heard ‘listen to me’. It wasn't until I started listening to them that I began getting over them. I see them now as being the angry fragmented voices of the angry fragmented person I had stamped all over and dressed up in different identities and denied, denied, denied. The person I really was got so sick of being mistreated- I wasn't even drinking water or sleeping, that’s the extent to which I was denying and neglecting myself basic care without even thinking- that she got a voice, then she got more voices, then she got louder, then she went on a power trip to punish me for what a mess I’d made of whatever it was I organically was meant to be, by pretending to be a whole load of other things and never letting myself be happy and making people around me sad too.

But I’m so lucky I never quite believed the voices totally. If I had I wouldn’t be here to talk about it. I knew from the start, perhaps because the nature of the voices and my unconscious mind with all the tricks it played on me was purely and exclusively Machiavellian, that they weren’t words I could believe or trust, if I wanted to get out of it alive (no hyperbole), and if I wanted a future. It’s very hard to tell yourself not to trust the things you find inside your own head. Usually you assume your thoughts are your own and therefore true to you. I had to continuously believe that my mind was not to my own- the things I heard were not my thoughts. Often they were the things, I discovered, that I was afraid of thinking or feeling, or afraid that other people thought I felt or thought, or the things that I absolutely did not believe or think or feel.

The voices made me conscious of what I was doing, what I was afraid of really, what I was becoming, what I was losing, what I was missing out on that I could have but was so busy being wasteful and harmful and in denial that I couldn’t even see it was being wasted. There is nothing I've experienced more terrifying than hearing a voice in your head you know did not come from the outside world but sounds like it did, but actually shocks you because it’s not your own thought.Not an inner voice or imagined. A shocking, surprising, horrible thought in spoken word- a voice probably recognised- that you did not put there yourself and you do not want to be there.

I won’t write anymore about this now but listen to this recording
and it will give you a short insight into how some of it sounds. It’s like this and it doesn’t stop.

Altogether, it has now. I'm better for it.

The voices were there for a reason, and even though my unconscious mind went above and beyond to show me how much it hated me, I hope I’ve gained some of its respect back, at least enough to start talking in entirely the first person and continue on in my life as a whole person rather than the scraps of someone I don’t know and don’t care about enough to look after in the most basic way. Since the psychosis, I’ve been reluctantly able to accept that I am deserving (of water etc.) and sometimes need to be listened to, because there’s nothing to be that is ever going to work if its fiction and not fact. The scraps I’ve collected are structured day-to-day, moment-to-moment, and it can be ugly. They are demanding little bitches, those voices. Still, whether they meant it all along or I somehow managed to salvage the tiny speck of good leftover from the hellish experience, those voices gave me insights and taught me lessons that have been invaluable, and though they destroyed me for a while what they destroyed was not a real self, just a costume, or many costumes, and in retrospect I see that they saved me, the real one, the invisible self disappearing under so many costumes I lost any recognition of who I really was. I guess I have to thank the worst parts of my mind for helping me rescue what can now become the best parts.

jumbled

Jumbled jam jars lined up on the windowsill,
which seeds are your own? You planted them yourself
in a bed of cotton wool and watch the days go by
while roots grow further and stretch until they stop,
when they have found their place.
I never set my roots down in school or at home,
grew them to the toe-ends of black patent
pumps, propelled from then into a well-made madness.
They let me go stale and I have no roots to go back to.
The root of all whatever-
Gold star blisters, stickers, bird names
assigned to school houses in yellow-blue-green-red.
Between the houses the walls went up- 1, 2, 3....
go- without direction, without waiting,
the soles of both my feet will not wait for me
to find joy in the older years to come.
Clean out of the nesting place, I go cuckoo,
other thoughts audible to me, and I want to go back.
Run at the speed of light then faster
so you can make me a time machine. I'll go back
and pick up all the scattered sticks, brush away
weeds, budding with hooks, clinging on
to follow you from nettle gardens.
Dead bees litter the lawn. I see them when
the ascent becomes illuminated.
The belief that only that which can be observed
and measured can be known- positivists agree.
I would be one of them if I didn't feel excited
about the other things that do exist and we can't see
so just don't know about yet. Things yet to conceive of:
I am cutting clean through whatever roots I managed
and I'm another uprooted Daisy.

There are no signposts, just dreams
and those I can follow. I can almost remember
the song that I can almost hear them singing.
Imaginary trumpets, blues bars,
up the sleeve trump cards for safekeeping.
Summer has come and I'm old now,
and in retrospect, I pay myself more respect.
.
Normality is something that is transient

and arbitrary.
Melancholy and happiness too,
but I'm happy, and it's arbitrariness doesn't make a difference.