Month: December 2022
I’m far more lunar than I am solar
Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas (Penguin, 2022)
Post-its
A Zoom whiteboard of post-its contributed by my Epistolary Experiments class on 14th December, 2022. ♡
When are you most happy?
Grating ginger from spoon feeling, lambent idea of no lucre to save, nothing at all, deposit of warmth – start using joy as a doing, you said I was joy, joying, unjoyed, a joyride ~ this belongs to you!
DROP SILVER INTO THE CLAMSHELL
ACID HARVESTS OF CHRISTMAS
DO THIS FOR KICKS
~
a sort of lacquer harvested from trip hop
✿*゚✿*゚✿*゚✿*゚✿*゚✿*゚✿*゚✿*゚✿*゚
Christmas Steps
Spider Necklace
That spiderwebs look like necklaces is hardly surprising. You made really good use of the cookies. They lived in your brain and measured time like a smart meter to cost more, horrible sharp smell of time, golden darling. The temperature got cold enough so that spiderwebs were necklaces encrusted with sharp frost, to unhook from trees and arabesques of gate to wear at night. The people took pictures of glaciated cities and posted them on the outer gates, with affections measured by the gram. They wore black tourmaline wolf spiderlings and blizzard stone zebras to cover their décolletage. Inside the small room, scared my hot water bottle would burst on me, I was too cold to have glamour. I looked at my golden darling coming close to coming, I could hardly wait for winter to end its solo guitar on the buttress of autumn. It wasn’t as though time snatched the web from her neck and said no more posting, no more selling yourself short as a small glass animal. Often I was a gelid cadaver, after a fuck. The man on the podcast who was a famous director said he hated to be in pain and encouraged women to stop poking their own wounds. He said to do things that made you feel better, instantly, and he put those words in the mouth of a blonde and glamorous actress. I used to buy lighthearted eyeliner and dot my face with artificial freckles to look ‘healthy’. Squinting at the sun is a personality. The moon is our universal friend. Those cookies will be hatching soon and we’ll live in the fat of their secrets. I couldn’t be alone again, especially with the gimmick machine of octovision. I had studied the web and was now found styling myself a spider matriarch, highly resistant to magic, indulged in the cannibalism of love’s imaginary, myself at the end of Verity Spott’s Hopelessness. Frost crystals glitter in the gathering wind saying people make mistakes. You can tear this from me, all of my necklacing sentence, I don’t care anymore.
First Day
My first day at language was painful – wasn’t yours?
Comprehension passages were my forest experience, sexual discovery etc. Why was that girl stealing seeds?
First day as a tree, first day as a ginger. Quality of energy and tying your laces at crotch-level or solar adornment. Ugh. I never did learn to tan. I was always raining.
First day as a patient.
Write a detailed analysis of the means by which the writer captures a moment in time.
Aye for an aye.
Frozen trachea. Osteoporosis of form.
Don’t you understand the poem has to mean something? I mean it always does?
You are lucky if you wrote your name on a tree in 1993
because now it is nearly thirty years old
and the wound persists
a loose idea.
Didn’t you do it too?
I was a loose leaf
a marigold, love-in-the-mist
or simple bean.
Sap-hot.
All out of luck.
First word was duck
duck goose.
Ornament & Missouri
Once, the temperament of the bellflower was of concern to me. I wrote down words like ‘ornament’ and ‘Missouri’. I had a Lamy pen to write sideways, slantwise, of my other life. There was one club in particular where I excelled in the art of other people’s music. What some call karaoke but I call languishing in melody, obsessively, falling apart in front of an audience. I was like the VHS girl-child in Aftersun butchering ‘Losing My Religion’ with such sweetness the whole resort goes silent. What talent had I for pitch or flourish? There was a column of white light above my head at all times which I imagined writing into, solemnly, a long list of my songs. The more they snared in my throat, the more they became me. The newspapers declared this behaviour ‘cheery perennial’ at the local, noted my penchant for particular martinis, the olive glow of the evening. Any evening, you could find me there in a sequin distress, picking my excess off the floor. I had this thing called a hem. It was the way my voice dropped. The way I gathered it up. Outside the club was a cottage garden, can you believe it, where I tended these purple flowers. I spritzed the last of my drinks across their wilted leaves and I murmured the inside scoop of each song, so only the flowers knew. Their growth was writing itself all over the skirts of the club, I was feeding it; soon we would nourish ourselves from the fruits of trial and error. It seemed appalling that my whole generation had fallen back into the habit of other people’s songs. As a child, I was dragged along to open mics, and all the songs were original, weren’t they? You had to put a few coins in the kitty to get on the list. According to the principle of locality, a particle is influenced by its closest surroundings, with interactions limited to the speed of light. But according to Bell, there are variables. The risk of being heckled or worse, adored. I knew my theory of the song to be incomplete and quantum. It went very far. I stroked the rare blue hue of my partial shade. I queued Outside. Sung the non-lexical vocables of glossy stars. Ate lyrics for kicks. I paid the price.
Albums of the Year 2022
Alex G – God Save the Animals
Angel Olsen – Big Time
Beach House – Once Twice Melody
Beth Orton, Weather Alive
The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field
Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Björk – Fossora
Charli XCX – Crash
death’s dynamic shroud – The Lunar Curtain
FKA twigs – Caprisongs
HAAi – Baby, We’re Ascending
Jenny Hval – Classic Objects
Katie Dey – forever music
Mallrat – Butterfly Blue
Mitski – Laurel Hell
Organ Tapes – 唱着那无人问津的歌谣 / Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao
Porridge Radio – Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladders to the Sky
Regina Spektor – Home, before and after
Rosalía – Motomami
Savage Mansion – Golden Mountain, Here I Come
The 1975 – Being Funny in a Foreign Language
Warpaint – Radiate Like This
The Weeknd – Dawn FM
Weyes Blood – And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
Yeule – Glitch Princess
~
Visions & Feed at Good Press
Audio recording of my set at Good Press, Glasgow on 9th December, 2022. Reading poems from Visions & Feed. ♡
Thanks to Saskia McCracken for the intro.