I remained on the alert to seize those vagrant moments which seemed to me in quest, as a lost soul is in quest of a body, of a consciousness to register and feel them
— Jean Genet.
I’m in a Caffe Nero in Central Manchester, and they’re playing Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’, a song I love dearly but haven’t heard in a while. People nearby are talking Italian, Portuguese, French; the coffee smells of a job I left behind. I kept dozing on the train heading south, the way you only doze as a teenager, as if falling asleep was its own laconic rebellion. As if your cares were minor enough to warrant a worldly suspension. There is something bittersweet I can’t name, for fact of the secret and something new coursing through me. I forget to spell, to brush my hair. I check in, and then out. I walk until my feet are sore. Along the canal the water glitters, a quintet of goslings tap at the grass. These shoes don’t fit yet. I’m collecting images for later, holding off the impulse to open my phone. Everything good is a little green light, an almost constancy.
There are bits of wax pastel under my nails I can’t scrape out, the blues and greens. Late at night I sketch mountains, undulating lines that mean something unnameable of time and place. This is where we are when we can’t hold it clearly. I need a selection of scenes. As if you could peel the line from the form. I do this over and over when I struggle to write. It all looks kitsch.
Transferable lines betray their futures.
As though you had to draw to think the drawing hand, the soul behind it. I could drink so much more of this thing that we are. Little symbol of something merlot. We talk of luminous substances, cinema.
*
I buy a badass topless postcard of Sappho. I do the splits at a poetry reading.
An elderly man from Cumbria relays a potted history of the railways between Preston and Carlisle. He tips his hat to me upon leaving the carriage; I go back to Clarice, reeling.
Suited lads order Carling till everything stops and we slump back into the city.
Fade out.
*
We do doubles and discuss our thievery; we’re not counting exactly, the hours just melt into amber, slosh after slosh and the sting of it. He says lovely hurt things, plus the syntax of limbs and rhythms. Weeks before, I snap glow-sticks onstage, follow the blue dot flash on the map. April feels sweet and easy. The blossoms are gone from the trees already. We are vaguely north. I want to hand you something precious that can’t be replaced.
We smash his plates at six in the morning, as though the heart were a sacred amphora.
Every few days I flip open Derrida’s Glas at random. I am caught on this gl, this glimmer and glyph. The only good thing we learned on that course was the runes, I see more of the runes in the church in Govan. I want to wrap my hands round a genuine sunstone, we discuss evolution at dusk and somebody is always interrupting us. The weather is clear and mild, like a symbol. Elsewhere I write the phrase, life is just stars refusing to die, and I don’t know why.
*
“We talked of the sun and moon, of what makes an earnest Instagram.”
*
I called it good air and used more cobalt to imply the sky. A man on my train resembled Mark Fisher and later I dreamt I asked him a question. Plexiglass demands a certain click. I scrolled on my iPod to find the playlist with all the rainbows, there was this chat of garage shanty and April showers. I tell your dad about the legendary felling of the lilac tree. Sometimes we think in firewood and catch sparks in the kitchen. If you want me I’ll be in the bar…
*
Cixous: ‘It is as if I were a fish and I wondered: “How can I be too much for the sea? How can I drown the sea?”’.
What is it we said of the question itself. ‘We never die enough’, she writes. Currently obsessed with excess, against lack. I die into the writing and it gets so I can’t even write! But that’s beautiful too, because the not-writing is the veer of the pen that leaks on my bed and the sleep that made it happen. I walked so far it was all I could do. Something turned over with pale deliberation; we had to elide the sea from each scene. And the gulls fell away like punctuation.
The fish drowns the sea with interminable shimmer! ABSOLUTE selenium. It is a vodka taste of pearlescent tendrils, it is everywhere you want to go of the road. We trundle into London at minimal expense. The air is mega.
*
Out in the dark, I lost the necklace with the ‘M’ on it, the one I’ve had since I was a child. I bore the loss quietly, which seemed to befit initial extinction. Later, I’d buy a watch with a face of pearl to replace it. I saw there was a value in time again.
*
Sincerely I wished to be a reader of science-fiction, but that was an effect of the store with all the metallic covers, the pop music. And of Messenger, ever. Some things you can’t parse from a future, but certain emotions grant you investment. There is finally something to want of tomorrow.
The day is all pinstriped and sunny, I can’t see through it.
*
Scientists are finding shrimps that are laced with cocaine. We’re geared up for anything, they scream in journals. I eat my way through loops, wake shiny without comedowns. Something translucent twangs of the skin.
*
I taste a nearly virtual plain, with lavender milk.
*
In her poem ‘April 23rd’, Bernadette Mayer writes of a ‘cardinal’. I keep thinking of that song with the butterfly and the dogwood, the shades drawn down. It just appears, almost without comments excepting the greyness. Cixous notes, ‘The things that happen are too beautiful to be written’. This is all true and maybe why mostly the lines elude, or weigh too rich on the page these days. I am grateful for small indefinite phrases that come, and the pretty ones that even sometimes land. You can cry if you find the right canopy.
*
He wore green velvet.
*
There is all this tender intuition. The expressions of vanishing in Permanent Green Light. The protagonist who lies in a sleeping bag on this soft suburban lawn, a piñata hanging in the tree above him. Prior serenities of sleeping on trampolines through summery twilight. Blinded we’d swipe at the sky to beat the last of the leaves into tinder. Explosion is what happens to the sun all the time. It’s kind of delicious to think of that, like romance as solarity and the space between us. Measured days and days, held breath.
…What changed?
*
Dream of Sibylle Baier’s colour-green sweater. It’s made of angora and makes me sleep into the sleep of itself, as though sleep were exactly what you drew about your shoulders. And you did.
They were playing Bright Eyes in Nice ‘n’ Sleazy’s, a good omen if ever I know one. First with your hands, then with your mouth…
*
Alone on the stairwell, dropping slips of snowy paper. Enjambed cacophony of the neighbours smoking, and a blue light that isn’t mine, the massive tv I pass each night in familiar windows. I love to be alone in hotel rooms, the soft mood of the light. The endless sense of mirror and sleep. When you played, you wanted to see to touch. I tried to remember the beautiful email, to make it better. Little confused thing, said so simple, sorting papers.
Sometime in April a letter I wrote.
Last edit was seven hours ago and boy can you feel it, a critical hit.
*
What I drew had no obvious form. I’d stopped bothering to look for permanence. There’s a new kind of ring to the rain, the smell of green leaves and the river’s illegibility. Most extravagant violet marks, a watched ellipsis. Here.
~
Sibylle Baier — Colour Green
Yohuna — The Moon Hangs in the Sky Like Nothing Hangs in the Sky
Pinegrove — Skylight
Hand Habits — what’s the use
Twain — Solar Pilgrim
Frankie Cosmos — On the Lips
The Bellybuttons — Mannequins, Gr.
Aldous Harding — Fixture Picture
Thee Oh Sees — Island Raiders
Youth Lagoon — 17
Buck Meek — Halo Light
Cate le Bon — Home to You
Joni Mitchell — Little Green
Weyes Blood — Something to Believe
The Cure — Plainsong
Galaxie 500 — Hearing Voices
Four Tet — Teenage Birdsong
Robert Sotelo — Orangerie
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard — Planet B
PUP — Full Blown Meltdown
Better Oblivion Community Centre — Exception to the Rule
FKA Twigs — Cellophane
Princess Chelsea — I Love My Boyfriend
Sky Ferreira — Voices Carry (‘Til Tuesday cover)
Big Thief — Orange
Talk Talk — New Grass
Yo La Tengo — Green Arrow
mariaology 