Into the mist, the buildings recede. The capital is a liminal city, I catch it between seasons and then hardly. What is it I catch exactly. Skeletal trees made blossom of meadow then gold. There are so many reasons to draft excruciating messages, what lingers as a flicker, moth glow of the station. The soft, ersatz rills of bank adverts, faux sincerity, another piano warble that wants the drain. I stand in empty rooms without presence. Her voice fills the box which is lined with velvet. There is an immense sucking away, a vacuum of hours and days, leaving only the tarnished jewellery.
I am so nervous sometimes, the tips of my fingers are fire again. The pungent scent of truffle oil will always be late summer, hovering at a bar, asking questions with my eyes. Smacking my head off of marble. Are these boxes recyclable? These bleeding nights, where light is like having your eyelids prised, is infected television. What are you here for, the drunks want knowledge. Slats in the blinds you can’t blackout. My dreams grow vibrant, flower in narrative. They stole the chairs. And what we have is this whole psychic thing. I set alarms in the middle of the afternoon or evening, in case consciousness catches me otherwise. Time out of time. Envision those months, those hours, as monolith blocks of structure unsound. Pull out the fragments and I’ll give you a secret. There are graphics I haven’t learned to translate yet, files sunk down with encrypted names.
Sketching in bed, I can’t say much. Words are bleach, they erase the delicacy. There are so many songs I love with Ohio in the title. Nine minute jam version, scour YouTube comments for ethereal clues. Accidentally open on a page I like, it took a long time to pull away. Whose colour and noise?
This song reminds me of when I was we all were he was she was, the song is just there, it’s There, you know? When I was wee.
A twisting into. The colour black is pretty much perfect. It’s never the shade of the sky in a city.
The nauseous trypophobia of all these drawings. Sticky lineaments, filigree. Blonde. It’s Glenfiddich, it’s raining just slightly, it’s handing over the money saying This feels slightly mafia. Marfa. Judd’s boxes. A whole array of aluminium gleaming, and so instead walking the perimeter, and so instead dwelling upon reflection itself without reflection. Smoothness. A million healing frequencies, a night bus, a burst of starlings in the morning mist. I lose myself slightly, drifting home at six. Someone appears as pure apparition; double denim, listless. My ears still full of the roar.
Wanting to peel my own skin off. Metaphorically or not.
It strikes me that time is a liquid. If liquid could strike. I listen to the rain and it comes out my pores, the shimmery feeling. In the dream I am trying to pass through a kissing gate but the metal touches and electrifies me. I’m obsessed walking home, obsessed with the thought of walking home. It’s like walking to a place you call home but the dwelling is really the walking. The thought before. I still taste the salt. Cycling in rain till my skin is dripping. Yellow trousers peel off as sticky leaves. Summer is over. A close friend tells me her pining is done with, finally, but nothing feels like a new beginning. When they met IRL there were tears. To be more vocal. That is such an email album. Checking between beats. Rachel Goswell’s misty eyes in the 1990s, when television was always already wistful.
Caught the moonlight all eerie on the spire of that church. Have pulled some evil tendon.
Miss lushly abundant summers of yore. We stay up all night until morning matters. I grow yellow and luminous green inside, it’s like being arboreal and offered the light as wicked. Everything we’ve said since is canopy shyness.
You look so nice!
You look so nice!
Tiny ember orange of an errant fire made down by the river. A fire the kids lit up in Yoker. I cycle to the ferry and back but there’s nothing to catch but the wind in my ears. A shout.
Ate a cereal bar, changed my sheets.
All pale light and song, golden hour I love you.
The chefs have filled the bowl with yokes: which seems obscene, counter-evolutionary.
Tom McCarthy is a Gemini.
Bed-time is regularly six am. Am here at six. Am slathering Thorntons brownies with 70p tubs of peanut butter. Am communing with other vagrant insomniacs, minds in the night that lack bodies. Green lights flicker between times, to click. Palm oil guilt.
He sends me these videos of crystals, turning them so the lovelier facets catch the light. He’s in a deep house bunker, lost in New York. Too wasted to drive home &c. I’m taking five pound notes off strangers and orchestrating the delivery of chips and pakora. I’m sinking further backwards where the sun can’t hit. I get the bends from the steam in the kitchen. I picture a five lane highway, looping a mobius strip of traffic. The glass washer rumbles like something undigested, deep beneath the slurring sea.
Is it yet time to insufflate those memories? Pop six pink paracetamol into his pocket.
We sat on the bridge among midges and listened to Fleet Foxes play at the bandstand. I’d never really felt so pastoral. Remembering pennies in the shrine for wishes. Meet you at the fountain in an hour.
I guess I’m still learning the art of surrendering.
He was taking tiles off the ceiling and rinsing them individually under the sink.
This is or isn’t fiction. I wish flexibility upon the bones.
All violence in the novel is just ornamental. There’s a spark I want, what dwells between the red and mustard and is all of our walk home hunger. The obscener white light of the takeaway where I point out a single, iconic tomato. The houses that collapse around us don’t matter. Everything afterwards is pure saturation.
Living room volleyball.
Rooms for living I’d not noticed before.
These rooms we once lived in, then miss as friends.
Leith Walk is endless, its illusory scent of the sea.
Whoever else is fleeing just slightly, now utterly craven and wasting.
There are blackberries when you come off the main road, shrivelled already.
Dole out the blackberries. The rose of my tongue is a thorn.
Containment of plastic.
I see signs now, I see them at night. This is a specific, special sort of sadness but it lacks boundaries.
It spreads into everything.
So it stands for adversity, so it’s a symbol.
Isn’t it fortuitous that we met on the train, sharing the value of green and gardens? The infinite forest a blueprint of youth. I wanna visit Sweden, it’s almost like I’ve been already.
She is always so hurt over something.
A cocktail of tequila and cold-brewed coffee. My mother’s birthday, the rain.
Remember before dawn, remember the rain. Remember what you said was a French hour because it was incredibly lonely without reason or meaning the word ennui maybe and I thought of the video for Jeff Buckley’s ‘Forget Her’ and that bluer version of Paris and twining phone cord round fingers in public toilets and wanting to be anywhere but a station. Don’t fool yourself. Drown in pdfs about the Anthropocene, stolen bread rolls, enthusiastic lovers of hip hop. Lay on anonymous floors. The hormonal fog is clearing. What she said of the fight in the dream, You were reluctantly laughing the whole time.
The man playing cello in a tunnel in Kreuzberg.
I hide where the till makes its interminable bleep, the red light demand of a rip.
A day you can fall through, fall for, filmed in super eight. My eyes become lakes when she says we’ll miss you. When she’s been one of several mothers to me.
O, Mazzy. Star of the sea.
The pleasure in being there. The pleasure in everything. I don’t think I’ve eaten a cherry all summer, but it’s been pretty sweet all things considered. Spit out the days as pips you’ve chewed.
Little miss midnight.
There are these hours that belong to a shift. Finish at four, back in at twelve; like everyone owed hours after work with which to wind down. Life behind bars, bar night. Back into what, reality? These amnesiac hours, shaved from our lives. I have no recollection of what happened between five and eight, why once again I did not sleep until after the dawn. The rest smoke on balconies, watch infinite game shows. I go back into work and it feels like the middle of the night. With every plate lifted, every circuit of the bar, there’s another unbalancing. Did I leave at all? Is this all just continuous?
When I talk too much and lose all my words.
The mist is all over, this turquoise reply is just a memory. Missing, misty.
There’s a lilt in the dark if you want it.
~
The Jesus and Mary Chain – April Skies
Sisters of Mercy – Lucretia My Reflection
The Twilight Sad – I Could Give You All That You Don’t Want
Lau – Far from Portland
Mogwai – I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead
Jesu, Sun Kil Moon – Beautiful You
Alice in Chains – Nutshell
Khruangbin – White Gloves
Frankie Cosmos – Caramelize
Teenage Fanclub – Sparky’s Dream
Free Love – Pushing Too Hard
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Abstractions
Grouper – Opened Space
Oneohtrix Point Never – Sticky Drama
Tim Hecker – This life
Aphex Twin – T69 collapse
Vatican Shadow – Luxor Necopolitics
Gaika – Born Thieves
ANOHNI – 4 DEGREES
Clinic – Harmony
Helena Hauff – The Smell of Suds and Steel
Autechre – turbile epic casual, stpl idle
Huerco S. – Cubist Camouflage
Sarah Davachi – Evensong
Sun Kil Moon – Carry Me Ohio
Mazzy Star – Still
Nick Drake – Time Of No Reply
Nico – It Was A Pleasure Then
mariaology 