MOOD CHART
Category: analysis
Christmas Eve Auto Draft
You’ve got a nerve to be embodied. Lana says it pains her how good the male vocals are on ‘Dealer’. Season of frivolous spending I call you from the floor of a mall, you spend £16.90 on coffee, I don’t know what prose is.
At some point I must have remembered the password to the room of amphibians, Analysis.
It’s not like the contact is there. A plate of sliced ham many decades ago, the puppy ate. A palate refined into podcasters who go out for cheeseburgers, murmuration of commas, choleric entropies. It’s a form of sleep paralysis. Horny letters to environmentalists.
Save me…as…
You lucid dream or you stop / shall it be blessed to touch the furnace a hard-light, the caterpillar blonde.
The door is locked. It needs a medicine. Rivers of cognac coagulate arterial: one is gold, one is white. Nightmares of Fancy prose. Aperitif or signet ring. Solid aura.
The barista gifts me free lemon cake “for someone that needs it” and it might be me or I half it with you? All canal walk I sipped the glow of that coffee their human kindness
The city a hologram out of Musk’s Eye™️
Sharing our name with the semblance of oatmeal, remembering for the business of hibiscus. It’s not as if I don’t want to say sky leaf, high staples, the charcoal nights of London. The bars are still apparently ours, a sensibility measured by flood vibe. Names of boats.
I can’t listen to music it’s all ships. The pillow faults of true music. Soundcloud was a planet. Salad Daze. Salad translates leaf array, a contour irrealism, swarm economics, morbid blonde. Wafer arrangements of transistor radio.
A feedback loop of the dark. The edifice of gelatine.
Time goes off like a triangle.
Photoelastic buoyancy; saline; bone; lime.
Nearby they are sleeping so I am the night elf
I miss tinsel I want so much tinsel I want Porphyria’s Lover erotica tinsel I want to be metaversed into the scintillant realm of tinsel a mass effect class tinsel I want blonde tinsel a gold physiology I want reddish the trad version tinsel ikr
Silvering with these destroyer lawyers
What was the original chipmunk music?
tinsellllllllllllllling total tinsel insensate a hard sell 🙂
I sue you!
Remember the xmas we listened to psychology podcasts as we hung gold baubles on the natural tree I wept in the eighties before sun lamps were invented
Remember me, I was a product
Playlist: October 2021
Wet-leaved, walking up hills with chain oil on my elbows, knuckles, knees. We are on the eve of the ‘big climate conference’, which is to say, to be a host city of preemptive closure: there will be no more roads so that nobody can block the roads without authority, no more bridges for your tiny feet. I imagine a commute that takes me north to Kirkintilloch and back along the canal, an extra hour and a half of leg power and stamina and to arrive like of a beetroot complexion to the moment when somebody speaks. These streets are mostly broken glassed, and I see nothing to sweep that; I see buildings go up, see extravagant plant life grow from abandoned houses. I dream about bike punctures from enormous shards of glass. A mushroom sprouts in the brutalist building. I should have planned to do something. More tired than words can.
Imagine awaking beautifully at 5am each day, to actual birdsong and car sounds, still going through the night to Edinburgh or the general east as they do. I miss the ocean, which I have not seen since May. Sometimes I forget that its quiet, rhythmic hush is always in my ears, a tinnitus with the switcher dimmed. All summer I swapped the ocean for industrial estates, teeming with buddleia. If I go to a club, it gets full bright. The hush. At 6am I make atomic coffee, await words, say rain. I could tell you about the new university building and how I will never find a space to work there, doomed to circle identikit floors like airports in a suspended time that nonetheless eats into my time of work, a starship, doomed to fill a cup of hot water and carry it up and down escalators only to be cast back outside with scalded hands, cried into blustering autumn. A hazmat suit to be a student, studying the microparticles of your love in blunder. If I could study on the floor, in the street, with the leaves stuck to me. But I am a sufferer of frostbite and poor circulation, owing to damp homes, an unfortunate experience in the snow and damaged nerves, fragile metabolism. I am not there anymore, in the place we have been
Canned words taste better with more salt on them. Fuck you. Sitting on the curb in the 1990s surprised us when a plane went by, it was carrying my childhood. Remember we used to put each other literally in bins, until that wasp stung your ass and I was sorry. We prise open tins for the juicy bits of the story like, what would it take to get the attention of a virulent benefactor? Should you become a red squirrel enthusiast, or take up the statuesque hobbies of sportsmen? What beneficent largesse would require it?
Imagine not living by the anticipatory hormone storm of a coming menstruation, or like, the cramping wildness of the night and morning or blood gushed trying to have coherent thought in the day when your mind is fog. I want to transcribe some of that fog to writing, to remember how it was when again I am in clearing, to be like this is the place, it’s never gone. I was held in it, the tearing itself to shreds sensation to write this at six in the morning before work. Plants don’t have to go through this; is it that they’re always ‘working’? How do trees feel when they shed their leaves? Is it like an annual period and do they miss them? Should I develop fondness for shreds of blood in the toilet, abject bits of me and not? I saw a leaf blush out of my mouth and into a leaflet. Smoking kills. I watch the men in high-vis sweep up the dead leaves, more like dying, into black bags by the side of the road. Someone around here is always burning rubber tyres in secret. It’s kind of erotic to watch people do something repetitive and with great concentration, as if no one else could possibly notice this. To do your work that way. O your beautiful butterfly shoulders. Missed opportunities.
For instance, I could have lived through this moment to learn another language, write a curriculum vitae for the purposes of waged employment, called you.
“It feels so good to walk in nature.”
Blood drop in the shape of sycamore.
Where is Canada?
The revenge fantasy is only that trees are flirtatious as hell, winking pollen so that you watery-eyed have to look up at the stars sometimes and beg, like take me. Let me out of the forest so I might see
(fantasies of committee,
the ground to tie
my own laces in figures of eights.)
Authenticity!
The figure of eight in Karla Black’s sculpture which is pink-smeared recalling everything I used to put on my face. The idea is to find a sort of peace with it. School bathrooms where a face was pressed against glass and cruelly examined. I dream of rooms filled entirely with blizzards of eighties-blue eyeshadow. Angel Olsen, 2014, Pitchfork Festival. Having lived with the spirit not for resale, traded on a stark memory of that colour where every remembrance seems to intensify blue, until all I have is the pigment itself, ultramarined into oblivion. To wake into that blue and not see beyond it. I put my sore arm through the right-hand loop of the eight and pulled this out for you.
In the dream we pass an armed convoy and into the bakery with coins allotted to us by authority figures, and we buy pastries adorned by sugar ice drawn in mobius curlicues, and the pastries flake away as we eat them, greedily on the street, so many flakes falling before the guards. And we are butter-mouthed in the face of conflict, war and summit. A kind of shout chokes the air but the golden morning goes on, the falling leaves. I have these cramps and double over in the falling leaves. Men come to sweep around me, where I have fallen. One of them bends down — he is so young to be working — and pats my head tenderly and I see a leaf fall behind him and I know that leaf to be us, so we embrace platonically for one moment, as though I were his long-lost twin, before the foreman calls his name, which I can’t recall—
No, not that at all — he touches the soft part of my ear, goes “are you not young to be leaving?”
In trash, the language of trash, the trash piled up against the highway of your declaration. The men stopped coming.
Azalea, camilla, plum blossom, hydrangea.
Rizla, tin foil, styrofoam, gum.
The noise of vehicles pulling up around the city, emitting fumes.
The petals shed and I sleep on them, dreaming my blue becomes turquoise
another morning where the sun won’t rise
until we are paid.
~
Painted Shrines, Woods – Gone
Au Revoir Simone – Stay Golden
Uffie – Cool
Margo Guryan – Something’s Wrong with the Morning
Green-House – Soft Meadow
Frankie Cosmos – Slide
Arthur Russell – A Little Lost
Grizzly Bear – Deep Sea Diver
Tricky – Makes Me Wanna Die
The Raveonettes – I Wanna Be Adored
Beach Fossils – Sleep Apnea
Lykke Li – I Never Learn
Cate Le Bon – Running Away
Vagabon, Courtney Barnett – Reason to Believe
Angel Olsen – Some things cosmic
Jason Molina – I’ll Be Here in the Morning
Cat Power – I Found A Reason
[iPhone note] 18/10/21
Late October, Cycled home in my t-shirt, thru the industrial estate and beyond. you and I remember well the opening sequence, credits to all those sly cartoons who lived in colours not of their own choosing. what I’m trying to say is the warmth comes not explicable from crisis, to say ‘i was warmed by crisis’ seems wrong, and yet as I walk in a light denim jacket purchased on the day of the kenmure raid, people are still debating who was the OG lady of sadcore, adele or lana del rey? there are two versions of the skins episode where cassie escapes to new york and she runs through an impossibly empty city: one which plays an Adele track and another which plays ‘My Town, My City’ by an unidentified artist which now seems relegated to the half played halls of ancient youtube history, yet also the chorus that would seem to claim for its singer something of a belonging in cold despair. in memory the piano begins when she bites into the apple and starts crying but this could have happened in any dimension, especially considering every time i bite into an apple now my eyes smart, crunching into a moment straight from chris marker and sugar brushed with what he doesn’t know, bright red, i mean ordinary feminine pain, or like, the year 2007 in bristol. i didn’t know what UK garage classics were until i keyed my first car or like buzzed myself athletically through the other door where i would be welcomed as a stranger to victorian milk and honey, reversing the version where you can’t wear that necklace for it has bumped against her sternum and now something of a soul is dead. my friend died but ever since july i have compulsively worn purple. when i get synaesthesia it’s usually for songs, words, general emotions that in relation make up grids or curlicues surprisingly happy to coexist, like if i draw a lilac spiral where your name once is, i feel better, i feel better. it’s a schoolgirl trick of the selfsame like writing out names in our jotters, yours or mine, walking the perambulator back to the moon where exhausted mothers are calling their mothers to war. we benefited from working tax credits and educational maintenance allowance, i asked friends born with particular chromosomes to buy me yorkie bars, i remember the feel of warm summer tar against my skull better than i recall my first fuck tho a kiss was easy, it was like pulling another fish through a big comma soaked in bourbon and the bright lights were on and everyone watching? sometimes i have to go out a room to remember something like what are you doing here, now i have to walk around to even get writing or find eloquence in pavement slopes. where i live now you smell hops on mondays and thursdays the cats are not ginger, i let them nuzzle against my leg in exchange for a purr. tonight there were electrical failures in the library so i decided not to imagine my evening as a series of blocks defined by the hours locked upon flat surfaces. this house has a shed! if i listened to anything it was to the street lights twinkle as mushrooms do when stamped on, baby screeches, we come home with medical certificates and iron deficiencies with mouthfuls of words about aurora borealis and sandstone. thru the periurban and elderberry. i create a sequence and it forges a colour for itself, can’t be changed. i’m wearing a white t-shirt and it’s late in the autumn and i’m telling you this because the sky is purple, it’s 16 degrees and i want to change
Starlight & Bloglore
*
If you wanted to know, I’m from Mars, like men are, or in the order of things what a man doesn’t know the controverse of other waters, almost all of us exist as ice. Never to be ready for end, its artificial blush, to edit and close to the distance of light.
That you await water or more, gone muscle of the month nothing happened, acres of pleasure gone and into the stadium, more or gone to wake pink and stinging the dream, everybody wants to. The many-stomached among us arrive and wearing lace. We eat bees, we half kiss
If it is a mall and if analogue. I begin to forget the difference between, how easy it is to order hard slushie, rewind and loop myself into the fretless moment, a whistle of football, a slow man. Test acids:
No cup of coffee is hot enough. You up, you accuse me of people, I seem to have revelled in the air for too long. Where did our liquid water go? The intriguing discovery of three buried lakes, surface bruises. Had I the famous grouse and soda of your eyes are bubbles, we sup on the luminous and blemish, generous language. “Lack of a substantial atmosphere” was our review. Not to advise a trip here. Wait.
But trip, you go. Sip peaches under the bleachers, three poems. Not up yet. Not bright, not early. Waiting on me for the thirst. Bloglore, blueness, periorbital circles. Why so much neon pigment, not sleep, you go bass it is sultry “just pretend they’re your friends”. Advantage of entering thirties is the austerity of early sanguine, no YOU go to bed at noon; I will iron your watercolour until it is warm.
Victory to the internet so said privacy, party, my vice a nightly garment, smelt pain. At the left desk dream-amaze you save me, take pictures in natural formation, go see frog. Conflagrate lateral flow, high up in the sentence is forfeit, your sweat.
There is a courtyard on Mars where daylight, nay the leafminer, leaves scarification. No more raids. I have been here in flesh and blood to salsify, lightly the oyster plant is edible and does not grow. You do shrub mail, you don’t hot. Everything to do could else refuse.
No more scare, cup ring, close your accent permanently.
Plans for the Fall. Accounting.
Enrol to all that and wear a cloud, I want to write this you, to you, lower ourselves to parallel tarmacs; am I to speak the particulate deltas of this planet, no this one, you are a rainbow. We could be anywhere. Alice says ‘sad foam’, ‘Disappear’.
The money forth comes, does not accommodate thought; it is the feeling that I saw a seal. Start your bitcoin emptiness and pyre of light; I wrote on afternoon this letter. Ocean goes away.
Fullness and not to floss sleep from prison but I think the Marxist rabbits are fucking released.
Maggie says of the urge to begin mistakes. A surprise that the flotsam arrived here, not of shape, are you the sleekit to enter say the sea isn’t real.
We build whole houses with roofs of sequin. Desperado attic of saltheart, salvage flower. Meadow / Black / Wild / Yellow varieties.
I deleted 54% of this article.
Substantial genitalia of the not getting wet.
1.6% argon, we are gone
where softly the walls sag.
Knit you a fortress of seasonal transition. Khora my lame electron.
Martian quality relayed in me a voice, surface, can’t get a full-length mirror from you, get dressed, exit the internet. I exist in this flat and wait for the post. No more furnishing.
Lemonade also goes this way.
How did I thinner the telescopic? Lop a water? Log into the apple?
Well, it is Red.
Starfish suck excess from solar landmass.
Sometimes gravity, shoots you up, does not come back. Inelegant hipbone blue and yonder. Sometimes very close to the ground I like spiders. Eat you up. You up.
What did you think of your time alone?
Playlist: April 2021
Last year’s April was a leap year. For every 29th day I summoned to think of the hours as gifted, secret, strength. I spent the actual leap of February in somebody else’s bed, a cherished cliché: cradling sadness, cat-sitting, reading Anne Carson and rolling the word ‘tableaux’ around my stressy mouth, whose hostile environment required twice-daily salt-rinses. On the 29th of last year’s April, I wrote about vermillion and silverware, ‘the lint of your heart’ and hayfever. A friend and I exchanged tips on how to best work from the floor, how to make it your best work. I miss ‘working the floor’ in other senses.
What do you want is not the same as What would you like?
There was a reading group on Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal (2020), and the Zoom chat was elliptical pursuit, a good fuck pendant, fractal kissing and restless deferral. The word besmirch which isn’t a word search.
Those days
I remember cycling long into the hard sun; I recall better eyesight.
⋰
Okay, recently. Do you want to hear this? I spent a week of anticipation, languishing with migraines and digestive upsets and the kind of blues where mostly you curl foetally into the fantasy that really you, or this, doesn’t exist. Sip worry coffee and brush the hair, tweeze or shave, sit patiently on top of the abstract, waiting for something lucid to hatch. ‘Opening up’. A weekend bleeding, the minor cramp of womb in Autechre rhythm; then a further week of physical ailment whose primary treatments, according to the lore of reddit, included punching one’s spine, counting to ten, pinching between nose and lip and lying in hot baths. I did not have the baths, which seemed terrible and luxurious given how faint they could make me. I read two books by Samuel Beckett.
In Garments Against Women (2015), Anne Boyer writes that ‘Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing. We embarrass each other with comfort and justice, happiness or infirmity’. It is awkward to smile and to squirm. To be red-faced and faint after a luxury bath. To be found frowning in the Instagram reel of somebody else’s dreaming. To apologise, to dwell upon, to ask for help. To be the one clutching a hot water bottle in the Zoom call; to hide or show this. To sip beer, the migraine coming. To say “hello” from the room next door. To deem something luxury, to partake of it. ‘I have done so much to be ordinary’, writes Boyer, ‘and made a record of this’. Say I learned this month how to paint my nails grape soda, define hypercritique, appreciate the slept-in curls of my hair.
It is awkward to be unwell, to express this without clear definition. “Sorry it’s all late, I’ve been sick” and to not elaborate on that sickness, the specific ways it kept you up all night, kept you retching or clutching something tight inside yourself which seemed to want to give birth. A stray barb or small contaminant. A numb pill. Transpiration is the process of water movement through a plant and its evaporation from aerial parts. Plants are not awkward; they just grow. Sometimes upwards, sideways; sometimes back inside themselves. Wilt logic. ‘Let’s be happy insofar as we were for a few days not infirm’ (Boyer). The ecstasy of a new morning where the body stretches out, the mind clears and one is ready to work. Who gets these mornings? Can they be traded? Is their delicious ease somehow fungible? What would I give for more of them? Fungus, rot, the fangs of lilies.
Maybe it starts with crisp garments. But pretty soon the neat attainment of day will unbutton. Watch it happen in Lorenzo Thomas’ poem ‘Euphemysticism’:
Some happily sing
They have joy for white shirts
Singing “O white shirt!”
And that’s just the start
What ecstasy to declare the white shirt! What embarrassment! The chiaroscuro of lily-white shirt against the everyday’s dull shadows, but then showing up ‘baby pictures / Of pollution becoming disaster’ and Thomas’ poem is all about this. Disaster. Headlines, emissions, confusion. And that’s just the start. ‘A man crashes with his shadow’, perhaps because there is no one else. I did this for months on end because nothing else was safe. I could go the long walk for my safe grassy spot and crash there along with my shadow. I crashed in sunshine and rain. Crashland. Why did I bring the lily. It was like being fourteen again and walking for miles just to find a safe, anonymous place to smoke or weep. Sleep crash. ‘In the prickling grass in the afternoon in August, I kept trying to find a place where my blood could rush. That was the obsolete experience of hope’ (Lisa Robertson, XEclogue). It was like staring at the potential of Marlboro Golds tucked behind books and wondering what version of me they belong to. Synecdoche. Rising swirls. The poem burns out but also gets better. Blood rush and screen crash are lyric in pop songs. Sorry my windows. They are getting cleaned today.
Narrate my day again to you.
Thomas’ poem turns to the reader: ‘I’d like to check your influence / Over these ordinarily mysterious things’. The poem takes pictures or talks about it. What is a photographer responsible for? Do they re-enchant or estrange? If someone took a picture at this point or that point, if there was evidence, who would need to be told. How do you photograph pollution? Is this merely witnessing? In the past year and more, I have become witness to my own inability to really see. Disaster itself recedes into medial condition, blood swirls, scratching matter. I think of the way Sibylle Baier sings ‘I grow old’…
Some happily sing the white shirt and are they complacent with their conditions of work? Influence! ‘Desire is a snowscape on a placemat’ (Thomas). I trace its snowy lines in the stray thread of this weave. Ant-sized bloodstain. Am I to be made safe, or eat giant buttons? Put your plate on a place elsewhere and devour the rolling hills. Artificial snow is delicious. Crinkled thread. The white line curls around my tongue like spaghetti. Lila Matsumoto has a poem, ‘Trombone’, about hammering buttons. I unbutton the top three buttons of my blouse to walk around in fifteen degrees, absorbing/zorbing, and call the sunlight oil inside me.
‘There is a risk inherent in sliding all over the place’ (Boyer). This is what language does. There is a risk in crackle, in static, in the O shape of ‘sorry’ or ‘love’ or ‘alone’. Petition to upgrade for bubble emoji.
⋰
Last night, on the train back from another city I had not visited since August, I opened Sarah Bernstein’s new novel, The Coming Bad Days (2021). I did not close this novel again for several hours, except to pass through ticket gates or beyond groups of steaming men whose presence was vaguely threatening. They seemed cardboard cut-outs, stumbling towards me. When a migraine began burning my temples, I took paracetamol and kept walking, reading. When the light became gloam I walked faster. When I got home I sat at the table and opened the book again, like a schoolchild eager to begin their homework (as a ticket to freedom) or revisit a dream. It is risky to write about something you finished barely twelve hours ago. It’s embarrassing, the way talking about illness is, or happiness. To gush. You risk offering a raw piece of thought. Something has stuck to you and you are trying to convey the exact, impossible, vicious way in which you are changed by it. Still steaming.
This is what I understand by gorgeousness. As in, I gorged on it.
In the book’s last third occurs a fabular moment. The narrator is often telling their inner life through external surroundings — textures and fluctuations of weather. This is also to tell disaster. It is not the dramatic crash so much as a slow, implacable violence whose consequence ripples below and above the surface of our lives. Sometimes there is rupture: a cyclist is hit by a motorist, a storm occurs, an unspecified act of harm is committed, a life-changing conversation alluded to. But so much is in the insidious atmospheres which turn between dream and reality, which refuse to be nailed to the moment:
I dreamt of a landscape, overgrown grass, trees blanketing a hillside, leafy canopies moving against the sky, a deep river bisecting the scene. Fat berries pulling on their stems, apples weighing down their branches. Then a breeze came through with a slow hiss, and I knew it carried poison on its back. Here was a green abundance that I could not eat, a cold stream from which I could not drink. Take care, a voice said. Take care to call things by their names.
(Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days)
In this Edenic scene of harvest and green abundance, nothing is properly named. The landscape is unspecified, generic, anywhere. The voice belongs to anyone. It could be a serpent, a god, an angel, a person. Unlike Adam, the narrator cannot name things in nature. It is not their purpose. They came to Eden in dreams and after the fall. What fruits of knowledge exist are overripe and almost a burden to their branches and vines. In addition to the biblical resonance, this passage recalled for me the fig tree motif in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963),the poison tree of William Blake’s poem from Songs of Experience (1794). Wrath is in the air, and failure. I want to wrap around the passage like a kind of vine. Hold and be held in it. Is language a kind of taking care? A watering cruelty? What are the ecological arts of attention and tending to, towards, against?
I was struck by the possibility that Bernstein’s narrator embodied the abject and porous, slow and injured thought of an anthropocenic subject. This statement feels inevitable. The only abundance they could conjure was unconscious and laced with ‘poison’. It could not be imbibed; was not nourishing. But somehow such dreams nourish the text. For all its depiction of coldness, cruelty and the failure of communication, the cold stream of suffering, the weathering of Bernstein’s lyric prose effects a possible intimacy. Weathering, for Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, ‘names a practice or a tactic: to weather means to pay attention to how bodies and places respond to weather-worlds which they are also making’. I think of the narrator skittishly eating cheese sandwiches at the window of their office, every single day of the week. I eat this sandwich with them. What is it they see? Each iterative mention of the weather reminds us that the social and interpersonal dramas of the novel are part of the medial, immersive or remote dramas of climate. The agential presence of rain, frost, clouds and fog, the turn of the waves, the ‘glistening violet evenings’: it’s more than metaphor. It sinks into the prickling skin of Bernstein’s language. Maybe you’d want to call this a weathering realism.
This novel seized me to read with compulsion, the way a dream does come and the writing of the dream is luxuriance that only later you bathe in. Not quite vulnerable or resilient. Responsive. Exposed to something.
⋰
On the 28th April 2019 (no entry for the 29th), I wrote in purple ink:
We would do better to sleep now, I have been sleeping much better and trying to resist the pull of insomnia, trying to perfect a monologue. What comes and goes in a dream without noticing, whose handwriting on the sun you recognised chancing your luck with yellow corn and fields of trials against sensitive, colours of smear and floral obstacle. Hyperboreal data flow into the crinkle cut futurity. Applying for latitude, acid.
Not sure about ‘we’: did I mean the ‘we’ of me reading back, and the ‘me’ who was writing, there in the moment? Are you also included, reading this passage over one of my shoulders? Can we take care to name things in dreams? But when I dream of people — friends, loved-ones, family, colleagues the famous — as I often do, what happens when I write their names? Am I opening them up to something that could harm or exhaust them? Is their presence a giving over of energy? Am I to be persecuted by the purple, anonymous flower of somebody’s need? What if I didn’t even know? What if the mark-making of initials was key? Will it bloom or wilt?
Go back to sleep in the forest, soft cosmos of dissolving forms.
⋰
There is a sense of missing someone that grows an acorn in your belly. It hardens and rattles with new life. It burns out of place. Leaves you with a feeling of placelessness. Impregnates every word with the possible, the fizzy wake, the fear and hurt. Makes you grow sideways. Hey. To exist in no-time of not knowing when the feeling comes. Pastel vests are back in fashion. Pull over. Kisses. Rarest flower emoji that doesn’t exist. To be sometimes well and other times racked in a well-documented madness that pays various attention to weather. Something painful. A few days of goodness seized. I would leap out the door, do 15,000 steps each day; so I would name the colour chartreuse when I saw it. Watching for changing bone structures in Zoom tiles. Your hair grown long and lemon blonde. My internet broke for a whole day and night. I felt old-timey in the pdf archive. Phoned you.
~
Bebby Doll – Weeks
Ana Roxanne – I’m Every Sparkling Woman
Zoee – Microwave
Cowgirl Clue – Cherry Jubilee
Laurel Halo – Sun to Solar
trayer tryon, Julie Byrne – new forever
Life Without Buildings – Sorrow
Cocteau Twins – My Truth
Kelsey Lu, Yves Tumor, Kelly Moran, Moses Boyd, ‘let all the poisons that lurk in the mud seep out’
Iceage – Gold City
Le Tigre – Deceptacon
FKA twigs, Headie One, Fred again.. – Don’t Judge Me
Porridge Radio – Wet Road
Angel Olsen – Alive and Dying (Waving, Smiling)
Big Thief – Off You
Perfume Genius – Valley
Grouper – Poison Tree
Sonic Youth – Providence
U.S. Maple – The State Is Bad
Sky Ferreira – Sad Dream
Waxahatchee – Fruits of My Labor (Lucinda Williams cover)
The Felice Brothers – Inferno
Bright Eyes – Train Under Water
Weyes Blood – Titanic Risen
Lucinda Williams – Save Yourself (Sharon Van Etten cover)
Hypercritique: A Sequence of Dreams for the Anthropocene
Pleased to announce a new journal article, ‘Hypercritique: A Sequence of Dreams for the Anthropocene’ is now published as part of Coils of the Serpent’s ISSUE 8 (2021): IM/POSSIBILITY: ON THE PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, AND ARTICULATION OF THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE. With thanks to the editors.
You can read the full issue for free here.
What sort of coming belongs to a dream? Existing suspended, to come, now, is to place impossible faith in the possible: that passion for “something” which answers as closure, fulfilment, echo, return. The conditional tense, “to have given us to believe”, as though this were the very text we were each receiving. And I call you from dreams like the siren, and I am more of each line, the outwards spread which you circle to end, ellipsis, still typing, which you centre but do not settle. The anthropocene, this hypothetical epoch of the lived, the literal extinction, asks us (and could it) to see ourselves coming as pure expenditure, general economy, the discharge of species.1 And so I ate the lure and let me go.
Playlist: November 2019
The hall is full of noises, sounds of torrid airs and sigh. It is a steel hall, non-place, serving lusciousness in plastic cups. The animals sing on a loop. The choir just lifts. ‘The science is clear’ (Greta Thunberg). I stayed up waiting until the cries came, curled on my little sofa. It isn’t years that slip when she starts, when the young ones start, when the colour is like a radical hydro seminar. What do you have to contribute, I give you my silks just once, clutching a ticket. Can’t stop worrying the skin of my cuticles into a bleed, scrape the hard bit sore against my thumb. She just swirls. Something has shifted between us since. She moves she. Moveable she. I can’t start up.
Two of us drift in dresses, crushed of scarlet velvet.
It has been a long time since this was honeyed. I felt sultry like an Everly Brother, his actions speak louder. On the line standing and learning, the lines, I think it hurts.
In the poem I am clipping my nails again. Words, words, words; a snip.
How is it that we sat up late, same sofa, in the skeins of this year? Have you even come down yet?
His actions speak louder than shimmer_
Bliss not this, Christmas cactus at the corner of_. Is it better to cry in the sun or the rain. The rain is so obvious. I confected a dialogue to spite the blues and the cherries, rinsing packaging in the sink. It was supposed to be red. You said it fell flat. There was a half-moon curve between us and I sat there hugging my knees. The others. I like when you say you like a riff. Let’s be as I was in the hall, champagne later, tiniest bubbling; don’t say rise, let’s hold it cute. A sippable glitch in the music. Walking home in the rain, I murmured it: wtf wtf wtf. I made this punctuation; be here now, missing the body. She does this thing with her lips; teensy bubbles taste dust of gold & angel.
Watching your arms like a symphony, fucking—
Perhaps it is not about being at all, yet I am at the table and the hydrangeas are just too much. I wish there were Silk Cuts. Deathly attendant, where writing to you at the specific moment was standing in the flashbulb of a passing car and trying to look up at the stars. Just as the stars in the valley, we visit the shire. The stars you say are most particular, yet they are anyone’s; the stars are in the garden now, a proximate shrubbery and I put on my makeup. Deep bled fuchsia into sage and clary; yet we are violets, smelling the sea. And a dram before class, something citrine to start us, blendable night. I try it again; the word ‘frenetic’ peals from me.
If history was different, wouldn’t I be singing this.
Merry season helichrysum. There is a headpiece of corals worn by the sea. A quartet of angels play the flute-hoop and daylight twists, and Greta says it more than clearly. So hot this hurts. At current emissions. Someone in the back shouts FUCK THE TORIES and I put on my shoes. I wake up to my nails not coral-red, my eyes not pressed with cornflower blue. ‘if the word / does not arise it will fall back, the thing itself, it will fall again / into that ocean where it is not biodegradable’ (Beverly Dahlen, A Reading: 11-17). The thing of the word fell back into water, lots of it deep and luxury water. I wanted to say, the word has been waiting in shallow poetics. Floats of white. Water is a memory of the water before it. That feels like love but is that a falling. Into it, into it. That ocean speaks its chords again, thingly and falling. Dear degradable, non-bio daylight; sentiments of infrared, blip of foam.
I wanted to ask, are you striking, striking. The blood clots around the skin of our thumbs. Got lost in the rhythm I leave at the door / you painted helium blue. I knew it would bring me home to you. I was immediate, here, I knew what to do. This electric hand, hello.
What did you have to almost wake up for?
There is so much to grasp, at any one point. ‘We’ll clear a trail through the forest’, Hélène Cixous says, but ‘We can’t go via the city, nor at will, nor by bus’ (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing). All those doors in the underpass, surely one was a portal? I thought it was only that you wanted me back in the leaf-trails of language. What is it that carries you now? The cold air whipped your chest and I pissed in the bushes. How much neon is the news.
Time collapsed so soft, we were in thrall of the science tiara.
We sat in this anonymous hotel lobby while the rain piled on and the beats got wet. Tresses of soaking beats. You say the only music that gets you now is pop. Continuum of sweetness in the formula lifts: the trick is melodic. So hot, you’re a burning peach. Embarrassed, I look at such childhood photos, the soft plash of it: language out of language it folds me again. Brush your hair. Softer your face, I come back to that star that is it. Approach, he holds out a finger to say, hello hello, hello you green. Is there something like a sour glissando? The bass was flat, my wilted leaves; the Styrofoam kept your guitar too warm. There are so many strings, collecting the sea. Only one you know
I was at the edge of a rainbow, sipping echinacea tea. ‘Farewell, Angelina, the sky is on fire and I must go…’ (Joan Baez, ‘Farewell, Angelina’). Do you think maybe it’s like, those emails were part of the plenum of summer, when I passed so south on the train with sugar-licked cakes of rice and a readerly silence? The sky was burnt and strange. And you could have boarded at the requisite moment, or maybe you were in the glass also, the glassery crying for the sound of drowning Amy from the game. When she did this impression of the lamb, I could not help but cry out. The aw, the aww, the missing ‘e’ in awe, a ewe. It was you. http://www.findyourfood/. Zombie tunes, sonic aporia. Mum said she nearly called me Amy, and I would have pink hair and sheaves of lyrical gestures, like this. Someone I loved had a house.
The sky is untitled.
Branding me narcopastoral, shepherdess at stringent dawn. We drag a high—
Break into it, careful at first then with clear intention. The wrapper falls back and away by clouds.
Upside down, we approach the softest waves. I’ll not harp on about the light, how it caught the crease of our plastic. You take us to the boat, so lovely and blue like sky. In the dream she unfurls her fist, a lot of blue dust comes out and her voice is thick and quick as an auctioneer’s. She has swallowed the age of the water. But we are rowing on, cordoned from time by the ripples of unforgivable sea. I want you to never forget this. Dream again—
We wandered a garden of samphire and crystal, met some friends at the edge of the blue. The grasses were singing a grassy melisma. Suffering cramps by the burning sea, the glass of the elsewhere orange, trembling sky. Scrolling my phone, I was reading an essay on birth control where the author, a man, argued that taken daily two spoons of honey would regulate your cycle. She got him by accident, a cherub handed down by the gold-dripping moon. I polished his soapstone limbs and drank from the chalice a lateral condition. Let’s go at this sideways, say every droplet of rain was a baby. Honey.
The additive birth of water, over.
Most palatial things are isles or sets.
They bring treacle scones for the picketers.
Bottles of wine for your glistening birthday. The sky is a film; it goes click, click. The season you say is looming, a moment agogic and I let you tender the rain of me down. I was all strings when the image appeared and you pulled on a tensile thread, a tease and we fell into the same whole notes…
‘Ion square, perspex swings / I breathe out, you breathe in / Permanent midnight’ (Bloc Party, ‘Ion Square’). It’s this song that feels like fucking, live in happiness, breakable day you free in a hold, before this sleep and the night bus home. I walk along the motorway. A breath between us feels like math, the ruination of the norm. I had nothing to bring you; I was reaching the end of the film where they find her dead, but only in photos. End of the lilting road. Quadratic Lily, Lily, say this is Lily. It’s just somewhere in London, and I want to love my mind. And I want to love my mind again. Did I love yours and yours too much. The fog rolls out of the square the same. When you drew me, it was like I didn’t have a face. The birches gifted their silver and I felt like sleep, so heavily berried. The sky is a film, you take it.
Trapped in acid, the hotel air is seething. I wanted breakfast to feel the same, and I wanted to love my mind; to love my mind for the sake of you in it. When the lyrics appeared it felt like the end-of-the-world digested, yes, it was a crème de menthe apocalypse — by which we mean, you can just hop in the grass of the future. Björk’s utopia. Juuuuuussssst that kiiiiiisssssssss. Perpex swings in helix of flute, could you insinuate a sleep, these spirals of harp. I’m not where I want exactly; look out the window. Sugar-rim. They pay less, pay less, pay less. A shot.
By the time I got back, the leaves were all gone. The stars, as if they were plural.
In the belly of the gnarliest graphics / I felt impaled on a former capital. There is luxury in the curriculum, but we live off our clearest cakes of rice. Break this as crumbs, don’t say word / The consoles cast their dust again. Press replay. I wanted to lie in a field, but that was you. A salty fist. I wanted the lie. Little curled hairs in the sink. Your name is doing well / Look where it got you.
The university a corpus ate the rat.
I was tired, you were tired, my mum was tired. This makes a rainstorm a screensaver.
Has anyone notified the trapeze artists about our sea?
Most things don’t occur as they do in this space. It flexes and folds in lucite, yet against the glint, less of your mobius eye. Roll it up, like a wave. We wait for the bus and it rolls in smoke / I press my faceless against the glass.
~
Bloc Party — Ion Square
Björk, Arca — The Gate
FKA twigs — home with you
Double Discone — Sam’s Kinky Hat
Clearance — Chances Are
Bradford Cox — Natural Harp Monitor
Princess Nokia — Balenciaga
DJ Heroin — My Veil
Grace Cummings — Paisley
Alice Coltrane — Lovely Sky Boat
Malibu — Nana (Like A Star Made For Me)
Hiro Kone — A Desire, Nameless
Hannah Peel ft. Hayden Thorpe — Cars In The Garden
The Brian Jonestown Massacre — Food for Clouds
Maija Sofia — The Glitter
Tomberlin — Seventeen
Weyes Blood — Seven Words
Soko — Sweet Sound of Ignorance
RF Shannon — Snake Oil
Caroline Polachek — So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings
The Everly Brothers — Love Hurts
The Cure — Charlotte Sometimes
Princess Chelsea — Come As You Are
Astrud Gilberto — Look To The Rainbow
Playlist: October 2019
Ana Vaz has this film-in-progress, what she calls a ‘saga’: The Voyage Out (2016-ongoing). She begins with a projector showing nought but a scratchy, flickering red of varying hue, she reads over it carefully. There are different types of mutation: the body in a state of desire, the body in a state of trauma. When I am close to you, my body changes, my senses heighten. A hormone accelerates at the start of a touch. Irradiated so, changes to my cell structure alter forever. These are taboo subjects. Whose voice would we have to inhabit to live the troubles we stay with? Occidentally speaking, I have been lucky. I have not yet been exposed. At the end of the film, fireworks explode in vivid asynchrony with flowers, swaying in the breeze. There is life. Iterative light, noise, flicker. The fireworks are revelatory, would it be to crass to say like sex. She reads very softly, as though at the mid-point of this gyre we are caught in. There is a slippage between shock and pleasure, pain and sweetness: those flowers, their yellow burning between shots of the other colours, popping off with gunpowder and spark. Closing my eyes I see hundreds of black-eyed susans, flashing. It is a Sunday, after all or nothing.
What of our labouring fingers were jaundiced with turmeric? What language is it that starts a week? What curl of black hair is found upon the illustrated daisy? What occupation would fashion a consistent indigo? What message would you send me to say the end-world is good as the first? It feels like science-fiction.
In 16mm stock, colour is hungry. It lusts for presence. We filmed a trembling nest and waited for the eggs to fall. You could flip the lid of each egg and pull out a gooey universe: look, your stars are dripping. Hold record. If I was filming my writing, would the running vanish? For it would surely reach a point. I sap my writing of colour to get bone-clean in the morning. I take stills from the vaguest hour of this vanishing. There is land, a woven bracelet, a live wire. The first thing I wove for you, was it a fungible dream you gave me? The eggs break exit.
Contrary motion, contretemps. I had read of the wildfires after midnight, I could not sleep; I was craving fever. In the morning, quivering, there were all these fiery leaves. October you are topaz, colossal with multiple facets, burning. All of your facets, reflecting streams in brilliant cleavage. I pour orange on you, god pouring gold, I tilt the tap. There is all this fizz inside you, bubbles rising up to your hard smooth surface. Added orange, you change opacity. Brisk/kick; what it takes to leave. I think about what it would mean to break off a chunk, polish and wear you. October, a perfect solitaire. You ask what it is I am promising. I promise this month to you. A stone you could swallow. A flashback.
The clouds move west with glitching frequency. It is 1 degrees celsius as I write this, partly cloudy, 10% chance of rain. Only a particle ice. From level nine I spent ten minutes watching the distant turbines, gracing the hills without name. The sun went down on Saturday; the clocks went back. I lost a health, cherry-red after cherry-red. Clots of the dark came and I talk too much, as though just to exist was auto-theory. Say an unfamiliar hand drags silt from a perishing island, pulling out luminous eggs. Say you could eat one whole and raw. Say there was a commons, a luminous commons inside it. Longitudinal, awaiting the nourishing rain. A fridgeful of wilted spinach. Say you fainted.
I switch accounts and fall out of the handsome ashcloud. Erstwhile to the eating, there was a glossy aporia starting to form close to the zone. So I circled the trees with you, came back to the bench. A child drew our portraits as double ovals, adorned with lines. Knots of pain convect in my back. How pink the sandstone tenements look, like gleaming chunks of spam, the year’s first frost a salt. Click here, please just do it for me; the scene can refresh itself.
Björk says a “gorgeousness”. ‘No one / bears witness for the / witness’, says Paul Celan. New poems from snowflakes are not just hipster. My empty cryalog started to melt, its position on the internet’s dissolve. We grow interested in the broken links, the page not found. I want to ask how this happened, but something feels prohibited, as though I were enquiring after a personal illness. But where does the work belong, who is responsible?
How we met. There was a midnight, a new bleach, a sloshing of soda and gin. Someone was sticking a plastic fork in the heart of their chicken pakora, staking claim to euphoria like a triumph in football. Mary Ruefle says it is ‘One of the loveliest possibilities / […] that the truth is made of glass’. Someone came behind with me and broke all the empty fishbowls. I was collecting their thick curved shards for hours, like pieces of easter egg I could not eat. For I would cut my mouth into meat again.
I copied the recipe for orange brownies, I copied a verily thought. There were measurements.
On the phone we talked personal crisis, plans for the weekend. I felt supine in the drain of my data. The cats were terrific, elastic in their relaxing spines. The concrete turned to milk underfoot. It did it just for them. They stretched themselves warmly out of season.
Email says: use research to promote equity. Dreamily reading the email. Weather dry, bright, crisp and cold. Little abrasions on my skin, little ways I am called back. Teasing out soundbites.
Fireworks and flowers. Daylight becomes an equation. I trade it for slices of fruit, think about the cut on my cheek and why it happened. Blue jumper, red text, red leaves (so cherry-red!), pieces of yellow in the beech leaves, black hair, cream linen bag, blue sky, blue capital.
I grill goats cheese on a baguette, plummed with chutney; I settle into the day. The city feels accidental to the fact of other contacts. ‘A good kind of pain, like a strong kind of theory’. I was reading Sedgewick, thinking about loops and silk. Where you said the poems were textured. Kissing stops at history. All that writing about snow, as though the snow itself were a thirst. Pour all the cinders down the sink.
Octopi on MDMA.
Octagonal mandy.
October magical.
There were all these facets, slants of contact, exchanges of touch and light. All the red smudged off the days. The girl in the foyer, saying over and over “I’m from Maine”, as though it were self-explanatory.
This month I can’t start or complete in the mess of a century. Dot dot dot. Cancel anytime, at the station eating a cheese sandwich letting the crumbs mess your velvet. This is anyone, this is anyone’s month. I saw three squirrels run across the road.
The art depicted a pale blue cloth, an assortment of roving peaches. I knew the peach was more than a prop. Navy ink stained my bedsheets, the creases were moving, the peaches tasted bad and winter. Mum says her dad would skin a peach of its fur every time.
The contestation of tenderness, the flicker at the heart of the light, the symbolic cocaine. When a flower folds towards the year. Find me in the flailing leaves, the syrupy windows splashed with light, the typing. We get all the way down to the minuses.
~
Floating Points — Last Bloom
Gelatine — Heavy Sheets
Black Marble — Grey Eyeliner
Hiro Kone — A Fossil Begins to Bray
Aisha Devi — The Favour of Fire
Lanark Artefax — Corra Linn
Portico Quartet — Immediately Visible
POLIÇA — Driving
Porches — rangerover
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds — Bright Horses
Angel Olsen — Summer
Wilco — Everyone Hides
Matt Berninger, Phoebe Bridgers — Walking on a String
This Mortal Coil — Kangaroo
Grouper — Alien Observer
Bob Dylan — Boots of Spanish Leather
Big Thief — Cut My Hair
Vagabon — The Embers
Infinity Crush — lunar pull
Karen Dalton — Katie Cruel
Arthur Russell — You Did it Yourself
Saint Etienne — You’re in a Bad Way
The Delgados — Coming in from the Cold
Coma Cinema — Caroline, Please Kill Me
Sufjan Stevens, Timo Andres — IV
Angie McMahon — Take It With Me
Weyes Blood — Wild Time
Playlist: September 2019
Poetry is a great consolation for all the ways you fail to be present.
— Eileen Myles
Did I not have a dream of horses and document. The document was very full indeed, if you can standardise what a document should look like in full. Its no print zone. The document started to lag, by dint of its size. I was flitting between offices with my hands like noons that smelled of yesterdays. The positive rage of all this. Collapse on the library floor while freshers fly staples through the air in click & spring and if I tried to type it was only to make the time faster. But faster only to go backwards, in a kind of MSP political-orgiastics ‘Yes’ sort of way by rewind. In the thrift shop, bearing my huge pink book to the counter, ignoring the diamond earrings. “Who?”
& a wound in the name for a tree. Trochee. Freely moving
glitch & clasp.
The document bloated with calyxes of unquotable glass. We are usually green, but lately the politics abused us to violet. Perianth refracting the thing that most excites, the lightning. If a bolt struck the whorl of a flower. They die in graves of obscurity, loamy soil for the paparazzi.
Remember we drank a non-trademarked cola. I hid beneath a canopy of photographs.
No, I will write this simply instead. September is a series of concentric air bubbles, each of them gleaming rainbow mutual. A series of unanswered emails, illnesses, unreadable entries in one of several notebooks. If a leave flows, the oak will shiver. There were a lot of books! The books were in towers, guarded by long blonde hair and wine. The air smelled of plimsolls. I slumbered dearly on the train, reading of clouds. Remember when clouds were a feature of sky. In the aftermath, there will always be tinsel. Books will cost what albums used to.
Bloated economy.
Block chain.
Bubbles he would drown without, sonic, and how I went anyway, breathably pink.
I was surprised at the glass that came out of me, sequined at the disco. I slammed the fridge door to spite the silent conservatory. Men came to be sweet with numbers and glasses of milk, the wrong glass type for the glass I needed. For I had been bleeding, heavily, from my perch. They smelled the blood across the bar, they always do. Swerve across lights to find me. Listen to hip hop, softcore; implore, implore.
Off to Jupiter, via the lily pads. I phoned citizens advice to protect my weekends.
What if instead they brought me coffee? Many times this month in the Pret on Lothian Road, nursing a 99p filter, shaking my skin of the rain. This liquid has excellent shadows. My palette changed like the colour of coral. I was being bleached, as though salt were coursing through my veins. So ho[a]rse, the coarseness.
At the end of the world, was there blog posts?
Once more, with chicory.
Who could remember the first deception? It was a hothouse flower, swaying in the programmed breeze with a smile. Stupid hothouse flower. You won’t grow taller than me.
I am the horse from a Dorothea Lasky poem, ‘black smoke’ and ‘the squeaky noise at night’. Mostly paper and things that “start”.
I am a failure for having never tried a Girl Scout cookie. Adult tastes are savoury. If you recall, my data pertained mostly to alarms for marmalade, pills and scree. We spread it all upon the rocks. I was thinking about Sophie Robinson and ‘fucking up on the rocks’ and a drunk sensation beyond me, like sewing your skin to the air and having it pulled so tight by the breeze. Whose breeze is it forever. Wordsworths I believed before. Grave trip. That photo of the pop punk hero in a hospital bed with a bloated liver, my phone cracked of shame and screen, eyelashes curled in the sheets with your curls of hair. A cereal.
You pop one bubble, you give into the next. All of my glitzy messages, failing. A water lettuce of vitreous finish, salvaged with salt. We dined upon tips from a haircut. I was so thirsty.
“What matters is the passion alone, and your polo neck.”
The man that was named after myrrh and water. I stood in front of the hundreds, played licking at carpets to catch the box. What if you won and you’d reconstruct it, rip by rip, to make a home. And we lived in that like sulphites, crying.
All of my friends, erasing tattoos.
A week of walking.
Walk the week
Walk the week
The pace of her voice fitted my walk and I saw that Lock 27 was open. The colour of lager in springborn hangover; the back of my throat. Kept walking for the sake of the cloudless sky. Craving rainbows, sugar, arcadia. A harvest moon glowed as I made my way home, listening to Titanic Rising as nameless birds made their roost inside me.
There was a launch, the end of a diary, a new kind of wildness.
I stop my breath at the stop. At Wembury Beach, I go barefoot in the sun-warmed pools. Silver gelatine in lieu of a sky. The world pictures us back, I feel pinholed & nearly a cinder. What do we mean when we talk of aries. The track marks of cormorants were a font. Sticky toffee aporias of sense, a sugary endlessness. Plymouth.
<Oculus diacritic>
Train take me east, where the time goes slower. We can hear the waves from the wall again.
We can hear the waves from the wall again. And the horses, horses. Horses come out of the sea. So many white horses, ‘and the ground shook I got this feeling so strong for the first time ever, then I just put my eyes down on my knees and covered my ears’ (Alan Warner, Morvern Callar).
I woke up to ‘Carry Me, Ohio’ and the soundless canal with the slender girl, swallowing whisky from a watering can. Things slid down my cheeks. In the border of drunken plants, we thinned in hormonal resilience. From the dream-gig returning with postcards. Imagine return to implore, say over. Press that lovely Enter.
“One of us is a mushroom.”
What Rachel has to say about roads.
I had the new books and the covers; the poem felt like a cover I was singing it so much I forgot the truth. Do you have the time, a laminate silk.
I was so tired I could hardly lift my eyes to roll.
She screamed the city through my ears for me.
Trolling in the pleistocene, trolling waters. They triggered my sorrows set to fleek.
My phone died in the south side I was wandering around at some pace. The exhibition opened out into shimmer and light, in dramas of beauty and violence. Not violent beauty. Not violent. Kept saying it as the ornaments turned. Art. Art. Art is a finishing. I felt cliché in the gardens afterwards, sipping chardonnay alone, reading Mary Ruefle:
There are poets who are resigned to not being able to save the world, who barely have enough time to catch up with themselves and the attendant mystery of their fear and being.
(Madness, Rack and Honey)
Once again, twice over the text. A hardening gold. School girls shrieked in their uniforms, throwing rocks at each other. Their mothers drank wine like me, but talked. The air started to simmer as the shadows came over and I realised too early that it was no longer summer, despite the heat; the mind crisped at its fringes with golden exhaustion. I got sick. I climbed into a lighthouse / It was a very bright house. The light over the sea was gold and also.
Type slowly, time is stained.
New clouds fill the lines, like something extraneous from the hand of Klee. Shaky coke. Vegan bakery caper / The Archers. Narrative is this luxurious telling from the ethnographers’ disco. I put down my reflexes one by one for an earnest thought. He broke a glass. A surprise encounter. I drank until the bubbles soothed my burning throat. A toast to books
Between thick slices of books. The brain. Splayed on Marmorie Paper. Someone I loved had a house and filled it with spiders, drawing silver all over the rooms in complex geometries; the house was teeming with lines and if you passed through they’d stick to you. The resultant tattoos gleamed with mercury; you could tap a needle on the line to coax a red. The little ones come out the dark, they were crawling with cries. Lasers of silk and intrigue!
I close my eyes to salt again. “Away / Shyest.”
There was no moment of ‘disembarking’ in the green-hued dream of Shetland. At the hostel I lay in the bottom bunk dreaming of ink in my veins. I peeled apples for the invalids of the moon. We colonised the office with shades of blue.
Remastered the inches of that single. His voice quicksilvered the rain. I warmed.
Walked around listening to Lana, blood-lilted by a Larabar. My session timed out where the space exceeded.
Did you spell the calorie correctly.
I ate until the morning came
Lately /
A file name
Adjusts us.
~
Neil Young — After the Gold Rush
Sun Kil Moon — Garden of Lavender
The National — Terrible Love
This Mortal Coil — Another Day
The Innocence Mission — The Lakes of Canada 2019
Lens Mozer — Cut My Heart in Two
Electrelane — Birds
Cate le Bon, Bradford Cox — Secretary
Purple Mountains — Nights That Won’t Happen
Angel Olsen — Lark
(Sandy) Alex G — In My Arms
Black Belt Eagle Scout — Soft Stud
Infinity Crush — virtual heaven
Vagabon — Water Me Down
Perfume Genius — Eye in the Wall
DIIV — Blankenship
Thee Oh Sees — Plastic Plant
The Nightblooms — One Weak Moment
Mark Hollis — Inside Looking Out
mariaology 