Tag: bar

Playlist: September 2018

IMG_3791.JPG

 

💎

 

and the new day forms
like a china cup

hard, cream-coloured, unbreakable
even in our travels
— Adrienne Rich

 

Whatever else requires a lightness.

The man with the vacuum is making love among dust in the corridor, a clack clack clack that wakes me each Wednesday, before my time.

To fuck in the dirt, the dirt. To forgive.

I am crawling around the floor at work, the shadows pressing into me. In the dream I cannot access the glass of water I want. The ice coruscates, tumbles over and over in a distant machine. Its absent-presence smoothes me, the creases in these dreams; once the ice went missing, we had to replenish. We have ran out of the beer she likes and she is twisting my arm and when I wake I cannot move it for half an hour.

Whatever else of lightness.

I smell the metallic tang of me. The perfect little cigarette you rolled, like you’d preserved a secret wave from the sea, a roll of paper and salt-clung thought. I’m trying so hard to be sweet for the world.

Lightness wherever.

The ice is a panorama of what’s happening. I catch a landscape and watch till it melts into memory. Mottlings of familiar tulip glass. The peach-struck colours recede into this chiaroscuro of hills, mist of sky and sheep. They are the blurry insistence of words, each one a cloud, a bleat. They emblemise time.

To say it lightly, I love you.

There are two songs called ‘Heavy Water’. One works like this: ‘We bully clouds now’; the other, ‘I want the love I fought to say’. I leave one zone for another and sometimes bring you. Bring little motes of dust, and so struggle to breathe.

The air here is heavy.

I am dragging myself up out of dreamtime, requirements of lightness. You drift as snow, your water is crystal. It tessellates, the shape of your thought which is silver. The sound of silver.

Autumn is restless, there is more of it in me.

How the wind came, named with volition, stealing the limbs of the trees! I felt good in all the arboreal catastrophe, I relished the chaos. It beat the blood back into my cheeks. Climbing the hill at the park. Air sign. I sent letters, felt better. I arrived at the bar and asked for a double.

To write of starry-eyed narrators, textual chalices.

‘If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?’ (Rebecca Solnit).

My best clause is a blue you can’t see.

We look for each other in mysticism, she seizes us. When I inched my way to the moss and felt the fronds of that fern betwixt my fingers, when my own skin became mycological x-ray. We look for the eye that already recedes, a flash in the room, twinned in blue. Verisimilitude.

We floated ideas like spores. Those songs were both tender and epic.

I am going to take a fresh notebook and paint every page blue before I write in it. The watercolour tinge will be green on blue, a cool viridian. To swirl, then invite lines.

Each page like a pool you can swim in.

You walk along the river and walk along life. I am so drowsy I can’t feel time, excepting the hour of sunlight this morning. The permanent sofa. I’d rather be sleeping. This is not to say, I won’t cherish a week, a week to come. I hope despite blood this one’s a good one.

To suck out the essence like liquorice.

In the shower the dream water came gushing reams of hail. My skin red raw and amazing. I notice the spidery cracks on the back of his hand, how they make a sort of Pier Kirkeby sketching pattern, a blueprinting cobweb. He pours pints like a pro. We are clean out of work but otherwise dirty.

I would like to be ‘splashed and held’, like Schuyler’s bluet.

Paring acoustic versions of old Kinks songs, leaving the core of my sadness around the room in plural, like apples. To say thank you and mean it, there is always a breaking, the lit parts eking their news into juice and crunch.

I need a day elsewhere.

The dark is just circumstance when you touched my shoulders, a situation thinks its way out of the rainbow. I find them now scattered on cream plaster walls, and twilight is terror. The reflection just happens, occurs in circles. Somebody comes to mop it up. The upside smile.

This is a shimmer. It stirs in me.

 

~

Peter Mannerfelt – Shining Beacons of Light

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Blues From a Gun

Fred Thomas feat. Anna Burch – Altar

Lana Del Rey – Venice Bitch

Kurt Vile – Loading Zones

Beach House – Drunk in LA

Surgeon – Seven Peaceful Deities

Yves Tumor – Limerence

Sarah Davachi – Gilded

Thom Yorke – Suspirium

Peter Broderick – Two Balloons, Pt. 4

The Clientele – Losing Haringey

The Kinks – Days

Kiran Leonard – Unreflective Life

Jeff Buckley – I Want Someone Badly

Alice in Chains – No Excuses

Low – Rome (Always in the Dark)

Airiel – In Your Room

Hiro Kone, group A – Pure Expenditure

Tim Hecker – In Death Valley

8/6/17

IMG_2528.JPG

 

 

 

 

 

 
O rain you are too long you are
slender droplets there in the
weird blackness of sun, Theresa
running in wheat fields I guess
she has stolen Lawrence’s golden
pastoral have I longed for God
have I prayed in dark chapels
for golden thoughts, the boughs
of yews over graveyards in all
their berries of blood. Nobody
remembered my name in the room
but they smiled when I spoke
or spat my madness. He was a
Kantian explanation, the rain
brought fear to the sockets; I
nourished my milk, I felt the
amoeba glow of imminent illness.

In the surgery, in the white room
peeling the scabs from his skin
I could feel that whisky that silt
on his tongue and I wanted the
whole of him dark within me;
one brood of the shadowy hour
we’d be, just that nicked with
millions of cuts. To be wild
is to shed that plastic, that film;
like a wine-dark pool I was always
absorbed, marble glass that
shone from without, within.

He wrote a tune that shivered
and the real rain in my head
retreated, the cool of it slow
beneath my heart where the
malady slicked and parted.

I voted and drank in the bar
where everything bristled;
here, what austerity of the
fruit machine, what horn
of Tennents, of peanut plenty.

Lonely,
I gave birth to a
hundred wilted roses.

My labour
of love for the sickness
quickens then sings it.

Strangers in a Bar

img_1796

We decided to meet in a bar, one where old men gathered for their daily brew and crepuscular women exchanged knitted secrets in the shadowy corners, around time-gnarled tables. I knew you instantly: the Celtic heritage of your red hair, unkempt even now; the cream-coloured Aran sweater, too warm for this time of year—though you were thinner perhaps and therefore colder. Half-way across the bar I could smell your cigarette smoke. I could feel the way it was before, in your fingers, stale and yellowing, chemical; the ash splintered deep beneath your nails, the black clot in your lungs which throbbed as you coughed. I remembered it, the way you would sit up in bed in the middle of the night as if struck by lightning, the thrust of it right up your spinal cord. I would bring you glasses of water; I would stroke your arm as if my fingers were falling leaves.

A pint of Guinness sat in front of you, barely sipped. You were reading a book, wearing glasses. I had never seen you wearing glasses. What was the book? I try to recall it. Frank O’Hara, perhaps, a handful of scattered street poems; maybe something by Whitman. You always had a thing for the Americans. It was part of your mythology, the dream of the road, the need to leave the homelands. You hated this city, but still you were here. You had returned.

I pulled up a barstool and for a moment you didn’t even notice me; didn’t blink once from your reading. I grabbed the glass and swilled some Guinness down me, the froth of it coating my lips. It came back to me, old friend: that black, hoppy, toffeeish stout. There were all those nights: the sticky surfaces of bars, voices that rung cacophonies, inane words snatched from strangers. Outside, the brisk March wind that billowed my hair in your face as you smoked and smoked. I tried to deny the way I loved your smoke. I could’ve sucked it in all day, like you were giving me wisps of your soul. Sometimes, when I pass a smoker in the street, I have to cross the road—the tarriness smarts my eyes.

I suppose I was hyperaware of everyone around us. What would they think? Would it seem strange now, to see this thinness of a figure stealing their way to a table and taking a man’s drink? Would they notice at all? We were always conspicuous: it was the black lines drawn thick beneath your eyes, the fox-coloured shock of your hair; my silence, my obvious adoration. The swirling limbs and all the dancing, the clubs we were thrown out of for being violent. You wouldn’t see it now. If someone took a picture of us, we would be two strangers in a bar. They’d have to pick out the way I turned towards you, hoping for your notice. The drink would seem my own, anonymous. How could they know of our entwinement on any number of sofas, the graffiti of our names we sketched on the tables of trains, the countless coffees and cokes and sticks of gum shared as if mouth-to-mouth in our indivisibility?

I watched your eyes follow left to right along the page, so engrossed; as if looking for treasure beneath the lines, behind the lines, at the end of the line, the final line. Maybe you were waiting to finish a chapter. I longed for you to acknowledge me, to make my interruption.

How could they know, the way we would meet every day, in bars like this, and our spirits were the same? The spirits we drank and sank and raised? How could they know?

Just then, you folded the corner of your page. You reached over the table and clasped my hand, the one that still touched the Guinness. I saw your lips raise a smile, the eyes the same, sea-green aglow.

You said: “Hello.”