Routines of arbitrary stillness

Love like a butcher knife. carved out, and blindly awake
as the star alive in the sky. pointing north.
A cadillac with a massacred paint job, bad orchestras,
hollow at the heart. Good riddance. you hear that?
We can cultivate careful flowers and preserve hands
like clay or lake water; delineate what I know -
all the missed calls, together trying to suspend grief.
I liked that version best. On the day before the war I woke
to forget safe, forget someday, to forget all I have done or can do.

Take memory of us as children, pale backs to the open air,,
unhinged and split down to the unsolved sum of their parts.
Language is out of whispers, out of dental floss, out of spines
and I want it gone. the gossip of eyes. Your face healing,
becoming wider, slicker, something peculiar, mystifying.
Chipped paint, my broken toes- here, eeriness is terrifying
and irresistible. We’re made into animals, into streets
then shadows, our ghosts finally unravelling in gilded seams.
The sun creeps down haunting myself from within,
heart yawning open, wider with each passing moment,
your empty promises of bones or something like that.
and your hands open, larger each time twisting away.
shuddering yellow as butter, as wheat field sadness,
right there in a parallel universe where this isn’t quite natural.

We were sheltered in spiderwebs, rundown by motels
with blasted neon. My brain has become a fuzzy blank.
I am sick of cries from the mouths of birds being poached,
colossal grief in the sky, grey slabs of meat, banality, lawyers,
a gesture, a mouth bruised for air, the thing you feel
teasing at the sutures, the faraway planet. We never get it,
maybe something close, but always something else:
a variable, some otherworldly energy blast from a hero’s eyes
and the high sinister jagged moon looking down on night
demanding that it hides different versions of itself.

We recited stories of dragons everyone knows and pretends not to.
The only thing I know is to be gentle, to be flaky, and too quiet.
There's floral wallpaper in a steamed up bathroom
and this sadness - the kind of fear of seclusion, window
on a ruinous heart, carrion catcher, sleep in the pits of reddened 
eyes.
contaminating poetry about love and bicycles, that 1920’s echo
in your empric mouth. I remember the laughter of people long gone,
an old whisper to an old friend, “Shhh, don’t spook them."

Fear is not one to reason with. Time zones in clumsy prayer.
How the mondays folded in on  birds, my willingness to spill blood
at every opportunity. Don't think about faraway fragile nests
and the whole dizzying unfair gentleness of it all.
It's 5 AM and what’s left is the delirium to pry dawn open.
An evanescence of being. Short-lived, sweaty. a shadow to carry
though it's smitten loud and an endless maw of your affection.
Suddenly, it’s summer. Suddenly, I’m unremarkable.
My heart getting weighty with the demolition of stars.

my own nursery rhyme

The way we were

Monster Love

My first attempt at stop motion (well, not strictly my first, but I have only tried a few times and this I actually did with a camera and tripod). Sadly I don't think I have the dispositional patience to make stop motion films as a passtime. 

Good touch, good night, good light.

I am trying to make a decision happy enough. Hello, you, welcome home. I am called this girl, I have not been deceived by myself this time, but the light is almost gone. It is black honey. We have tears, it is not a picture. Dead mountains, clean roads, all lovers in the shape of stars reducing their path through that of the least resistance. Night's girlfriend brings the radio- it carries a little song and tells stories that look like grace. We are thinking of loving and losing and forever and forevers. Balance killed us and left us, but Hope stayed. Good touch, good night, good light, kiss. Tonight, on the highway, you eat a fruitcake with a knife like a boy's face on the universe wall. I want to be like this, when someone said that a failure was accepted, even in a statement so far out of context. I will try not to think of my hands anymore. I miss them, but that story is over. At the beginning of the story someone says that. Christmas stockings, ice cold Cornish spindrift, everything hidden in hidden letters. There are many names in history, but none are going to be ours. There is no accident when the room is empty. Everyone needs everyone. Everyone goes where they must go. Those people think about the meaning of war. What can you learn from your enemies? Do you think this love will lead you where you are meant to go? If anything is meant at all. Love is a bad word, maybe. I am sorry but I don't know where our enemies are. Are you worried about getting up to the microphone? The story you know is just paradise. If you hear a phone call in your head, your eyes have only partly open. Your heart looks like car parts in your head. Seasonal falling is causing laws and explosions and Human failing is cause for the dead. As you understand, I take what I think, what you say, and when I still love it I will do it again. I do not really know what to do, but in this version it is a bit brighter, yet not bad for the black sky. We speak whispers in wooden houses, in low words like tents. I cannot cancel them out. Valentine's been destroyed. For forgiveness, I'd give it all away. We know that we have problems and we have to ask a lot of things. I am seeking further help.

Practice in editing- a short film

We're hoping to cover this song soon so should have an original version in not too long, but I thought I'd practice my editing and The Leftovers seemed like the perfect television programme to draw from because the cinematography is so beautiful and I hoped to make something captivating.

Bury the Junk

Basement

Tucked under a stack of dusty shelves next to a broken xylophone,
where I don’t have to avoid you. I thought I might see you
when the party moved to the garage, girls with red wine mouths
and men all dressed the same, their eyes shiny and lifeless
as marbles. I don’t want to be a broken faucet or the future of
electromagnetics. Just set on the idea of being clearly understood
and uncomplex. There are old carcasses grimacing in the sink.
I am happy because at least we are both alive, even though,
one day not long ago though I couldn’t say when, I petrified.
Ineedmoreofwhathelpsmethink. I need not to think of you at all.
All the leaves blown up from the pavements pile on the bed.
We’re all working hard on our dreams. Life didn’t meet the grade
last year, but I felt free, even if I was free just to realise
that I will never fit in. That everything changes with expectations
I’ll never meet and expensive wine I’ll never tell apart from
the cheap stuff and seeing clearly that some people have it simple
and that’s enviable because I don’t, but it’s also not obtainable.
Sometimes I know it would be better if I were a scarecrow
with hay bails for brains and good posture, a fastened-on face,
a purpose that everybody is sure of. I know for certain
a scarecrow would be preferred to me. I wonder what it’s like
to always think that your life is what everyone sees as just right.

Alfred J's Song

You and I then, let us go
when the evening starts to glow
and there’s no one else about.
You and I, then, let’s go out.
When the streets are all deserted.
Let us not be disconcerted.
Let's try this time to prevent
the ever-looming argument.
When no resolution can be found
Our talks and walks go round and round.
A circle's round without an end.
That's how long I want to be your friend.
Something’s sleeping on the floor
and I would much like to say more
but instead I chew a peach
and walk all lonely on the beach.
Wondering how to part my hair,
wondering how much I should care
when the one I love sits over there
at the window with a vacant stare.
Screw up the stars in a fist,
thinking of lips I should have kissed,
watching lonely people wait
for life to be served on a plate.
Evening growling like a dog
and yellowing in winter fog.
I hear mermaids calling me
from the reaches of the sea.
Maybe that's all in my head
and all the mermaids here are dead
but I hear their distant song
and when I walk here I sing along.
Do I dare, I have to wonder.
Double trouble boils like thunder.
I hide behind my smart attire.
I hide because I am a liar.
Knowing I am just the same
as everyone else who has a name.
Knowing a life built of fear
feeling far from what is near.
This I think is a love lament
though most of my days are spent
growing into my cold shoulder,
growing colder getting older.
I sometimes think what could have been
if I’d let myself be seen
but mediocre is my shield
and politeness keeps my truth concealed.
I am not a special man.
I have always done what I can
but what I can do is not enough.
I wish I was made of stronger stuff.
Wishes are frivolous to keep
and tend to keep you from your sleep.
I try not to think into the deep.
I cannot take the faithful leap.
It’s not quite lonely, but not otherwise
wearing always this disguise
and finding safety in solitude.
No wonder that they call me prude.
I know they laugh behind my back.
I know very well all that I lack.
I should have been a go getter.
I should have been so much better
but that’s just flight and fancy talking.
I would rather spend time walking
on the sand not wearing shoes.
If you don’t compete you cannot lose.
They call me Prufrock, sometimes J.
To them, I'm fine, that I'm okay.
All I am is what they say.
But I know I'm the one that will stay
come the hell or when water's high,
even though I know I'm shy.
I know happiness is best when shared.
If they only knew how much I've cared.

wordswordswords

And two poems, one very personal, the other very not.

Moments

What Didn't Flash Before Her Eyes

When she understood her first game of chess.
When she was runner up.
When she swam in the sea fearlessly.
When she heard the words I Love You struggle from his mouth.
When she landed on the ice and didn’t fall.
When she shut the door and was brave.
When she was sad because someone else was sad.
When she was happy because someone else was happy.
When she fell asleep on the train and travelled far beyond what she knew.
When she went elsewhere and came back.
When she learnt to identify fox gloves and two distinct birds.
When she read what Katy Did because she’d been told to, what Katy Did Next because she wanted to.
When she felt beautiful and invisible and good at his birthday party.
When she got an upgrade on an aeroplane and fell asleep with all the leg room.
When she broke a bone in a playground at night.
When she protested for peace.
When she photographed them smiling.
When she walked calmly across a stage.
When she made a statement about double standards.
When she was eloquent at the dinner table.
When she decided to let it go.
When she said goodbye and looked back.
When she said no and meant no.

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.