Some pages from a notebook kept while invigilating The Palace of Humming Trees (French Street Studios, 2021) during a thunderstorm in August.
from Palace of Humming Trees Notebook (1)
Category: lists
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
notebooks
Playlist: January 2021
Not long ago a blog was destroyed. Inside the blog was a forest; what they called forest but by all intents and purposes was more the unknown contribution to chronology which made up many pages of codes and trees. Codes and trees. The liquor in a small pool was seemingly endless dirty martini, where olives float in lieu of lilies. I meant to say it was destroyed and the incident being customisable, now to look back, I see a particular man at sunset wielding buttons. Pop, pluck, glock. Boys share the same blouse as me. Then gingham and dungarees to write in the blog another hour or more, sleeves rolled, plunging seasons into seasons. Keep yourself sewn. Don’t get shot. This winter will you change your life. This summer will you lose it. All of the paper incineration. Sound of artificial camera flash in the dark, razor the code from the trees. This change, not the life, not necessarily. Scrolling the trees.
What will it take for the server to work? There was a dark room of my childhood filled with blinking lights, layer-bake hard drives, wires and cables. Bringing you coffee, I go there closing my eyes to the electronic warmth at the heart of the office. Whose office is this? How can I work there? Will you give me a job? I am a fine typist / I like the word ‘twilight’.
But not long ago, a blog was destroyed. We were in generic city, you know the one with buildings, and something swerved into us. I was scared at first, weren’t you? We kept left-clicking the breeze to stop, but the way your hair looked, lifted — I could’ve almost gone with it, the hum and song of the breeze just pink. Remembering lines like ‘January is endless’ and ‘the Northern Line is the loudest’ as I consent to give cookies, consent to be multiplied in the archive of giving me moments in capital city; where is my iPod? Small things you can do, exchange of fruit, the scale of it. Something swerved into us. I was scared at first, weren’t you? My blood was all scattering berries, clots, poisons. We knew the album was amazing. We said this many times. I said we have to see a doctor. Just a guess but the crescendo fucking kills me. I breathed too hard it was scary. The road was quiet but something swerved into us. Couldn’t tell if it was a truck or a set of emotions. Kisses from France. I was climbing to get to the good bit. This is a painful song coming on I won’t talk about further, being dull and adult, seeing old college friends lost. What is a moon. I said we have to see a doctor and we did, we got in line outside with our masks; it was a time before masks but I add them. Losing your pearls, losing your solace barometer. Remember X overmind of me. We were turned away at the last. Did not see doctor. Jellyfish. I wore the blouse that all the boys wore, proudly.
Driving to Brighton, not driving to Brighton.
The ocean washed up masses of cash, bank notes sticky with kelp and salt, tons of pennies in lieu of pebbles, bits of glass. I paid for a book of poems with a cheque signed on behalf of my father. I paid for my life. The blog lived inside of the sea. It was being destroyed and so the blog called tsunami. It had a world in it. Tsunami_93. Commission you tell me the endless failures of Wednesday, Thursday, watching the ants by the ocean accumulate broadband costs. Watching the ants and cash. Spiralling ants and cash. I said something swerved into us, it was fucking horrible. I saw it, the long hard crash of the numbers, upwards. The colony of allied ants just clicking away in the dark like we already knew them. A politician comes and goes from the hole where you fall through, nightly, clutching at sand. A burlesque of sleep. The patent glitter of policy, it gets in your body. The ants made a moat of the hospital.
Silently, you came to town in my closing dream which was killing our molars from kissing too much in any forsaken house by the sea, endless you climb inside me — figure this in, you figure this out. Sometimes the text at the bottom of the page just disappears. Tell you a blog was destroyed and my concern is for glutinous sentences, stretching. Planetary hardship was relative. Tell me, hold me. I write about dying in my diary, how will it feel to be six or five and not knowing about the dying, how will it feel to look back knowing you lived through it. Tear off the blouse the boys gave to me. There is a coming through of such dreams I have had, splashes of sick pink light, infinite distance — and can I say the animal I never met was nice, they were so nice, the album was amazing. The animal pronoun that therefore I am. Something swerved into us; it was the whole fat year of pink rain. Where a blog was destroyed, you put down the stone. It is shaped like a heart that needs convincing to beat.
Kept diaries of numbers kept easy job kept crying. Felt like portraits of femmes in rose blush and yellow and emerald green, leaking, felt like looking into you back from Matisse or wherever it was in generic city we saw what doesn’t is seen. Domestic bliss. I remember the wires in my childhood were totally opaque. Quiet symphony of dialup and call you. eBay and a “flurry of cosy ideas” says eye, closing for the last time, plated. Down a long gold tunnel and DNS error. “Are you alright? Are you alright?” I hate this question but whacking a drum and bass beat right HERE was good, if originally ballad but easy
to me, this song is less about a particular situation, and more about that feeling you get looking back
on things that have meant a lot to you, or you
feel could have meant more
I hide the application anyway. It is spring 2008, no forests exist, the bathroom sounds of lemongrass scent and harshest bleach. I’m sick. I’m sick of parks I want genuine forestry and a place to be lost and call you. I remember football on the low green, barging into silver, not knowing a wave meant more disease. Not knowing the waves as anything other than the earnest self-abuse of the sea. Salt heal. It hurt to listen by the long thin phrase of your cigarette, smoke getting up in the hours of my eyes. I remember kissing in tents / remember running home drunk from school. Remember who watched us. The man who squared-up for no good reason other than the sound his own voice made, which was a sound of bright cash howled from the sandy reminder. There are memory dunes where stuff piles up, stuff gets sucked or dragged away. Stuff gets pissed on. Something swerved into us and we did not phone the cops. I carried the hurt for a while instead. Walked from one end of the green to the other. Now in the city. On the mobile phone a big red sound passed beta-waves through us and you asked, “what was that?” and pleaded “please don’t die”. I minimise the year, I always reply. I fantasise portals to London.
Dreamt the prime minister was crying on Mars for the ninth time and it was a ninth wave and it was very bee loud it was glandular. Second wave, third wave, watch out for next winter. A man who swallowed all of the cash of the sea was blatant in wanting to touch this and ruin my life. It hurt to listen. A novelty sermon on visions, ecstasies, roses and bread. Something H.D. says about a jellyfish and will you sign up for infinity melt club — it requires the overmind, sad to miss, buoyed up by salt water always. We passed the number we wanted not to pass. Will Alexander writes that poetics is ‘a place where language becomes a fertilised concentration that explodes’. I’m talking about everything we used to do. Another life. Voice barely makes it to audible status. Every month I turn fifteen again and my mouth tastes of Yorkie bars, acid, ice cubes painted with crude sweet oil, Diet Coke, extra salt. Maria, it says, and I wonder. Someone is a shadow they are painting the walls with it, more and more, the paint fizzes up. Crude sweet oil, the blouse of the boys. Softly you bring me the water, more of it, enormous with cash, I hate it. I mix all the paint with us.
That person who used to work, I miss her. January is endless. Should the blog be destroyed? It was Platonic like kissing the stone at the place where sunflowers grew upside-down by a crumbled temple, they let us go. You say, “this is wretched” then turn on the radio. Elliott Smith in front of a mural, covering The Beatles. That I a girl from Maybole would like to be consulted; would like consultation. Because. The doctor turned us down. The river was frozen. Salt. Pretzels of fallopian tubes. Someone on the radio said poverty. The blog consolation of be love because you. Remarkably clean air I remember? What comes next is older and older, how early the cruel was, forecast, thinking in paradigms and not glassware. “You look young!” It might be I always hold out. Still you smash, the failures of Tuesday, no melatonin. Blissing Chamomile Mountain. Payne’s Gray, Davy’s Gray, Naples Yellow. Salacious impression of what is a gesture. I have all these dreams about ladders like—
å̷͈̳̉u̵̞̰͊̐̕ba̵̱̺͌͊̏de
The problem of the marry a cloud of the martyred morning
In the soft-touching laminate space of the morning
The promise of a landing, striped by the morning
We edit cumulus, collect yon fish by the morning
A rain passed wetly over our morning
The actual cat got into the morning
My proletarian alignment against the morning
Is only a maths class happening this morning
Did you want palaces in the light of this morning
To feel you never got hurt this morning
When it swerved into you in the morning
Of comparative hotness at morning
Equivalent to mattresses morning
That planets lie down inside us, warming
And the flowery agenda of what they would do to avoid this scarcity. Kept saying science, science like a car advert, £500, kept you awake at night. Salt. The technology trusts us! Liberating production to what freeing from labour a person being careful would order milkshake. Water this artificial strawberry. Audit the communal blog was destroyed. Salt and oil. A wheat field in a movie. I remember aspartame sunrise at which close to the not-top of Louise Bourgeois’ many ladders was a droplet of hooch blood, red-to-punk-pink. Under the fairy lit trails of Tuesday, I said FUCK YOU to the motorist, I said OUCH! Today is Blue Day, tomorrow is Green Day; expropriation of serotonin to Bad Day, it is quite a state; put back ice that you stay on, tulips; a sugar-lift etch to keep say [“I miss the nineties”] belong to my early days of still love indie. Weeks become necklaces I am choked inside them. Tending the forest, drive out of the city. Impossible tacos in landfills pass us, having never harmed animals. Nothing swerved ever in heaven; you get really close.
Study the lightning-shaped graze on my knee.
~
Burial – Chemz
SOPHIE – Is It Cold In the Water?
Honeyblood – Super Rat
Billie Eilish, ROSALÍA – Lo Vas A Olvidar
Sharon Van Etten – Serpents
Widowspeak – Sanguine
Infinity Knives – In The Mouth of Sadness
Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails Over The Country Club
Xiu Xiu, Liz Harris – A Bottle of Rum
Fishtalk – Hummingbirds
Los Campesinos! – Got Stendhal’s
Tim Heidecker, Weyes Blood – Oh How We Drift Away
The Antlers – Solstice – Edit
Songs: Ohia – Boys
Field Medic – chamomile
Vagabon, Courtney Barnett – Reason to Believe (Karen Dalton cover)
Sun June – Everything I had
Coma Cinema – In Lieu of Flowers
This Familiar Smile – Flawed Fables
Hamburger – Supersad
Donovan – Colours
The Velvet Underground – Sweet Jane
The Replacements – Skyway
Playlist: December 2020
PART ONE: FLOWER NEUROSIS
There is a place where these supermassive roses might be planted. A harsh place that exists at thin resolution, we have to resample; I am doing the maths to know how 100gb permits her entrance. The process slows because this behaviour is not natural. Her entrance with the roses bundled in giant’s arms, and the long tresses of foam and seven neat words she has tucked in a satchel of crocheted pea proteins. She is attuned to a certain instant where it works that she plants the roses. They are gnarly, monstrous, thirsty. The roses are not sober. And the girl? She stumbles on her third negroni, abstracted, poured by the silent one who inhabits the hedgerows. Vermouth of sun, gin of moon, aperitif of the bitterwort and marshes, garnished with wedges of orange from overseas. These seven neat words I will not tell you with her lips sealed blood sugar, femme confection, a certain rain, a squall.
The clarity is lost a little when we adjust figures. But the girl is still there, in the corner maybe, bundled from sight with impossible flowers. What do we know of a girl and her flowers? She could be a waitress, a bridesmaid, a funeral attendant — but no, this is extravagance to belie all such professions. The flowers won’t fit in the picture this is. It is not merely to carry. Some say they are hyperobjects, but if so, what of the girl? She is also beyond human proportion; she would live a thousand years. Sprinkle hundreds and thousands of leap years merely upon breakfast, and yet at nineteen does she not look a million? If you were to splay the fine skin between her thumb and forefinger, you would begin to see the star stuff which flows in human capillaries. But at such resolution!
Of her face since nineteen, the narrator of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover [L’Amant] (1984) writes: ‘But my face hasn’t collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste’. So when the girl lay down for another of her size; they were a cloud, it rained, the girl awoke with child. But she gave birth to nothing but roses. She was a fixture of the processing plant. Initially, sealed in mousseline baubles, they were not even roses but rosehips clustered among thorned vines. And you would imagine these vines entwined with her spine, climbing them as if the destiny was always her neck. She would speak at night, tapping the fine glass, warming them as eggs. Give everything away: the rose-meat of petals and their pale, inward jam, hatching saps, their crying.
A cloud always passes, it creases the sky. Cars go in and out at night.
~
The fruit of rose, especially a wild kind
when I write of a Mary Sue
or brush her teeth, when she is more tall
than willow and yet I have set her colours inverse
so in reaching for rosehips she must reach into shadow
and isn’t that all
in the working day of dreams is deferral
of Edenic cinema, she grows in wilderness
also known as the fortress of lossy compression
where trees are shaky with original pixels
and her clothes are torn as mine would be
crying forever by the sea
with my dairy allergy for twilight
‘The blues are because you’re getting fat
and maybe it’s been raining too long’
and if she is me then I am she
rehearsing definitions for litany
via prayer, supplication, complaint
am I a melt vector on cutting board
you call me aslant with the knife tucked close
to cupid’s bow of my lips
‘she was noted for her command of dialogue’
but no one said anything
lipsticks: sweet chestnut, amarena red
tender rose and orange delight
shaking the rosehips all night for Roman god
of erotic love is just rare labour
of the shepherds in pleasantview, saying sorry
or what colour your blouse is, mine is damask
you could press to make attar
so I know how I love
is mother puts glitter on a wreath
of ivy and dying hydrangeas
to hang on the door, entrance Mx
I give you generally acceptable apples
the shop called jazz, they are wrapped in plastic
we look up to see the planets ‘almost touching’
but they are something else entirely
easy, lucky or free. These green diamonds
don’t occur in the wild;
she makes them from slices of apple
glitch effect plumbob
oil of rose is condensation
a playable simulation
novelist in decline
as I lick the sea wall
cast this upwards
to where another hour is ravished
you start to read.
PART TWO: SACRED PORRIDGE
Perhaps this would be enough of the rose-girl if she would stop haunting me. I dreamed Bernadette Mayer wrote a novel overnight, it was midsummer, she was 27 and had a fountain pen the size of the Eiffel Tower. Tell me what she was smoking, was it Marlboro or lemongrass? Maybe cloves? I get mixed up, I’m darks and pastels, nobody likes me. Open a beer to share regardless / Crude oil streams from her words. I became suspicious the rose-girl was a fiction of Bernadette’s, that I was stuck in the internet fiction and whittled away. There was a poem called ‘Thorn’ about a penis. Brexit or no Brexit, I was anyway hoarding tins of beans in the hope they would get me somewhere – a similar purpose to breakfast. Recite to me from memory these stats about lactose, creatine, muscle enhancement. I lift my arms to reach you, I am hauled to the new wall painted mint to match the green iris tea of your eyes, it’s Greenwich Park / I am spent with apple pips and cauliflower hallways. I want to be hurled across continents sprightly / put acorn in pocket. I am not her but she is me, here, in a harsh place. You are the smoothest nut! What was the novel? I don’t know, I have this line: ‘the negative capability of raisins’. Don’t kill the squirrels! Sunday you make porridge with peanuts, sour cream, biscuit, honey, drops of chocolate, muscovado sugar, extra milk of oat – why not acorns? The rose-girl watches. Her breath is a draught.
She is so huge you would miss her. All December the faint scent of her pea satchel follows me so I know I couldn’t possibly have corona. Plunge my nose in vegetal folds. I would be the aura of plasma around her sun, that’s all and merely. Does it rot? The size of these roses, really, is impossible to measure. Expect several hundred metres or miles, stumbling in the world of error where we go to buy bread. Is it for months you have been a tile, a talking head? You are very delicate and I stroke your nice hair, which loosens through the screen to meet me waterfall. I climb to the top of the beanstalk we braided from eating well. We read Lee Harwood in the rain, As Your Eyes are Blue, and drink mulled wine. I guess I am riding horses to catch up with the size of these roses, blue ones also, fat and mellow. Jackie Wang calls this ‘outlaw jouissance’; a phrase I wrote in my notebook, quickly. The line gets whipped! I think about Cy Twombly. The horses are all kinds of colours, but mostly the pearlescence of inside seashells, or mollusc aurora’d in a way that seems Björk or genital. I suppose the rose-girl arranges them nightly as saints do, genial; I suppose it is like Sylvanian families. Sometimes from copses of rowans, the tops of the miniature or minotaur trees, red-berried painted I read her Sylvia Plath. My poison voice must catch the wind exact, ‘The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea / And comes from a country far away as health’, as health shall be a human dimension, unrhymed, the rose-girl considers. She is the only one of us who has seen a corpse flower, in a third-floor apartment where somebody important had smuggled the seeds from Chicago, where was she. The corpse flower is not a singular flower but a cluster of blooms, and so is she. It all stinks, I say, so I don’t have corona. If you touch the flanks of these horses so smooth your hands will vanish in gossamer, they become other materials, still smell like hay. This viscosity to friction feels good, it’s lush with endorphins — why don’t you try it. The water is warmly you and me, like the sea; it comes from the eyes of the rose-girl, crying.
~
There’s still time to shop, you collect from store
towards a possible come on let’s go of the literal
it stings, who you would be in the dream
not the enemy’s eye
or the unripe banana
I stayed in bed til mid-afternoon
writing feel-thesis, correcting citations of Clarice Lispector
it’s Christmas, you know
I don’t have corona
on the phone to Avanti the songs are played in such intervals
of 45 seconds as to make you hate
the very nature of a chord progression
is desire’s deferral and will you secure a seat for us
at motion sickness
what is necessity feels like
Velocity is I am washing my hair
with tar shampoo and cider vinegar.
Come close, wish soon,
revese December.
Should I call someone?
It might be you,
explaining multiplication to me, you carry the one
and the two, and then I never do
read my old diaries
smelling of blood and sleep deprivation
acrid bulimia, spray of A7
garlic mussels, scarlet muscles
my brother says he will donate his plasma
for medical causes, have I fear of needles?
Lady bird shell collect
bathroom dust, antibodies, I am clean
and typeset like the stars. You open my coat
because of this Reynauds, too cold
to unbutton. My anhedonia
is cyclical, I stick little poems to the wall
they go like
once upon a midnight weary
came the lovers on a ferry
they were drunk and very old
but never had they had a cold
over the hills and overseas
they could be you or even me
It’s like the Friday of 2019
I read Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant journals
from low-res pdf festive darkness
crying in trashland
and couldn’t stop tasting purple for a week
of otherwise phantosmia, what I smelled was
the crushed illustrious rose of infinity
pinned to my bittersweet nasal cavity
as I am to watch corpse flower time-lapse
resemble green diamond, they erect an umbrella
and a rare titan arum bloom
beneath you
typing at the library am I
bike spoke, a concept strike
for closing the erstwhile windows?
Click to know mood…
We keep going
We leap in a pool of pure negroni
and my lungs keep coming up blossom of orange
and call you
“Hey everyone
welcome back to the room, you can open your eyes now”
Like probably I have told you before
about the band I am starting, a synth-punk
deathcore revivalist outfit called Yoga with Adriene
I have her permission, she says
May all beings be happy
Move from a place of connect
Present and awake
Love your neighbour
Things get better, they have to
It’s a revolution of the muscular laxation
of the life you find cored
If you have apple belly
thick-skinned of futurity, there will be a chorus and verse for this
that goes like scream
Motive, Trust, Floor,
High, Kindle, Salve,
Soften, Strength &
Harmony
My thighs are burning brightly, it’s the end
friend of my Norwich or Brighton, Manchester, Glasgow
and some kind of New York resemblance
is ‘cracking America’ at the top of your list
I have never been to the south coast
of an average celestial body
yet watering your houseplants
I won’t go viral in the night with pills and tweets
There’s no cheating in yoga, you make it your own
as I do cartwheels on a leap day of acid comedown
they say I do it too fast
the flight gets in and distant cat miaows
as I do kiss you
a lot they say
catharsis is found in the blues
and green laps up the rest is stretching
if you can only find it
like the sweet spot asana with arm across chest
I am become rowan tree, flexing queen of the prom
you pluck fruit pastilles
from inside me the sea,
first try is easy.
PART THREE: TENDER ALPHABET
A. will write in the time of commute
B. prefers spearmint toothpaste
C. is inside of me
D. the size of Paris cumulus
E. is all you can eat, ecstasy
F. who I love
G. has grown
H. the hendecasyllabic I fail to write
I. doesn’t rightly exist
J. sends endless emails
K. is a joke
L. for loosening jewellery
M. with dark sweet cherries and doubles
N. conspicuous passionate weekend
O. checks the notification
P. of classical pleasure
Q. minds the gap
R. is a rising rat-souled singer
S. supposes the cognitive deficit
T. exists in lyric saloon
U. then driving me up the highway
V. to frangible lust I am
W. of shimmer lamb
X. into cowbell rhythms we go
Y. yellow warning of wind has been issued
Z. is a property of citrus
PART FOUR: FLOWER SHOW
In The Besieged City (1948) by Clarice Lispector, ‘the flower was showing off […] it too was untouchable, the indirect world’, ‘exhausted’, ‘What is the flower made of if not of flower itself’.
OPEN LOOP (
BOUQUET ( )
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ) )
The flower exclaimed a soft orchestral impression of breathing. Adults no longer snack in movies. Spent five hours on a train, six on Zoom, three in the outside air is nice. A time-lapse corpse flower, the music being used, pace of light. Heat syncope of the sea, we dive. Someone is hired to recover her pearls or pears. My skin is peeling from sanity gels.
A fault language of shiningly happy teenagers. Rosettes for the nuclear pony. It’s all total showers today. Condensery of lemonade gemstone, sertraline, the lapwing massacre in a Sufjan track / so I am endlessly sorry.
PART FIVE: NATAL SMUDGE
When everything started to wilt, the moon was too late. Untouchable stem of a name, yet the rose-girl knew what to do. She swallowed the world like a gobstopper, a lightbulb, a tulip. The arrogance of sundown was only that it knew how to try.
Turning over, see the supermassive rose in her belly.
Superstitious gemstones include violets and opals, sleepflower, nightshade; don’t @ me if you think they are cruel or kind. Marlene drops cranberries from the wall and you piss twice as hard in Scarborough Fair, are you sad, buy me blue cheese, there is vigilance in the dead. Rosemary for memory, thyme for a life you led, who sells it. Marlene says she misses Alisha, that’s not-me. Pray you arrive here safely, smudge of tarragon, mushroom photography, lines of flight.
We, after Sophie, after Frank, say Ask for everything!
Regarding conjunction, something about publishing, spirituality, knowledge and authority figures. There will be tension with Aquarius principle. A slip of paper. I was born at 06:20, in a thunderstorm.
[Oh yes! x]
The rose-girl had an overture: she tore wedding pearls from her branch-sized clavicle, let them scatter from the tub where she lay and the tub was a cloud, the pearls were snow. At the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, she was a divorce child with her hair in two plaits we would climb up to kiss at the nape of her neck, that’s it, I play all my aces so we won’t die. These cards are beautiful, we turn them away. There will be no dying, not here or now. I thresh the rest of my skyluck, lager, my skylark. I’m lucky the mirror is showing up nowhere. Sometimes it is Freud’s voice, or an oil pastel. The foam from her brushed-down hair. Of the past you have given me everywhere, Andromeda, minipops, electronic renaissance. In writing the poem I am playing the cello, I am playing the cello of poem to death, why not?
It’s up to you
It’s down to you
Don’t be so mournful…
PART SIX: SCENTED AND GENEROUS
I had a dream about the diary with the days mixed up. Each day had its own fragrance:
Cognac, cannabis, dill pickle, mown grass,
libido enhancer, sweet vanilla, jasmine,
ylang ylang, who shares all, heart notes
of shrub, blackcurrant, oak moss, popcorn,
peppermint candy, lavender, ginger
castoreum, chypre, neroli,
understory, wooded and tonka,
ambery, orris, top note,
emily brontë rose, cinnamon,
hot shit, gold dust, brine of ocean,
roast aubergine cologne
near airstrip pheromone,
oil pipe explosion, special cinders,
vetiver, slots into psyche, balsam,
absinthe, cassie, frangipani, saffron,
strawflower aka immortelle,
black liquorice, lactones, myrrh,
sassafras, fruit loops, chocolate ice,
pamplemousse or french for grapefruit
martini and rockrose, peony,
tobacco, peppercorn, petitgrain,
scottish myrtle and soft fir,
nutmeg, new car, coffee brew,
pine needles, indole, musk of course.
Pitseleh means little one. Elliott Smith sings, ‘no one deserves it’.
I’m turning a petal to see you better / that I am someone’s difference.
Dear Alisha,
If we were to wed in the childhood memory where you circle the prairie with diet cola and you always know what to do, I see the cherryade reds in you, sanguineous of first degree and alacrity pitching your letter. The post office is closed. I eat more peanut butter than Elvis and nobody stops me, I get it from Aldi. The day feels closure and we edge towards lockdown, I’m texting, Starbucks is open on Christmas Day, will you bring me something? Again, like the time we ordered starlit capitalist fuck lattes and dusted methamphetamine before shift; we were exquisite, fruit toast, the nourishing glitter in our hair was ace; we served 200 covers, sixty quid in tips, and you were scarlet in the uniform poem called A Scarlet Letter. Not the one or the many, just any. I knew this already. We had written them all! You have to have dashes of green to make red, tell Hilary, which is why I am writing to you from my rowan tree, fred asks is this a rowan bush, I say a rosehip, I don’t know what to do; the inchplant is coming up fast, it will ingest the television, I look forward to it. Brockley Station, Nina Simone, stomach cramps, star flood. Must learn how to climb / the branches brightly.
Write to me of conspicuous passions, such as aging, or the fairy fountain with permissible agelessness. Crystal arpeggio. The various glacés of Rome, ornamental corpse flowers, pistachio and your deep, carnal desire to dance. I brush all the sea-foam from the rose-girl’s hair and she would collapse in panic. What the heck is in this carpet. Can you send me again the dimensions, dots per inch in terms of the plant, or planet? There is much to do. I am sewn a yellow word and kissing you cherries to lemonade, black to blues. Needing earth for it, rich stuff, thoughts on allotments. Omnidawn is the word, when the camera pans out and one million people have streamed this song, the credits come up. O blush, Love’s refrain in summer! 500,000 ampersands, can you imagine it? My new grand dreams of porny conjunction…
You taught me how to shoplift the various accessories of girlhood; I’ve given it up. See how my brows disapprove!
December is cruel, the dark green foliage of tinsel and shrubbery, poinsettias, it’s kitsch. I learn a blue-grey song on guitar but it sucks. Mum makes paella for xmas eve etc. Pantone named yellow-grey the colours of 2021, Katy is raging as I might too; I had a poem about this from before f-sharp, it was all about cycling, snapped ankles, absolute melt. Get to you. The way you arc your arms just so is centrepiece: everything will be the same as the sum of it was, serving us dinner. Cryptocurrency, wrong-name, Tony Blair of bad air was trending, you do it last-minute, pronounce it soft, you wear a blue velour lace thing, fka misty. These are the suburbs where doors were slammed, and these were offered cookies. Fuck a lawn. But you dip your feet in scant oasis, you break off a piece of the dark chocolate donut. I have dreamed of this. Stillnesses are not without purchase. Another spam mail arrives, dear pal—
I am going out to buy us blowsy hours, belong and casual distortion. Black forest gateau and log of the roasted poem, emitting steamiest lines, pleasure days, no breaks just ganache is that thick language. We lay together, birthday of shadow work, wrote sunlessness. I draw dark green liner on their eyes like vines. Wish holidays longer. We enter the alone wood with natural lights they are strung they are simple, leafage pressed between them. 1800 dpi, virus gone, unmute the sea. You are warmly invited.
~
Mermaid Chunky – Gemini Girls
‘Til Tuesday – Voices Carry
God Help the Girl – Down and Dusky Blonde
Sunflower Bean – Moment in the Sun
Phoebe Bridgers – Graceland Too
M83 – Karl
Tomberlin – Hours (Katie Dey remix)
Gia Margaret – apathy
Felicia Atkinson, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – And The Flower Have Time For Me
Massive Attack – Black Milk
Björk – It’s Not Up To You
Cocteau Twins – Orange Appled
Yaeji – When in Summer, I Forget About the Winter
Laurel Halo – Blue Notion
Sun Glitters – Somewhere, Nowhere
Robin Guthrie, Harold Budd – Beau, As In Beaumont
Lana Del Rey – Summertime The Gershwin Version
Joan Baez – The Rose
Karen Dalton – Ribbon Bow
Lucinda Williams – Met An Old Friend
Pinegrove – Morningtime (Amperland, NY)
Elliott Smith – Pitseleh
Vashti Bunyan – Here Before
Zoee – Used
Julianna Barwick – Inspirit
Pelican Tusk – Not What You Meant
Neutral Milk Hotel – Where You’ll Find Me Now
Cloth – Old Bear
Lawn – Rats
Mush – Revising My Fee
Big Thief – Not
Joanna Sternberg – Don’t You Ever
Belle & Sebastian – I Don’t Love Anyone
Bloc Party – Waiting for the 7.18
serpentwithfeet – mourning song
Magic Island, Zoee – Agony (Yung Lean cover)
Anna Burch – Can’t Sleep
Kelora – Ultramarine
Albums of the Year 2020
Friends, I was so close to not doing one of these this year, but my bad case of archive fever was too strong to resist. For the first time since the depressive loops of my early 2010s, I’ve really struggled with music this year. Yo-yo’d between extremely intense relations to music (listening to Grimes’ ‘IDORU’ three times in a row in spring’s post-cycle endorphin twilight, crying to Mogwai in the supermarket, thrash dancing to old Boiler Room sets alone in my bedroom, knocking everything over, basically living inside Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Garden Song’) and a very numb sense of trepidation about listening altogether. Have gone whole weeks without listening to anything except ’10 hours sounds of a meadow in june’ on youtube. Have gone whole months without noticing new releases. Music has anchored the year in strange ways. I think about the man in my block who kept singing/screaming Oasis’ ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’ in the shared garden, and did this several times throughout lockdown 1.0. I was so concerned. Boards of Canada albums I fell into, haphazardly studying. The conditions of lockdown, not to mention PhD and other pressures, have slowed down my output of published music writing, but I continued to diarise my listening habits and it was a pleasure to write on occasion for GoldFlakePaint, Secret Meeting and other places on new releases from Jason Molina, Phoebe Bridgers, Katie Dey, Superpuppet, Fair Mothers, Modern Studies. As ever, you can dive into the music journo archive here.
What follows is a selection of albums I’ve managed to dip in and out of, form some kind of bond with or which otherwise stayed with me. One of music’s main attractions this year was its provision of sociality: whether through late-night Instagram DMs or seeing everyone’s Spotify listening (pale vicarious experience of sonic simultaneity as commons), running Pop Matters workshops with the inimitable Conner Milliken or losing myself in heartfelt comment sections, music was a kind of touchpoint for contact when other kinds of talk or response seemed impossible. That you could screenshare FKA twigs’ ‘Cellophane’ video and all silently hold in tears while free-writing together on Zoom, that you could send some kind of bedroom performance to a friend when words were scarce, that you could buy stuff for Bandcamp Fridays and feel like you were doing *something* for artists while our livelihoods were otherwise being stripped away by lockdowns, recession and endless government (in)decisions. That you could send lyrics in acts of solidarity. That you could sit round a fire in the Trossachs and listen to ‘Farewell Transmission’ with smoke in your eyes or be in Hackney with a heatwave and Lucinda Williams; that you could cycle past psych buskers on Kelvin Way, or lie on the floor with Grouper recordings from 2018; that you could breeze down Sauchiehall listening to ‘Gasoline’ in a world without cars; that you were lucky enough to see your cousin, Hannah Lou Clark, play The Hug and Pint before lockdown; that you could micro-analyse Angel Olsen remixes with Douglas, lamenting another postponed gig or remembering an old one; that you could walk yourself into autumn melancholy with Grace Cummings, longing for the wind and sea; that you could read Amy Key’s excellent essay on Joni Mitchell’s Blue and remember the first of January, sober as a trembling bell and listening on repeat as everything refused to wake, and wine. Admittedly, I may have missed many significant things. Tell me!
Previous EOTY lists:
In no particular order:
Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher
Angel Olsen — Whole New Mess
Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud
Savage Mansion — Weird Country
Yves Tumor — Heaven to a Tortured Mind
Sylvan Esso — Free Love
Mogwai — ZEROZEROZERO
Minor Science — Second Language
Caribou — Suddenly
Moses Sumney – græ
Grimes — Miss Anthropocene
Open Mike Eagle — Anime, Trauma and Divorce
Run the Jewels — RTJ4
Protomartyr — Ultimate Success Today
The Kundalini Genie — 11:11
Sparkle Division — To Feel Embraced
Juliana Barwick — Healing is a Miracle
Arca — KiCk i
Pelican Tusk — Rhubarb’s House (EP)
The 1975 — Notes on a Conditional Form
Porches — Ricky Music
Fiona Apple — Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Martha Ffion — Nights to Forget
Gia Margaret — Gia Margaret
Mary Lattimore — Silver Ladders
Jason Molina — Eight Gates
Sufjan Stevens — The Ascension
Fleet Foxes — Shore
Keaton Henson — Monument
Half Waif — The Caretaker
U.S. Girls — Heavy Light
Katie Dey — Mydata
Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song
Eartheater — Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin
Oneohtrix Point Never — Magic Oneohtrix Point Never
Jessie Ware — What’s Your Pleasure?
Perfume Genius — Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
Field Medic — Floral Prince
Braids — Shadow Offering
HAIM — Women in Music Pt. III
Porridge Radio — Every Bad
Christian Lee Hutson — Beginners
Soccer Mommy — Color Theory
Four Tet — Sixteen Oceans
Lawn — Johnny
Lomelda — Hannah
Bright Eyes — Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was
Pinegrove — Marigold
Adrianna Lenker — songs / instrumentals
Duval Timothy — Help
The Pictish Trail — Thumb World
Tomberlin — Projections
Tennis — Swimmer
Laurel Halo — Possessed (Original Score)
Alex Rushfirth — The Moon in the Clouds
NNAMDÏ — BRAT
Autechre — SIGN / PLUS
Superpuppet — Under a Birdless Sky
Bartees Strange — Live Forever
The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You
A.G. Cook — 7G
Playlist: November 2020
Surf Rock
for fred and kate
Lioness chained to hillsides of lavender the sun
is streaming oversea entirely conceptual homeland
5G howl like how a fractal glint
constitutes one or more endings and is just
never never never never never
lavender exactly who unimaginable loses
when fox does borrowed snouts
language of flowers fuck this howl
again five dimensions
Is you said to me a common placard
stands vantablack in the manacles jason cries
his heart broke in your jaw I swam all night
to the motor show roseate perfume of the
problem being born out of lobster wedlock
to be ravaged by the neo-marxist programme of
naming us wasp and other wasp sadnesses
it is for me as I for you better at swiss twilight
when I was community
In the womb wept effort of what insomnia
does
from the latin meaning wandering
policy of “rural lust” I will swim
I will swim through hedgerows I will swim I swim
this isn’t the song turn up your sleeves we enter the
chess in brightness mode I wanted the heat the reat
skelped by autofictive descent
another coxcomb
texts you back O lariat
At that altitude paying the rent in pale world
and even if she has lost control
what a car does in green light heaven
obscenity pedestrian the ground here opal silicate
owing you a crush moratorium
cheques out after all
this is just a modern rock song
adjusting styles pane of my old wound, new wound
at clydebank the skycastles at four o’clock who are u
Harvest season was accordion sonnetry I lifted my
volta skirts for assholes feeling perennially strange
in melancholy chord progression of certified orange
is this out of the question lazily in the grass
lexie and cecil and ariel open your mouth
be lucid
corduroy when stevie sings
harmony on thursday morning exhaustion I thought
just swish would do it
Could be 1995
how will I get there painting the ice-
course with fairways is all that I have
boygirlboygirl varieties of noodles
bunny calls it cloudheartedness
be mute in serious leaf together
is falling
the same as time at all / it got claws
hi can I have some more bourgeois heroine pastry
Okay to just swim and arrive here my salty
fiancé is a type of fish did you enjoy The Shape
of Water and other films to which I might fuck
glitching in the real world
darling is a missing numbering
merely the sun streaming feminine voices
never never
a century of the Laurieston & all of my guinnesses
are oxygen saw another fox
And wherever you are I suppose the squirrels are
listening
as bartender came home w/ three crystal ocean
we stub the ashes out
we stub the ashes out it’s him
that I am smashed mezzanine phoning my dad
big blue energy
another song about the suburbs / mineral & gem
sometimes I can’t believe
Red lions and lionesses are not metaphors but love
laura no lies & lilac passion in the first place
I wrote about you in my notebook: we might not
even be awake in the world is still in the kitchen
scratch at my socialist lichen
second paramore whose kisses are
madness my counsellor said yeah
I like those mornings also
London fog, London fog
~
Oneohtrix Point Never — I Don’t Love Me Anymore
i_O — Castles In The Sky
Quirke — Luxury Red Pence
Mogwai — Dry Fantasy
Salem — Red River
Songs: Ohia — Lioness
Silver Jewels — Federal Dust
Johnny Flynn — Lost and Found
Keaton Hensen — Ontario
Life Without Buildings — Sorrow
Drop Nineteens – Winona
The National — Dark Side of the Gym
Weyes Blood — A Certain Kind
Marika Hackman — Playground Love (Air cover)
God Help the Girl — Pretty When The Wind Blows
Porridge Radio — 7 Seconds
Elliott Smith — True Love
A. G. Cook — Beautiful Superstar
Bat for Lashes — Peach Sky
Lemongrass — Sayonara
Tennis — Tender As A Tomb
The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)
Golden Mean — Midnight
Phoebe Bridgers, Rob Moose — Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)
Angel Olsen — New Love Cassette (Mark Ronson Remix)
Belle & Sebastian — This Is Just a Modern Rock Song
Playlist: September 2020
Darklands
what if she entered
the sliver of morning and haemorrhage
left for her
on the rooftop, signal
that someone was still coming in caustic shoes
theorising a free continuation
of handsome disorder, to access the paywall
and free us from pain
she could breathe here, just
to feel like getting trains, filming herself
speak only to speed
and lag
in practice of relative motion, to feel it
“how all the protests ceased”
but not to look
was to watch the hard tomatoes soften from green
and the weight
to glow awhile, orange
and I miss
a strategy of oratory whereby someone has a line
from beautiful afternoon television, like
“who would buy this house?”
as if there were choices
next to the undiscovered
shaven lawn
*
I’ve been having dreams about family
and scaffolds
how she just lay there
literally
until the child began throwing soft toys at her
in the 1990s
anyone could come to life and be numb
I want to read Graeber’s thesis on magic,
slavery and politics
she didn’t say to me
do you ever feel free, for instance
in fugue state when brushing your teeth
I’ve been dreaming about ancestors
stuck on trains
killing rabbits and eating crackers
it was that easy
all season
complaint of what’s coming, knowing nothing
of photography
when you can’t measure the wind
by the grass
she had this enormous laughter
*
dwindling into ambivalence
if this isn’t a dream exposure
and we can’t enter houses
I’ve been trialling sentences, Bernadette Mayer says
I’m not faulting being periodic but sentences with caps and end marks do seem so bloodless to me
You swing gazelle legs over the actual
You wait in the room for the wine
You pull collectives out of the sink
distracted, I watch through windows
turn on my flash
to lead workshops on trash
and poetry as finance, like
eons of speculation
had brought us to nothing but numbers
and the anxious among us, cooking the numbers
I watch her slice an avocado in the dark
and the police van
opened to reveal us
with leaves in our molars, perfect hello
it’s autumn
in the bloodless sentence
*
dreamt I was tidying the rooms
of siblings
this mad kind of everywhere acid
I couldn’t clean up
in the panic of rich, linguistic Monday, you are
part of the story, too smart for me
the interminable smell of pine resin, kimchi
and menthol gum
yes, just there
in lightness rimming
I made this commitment to sleeping ‘upstairs’
taking pleasure
on my editor’s credit
before the treehouse snapped
*
I can barely listen to music anymore
it’s all error
describing her pain as shooting
when I smashed my thumbs in my eyes
you kept going
it was Jupiter
now
cruising down Alexandra Parade to send you
the voice message
of not seeing nightingales, a bathtub
attached to a car
I wish I could touch
between times is when I most feel ‘we
exist’ and just like that
the cornflowers won’t die
and we can’t enter houses
and you end
with the fresh heat of illusory commute
I could say anything new
in dumb, erotic anonymity
where all this falls
*
she had lit up the sad remains
of the tree
bound to other seasons, even look good
despite not hearing this live
I like it, finally
summer light on the same
even if we live
in adrenalised versions of trying to keep warm
on the video call
or wavelength
of audit continuum
she was all
“it is up to the unassuming […]
to represent reality”
in The New York Times
and the well-oiled loss of taste
feels the same
the shadow
years of tax avoidance
edible sundown
*
what if she knew before all of us
doubled in running away with me
I dream all my friends
attending the burning
“where have you been”
and you could put this to archive
swipe left for the hidden
indentation of nothing happening
20,000 years ago
mostly I worry if she lived in the dream
I had to wake from
cradling the ersatz animal, sprigs of rosemary
having clambered reality over again
and knowing you survived the scaffold
GESTURES FOR LIVING AIR
as the art was told
“I just need to check
your temperature”
a rough kind of festival kiss
that was listening
in the underpasses of everything
prior to millennium
installs a magical feeling that
:heart:
you would be at the station
and my bouquet emoji of blood
flowers await.
💐
Fenne Lily – Solipsism
Sylvan Esso – Ring
Gus Dapperton – I’m Just Snacking
Sufjan Stevens – Run Away With Me
Fleet Foxes – I’m Not My Season
Chastity Belt – Ann’s Jam
The Durutti Column – Sketch for Summer
Frog – Photograph
Adrienne Lenker – anything
Tim Heidecker, Weyes Blood – Oh How We Drift Away
Bill Callahan – Sycamore
Gillian Welch – Picasso
Margo Guryan – Why Do I Cry
Norma Tanega – You’re Dead
Elliott Smith – Speed Trials
Kath Bloom, Loren Connors – Tall Grass
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Darklands
Alice Boman – Heartbeat
Edwin Organ – Self Alarm
Broadcast – Echo’s Answer
Cocteau Twins – Aloysius
Yo La Tengo – Bleeding
Perfume Genius – Valley
William Basinski – Tear Vial
Oneohtrix Point Never – Long Road Home
Playlist: June 2020
The daylight was like ordering pyjamas off the internet. Light blue. Sky broke for when it rained and the hills were seen as old pornographers watching us pass like gifs. I’m grown into us to reach for the kettle, for the internet, wearing my silks, something’s on the boil and it’s not quite tea. I think of some other season and know it is cornflower, not quite light, not quite blue of dawn because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the dawn. People are buying vintage files to play dialup connection. The old pornographers eat their cameras for warmth. I’ve seen them do it to be secret, fucking careful to be made up in a lovely afternoon with blusher, oranges and Russian vodka. It’s the same thing you lie down for, sometimes lying down because I can’t get a word, or a line, can’t catch or watch. You have to watch it for happening. The daylight was like that, then pulling on silks, moth-fringed, light blue it was like the colour of the internet turned inverse for ‘its’ children. They were still making artillery in the system, so we could sleep here peacefully and not be disturbed by the old pornographers and their bits of camera. The sexual motion / of foliage all up in my software. It wasn’t that we had any tension, there were other kinds of ars poetica, but something’s on the boil and it’s not quite tea.
There were other kinds of daylight the colour of the internet and not the quite blue of this tea. Because sky is making us pass like gifs in such loops as I can’t get a word. The deteriorating resolution of you are not bloodleaf. Because June is super lovely, moth-fringed, pulling on silks. You pass a lot of grasses, long-grown from their natural habitats, watching the drops fall out of the sky for what, for love. I don’t know what shape it is they make on the surface of water, but I watch. The old pornographers were making a nature documentary at the edge of the forest, which was inaccessible, badly rendered. So I could sleep here peacefully, I came out of the shower in cornflower to tell them the best blue spots they could film. The colour of the internet is touching a liquid, then it goes through the lens, fucking slow, so huge, it belongs to this season. Snapped. The tree was just that down the middle, sort of bruised where it had stood, not light blue, lightening out into favourite tone. The old pornographers scolded my aura and told me these pretty white lies. Like. Say your best tree was a willow and we do it lightly, willowy, that’s how I know what tallness is, like pulling on silks in London. It’s the same thing because I can’t get a word, moth-fringed my mouth is pushing up cobwebs. (*) The loop is very beautiful it feels like you are grasses, lots of them exist unmown for hours, how at dawn for the children, light blue, how they enter and trample; only the old pornographers trespass for profit.
Here look at the tiny bird nursing her young which are tinier still, it’s the same thing as knowing it rained and a goldcrest buoyed up on the birdbath, tiny thing, not quite vodka. Because I can’t get a word, there are gilded flakes in my colourless tipple – visceral realists! – like anything we had off the internet, like this particulate stuff that fell from the sky. I want to be fucking careful to light blue the mise en scene of this feeling, tell it slow to flicker. Be made up in a lovely or a line, can’t catch or not be disturbed by the old pornographers, whose interns were cameo sylphs of such beauty as to even sleep peacefully here, or inhabit the air. It was like the dream of Bloomsbury and the supermodels draped over carts that advertised mustard to the masses and it made no sense except mustard can boost your metabolism maybe, yellow it is, so I ride my bike beside them. I’m grown into us to reach tension, summer thinspiration, I dawn because it’s been a long kind of daylight to find this, pulling on silks, dust caps, yolks, some time since the colour of the internet turned up bits of camera. The contact sheet of ruinous cornflowers, raindrops stained; pinned animals appear in separate parcels, how it all looks side by side is not quite vodka. It is yet a shard. Archival. I’ve seen them do it for happening. Warmth. Freedom is the edible mischief of knowing poetry could never. Warmth, warmth is keeping a secret, local to cygnet, melt & forestry slenderness. The daylight blusher made love of your face, I’m fucked.
~
Sun Ra – Realm of Lightning
Run the Jewels – yankee and the brave (ep. 4)
Spellling – Dirty Desert Dreams
Noname – Song 33
Fleetwood Mac – Storms
Laura Nyro – Broken Rainbow
Connie Converse – Sad Lady
Ratboys – A Vision
Big Star – Dream Lover
Bright Eyes – Mariana Trench
Coma Cinema – Tall Grass
Gleemer – Brush Back
Feng Suave – People Wither
Tricky – Fall Please
Let’s Eat Grandma – Glittering
Soko – Being Sad Is Not a Crime
HAIM – Gasoline
Kelly Lee Owens – On
Tomberlin – Tornado
Slowdive – Some Velvet Morning (cover)
Mogwai – Take Me Somewhere Nice
Bing & Ruth – The Pressure of this Water
Ecco2k – Hi Fever
Lil Peep – driveway
Ashnikko – Cry (feat. Grimes)
Donny Hathaway – I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know
deeper – Pink Showers
Katie Dey – Dancing
Christine & the Queens – People, I’ve been sad
Thurston Moore – Hashish
Ian & Sylvia – Early Morning Rain
Robert Wyatt – Shipbuilding
Soft Machine – Why Are We Sleeping?
The Replacements – Can’t Hardly Wait
Songs: Ohia – Didn’t It Rain
Kath Bloom, Loren Connors – Wait For My Love
Lianne La Havas – Weird Fishes (cover)
Phoebe Bridgers – I Know the End
Playlist: May 2020
Playlist: May 2020
(1)
These paraesthesia days where there is a thing like too much or less of light, continuing to know ‘what went wrong’ with the license. There is a Crispin Best poem about your inbox filling up lightly, your inbox lightly fills; but the word he uses is gentle. I like it when I’m looking for a line from ‘a poem’ and I can’t find the line, and the poem gently eludes me because it is a caterpillar already cocooned, and you have to pluck the caterpillars from the wriggling tree of the book, or is it a forest before thought, because pretty soon it will be swaddled in the transformative and what comes next is too much to give wings, it’s anamnesis, intangible, the pines in the wind. Max says Red Bull got their asses sued for claiming their drink gives you wings and I want to attest to a singular experience in which I spent pocket money on a genuine can, silver and blue, and the sugar made me fly from one end of the period to another, during which such time piled up in triangular grains at the side of the rainbow road. Is this the same as the sugar elixir you give to save bees? But I can’t go back, my wings are wilted, there’s less appetite. I write this with rainbow spectres spilled on my fingers through polished crystal; like I ate the apple from the old Apple logo like the one on the old computers at school. And we’d sit on those stools in art class writing for hours on machines where a thing could not be ‘saved’ except to desktop, where it would chill very lightly for a dusty season or two, and then be removed by a cursorial drag of September instance. I want to go again, be there, drink cheap vodka at lunchtime and write my magnum opus on radio design and fall into the white-tiled toilets crying. Later I would do the same at work. Lorde sings ‘It feels better biting down’ but the bite was out of the apple already, like the bite from your arm. Marks we have shared of our flesh. I have been sitting at windows again, waiting for caterpillars to appear in the floats of my vision. They are gentle and beautiful and ripe for the pluck ‘and that’s love’. I can’t find the poem about the inbox that gently fills (whose?) but I like the bit in Best’s ‘Nature Poem’ where ‘you can hold a tiny leaf and say “leaflet”’ and ‘you can tell me “don’t worry your sadness isn’t going / anywhere let’s just be alright together awhile’ because it is so gentle towards the sadness, subjunctive, cradles it into a lessness, that’s why the line folds just so, with us just there before ‘anywhere’ because we go in the going, that’s crossing a line. Why do my toes buzz when I sit too long and is this what people in novels call ‘cramps’ and when I say people in novels I mean primarily men because ‘pins and needles’ is too feminine, domestic, except I knew men could sew and I knew sailors and waiters who could stitch up in no time and once I was wounded and let them hold me on the planks or the bar with red thread to stitch up my sorry knee and each stitch was a tiny vicarious kiss and the thought occurred to me there isn’t a word for that, a tiny vicarious kiss the way you can say of a tiny leaf, ‘leaflet’, or of a cat, a kitten. Maybe you just say ‘feather’. Well anyway, your inbox gently fills where I can’t find it, the petals for roses, not of them, and I sit here looking for synonyms while the world can’t sleep or burns and I can choose to cocoon myself in the almost not-knowing of other fevers. Sifting through the less of each other, days pass into messages, like people used to say for a trip to the shops. I see things shuttered and strangely detached from their context, objects afloat in the space of what was. You would fly over all this, laughing at me with your endless, sanguine energy. Turns out the poem is actually called ‘your inbox gently fills’ and maybe it’s like the making of love is like looking for a title, you want to complete and not complete, you want it to go on or finish forever in this one whole thing, still rippling, this ‘big and spooky’ world again which is always the outside-in of it, the best you’ve had, asking about the mouthfeel of Hegel or something. It’s not about names though, right?
(2)
Feels like the hospital inside the hospital inside the poem. Feels like you disinfected the irrelevant conversation to make it clean again, whole again. Her voice feels clear in a way I can’t explain or speak to, that’s not the point or why I would squeeze more juice from the aloes for the sake of my cuticles. When the caterpillars start harmonising, high pitched squeals of light, I know it’s like saying which of us is speaking to the violent affirmation of nothing like rainfall? They die in your tread if you let them. I want this to stop like the world, and helicopters fly over the scene of writing which is my little head, or a sonnet by Ian Heames. In the dream it is September and already ‘over’ in the ladies basement, washing our hands for the atmosphere to the tune of ‘drink water / good posture / good lighting / good evening’ which always made me think of shortcuts to a Schuyler poem, like saying I love you, like how many times Prynne gets away with saying that in The White Stones is super beautiful waking up at 6am with this huge yellow hardback bruising my chest and it’s only that ‘good morning / I see you’ in this place which is less than air, but sirens. And a slant of light he had said I would know, even with everything over, the memory strays in solar resonance. I had never done such lines as the posture of quartz in the month’s end, gloss hair, cut with lace, a noted conditional; but I am selling these paintings to support the purchase of salt, shadow and one day a purple diamond in general. It’s nice The New Yorker noticed the amphibrachs. That’s my name and it’s not. I once told Callie it sounds like a Pokémon. The air here, glistening, is super effective. 18 degrees with a 0% chance of rain. I pedal the loop like I haven’t before, then / Celadon coloured scrunchie, release huge hair and the special aporia of all this falling.
(3)
What if thoughts are snacks. I carry them around and worry their edges, like peeling the skin very gently where the body just gapes because it is tired and sorry and your hair is long and I tuck myself behind the prospect. ‘Socially distanced tins’. When you give up the fruit of the internet and the caterpillars lap at the sugar and they have cascaded from the breadfruit tree in the song called ‘Barbary Coast (Later)’, ‘a dancehall there / where the sick folks go’. I gather up such caterpillars, when strong sometimes / a waltz is made… in the rain that you play in, in the lozenges sucked of the sunsets thick in your blood and another apology for ‘clogging your inbox’, a gestural stretch of the arm is pattern. If your thought is a peach and the slice of the peach and I open the tin very slightly, prise you out, and you slick there in syrup all over my internet. Such limbs. And I would cry at this kindness as the wishes allow. Wherever the mail arrives there is starlight. Dancing to Peach. Syncope. Little heat in my foot. Imagine all the email was fruit, the gentle pile-up of apple peelings, my laptop hot from the former resource wars (is brutal). ‘The more I see / the less I scream’, soft feelings, soft feelings.
(4)
After school, she would cut us the apples. After the scholarship, I would cut up the hours for the tree D&G say is Chomsky’s, acid-hard, and I find myself in the trespass of yesterday. Whose node goes there. Snacks please. Crispest, best. I like the bits where he (Best I mean) steps back and lets it happen, like ‘i let summer take over the house / for however long it needs’ (‘Don’t Call It A Dream’), which is how this feels, small-caps sense, which is a title that makes me think of a Crowded House song and maybe this is played somewhere, Freaks and Geeks say, did we watch that the heartbroken night before Christmas where I walked to Dennistoun to eat dinner and it didn’t snow but it could have, why not, make love. Life’s bad teen comedy is a situation tragedy of the not-going-forward, into the absolute and the man who has walked five times past my window this morning, now he carries Sophia’s cereal. Summer is crawling across the bad efficiency of risk assessment and I miss trains, even buses, mostly the lightfast feeling of passing by an evening sea. Bluest of green and bluey greenness a mad men would write in the advertised plural…Like a praying mantis, this is a common species of pain.
(5)
If you fold into a leaflet. If you let this go. The caterpillar crawled into the last of your Tennents, yellow can left by the river, distant tin, and it grew on that fizz into the county sensation of other nostalgias. The cough syrup afforded by terminal contract, it sticks us to base and we want to go further, cherried, flex our last before cutting season. If I spread my wings for however long it needs to be summer all over, the clairvoyance of airborne diseases and how we began as larva is just wage precarity. I look at such attic moths across the moon as is permissible in lyrical chrysalis / fruit pickers required in the north / and you choose not to kill One hour after the other, starting to hatch. I feel not gnat. Summer takes over the longest passage in To the Lighthouse and it is choosing to not read, milkweed all over your throat, it is choosing the patience of the old cicadas. But I am thus plucked and I float. What does Alice Notley mean by pastly?
(6)
To be known for spirited performance, the caterpillars fuse in devious multiples. The past is a margarine tree that you climb and I wait for you there in the climbing, spreading myself on toast like stars or tiny seeds of pollen the cataclysm would otherwise eat, being as selfish as saying ‘my brain was glowing’, not same as before, my friends just pretend to be ants on facebook. Big <3. Guitars collect sex at the gift shop. The light vibrates in the loss and it’s lemon and green, it’s in major key, it’s trying / you can’t treat it.
(7)
Whatever / fuck modernism / if it can’t be in favour of insects / I can’t feel the blood inside my capillaries. Better to sit beneath the breadfruit trying to describe paradises you’ve never even been to or won’t or can’t. What he said of lightspeed and photons, bright infinite pop, answer the question, the little ellipsis in O’Hara’s ‘Now It Is Life…’ and I’m pulling all away, the fuzzy excess of the cygnets, the dog that refused, the picture not taken. The additive lyric, the flash of ‘Vanished’, the casual vernal sensation of having been here before and loved it. General keyboard smash and it’s all there is now, here, you can have the nothing that turned…
~
Manic Street Preachers – Peeled Apples
Bright Eyes – One and Done
Katie Von Schleicher – Brutality
Spellling – Under the Sun
Björk – Venus as a Boy
Arthur Russell – Love is Overtaking Me
Yo La Tengo – You Can Have It All
Belle & Sebastian – A Summer Wasting
Kacey Musgraves – Butterflies
Dolly Parton – Light of a Clear Blue Morning
The Velvet Underground – I Found a Reason
The Mamas & The Papas – Safe In My Garden
Coma Cinema – Marie (No Sleep)
Kath Bloom – Come Here
Jason Molina – Shadow Answers the Wall
Angie McMahon – If You Call
Lorde – Ladder Song (Bright Eyes cover)
Phoebe Bridgers – I See You
Conor Oberst – Barbary Coast (Later)
Fleet Foxes – Third of May / Ōdaigahara
Matt Berninger – Serpentine Prison
Caroline Polachek – Look At Me Now
Snail Mail – Pristine
The 1975 – Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied
Yves Tumor – Dream Palette
Perfume Genius – On the Floor
Soccer Mommy – I Think You’re Alright
Muchuu – Getaway Train
Ghost in the Water – Cardinal Red
Parasitic Party – Shifted by a Phase
FKA twigs – Glass & Patron
Bing & Ruth – Live Forever
Modern Studies – Shape of Light
mariaology 