You can just sing

Button-minded

I've gradually, and then suddenly, grown apart from being such a tiny thing. I'm still quiet, still little button-minded, blossoming right out of an open palm. But maybe I'm a touch louder, a touch more upfront, a little heavier too- with open things, with possible things and hopeful things, a shock of mess but a smile to go with it. I think about holding hands a lot of the time, rubbing shoulders, and I help elderly ladies carry their bags onto their buses, chat to them about their grandchildren, and I don't feel lonely when they smile back at me. I think too about dancing, about how I'd like to try it again in the New Year with my girl friend. I've become fresh water running down skin and wettened eyelashes. I don't know if I'll ever be comfortable in my own skin because I haven't felt connected to this body since I stopped feeding it for the first time, and then forgot how to feed it completely. I'm really making it up as I go along, but I do feel some connection to something else- something that isn't my physical self but something like threads, stretching and contracting with every movement I make. And I think of interconnectedness. I think it so strange that now I'm more aware of my little button-self but somehow not so terrified. Somehow established and sinking into a bottle of warm, brightly coloured sand.
I think Ella would be proud of where I am. I miss her more than I can possibly say. I never believed in an afterlife really, but I hope there is one, just so that eventually I can get there and see her again.

Spills and sunlight and sanity

I understand, and maybe you do too, what it's like to hold your hair back from your face, reach further and further into nothing, and end up staring at the wall. I am still relatively young, or at least look very much younger than I am, yet my back has been all twisted. I have felt heavy, a balloon, a glass full of salt, a floater. I have experienced days where I am that and then I am this and then I am that again, and I forget that nothing is permanent. I think I'm learning that I can map out safe spaces for myself. Coaxing weeds and daisies from sleep, spill a little water from a jam jar of plucked pansies, shake some sunlight out like dice from a palm; a calm chatter, a trickle, an almost totally silent collision.

I've had a lot of time to contemplate insanity. Back when I used to bang my head against the bathroom wall, or cut open my wrists, or spend months in hospitals, locked behind the doors of those warm wards, echoes of girls and women and boys and men and wasted. 'You remind me of myself, when I was your age,' said D, a woman who was 40, also with a diagnosis of borderline, who had attempted suicide many times and also tried to scratch off her own scalp. I remember thinking in that moment that I was not going to be like her, going in and out of places like that, scratching out my brain. We all had a ticket, and she'd thrown hers away, but I still had mine, and I was not going to make her mistakes just because of a diagnostic label. But what of insanity? Is it a constant repetition, while still holding out for a different outcome? Is it a coincidence or is it something else? Is it a torn up napkin, a hoarded pile of grocery bags, a crumpled ticket? Is it the continuation of rolling a boulder up a hill, fearing the whole time it might roll back and crush you, until you reach the top only to find you were wrong and you aren't safe. But you continue to believe, because you have to.

Confidence in what I can expect from myself has been progressing. What is possible and what isn't? I don't know those answers. I will keep on pushing because I want to believe, it's what matters most to me: hope. Sure- sometimes it seems like a knife through butter and just another chance to get cut, and sure- that can drive anyone mad. Crying in the shower, yelling into a pillow, downing some whiskey and shut eyes and disappear, disappear? No, not this time. I'm shaking that sunlight, scattering across the path ahead. I'll do what I always do and spill the water, but this time it will dissolve all the salt, and maybe it will resurface again, but here's to hoping.

I will dance in heavens that I've never known.
Flowers blooming in places I'll call my own.

The True Reflection

Things I can't do, and things I am not 

Mathematics, even basic calculation
Pose
Speak loudly in public
Confident
Put on make up faultlessly
Speak knowledgeably about politics
Chat on the phone
Organised
Stable
Graceful
Roller-blade
Give up hope

Things I can do, and things I am 

Apologise
Use British sign language
Take good portraits
Word play
Clumsy
Bookworm
Understand
Forgive
Writer
Lose a lot of weight quickly
Recite the entirety of The Love Song of Alfred j Prufrock, and Hamlet's soliloquy, from memory
Remember the details of conversations
Keep trying

Then and Now

A couple of days ago

I am trying to write you out of my skin.
That is to say: You are still here.
You are running in circles, you are making me dizzy. I am confused.
I thought these years had put me back together;
you’d found me broken, now we were whole.
Then you broke the promises you made and I’m not ready to break again.
I’m trying to write it all down, every corner and jagged edge.
That is to say: I am not finished.
I never can be, can I? I meant what I said. I never will be finished.
These words are stains on eyes and lips, on the tips of planes
that have torn the skies and crashed, buried in an afterthought.
I’m trying to end it all.
You already have.
I am trying to catch up with time, all over again.
It was light outside when you left for work. I was barely awake.
I should have stayed there, in sleep, in a permanent dream.
That is to say: I should have drowned.

Now

Poems are finicky things. Portraying a girl, wondering
what it is so wrong about her, what is so worthless?
And that is an accurate picture, and I would never
want to bury her without the decency of flowers.
She was just left to falter. She was just wordless,
having been betrayed before, just not by anyone
who had promised certainly never to do so.
A shock like that strikes the hours apart,
solitude can appear to push them aside with a touch,
and words start to flow and at first it's just hope,
getting all tangled in reasons, reasons that
trip over hemselves as they rush to leave.
Then it's just choking on doubts, covered in dust,
carrying you, the words all there and all lost
before they even leave the mouth. Unravelling.

The picture becomes different once you sweep up
the remnants, change the bedsheets, rearrange the life
you let go of without protest. Knots loosening from
around your heart. A sailor to the wind, to the stars,
broadcasting to the world- I am not broken, not
unravelling. This is nothing compared to what has been.
The memories and the memories of nightmares-
products of wanting and unwanting and biting back.
When you run, run away, isn't it because nothing
makes you happy? Or because you are asked to do so
and believe in the reasons? It wasn't one giant mistake.
But I was mistaken, I was gullible. That is a fact.
Running away- never explaining myself.
Running away- never letting the nostalgia in,
though it made me sick, though it made me ache.
Running away- finding myself somewhere
that I never expected to be. I'm sorry, and not sorry,
and I'm relieved I am myself again.
But after all this running,
I'm asking permission to return.

We don't know the same song anymore

Sharp Objects

From the TV series 'Sharp Objects' and quotes from the book by the same name, Gillian Flynnn

Adoxography

Stay

The hope of what can be made real, even if it seems ridiculous ot others or highly improbable or very difficult to reach out for, let alone make steps towards- well, that's always better than the disappearing act. When you start to disappear from the world, you lose things: memories, friends, idiosyncracies, rroutines, purpose, aspiration. It might be a solution to the terror of failing and the fear your hope will never come true, but I'm leaning towards not abandoning hope, because it's it's always been hope that kept me alive. 

The apologetic verbal tic

8 Friday Thoughts and a song

i. I am my own worst nigthmare. A glass drops into my hand and my palm shatters- conclusion: I'm too fragile for all this. I try to bite the rust from beneath my fingernails- conclusion: there are endless walls and walks and rides and the damage collects, and I know it, I'm just no good at fixing it. A book opens and closes, another on top of it, a hand is raised expectantly in a school room- conclusion: I am a question, unsure of being answered. A phone rings and rings, hands shake, the blinds close- conclusion: I am afraid, I would prefer to be invisible. So why is it that it means so much to me that I am remembered, noticed, loved? I blush, I hide, I need, I rattle. I am a nightmare.

ii. Pits of hunger feel better again. I'm a fool and buckling and I know it. I used to be able to stop it. Where did the strength go? Where did the rain go? Why don't I talk anymore? I would give anything to go back and start over, to when I could be and wanted to be heard, and I didn't see a tombstone standing in my doorway, and I didn't see myself from above and see an eyesore.

iii. Somewhere, sometime, someone said I was going to be okay. I didn't believe them before. I believe it now. I am still porcelain and not stone. I am still rust but not decay. I suddenly finding it strange to be myself.

iv. Possible diagnoses (not yet invented): disenchanted brain; history not one's own (delusion); abandoning of flight; undemanding tightness; birdbath stomach ache; translucence; corner cowaredice; blind trust; a healing through scar tissue; sanity through sentence structure; a reckoning. 

v. I suppose this is half-imagined. Like imagining choosing songs to whistle in the mounains or to sing on the street, like a radio looping in your bain. Like looking straight into an eclipse. Meeting a cheerful ghost at a rundown factory. Leaving something special behind when you go.

vi. The walls sweat anxiously and you whistle softly to me. There's nothing but nostalgia in the clouds and a heart thrumming in my mouth- mine or yours? Why did I never have the right words to say? I tried to write them. I tried to be a dream more than a nightmare, but maybe self-knowledge at the end of it is better than being just a phantom of regret.

vii. Someday- if I have the time- all of this will get the better of me and that will be the end, and I'll go to a place beyond this with books and bathtubs or just waste. Or it won't get the better of me and I will shrug it all away, or else I'll do anything at all- with no exceptions, besides having to remain alone forever- to fit the puzzle pieces back together. Loss breaks me apart in a way I can't articulate. I'm not finished. I'm not crazy. I do love.

viii. I don't know where I am going, or who I am, or what I can do. You have to tell me. I'm just made up of mirrors. I've known dead-ends and disasters but I'm still here. I shouldn't be but I am. War should never be happening, but i is, always will. I don't deserve to be happening here, but I am. Isn't that some kind of evidence that magic really exists?

Words at dawn

I don't blame anyone for not understanding how it is to hurt with both hands, like a blown circuit. I worry that the genesis of my brain is disenchanted, uprooted from its stem, burnt at the stake. I feel like- I worry too that I feel like- my body is a lost continent; the evenings sit and become nights and become mornings without rest, just empty eyes. Am I rusting? Am I still here? Stitch me back to something. I hope this will be more probable in the next few weeks. Winter tends to the prayers of the lonely.

Sometimes I am sure I'm alive because someone else isn't. My life and heartbeat whisper obligations. I panic, I lose my lungs for a minute, breath pouring o ut of me, stale and hot like mercury from the remains of a broken thermometer.

I know I'm sick. I know I'm not myself. Does one depend on the other? I hope that soon I'll be able to look at my reflection. I wish I could feel it again- that glimmer of hope, even just a glance of that fool's paradise.

A new recording

I apologise for my apology (?) towards the end and all the quietness. It just moves me quite dramatically, the lyrics.

Split

Taking a stroll down the knife-edge path
dragged by apathy, vague ambivalence-

Looking in the mirror and the immediate
need to leave the room, lest you pull it down-

Out of breath, on the floor, in the shower,
forgetting the words to explain yourself.

Worth nothing? Worth nothing? No.
You are not merely the contours of shadow.

Where you are walking, dreams don't go.
I know that because once I felt worthy.

I want to be invisible, to disappear, but
that's not true. I want to speak, be heard,

I want to be remembered. I believed?
Didn't I? Yes, I always have, I still do-

I'm screaming into silence.

There is no absolute truth

We cannot ever hope to win
without learning man's many games.
We can't hope to understand God
without learning his many names.

We can't see the top of career ladders
without counting their many rungs.
We can't define in other languages
without speaking their many tongues.

We can't know or try to quantify
without observing what's not seen.
We can't know a mile in other shoes
without being where they've been.

We can't say we know what's to be good
without knowing what is to sin.
We can't say we know others at all
without ever letting them in.

We can never say we know truth at all
without admitting our many flaws.
We can never say it's the right choice
without opening the many doors.

We can't see the sparkling of lighting
without the many claps of thunder.
We can't say we really live at all
without the endless ways we wonder.

Heavy Is The Pen That Writes 'The End'

1) Nothing has been noticed yet. Nothing has been felt. Calendars still shed pages and schoolchildren keep growing up. Newsreaders always speaking in tongues, in muted voices giving soundless shapes to weightless words. The tide still comes in and goes back out. The clock tower chimes again; nobody hears. The sea is a mirror.

2. They will eventually say that they always knew, even as early as this. In basements and fifth floor apartments, these individuals have headaches, bad dreams they can't fully remember, persistent deja vu. Tiny breakdowns felt like repeated tiny earthquakes. The heavy bearded man sleeping on the street outside the train station has felt it. Collectors of article clippings reporting terrorist attacks and loudly declaring themselves non-believers probably felt it too. But they weren't to know this was the real thing. Many of the incarcerated population might have felt it with fight and not fear, but their view came in slices, from behind fortified walls, mostly recycled, or only remembered.

3. Light sleepers are woken by friction. Paperclips, earrings, the buttons on winter coats. They swear their televisions aren't working. They secretly swear that the figures on the television aren't who they are supposed to be, they've been replaced by impostors. Breezes seem to thrum and sunbeams whistle through hair and fingers. The postman signs in to work under the wrong name and waits for something to post. Under the cacophony of everyday, small bells are heard ringing.

4. No one can say the last time they remember a new novel being published and publicised. Favourite radio channels are tuned out when listeners realise they have heard the same songs on a broken loop lasting about a week, and every week starts and finishes to the same soundtrack. Magazine articles are chewy, conversations about current events stick to people's teeth. Charity workers are seen shredding their literature and begging for change. Something feels different but nobody says anything because nobody understands exactly what has changed. More people hearing bells, fearing insanity, accepting loneliness. The priest notices that the church pews are empty but so many come asking to confess that he dreams in black and white, and words in the confession box feel like words exchanged at the bank and at the supermarket. There's a commonality in the way food smells. Drinking water has more viscosity. It feels harder to pick up a pen. Furniture appears to sigh in frustration when you sit or lean on it. Newspapers quietly fold themselves.

5. Policemen cave in the cheekbones of a seventeen year old car thief. Their radios are scattered with reports of domestic violence, fire-setting. The neighbour's cat turned up dead in a garbage bag in the shallow parts of a reservoir. Breezes seem to bruise and sunbeams sting.

6. The heavy sleepers are woken by large bells ringing, knocking about in bell-towers. Some people hang flags from their balconies. Those who live on the ground floor throw beer bottles out of their windows. Long vindictive and threatening messages are passed back and forth between computer keyboards. A disproportionate number of people privately plan attacks on strangers, on family members, in schools and on playgrounds and in churches. Hospital nurses stay home with crippling migraines. A politician is quietly arrested on the grounds of sexual assault. Trees falling in the forest, everyone can hear them. Nobody explains why the leaks from nuclear plants are infecting surrounding civilisations. Nobody explains why no help is coming. Nobody explains God anymore and the priest wonders whether he ever existed. Roofs ripped off. Rivers drying up. The incarcerated broke out then broke back in, reading their own last rites. Bridges are teeming with people who dream of jumping.

7. Houses are left empty, when families pack their belongings into cars and just drive away, with nowhere to go. Policemen break the spine of a fourteen year old vandal. Most people don't read magazines or watch the news. Every well-known radio personality has gone quiet. When books and music records are burnt, people yell and cheer and fight, some throw pipe bombs, some set cars and houses on fire too. People don't pick up pens anymore, nothing is written, no names are signed. The monuments in cities cannot be repaired, and the pigeons that once crowded them stopped visiting.

8. Even the smaller towns are flattened, their foundations pulled out and crushed. People rarely say their own names with so little need to. Trains don't run and when the air traffic couldn't be controlled and a plane full of people making a last effort at escapism dropped from its road in the sky, nothing was left but ash. Breezes are bloody and violent, sunbeams stop. While the priest tries to pray, the congregation pull his church down around him and when he turns to God, all he hears is footsteps. Hundreds of people in a crowd followed one another off a bridge.

9. An epidemic of self-mutilation. Revolutionary suicide. It is impossible to stand. Nothing moves, nobody tries. Nobody knew the extent of damage until it was already beyond repair. Smoke does not rise, it just hangs, moving horizontally. The only things that don't break are the waves, boy's voices. Not even promises get broken anymore because nobody makes them. All the birds nested in one tree that was chewed up paper a long time ago.

10. Complete catastrophic destruction. Damage is entirely total. Nothing is felt but perhaps the very quiet motion of the hour hand on a clock.  The sea is white.

Telling Tales

Tremble by tremble,
Cold, low-burning headlights,
a beautiful disused sentence
folding crumpled mouths over
stretched broken curfews.
Winter never meant to hurt you.
Stories are so tired of being told.

Tales of Aesop and of Chaucer.
Broken bone, teacup and saucer.

Your short shadows.
Your loosened forgetting.
Falling like a hammer
Falling like a suitcase,
 full of ageing wistful neck scarves.
Didn't I say I don't do things by halves?
Stories now so tired of being told.

Brothers Grimm and Rumpelstiltskin.
Tired of weaving the same words in.

Until the facts forget themselves.
Until book spines crack the shelves.
Until the morals can strengthen themselves.
I kept the best until last.
Our fate is told by the past.
Stories not so tired of being told.

Thought machines and iron cutlasses.
Sleepless birds and grey trespasses.

Stories never tired of being told.

Carduelis carduelis

The growing blush and the beating hearts
of sun in flowers will bring the charm-

spreading wishes, adrift on seeds and thistles,
carrying rubies, bars of gold on each arm.

A call to these arms or a cradle song learnt
becomes bolder, meanwhile their charm ages

until years that have been burnt mean little
more than memories, left trapped in cages.

Hamlet (the first drafts for the musical)

Slings and arrows, now natural shocks can start.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The rub of words, words, words; I'm sick at heart.

The woman changes faces, I know her as Frailty.
And we know what we are but not what we may be.
Shake off this mortal coil, get thee to a nunnery.

The rest is silence and to thine own self be true
Though you listen to many, you speak to a few.
You see clouds in the mirror of nature, hanging on you.

The bad beginning, the worse stays behind.
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There is method in the madness of my mind.