I'm back with Knees, Fists & Teeth, Bookcases & Bathrooms

Sorry for my enforced 'hiatus'- I hadn't renewed my domain name and it took me a very long time to figure out how to manage the whole 'DNS' business but it's done now.

A few photographs from the latest Horatio James gig.

Visiting a friend who is staying at the same place I did for a few weeks quite a while ago, during the period of my transient psychosis that I cannot define from start to finish or ever quite grasp the chronology of, but remember otherwise so clearly. He has to remain there for a lot longer than I did and it's not voluntary whereas I volunteered to be there for the time that I was, due to being unable to trust myself and realising that I was 'disappearing', amongst doctors referred to as 'dissociating' or 'fugue states', and while I was 'gone', wherever I was 'gone', I was a threat to myself- the deciding incident was 'reappearing' into the present having very badly cut into my wrists with a razor blade, blood soaking my bed, my flatmate having to hold me down and use his hands to stop the bleeding while my other called an ambulance, and having no memory of doing it at all- not knowing why, not knowing how it happened, and worst of all, coming back in a 'flashback' mentality, which was very disturbing, leaving me unable to recognise my flatmate and ending up screaming and crying and thinking some horror of the past was being re-lived. It was traumatic for everyone and so I was safer being watched, and it turned out that being under the care of psychiatrists who were not focusing on my food behaviours and my weight was the best thing that could have happened- it was not the first time someone had suggested BPD, but it was the first time it was written in my notes as a serious consideration, which turned into a diagnosis, which in turn actually improved my quality of life- it gave me the opportunity for the right treatment, it gave me an education about the maladaptive ways my brain had been working or not working for as long as I could remember but had never been able to understand, and it gave me the support and insight and guidance I needed to improve. Inherent in the diagnosis is the idea that one can never recover, or 'get well', but I think this just means I'll possibly have to work alongside these dysfunctional cognitions and symptomatic proclivities every day for the rest of my life being aware of them and managing them. The difference is between now and then is that I'm not suffering anymore.
Visiting my friend was a lot of fun. I got to walk back through Dartmouth Park again. Perhaps next time I'll see if I can revisit Highgate Cemetary.

Her New Currency

So I have conceptualised this new character, and this poem is from her perspective- it's purely fiction and nothing personal and another life and I don't usually write like that. Anyway, she's squatting after running away from home in a place alongside some No-Good-Guys but she starts to live that lifestyle, even if it should be a frightening path to take, because to her what she has run away from- the alternative to this scary road she's going down- is far worse.

Shelter I. Gutted Building. A Whole New Currency.

People sit cross-legged on hardwood floors, leaning on one another,
relying on the ground to rest their heads upon-
some look like they are sleeping. The spell is broken.
Others look as if they are in anticipation-
I know what they are waiting for and I still half hope for that too
sometimes, but it’s never again like the first time. The spell is broken.
Disappointing and irresistible, like so much that came before this.

Watching shadows bounce off the walls like the apparitions
of giddy children, watching the walls dissolve to let in the tide
of the blue streets and radio tides. New bodies washed up yesterday.
Maybe that’s why we are here, having to face what we thought
we were eternally free of. Being caught. Between one colour
and another, between a belt and a tap and a needle, between
the incisors of death. It’s just another windless evening.
Even the lighthouse that I occasionally think I see is in my head.
It’s safer in the wasteland. We sleep with the lights on.

I stroke his face, because it’s close. The partygoers’ ghosts
piling up in a sanguinary of star trails. We won’t be found
and that’s what I am really here for.

Here is the memory of mercury in retrograde,
of falling backwards and letting go but never shifting the clasp
on your elbow, pulling you back. Here the rooms are smeared
with red, crowded with developing photographs, not real people
or real faces. Instead, just their underexposed, wrongly-exposed
after-images. After the windchimes shatter, after the sky turns
into something molten and time becomes a revolving door.

I feel my thoughts dropping like pennies in a fountain,
a currency nobody uses anymore. Somewhere I think of doors,
and of an undreamt summer, but I can demolish that from here,
from the middle of nowhere, and if I can’t, I’ll run away again
for the last time into the breathless night. Remember,
things are known and not known and between are doors.

Dream Sequences

The Contents of Pandora's Box

Edie, I feel dizzy

Edie's feeling dizzy from the carousel.

Leant so far over the railings that she almost fell.

It's nice to hear her laughing 

without that screaming sound

that, even when she's silent,

seems to follow her around.

Edie, I feel dizzy, it's those pills I took.

The sun is such a colour, I find it hard to look

at something so beautiful, 

yet just unspeakable. 

So much that I need to say

is just unspeakable.

Edie becomes busy and changes face.

Becomes something else to take her own place.

She's running so very fast

to keep up this pace.

Becoming breathless but still

rushes with grace.

Edie I feel needy, can you just slow down.

I need somebody to put my arms around.

But she doesn't stop for me,

I didn't expect her to.

I have to stop, I think.

Someone needs to protect me too.

Edie now feels sleepy, and she's slipping away

heavy-lidded, limp, and there she will lay

I hope she wakes and thinks

I'm going to stop today

I'm never going to keep this up,

there is no way. 

We can find somewhere to sit together.

Sit and fold like wings, soft as feather.

Edie is more needy than her faces show.

I don't know much about her

but that much, I know. And that she likes

the ride on the carousel.

The way the world spins under a magic spell.

The way you can stay on and not feel well

but that's the best place to be because no one can tell.

We are unable to hear you

Going to and from somewhere not far,
I pass a couple of children on scooters
shouting, Ice Cream!
from across the street.

When I dare to raise my eyes to look out
instead of down at my shoes as I walk
I instantly see faces of strangers,
crying- Eyesore. I know they are right.

But nobody is selling what I want.
It does not seem producible.

It is not a house on a corner, the size and charm
of a dormitory, with window treatments.
It is not those shoes my sister likes with the red soles
or sunglasses my mother likes with the diamonds
or the endorphins or the caffeine or the career ladder.
I do not covet Ice Cream, the biggest or best thing,
and I don’t have romance for pipe dreams either.

That is someone's else’s dream,
unexceptional, formless, but probably fulfilling.
I hope I am never fulfilled.

In my hand there’s a digital map that orients me
in a roundabout. I am a breathing oscillating blue dot.
I can’t get anywhere from here.

Why do I not want Ice Cream or summer dresses?
Why do I not want to be out on the town, meeting new people?
Why do I not participate?

I watch people on television, traveling.
I am so scared.

I listen to Neil Armstrong radioing from the moon.

I scan the transcripts over and over of
Earhart circling Howland Island:
We are unable to hear you
to take a bearing.

Intermittent despair- what can you make from that?

I look up to see the sun caught in the tail end trail
of a jet. I wave:
Do you hear my signals.
Please acknowledge.

And then all my thoughts are frostwork and blue
with parachutes and windows on walls
and I am filled with clouds and I can’t see.

We cannot hear you.
We cannot see you.

Now I know I begin and end with images,
how far across this field can my voice spread out,
extend and reach in singing, in screaming?

Mumblingthoughts

August breathing down my neck // tap tap tap // nervous hands // firecracker vision // soft shallow breath // life is stop motion inside a cardboard box // knock knock knock on the front door is the cue to be still, hold it, pretend nobody is home, pray he doesn't come to the window // life in a fishbowl, tables got turned, and there was never going to be any pleasure to be taken in that because I let it go, someday long ago, and decided upon forgiveness and endless chances and accepting the risk that I'll be made a fool or get knocked about // that's what life does, it rattles you and it's all you can do to keep yourself together // but now I'm mumbling // don't make a fuss // speak up, nobody can hear you, say it again // what if I don't believe it this time around because words can just be the cement to fill empty spaces with no real meaning, no real language // there are no words in this language to communicate what I feel, how I think // thinking hurts, sometimes, it actually hurts // flowers withering in a vase, don't know where I got that vase // spine feels cracked and brittle like an old atlas // everyone is sleeping but you and me and words here flow efforlessly and they aren't light, they are heavy, and that means they matter // i'm so uneasy, i'm so undone, everywhere but here among my books and my mess // like Neely O'Hara, swallowing my sleep, time no longer works in a forward-moving line, it jumps back and leaps forward and turns over on itself and you weren't even asleep by then // the first few bars of Fur Elise on the keyboard // two more of us are gone and that sickness must have been right there growing inside him while he was making his speech at his daughter's wedding and I was watching and laughing and angry at my mother for being an impolite audience // just listen listen // you will learn so much more about the world when you are listening than when you are battling and clamouring, waiting your turn to be heard.

Voices II

Lorelei 

To keep him in my memory hurts. He locks himself in a room and how his loneliness and his fear rattles my brain like an electric current. He changes the matter around the concrete parts of my life because he wants a safe place, he wants a deeper blanket in a confined space and in such a space the only way to create distance is to be small, inconsolable.
Glowing and desperate, somewhere still inside me, come out where I can speak to you and tell you that I love you without blame. You dear disease, I will show you the big empty house we live in together and what has filled the spaces and the spaces of you that will never be filled.
It can be wonderful until I can't stand it and now I can't stand it, and I am still living. You must be too, wherever you are. You believe me, disturbed by your own unbearable position in nature, nowhere and yet everywhere, at least for me. I have given it so much thought, more so than anything else I ought to be thinking about. The youth and dark gravity, the memory and how it stutters, sobs, shatters, shines its refractions. The future is uncertain. Uncertain future has arrived, by default, and I work to perceive your absence, constantly, tenderly.

Sadie

It happened when I was thirteen. It was taken care of, no questions asked, no disagreements or agreements or any words really at all. Once I was in a position to put it behind me and could easily go on believing it never happened, I still felt there was something wrong. Something fundamentally wrong with me. Maybe it had nothing to do with that mistake. Maybe it had everything to do with it. Sometimes it’s painful to look at Sal because he’s my mirror image, except he’s a boy and I’m a girl. We ought to have turned out the same, at least as equals. We shared a house, an upbringing, an environment, an education. He wasn’t the favourite. I think I might even have been. But now, I look at him and he moves about effortlessly. He doesn’t need to try, to smile or to get serious. He’s got this strange crowd at school. They are like his disciples. While he’s out sitting on the hood of Colby’s car drinking beers and talking about nothing too important, I’m counting the pills I’ve still got left in the shoebox under my bed. I’m crawling up walls, staring out of windows with every urge to climb out and not come back, counting down from one hundred backwards in my head, or wondering how long it would take someone to recognise my absence if I just disappeared. I’m fundamentally malfunctioning. Sal is running smoothly. Perhaps it’s the difference between boys and girls. I’ve tried to fit into so many costumes I couldn’t tell you what really exists underneath them, what I’m really like, or was like before finding that seamless image and the ability to wear it as your own skin became such a priority, such an arduous task. He’s never been anyone but Sal. I have to love him, but at the same time, I hate him- it’s so easy for him and he doesn’t even know it.

Rudy

Sometimes I think my father a deranged glassblower because of all the fragile he builds. If he sits with me at breakfast he’ll make mountains out of salt and pepper across his eggs. He’ll fold a pile of laundry lint into a dollhouse. He’ll build a rocking chair from straw on the front yard. I like to think no one’s scolded his hands yet. No one’s bruised his palms or crushed his fingers out of anger, out of sadness. And I think to myself, why did I not learn that, how to create beautiful and delicate out of nothing. I want to puncture a hole through my stomach and use the air to fill a hot air balloon. My body is a series of sharp angles and overexposed photographs, left in some solution for quite too long. My body regurgitates everything, chewing driftwood, swallowing a mixture of cinnamon and sand. How can someone create something so beautiful? How is it that there are people who try to vomit new, vibrant land into the ocean, but only end up leave a hot oil spill in their wake? And out of some nondescript frustration, I ran away once. And left my father a paper animal at the foot of the shed door before disappearing into the woods behind our house. But he, with his inventor’s hands, created a hundred of my little paper animals to leave a trail through the woods, ushering me home.

Oliver

Milk teeth and coffee powdered nose. Birds scraping seeds off the small carved table just beyond the window. Sometimes the air is so thick at night I’m afraid to breathe it in. It’s like asking my lungs to swallow all these secrets that aren’t mine, these unspoken words that don’t belong to me. They look my way strangely, quizzically, as if they want answers to questions they’ll never ask. I know what happened here before I came. Or at least I know why people are looking at me and my parents and the house and its windows and doorsteps and rooftop the way that they do, even if what happened didn’t happen between these walls. I mean, if it had, someone would have found evidence. Someone would have found motive. Someone would have found the solution, the key that locks the door behind us, a means of closure. Nobody has that. I didn’t even know him or know the events that surrounded when it happened or know his family or friends, yet it feels like they know me, because here I am, sleeping in his bed, walking in his hallway, sitting watching the birds at his window, while he’s not quite there but not quite gone either. I have a sickening feeling that unless this ghost, this echo of a person, the shape they left behind that sits like a vacuum right beside me- until it’s exorcised, there won’t be room for the both of us.

Lorelei

Too much self on the small slice of a voice, all falling off. We looked at onion skin under a microscope and it looked like everything up close. Do you remember when we did that kind of thing for school. and everyone did it, all of us in a room and then the next class and the people next year, this was what they did. If that was there it makes me shake. Maybe we should go home now, let’s get out of this room and go home. There is something tender that holds me by my elbow and lets my head fall down but i’m still moving clumsy as someone that doesn’t know yet. I don’t know yet. I was a kid and I thought i was the same as every kid but a little more scared. You can only be a little more when you have a little body but i grew out like the rings of a tree. I don’t like the metaphor of trees. I like looking at the places dark birds fly over in pairs. They move in and out. They are the air. We look at them and think they are ribbons. We are wrong. We think it sticks. We are wrong.

Edie

Voices

Matilda

A boy just moved in across the street- his name is Oliver but he looks just like Ben Willoughby who has been missing for two years now. His family packed up and relocated seven months ago. I remember the day I saw them fit their entire family home life- or what was left of it in the absence of one of the four family members who once shared that life- into the back of a moving van, I remember it so well because the same day I stepped on a bee and saw hundreds of dead bees littering the lawn. I've had a dreamcatcher above my bed since before I met Ben even. Ever since Oliver moved in there with his stepmother and father and their cinnamon-coloured dog whose name I don't know because I've never cared to ask, ever since then, I've stared at the feathers and beads dangling from the dreamcatcher before I close my eyes to sleep, fixed my eyes on their slow rotation until I felt dragged by the tides into dreamless slumber. Last night I made the mistake of looking at it before I lay down. I saw right through it's middle and out of my bedroom window. I saw Ben Willoughby, standing on the lawn. He was dripping wet and his eyes were glowing amber and he was watching me. He was accusing me. His eyes said, I know. Oliver is in my class at school and even sits close to me just like Ben did, because my name is Wittenstein and his is White, but I can't look at him. He might know something too.

Bernadette

I died falling headfirst over the banisters of my stairwell at home. My life, the way they tell you it will, flickered in the forefront of my vision as the floor grew closer. I watched my boyfriend's shoulders slowly rise and fall with his snores in sleep, I watched and felt him kiss me, the sensation warm on my lips, I watched him shave from my perspective standing in the shower, and falling I felt the hot water falling with me too. I saw my mother applauding from the eighth row of the audience as I collected by Doctorate degree. I saw my cousin holding her newborn baby in her arms in a room crammed with flowers so thickly I could smell them, I had a tickle in my nostrils. I saw my father bandaging my foot after I'd injured it while rollerblading  and the floor was so close my eyes already shut. When I opened them I was sittting on the bench, poured all over with sun, in the park where daffodils swarmed, spreading like yellow oceans. A sea of light-petals to swim in. And my father was taking pictures of them with his black and white film. I didn't understand that at all. My ankle was smarting and my father was bald on the top of his head as he dropped to squat and meet my eyes, said, 'Ready to go again' and he pulled me up by the hand. I began to rollerblade again and this time I didn't fall.

Dalton

I always watch people, feeling slightly out of place. There is something so fascinating about people and their wooden hinges, metal teeth, and leaking eyes. They lay with lovers in cold beds and they catch their children, cradling him or her in their arms. They push shopping carts and purse their lips. When it is cold, they tuck their arms into sleeves. They are much like me, and that is why I feel out of place, for I am watching a ticking reel of browned and borrowed film. It is passing my eyes and plugging the cracked basins somewhere inside or underneath but that I can't locate, I just know it's part of me. My strip of film is scratched and I don't belong and nobody wants to see what I have accumulated on my reels. Damage just doesn't work for people, even if they pretend to be okay with the idea of it. It took me a while to reconcile with the actuality that the episodes of my life are just as worth watching as theirs, my scrolls of film just as valuable. Not even in spite of the scratches. Because of them. Not many others see it that way, but it's okay now I do.

Lorelei

Benjamin is weary from being missing, from nobody looking. He's brooding and cracking his knuckles in the house and in the woods on the walk to the lake and behind the shed where the bikes are locked. His eyes might be dark, reminiscent of a cult, which worries me so I daydream of bringing him soup and berries and The Jungle Book. We sit together on the roof not eating or reading but looking off to the past first days of spring when it was better. He pushed the hair out of my eyes, said the valley was vague and gaping like a nightmare. I had hoped he wouldn't say things like that. Every night afterwards I took to tucking a pill under my tongue and pretending I didn't know what he meant, but I knew. I had thought it first. Body bent in half and voice blank. One day is harder than most to leave behind, I know the date, it doesn't need marking on my calendar but comes by every year, as he comes by everyday without being here at all. He comes with red eyes and won't look away. Darkness overtakes the room. Inside of myself a flower blooms in illusory blood with wet heavy petals one by one falling into what I understood in the language of the empty, but have no translation.

The phenomenon of lost words- new favourites

As some of you may be aware, one of my favourite things in the world to think about, to talk about, to read about and to know exists is the phenomenon of lost words. Or should I say- the words that have been lost from our vernacular with the elapsing of time, the changes in our cultures, the amalgamations of different and foreign nations giving rise to new amendments to our native tongues- are among my favourite things: the contemplation of their once-existence. I have before written posts that have included some of these lost words but I have recently come across some new ones that captured my attention, so I thought I would not only list them but attempt to use them in sentences.

My 66th collage by Daisy King at Voilà!Collage – desing multimedia collage online

apanthropinization (n.)- withdrawal from human concerns or the human world
Once he’d passed the age of thirty, he retreated into a closed-mindedness and didn’t try to conceal his increasing apanthropinization.

archiloquy (n.)- first part of a speech
The assemblies always began with the Headmistress’s archiloquy, but today was different.

artigrapher (n.)- writer or composer of a grammar; a grammarian
My dream job is to become a professional artigrapher.

autexousious (adj.)- exercising or possessing free will
Those devoted to their God argue that it is only because humans were created as autexousious beings that sin exists in the world.

boscaresque (adj.)- picturesque; scenically wooded
Hansel and Gretel fell asleep under a tree in boscaresque and unfamiliar surroundings.

brochity (n.)- projecting or crooked quality of teeth
It was actually her idiosyncratic brochity that made her such a successful fashion model.

caprizant (adj.)- of the pulse, uneven or irregular
With a finger to my inner wrist, I felt the caprizant rhythm of my panic.

circumbilivagination (n.)- going around in a circular motion; circumambulation
When she recited aloud the dates she needed to memorise for her history examination, she was prone to circumbilivagination around the common room whilst muttering them to herself.

citharize (v.)- to play the harp
I have never seen someone citharize as effortlessly, the sound so mesmerising. 

coherentific (adj.)- causing to become coherent; causing cohesion
A daily dosage of risperidone eventually had coherentific effects on his thought processes. 

cosmogyral (adj.)-  whirling round the universe
In the waiting room of the psychiatric hospital, I met a woman who claimed she'd been on cosmogyral excursions, which seemed serious until she told me it had been 4 days of inpatient care, and I'd been there six months.

essomenic (adj.)- showing things as they will be in the future
She feared that her first son's failed marrage was essomenic with regards to how his own's son's nuptuals would transpire. 

eveniency (n.)- coming to pass
Even though he waited for the signal every night and it failed to make an appearance, he was certain of the eveniency of his last beacon of hope.

excutient (adj.)- shaking off
When someone deliberately tries to hurt you, try to be excutient the bitterness as soon as you can, or you'll carry it around with you and it will just weigh heavier.

fallaciloquence (n.)- deceitful speech
I've always hated politics, especially discussions about politics at parties, possibly because I believe that inherent in the political profession is the aptitude for fallaciloquence. 

hecatologue (n.)- code consisting of 100 rules
Sherlock Holmes was the sole creator of this task in deductive logic, but he'd cleverly set it out as a game with a hecatologue to adhere to. 

hirquitalliency (n.)- strength of voice
She didn't possess the hirquitalliency to get anybody's attention, so that is why she broke her glass tapping her knife against itt. 

icasm (n.)- figurative expression
He assured his lawyer that the death threat he had penned to his neighbour was an icasm and nothing more.

inocciduous (adj.)- of a star, never setting
I don't believe much of what goes on in the Bible but the imagery is quite lovely, especially that of the inocciduous and singular star that led the way to Bethlehem. 

inobligality (n.)- quality of not being obligatory
She didn't turn up to work wearing the uniform because her co-worker had said uniform was an inobligality but she ought to have trusted her instincts. 

interfation (n.)- act of interrupting another while speaking
His incessant interaftion was symptomatic of Tourette's Syndrome, and his family were accustomed to surprise obscenties being bellowed without warning after twenty-five years of it, but he still couldn't ride the bus or underground train for fear of the abuse from strangers, for to them it was intrusive and impolite.

kalotypography (n.)- beautiful printing
There is one room in the museum that is hung with work featuring kalotypography, and whenever I visit I come away with the after-image 'read me' intricately emblazoned behind my eyelids.

keleusmatically (adv.)- imperatively; in an imperative mood
One legislation that was keleusmatically passed in Parliament was the new NHS privatisation bill, which was so loathed by many yet such a relief to move discussion away from.

latibule (n.)- hiding place
His father built a wooden cabin for someone just his heigh up in the sycamore tree visible from the kitchen window, and it became his latibule and sanctum when he heard his parents' voices begin to grow more malevolent in tone, and louder in decibels. 

lococession (n.)- place for giving
In thar corner we have set up another lococession because there isn't enough space for all these gifts under our tree. 

logarithmotechny (n.)- the art of calculating logarithms
So avid was he about logarithmotechny that he sought that spiral everywhere he looked, he dreamt of his life spun out as the golden ratio, a perfect galaxy. 

montivagant (adj.)- wandering over hills and mountains
For days the Von Trapp family had to stay montivagant in order to cross the border from Austria to Switzerland. 

murklins (adv.)- in the dark
I was staggering murklins after that bottle of wine by the time I got the key out of my bag, only to find I was at someone else's door.

namelings (n., pl.)- persons bearing the same name
They weren't just sworn enemies, they were namelings, and there could only be one Esmerelda on this Earth, they agreed. 

nequient (adj.)- not being able
These days I am nequient when it comes to social arrangements and find myself wringing my hands and longing for an invisiblity cloak. 

nubivagant (adj.)- moving throughout or among clouds
When she left her physical body, she felt what could have only been her mind, as something else not physical but definitely there within the atmosphere, nubivagant and far above everything earth-bound.

parepochism (n.)- error in dating or assigning time period
It was a parepochism on his part, not mine, and that's why I was absent for the lecture. 

patration (n.)- perfection or completion of something
In pursuit of the patration of his newest piece, the playwright sat at his keyboard all day and then from twilight through until the following dawn, for three days, until hallucinations made him take to his bed. 

phlyarologist (n.)- one who talks nonsense
He isn't just a phlyarologist, even though he is a paranoid schizophrenic- there is method in madness, like Hamlet said, and there is sense to his speech if you listen.

phylactology (n.)- science of counter-espionage
If I'd had the option to study phylactology, it would have been at the top of my list, but I don't know where I'd even start should I ever go looking for a way in to that field of work. 

pocilliform (adj.)- shaped like a little cup
I imagine my mind, pocilliform, tornadoes swirling and nebulous within it, storming but not spilling, yet, and stifled. 

radicarian (adj.)- pertaining to the roots of words
A radicarian knowledge of Latin is definitely an advantage when making educated guesses about the etymological origins of words.

recineration (n.)- second reduction to ashes
Once was enough, he did not think he could withstand waching the recineration of his home, for he'd only just put his heart back there where his first loved walls once stood. 

roomthily (adj.)- spatially; with respect to space
Perhaps you should re-evaluate how you have funished the room, but in thinking roomthily, because feng shui really does work for some. 

sospital (adj.)- keeping safe and healthy; preserving from danger
The bald bearded man had sospital duties he took on with honour and humility, and he would have died for them, should the bullet have come from somewhere he may have been able to see it approach, instead of from a 46-storey skyscraper window across the busy road. 

sparsile (adj.)- of a star, not included in any constellation
You say you don't fit in, but I see you as sparsile in an otherwised predictably decorated sky. 

starrify (v.)- to decorate with stars; to make into a star
After deciding to putting on his Ziggy Stardust costume, he could barely contain his excitement, his hand shaking as he tried to starrify his face with Bowie's iconolastic make-up.

stiricide (n.)- falling of icicles from a house
It wasn't the weather that caused the stiricide, it was your snowmobile and your inability to drive it smoothly on his terrain. 

succisive (adj.)- of time, spare or in excess
Between revision each scene in Hamlet, they took succisive rests to eat fish fingers for fuelling brainf food and to swallow caffiene pills to keep their all-nighter plans on track.
.
tortiloquy (n.) - crooked speech
This is my courtroom and I do not permit such tortiloquy here, or anywhere else in my presence.

tremefy (v.)- to cause to tremble
There is nothing that can make me tremefy like the sound of the footsteps up the corridor, the janging of heavy keys, and the anticipation of the figure that had become the one constant in my ongoing varaition of nightmares with every sleep, all the details disparate enough to bring me a new reason for cold sweats upon ewaking but never varied enough veer back into the realm of remotely pleasant dreams.

tristifical (adj.)- causing to be sad or mournful
The attendants at my funeral all dressed in black will be too tristifical, and I didn't live that way so I won't die that way either, and everyone will wear sequins, striped socks, rainbow-coloured suits and sideways caps. 

veprecose (adj.)- full of brambles
Over time, the garden I'd kept knowledge of to myself grew so veprecose, the next time I went through that hidden door and tried to cross it to the bench where I had found more than just somewhere to sit outside but a sactuary to recline and write,  my tights and skirt were shredded and tangled as I fought a path to get to it, but every thorn's pinch was worth it when I at length put up my legs and wrote in my notebook under the warm afternoon sun. 

viduifical (adj.)- widow-making
The nickname 'man-eater' was not fitting, because she did not devour the men and make them disappear, but was convicted for her viduifical crimes by means of the poison she could put in any dish, but usually chose breakfast. 

xenization (n.)- fact of travelling as a stranger
This was to me my life now and as for how long, I cannot tell. Characterised by xenization, will I be given many opportunities to find friends along the way as I make my journey? 

Stranger words

Stabbing likeness, purple light-bulb, chewing glass, as if the entire planet were to sing three fine songs and the deepest canyons would swell, inside out, touch face, slip a hand in yours, say, all poetry is made up of overly metaphorical sentences; touch face, now safe, a blue blanket in the rain, shrunken over her frame, "You're going to kill me," she says into her hands, and unintelligent nonsense could sound better if only it were coming from someone different, someone close, but away, someone strange who is strange and often alone. Stranger gloves in winter, found beneath the car seat; hands so cold, no one should have to bear that, but I know, regardless, some do.

A Not-So-Lovely Love Story: The Tragedy of Infatuation Meeting Indifference

PART I.

PART II.

PART III.

Drawing and writing- and all that makes me happy

The first pages of my new scrapbook/notebook/diary/keepsake/evidence that I existed.

Things That Went Unspoken; What They Wished They Had Said; What Should Have Been Said

"I would be happy doing anything with you."

"You remind me of thoughts I've unintentionally left behind."

"Keep breaking your heart until it opens."

"If I could take away your insecurities, I would, but I can't so for now, I'll love you enough for the both of us."

"Don't ever go."

"You need to learn how to care, that's the problem."

"There are people, and then there is you."

"You make me think, even just for a second, that I can do anything."

"Will you please get the fuck out of my head, thank you."

"I've never found the words to say what I mean, and body language fails me- you will never know."

"No, I don't think about you anymore, but I don't think about you any less."

"I really hope someday you find someone to help and heal you, but it's not going to be me."

"I'm not worthless, I'm afraid you are just feeble-minded."

"Please don't look at me like that, because I will fall apart if I see you cry."

"Please don't ask this of me, because I know I am going to hurt you."

"You're braver than people give you credit for, but you're brave enough not to need that credibility."

"I thought I was her."

"If I loved you, I should have let you go."

"I'm scared, every day, all the time. Please tell me the truth, if you ever feel that way."

"I'm the word your lips forgot."

"Happen, with me."

(Footnote- these are from fictional sources, some drawn from personal experience but none are actually personal.)

Other Lives (Reincarnation Imagined)

TRANSCRIPT:

I don't know if I can tell you this: that there's something sinister waiting to happen. It's a rattlesnake beneath the floorboards type of feeling. A falling to your death just before you wake up because you've been dreaming type of feeling.

Do you believe in past lives because I never have, but if I did, I'd like to make them up for myself the way I make up the meaning of this whole universe, just because I know there isn't going to be a big reveal at the end or at any point, and nobody is going to let me in on the secret.

In one past life, I'm sitting on a porch and the evening is humid, I'm looking out over a creek, hearing but not listening to a cacophony of crickets and insects' monotonous drone, and splashing. I think I'm somewhere in the dustbowl I've read about in all the books about the American Dream. Or the shattering of that Dream. Or the illusion of that Dream. Or a dream of a Dream. But in this dream, or past life, there are two boys throwing punches at each other and they are in the water.
On one side of the creek, there's a pile of clothes. I know that there's a pistol hidden in it. On the other side of the creek, there's only warm darkness, hot night.

Another life now. I am a we. There's a you and a me, but he isn't my you and I can't be his me, or her- we are just somebodys. We are trying to find out what our insides look like using only words. His handwriting is messy, messier than mine is in this life. I mistake his scribbled hearts for small butterflies tacked to the end of a message he penned in a card. Anniversary. Valentines. Birthday.
It's another life. A harvest moon means something in this life. A heartbeat like an insect hitting the window pane. Again. Again. Again.

I'm in a car taking a moonlit drive with Jim Morisson. He's feeding me pieces of heaven. We are midnight heroes. This is another life entirely. But he bites his fingernails, and above his bed is a ceiling fan that whines like a dog in pain, and I hate myself in this life.
The mornings are ugly and my lips look like something I've fallen on. I am cold all the time. I am not introspective, and I do not know why I want to end my life, but I do, so it doesn't last long.

Next life, I chew the inside of my cheek when I am angry or nervous, or both, which is often, and in this life a man is yelling at me in Japanese but I know what he is telling me- you are not worthy. I want to tell him- yes I am- but I do not lift my eyes.
I think I made a long life in Japan but never spoke back. It wasn't the right time, not the right life. But this one, this could be the one.

I'm missing three fingers. I'm probably going to lose half of my nose. My skin is turning to the colour of chrome, it glows amongst all the white. I'm at the top of the world. I made it to the top of the highest mountain in the world.
We may not make it back down alive, but we got here, and this is a feeling I want to package, to put away in a bottle or small box and bring back with me to this real life.

But that was another life, that never happened, forever ago, never ago, and there were many and there were none and I was so special in some and so insignificant in others. See- it doesn't really matter. You can say it's a dream- you can take that pistol out and shoot a bird, you can let the warm dark swallow you, you can put your hands into his chest, you can take your last breath in a dimly lit bathroom, you can say nothing, you can say everything, you can be brilliant, or you can be worthless, but in the end it means exactly the same thing.

It's all gone to the dogs

Glimmering and pale on the storefronts that were now just litter and tattered signs, everything must go un-spelled in shredded ribbons, rust-clatter cages pulled down over them. It was as if a long rain had come and washed all their insides away but the shells remained, which made it more miserable to drive past if you couldn't avoid it- there were promises there, not quite broken yet without a doubt never to be realised, because nobody cared enough to kill it all off, for certain. They could have brought it all crumbling down. They could have swung a wrecking ball at every building and roof until not a single brick was left standing upright. A pile of dirt would have been more settling. But the ambiguity that hung over those forgotten places left it sickly and unfinished. Groups of anonymous drifters in hooded sweatshirts huddled over crack pipes in the alley between what used to be a dry cleaner and a once-whitewashed estate agent's office. At night, the darkness disappears down the drains and into the sewers. The air forgets that it's made of oxygen. They say a girl was cycling down that road one March midnight and dropped dead. The coroner said the cause of death was drowning.

There was another death by drowning a couple of months later. Mr Rubens was taking his dogs for a run in the chilly mist of dawn, under a sky so silver-white with cloud cover there was no evidence of the sun having risen at all, except for the lights that were beginning to flicker on in the windows of nearby houses, the sound of car engines starting as commuters pulled out of driveways, and the birds. You could always tell by the birds. He thought it was a swan at first, or a bird at least, with white feathers. When he trod down the reeds by the water and got closer to what one of his dogs had dragged from the shallows with its teeth, he saw it wasn't a bird at all. It wasn't even an animal. It was a woman's nightgown, dirty, sodden. Mr Rubens' head frantically whipped from one side to the other, he thought about yelling but the thought was fleeting and a silly one anyway. He walked his dogs down to the police station and told them what the hounds had sniffed out. The area was taped up in yellow for a few days but the barriers were cut before the week was through. No evidence left behind. No body. No crime. 

//

Thoughts in dream textures. 

Too scared to write anything down.

Nothing is obedient enough.

Fluttering - breathing - praying -

I watch my eyes change colour like the sky, from black to blue to purple to pink again. 

Staircases looming towards me. Walls falling into me. I crack against them. 

I crack and I heal, which means there's some power left in me.

While he sleeps I daren't close my eyes, but for a moment I do, and I do not see the non-colour of my eyelides. I see a field, I see water, I see weeds gently moved by the swell of the stream, and mud, sinking sands, and sky, stretching farther than this world. Another place, another pathway. I see another person, she's running. In another time, another space, she could be standing in the shallow surf of the sea. Perhaps the planet is an entirely different one. Wherever she is, she's unreachable. The waves crash around her, blossoming and booming. They whisper. She can feel the water when she stretches out her hand, right there, where the bedsheets should be. A small gasp of air is drawn from her lungs- 

in that second, she decides to become a ghost.

//

One house was abandoned, without warning, the same week the dogs found the nightgown. There was no reason to believe the finding and the disappearance of the inhabitants were connected. There was nothing untrustworthy about them. The head of the police department knew the man of the house from years ago, when they were both on the police force, but marriage, his colleage had said, changed everything. He said he didn't want to carry a gun anymore. He said he wanted to keep his wife safe, make sure she never had reason to fear for her safety and want to move elsewhere, want to leave. He left out the part where he ought to have added 'with or without him' but they were old friends, they'd been cadets together, they drank beers at the local brewery most nights, they went to the run-down, unpeopled strip club once in a while, where the music was melancholy and the drinks were flat, but that's not why they went. They stumbled home, parted ways, with a lot of back-thumps and hollered praises. When his friend had disappeared, the head of police knocked on the door, looked in the windows, but didn't stay long. He'd look him up in the pages, figure it out, when he had the time. There was too much to deal with right now- drugs being sold in the old part of town that used to be all yellow and blue and pink, sunny, uncluttered, and glossed-over, like it was all new and for sale. A long time ago. It didn't take him long to stop wondering about the sudden disappearance of the couple in that house. Maybe they'd just moved, maybe she had felt unsafe, and had reason to now the town was falling apart. Maybe they'd gone on a trip. Maybe someone's relative was sick. There were so many assumptions, so many dead ends, and he was too busy to find answers, and it wasn't his business anyway. He was watching the sky from his bed the same night he'd checked the house, watching the moon swinging amongst the drooping clouds. He had a fleeting conviction, all of a sudden, that he hadn't checked the back windows. He hadn't gone through the gate in the fence and into the yard to check the back of the house. And he wasn't going to. He steeled himself to sleep, thinking soporific thoughts of the cigarettes he'd like to smoke, the women he'd like to see in that slip of a nightgown, standing there in the moonlight, and the summer that existed, surely, just out of sight. Things must be easier to forget than they are to remember. Surely he could let the heaviness in his chest and stomach slip away by just forgetting the thought, forgetting where it had come from, retracing his steps backwards. In his dream, he walked through the fence and saw the back bathroom window was broken, stained with blood, and strips of pale fabric, the same ribbons of satin that had been missing from that dirty nightdress, were clinging to the edges of the glass, gently murmuring in the wind.

Train Song

My Evil Genius Split Brain: Read More

Spreading the word about transient experiences of psychosis and how you can come out of them without a life-long and monumentally detrimental diagnosis of schziophrenia or psychotic spectrum disorder...

Read More

People Think/I Think

People think that someone must pay.
I think that thinking that way is only your own loss.
People think that they are entitled to respect.
I think I am not entitled to anything, least of all respect, for there is nothing to respect about me.
People think what goes around comes around.
I think that sometimes it doesn't.
People think that they are not able to make much of a difference.
I think that people can make a lot of difference if they try hard enough and for long enough.
People think that others will have the same responses, inclinations and perceptions as they do.
I think that the most interesting thing about life is the vast diversity in the way people think.
People think that money means success.
I think that money makes people proud and that makes them ugly.
People think honesty is the best policy.
I think you can still be polite and civil to someone, even if you honestly dislike them.
People think that their childhoods inform their futures.
I think that our childhoods can inform our present and future as much as we believe they will, and allow them to.
People think that things will only be okay if there is a resolution or closure.
I think that sometimes you have to be okay without any resolution, and closure is a myth.
People think that your home reflects your inner state of being.
I think they are right but that neatness and order are not indicative of a better or superior state of being.
People think that the appearance of effortlessness is charming and attractive.
I think that people who appear to put in effort and to be trying are the most attractive.
People think that Nietzsche was a depressive nihilist who saw no meaning to life.
I think that he was a hopeless realist who didn't believe in an absolute meaning, but who thought that if there were to be one, finding it would be the end of us existing.
People think that they matter.
I think that they matter so much more and in ways they don't even know.
People think that there's some meaning of life that's in question.
I think that it's a question of what you decide it's going to mean to you, because nobody will ever tell you so you may as well make it up.
People think the best way forward is always following a path or climbing a ladder
I think that I'll always be looking up to people on those ladders or at people far ahead on their paths, but will not go in either of those directions- I'm just here, looking at life as it is now, wandering, sometimes in circles, sometimes between places, sometimes to new territories, and while I'm looking at everything as it is now, I know that it will all look so different in a while, or just a little while, or any moment at all.
People think that forgiving is condoning and forgetting is letting go of something worth holding tight to.
I think that forgiving is freedom and forgiving is letting go of what gets heavier the longer you carry it around with you, and that you should not forget, because you can only learn from what you remember.