A briar morning of London, the original underground statuette or ahistorical blossom — what are you doing here? It is very gentle to slice the cake of your loved one’s birthday, rich dark insomnia cocoa; the sky is practicing abstinence I can’t see the stars. Consider the interface of energies required to make this: several employees gathered around with walkie-talkies, another first edition loneliness, a seat to yourself. I say to myself, “this is the morning the sky is a gradient like the standardised gradients offered by Microsoft Powerpoint in the mid-2000s” and it is not cheapening? The modern philosophy of doing your tax returns in a panic to want accountancy exhausted and proffering the invoice through which a house is saved, this is the house of the poem whose cost is enormous. What is the most expensive poem in the world and was it ever gifted for Christmas? The doorways of the poem are the blanks in the world blank dream I sing for thee, the long day doesn’t remember itself as software. A man on the train says he’s connected to mystics and he saw a person looking over me in the moment I wrote this. A man took his Tesla into the dunes to obliterate the everyday dumpling of automobile labour, that you had to repair this through various elaborate steps like I order new headphones with speakers embedded so as to walk around on the phone, like a nozzle it connects my breath to the stars. You are dropping off sleeping bags in the dream, a shelf for your glasses, a coda for napping off lavish anxieties that bloom in the elevenses of news is a fallacy. Avanti mystics. This is the worst day to pass exactitude as a micro trend or see like zoomers typing badly in the 1980s; the person is a railroad that goes on forever once they get started. Friday is a frantic alacrity I love you a briar morning, my shins torn apologies of the privileged for getting this blood so torn — a tree, a sparkle, a dove, a star. Everyone’s locked in their own toasters and burning crumbs, smoking dope commons of the momentary aerosol, first-person trauma of seeing yourself convivial in other amusements. You read? You blink game? You test positive! It is a message to educate the beautiful thumbprint of kittens who haven’t yet scratched reality out of their innocent systems. Christmas is a rate of speed. Stasis, languid and of ivy, tussling, intimacy of the leaf miner and the leaf. We need holly, poinsettia, grace. A week from today will be the new year.
Tag: Festive
Christmas Eve Auto Draft
You’ve got a nerve to be embodied. Lana says it pains her how good the male vocals are on ‘Dealer’. Season of frivolous spending I call you from the floor of a mall, you spend £16.90 on coffee, I don’t know what prose is.
At some point I must have remembered the password to the room of amphibians, Analysis.
It’s not like the contact is there. A plate of sliced ham many decades ago, the puppy ate. A palate refined into podcasters who go out for cheeseburgers, murmuration of commas, choleric entropies. It’s a form of sleep paralysis. Horny letters to environmentalists.
Save me…as…
You lucid dream or you stop / shall it be blessed to touch the furnace a hard-light, the caterpillar blonde.
The door is locked. It needs a medicine. Rivers of cognac coagulate arterial: one is gold, one is white. Nightmares of Fancy prose. Aperitif or signet ring. Solid aura.
The barista gifts me free lemon cake “for someone that needs it” and it might be me or I half it with you? All canal walk I sipped the glow of that coffee their human kindness
The city a hologram out of Musk’s Eye™️
Sharing our name with the semblance of oatmeal, remembering for the business of hibiscus. It’s not as if I don’t want to say sky leaf, high staples, the charcoal nights of London. The bars are still apparently ours, a sensibility measured by flood vibe. Names of boats.
I can’t listen to music it’s all ships. The pillow faults of true music. Soundcloud was a planet. Salad Daze. Salad translates leaf array, a contour irrealism, swarm economics, morbid blonde. Wafer arrangements of transistor radio.
A feedback loop of the dark. The edifice of gelatine.
Time goes off like a triangle.
Photoelastic buoyancy; saline; bone; lime.
Nearby they are sleeping so I am the night elf
I miss tinsel I want so much tinsel I want Porphyria’s Lover erotica tinsel I want to be metaversed into the scintillant realm of tinsel a mass effect class tinsel I want blonde tinsel a gold physiology I want reddish the trad version tinsel ikr
Silvering with these destroyer lawyers
What was the original chipmunk music?
tinsellllllllllllllling total tinsel insensate a hard sell 🙂
I sue you!
Remember the xmas we listened to psychology podcasts as we hung gold baubles on the natural tree I wept in the eighties before sun lamps were invented
Remember me, I was a product
Elementary Witchcraft
Elementary Witchcraft
(something written before Christmas)
I stir the coffee in time with my monotony. Footsteps from when the children used to play round here still haunt the kitchen walls. Everything tastes black, bitter. The plaster is peeling. I made friends with a spider who lived in the top corner of the window; while washing the dishes I watched it spring out for its daily kill. It was satisfying to observe the squirming flies, caught in the sticky web. I licked jam off a knife as the pincers squeezed their deadly juices. Sometimes I buy butter, but often it is too expensive and now I make do with the cheap stuff, which Tessa is always telling me to stop buying since it is full with nasty chemicals. I don’t mind. I like the sense of my body building up all those chemicals, my veins like rivulets of rock, acquiring their cholesterol, their calcium deposits. Darling, it is all geological.
Josh sends his love from the city. He has a new girlfriend, a very pretty young lady with reddish hair and soft, emerald eyes. Basically, she has walked off the page of one of the fantasy novels he read as a boy and goodness, how lucky he really is that she’s real! I will possibly never see him again. Her parents own a castle in Dumfries & Galloway and that is where he is spending Christmas. There will be extravagant banquets, servants, Christmas crackers stuffed with fivers and slivers of unisex jewellery. Charades by firelight and expensive brandy. Here, I have made a small effort at seasonal preparations. There are three jars of pickled onions, a tangled pile of fairy lights, a box of Foxes biscuits—which I have only just refrained from devouring on several recent occasions.
You see it is very difficult to restrain myself these days; there’s no one else around to stop me. Tessa will come for the day and we’ll watch the soaps and probably smoke a great deal of her Silk Cuts and not bother very much with the food. She has a wonderful taste in tacky festive music and so we’ll blast it out with the windows open, the cold air rushing in as we dance around the kitchen, the wine bottle bubbling with festive spells. It is one day of our lives together and it will be perfect.
Tessa can’t come at all. She has to work; she’s a nurse. In fact, right now she’s probably clasping a long thin syringe, sticking some viscous, silvery substance in someone’s skin.
I pour the dregs of the coffee down the sink, which is clogged with nasty pieces of something that might possibility still be living. The bin overflows, but I don’t bother. The thought of the ice-slippy steps and the neighbours gazing at my garish, half-hearted outfit somewhat disturbs me. I have thirty minutes before I must leave for work, but the clock doesn’t seem to be working and it’s uncertain as to whether I can trust it. The minute hand pulls slow and gelatinously over and over, never quite moving past itself, stuck in the honey-trap of its own echoes. My teeth feel dirty and coated, as if I’ve feasted on some delicious thing with a skin. In the mirror as I brush them I see my face contort like an animal’s. I have such furious eyes, the skin beneath them spilled with their shadow.
Accidentally, I rip my tights as I pull them over my knees, the gossamer threads unravelling so easily. The mohair jumper that I quite liked and thought quite smart indeed has a mysterious stain on its front, which I can’t quite explain. My fingers remain jam-sticky, even when I scrub them raw with fairy liquid. It is impossible to conjure a style from my hair, though by now I have learned to be content with this fact. I have a headache which feels like rocks pounding off rocks in a hollow cavern where salt spray lashes at the walls.
Somehow I am late for work. On the bus in the plexiglass of the windows I see the reflection of a girl who is very tall and wild, whose ragged face seems to have come from another place. It is only when I sit down, clutching my handbag and its absence of forgotten lunch, that I realise she is me.
Christmas Traditions
Christmas begins with a different ritual for everyone. For some people, it’s when the radio stations start playing familiar Christmas hits from the 80s. For others, it’s the first bite of a mince pie crumbling its buttery sticky sweetness in your fingers. For most supermarkets, it’s the day after Halloween, when the shelves are quickly stocked with tins of Roses and Quality Street and Celebrations and a Christmas tree is rather humbly erected in every store’s entrance. For me, it used to be when we started making cut-out paper snowflakes at school; when they would play Christmas songs on the old stereo system that crackled when anyone walked near it, as if it were possessed somehow. Or a trip to a pound shop to buy our dog an artfully tacky sparkly collar and/or chew toy and/or basket of treats. These days I’m involved in buying sparkly socks more than dog collars, but the sentiment is still there.
Some people are super keen for Christmas and have their trees up right from the first of December. In the library during exam period the festive jumpers are out in full swing, as are the seasonal lattes (Praline and Pumpkin Spice) retrieved from the Byres Road Starbucks. In our house, the tree usually doesn’t get put up until Christmas Eve; since our cousins from England would sometimes come up to us, we would wait for their arrival to decorate it, late in the evening, before leaving out a carrot, mince pie and brandy for Rudolph and Santa.
Traditions, however, change just like people. At school, Christmas came with the baggage of P.E. becoming training for social dancing throughout December. No Scottish child has been exempt from the painful awkwardness of having to choose a sweaty-palmed partner and learning to dance often incredibly complex steps (I’m looking at you, Strip the Willow) to the amusement of all their peers. And that’s if they’re lucky enough not to be left last and paired with a teacher. Of course, the older you get, the less embarrassment tends to dominate your entire consciousness, so dancing becomes more fun. You know, I would even go to a ceilidh of my own free will now, although back then I thought it was a form of torture cooked up to torment children out of enjoying their Christmas. It didn’t help that the school dance also involved the necessity of buying a compulsory sequined party dress (not a fun enterprise when you are a ten-year-old tomboy that hates shopping) and a dinner whose only option for vegetarians was salt and vinegar crisps (I swear I’m not really complaining). Still, the brutally hilarious fights over ‘he wiz dancin with ma girlfriend’ that you could witness outside afterwards while waiting to be picked up made the night somewhat worth it.
At secondary school, playing in the brass band forged new festive traditions. There were the rehearsal days for the Christmas concert, where you got to take a whole morning out of class, carrying your instrument down to the tinselled town hall and sit for hours munching snacks from the local Spar and watching everybody else perform. Then there were the primary school tours, where we would pile into a mini van and play in the surrounding school assemblies for the generous payment of a box of chocolates that were swiftly devoured before lunch. You felt so important, playing up there on a stage and being praised by your old teachers while all the little kids watched you with wide-eyed wonder and you remembered that you were in that crowd only a few years ago, hoping that someday you could be the big kid on stage with the shiny instrument adorned with tinsel.
When Glasgow’s shoppers’ wonderland, the aptly-named Silverburn, opened its doors, a new tradition was created. Picking me up after a hard day at college, Mum would drive me up to the shopping centre and we would do the last bits of our Christmas shopping. There’s a certain magic to the indoor consumer paradise, with all the lights and the giant snowglobe for kids to get pictures in and the seductive glow of expensive shop windows. Everything was warm and clean and once we’d done our shopping we’d go for a mince pie at Starbucks, where we could look out over all the people dressed in reindeer jumpers and laden with glossy shopping bags. These days, traditional Christmas has become more fashionable and you can go to see the Christmas markets in pretty much every British city. It all has a German and Scandinavian flavour which still feels a bit refreshing. We used to always go up to see the lights at George Square, a tradition that seems very sad and innocent now after yesterday’s heartbreaking incident, but nevertheless retains importance in my memory – and many people’s memories, I should imagine. There’s also the lovely, extravagant decor of traditional department stores which resonates the Christmas magic of the early twentieth century: I’m thinking Princes Mall and House of Fraser in Glasgow, then Jenners and Harvey Nichols in Edinburgh. I’m sure London too has much to offer, although sadly I only get to experience that through my half-hearted attempts to join my family in watching the terrible Christmas specials of Made in Chelsea.
It used to be that we’d go to Culzean to collect twigs and fir cones and sprigs of holly for decorating the house. We’d spray them with gold and dip them in glitter. Sometimes we still do that, as if living out the old ritual of making Christmas cards that Mum made us do every year when we were at primary school. I love crafting and firmly believe that it’s one of the most relaxing things you can do. A few years ago I went through a phase of making loads of candle holders out of glass jars which I painted with acrylics. At school there was always the last few days of term where people wandered about not doing much and hardly going to class. Teachers would wave us away with a ‘Merry Christmas’ instead of teaching us and we’d sit and watch Meet the Fockers on repeat (at least in primary school we had the enterprise to bring in board games) and wish we’d decided to skive. Often I retreated to the art department where we could make snowflakes and paint bottles and pretend we were little again.
At uni, the last classes are a bit more exciting. For one thing, mulled wine often factors in. Also, the fear (in first and second year at least) of Christmas exams. I used to hate how university decided to give us exams in December, with only a week to study for them. It was incredibly stressful, but in the long run I suppose it was a good thing because we didn’t have to study much over Christmas, as we did with the January prelims for Highers and Advanced Highers. Sometimes, the fear makes Christmas all the more sweeter. I remember in my first year at uni, I’d just gone with a friend to an impromptu gig at Brel on Ashton Lane. It was Rachel Sermanni and the singer from Admiral Fallow who were playing acoustic sets and it felt very wintry and magical. And when I left, to go back to my flat to cook chilli bean soup and study, it began to snow as I walked up Great George Street. It was one of those enchanting moments when you feel everything swell up and really seem to mean something. Like you’re in a movie. I was finally so happy to be in Glasgow and a student, even with three exams that week. It’s hard to not love your university and city when it looks like this:
After exams (and more recently, essay and dissertation hand-ins) comes all the comforting Christmas rituals that I love so well. Buying sparkly nail polish and the December edition of Vogue which weaves a fantasy of luxury office Christmas parties thats nowadays I have the (privilege?) of serving if not just imagining. Seeing fairy lights being put up in the restaurant where I work and all the Black Friday and Christmas bookings looming before us. Decorating the Christmas tree at home each year with new decorations got in our stockings. I missed out on decorating the Christmas tree at school, but came back from Belmont one day to see that we’d managed to procure one for the sixth year common room, and someone had decorated it artfully with ornaments worthy of any John Lewis special collection: a load of empty crisp packets.
Still, sometimes makeshift Christmasses can be fun, or at least interesting. My brother and friend Jack randomly phoning in and singing ‘Last Christmas’ live on BBC Asian Network radio. Stringing a half-hearted bit of tinsel and some Poundland fairy lights over my bookshelf. In first year at uni, we had a festive dinner party in halls, but seeing as I’ve always prioritised exams and studying over pretty much everything else, I ended up cooking my own vegetarian option which was incidentally the only thing I had in the fridge: a fried courgette. Even so, the party poopers (obviously I was included) were the ones who had to scrape all the meat scratchings and grease off the dirty pans like a band of Cinderellas until one in the morning while everyone else was having a good time at the QMU’s Cheesy Pop. Still, it was a lesson in the underside of hospitality…
Arguing about who will do the washing up is a regular feature of our household at Christmas, as it probably is pretty much everywhere. It’s not so bad when you do it together. That’s the festive spirit, anyway. Then on Boxing Day we tend to go for a nice long walk – one year it was along Ayr Beach and through Belleisle, another through Maidens and Culzean, in past years it will have been places in England. Christmas Day used to be an early dinner and then sitting in the hallway stuffing myself with Quality Street and playing the new Pokemon on my Game Boy Advance while everyone else watched the Queen’s Speech and boxsets of Only Fools and Horses. We still retain the tradition of eating bagels for breakfast (I wonder is this some kind of strange nod to our Jewish ancestry?), but nowadays it’s more a cheeky Amaretto or some Bucksfizz (maybe it should adapt and be Buckfast) and a lovely walk up to Maybole monument through the golf course and dinner at about eight when the crappy oven we have at home has finally decided to roast the parsnips. Both have their magic. The best part is still the waking up early to open my stocking. This year, I’ll be working Christmas Day, so I’ll have my Christmas on Boxing Day. But that’s okay, because Christmas is what you make it.
mariaology 