This time last year, ‘I would look up, intermittently, through a canopy of light-filled leaves’. The unrealism of a momentary viridian, admitting I could not partake in. The nights went on and on in those days, there was a quality of sorry-not-sorry to the usual erasures. And asking for numbers, and watching shambolic ones fall into chairs and windows; the ceiling tilted.
Serotonin is my friend. I want to invent a character. The pressure front hurts my head.
We enter the gallery and there are the nymphs, the lilypads. You have told me a dream in which you ascended the lilypad stairs to heaven, was it heaven, and each one made a satisfying sound and sway when stepped on. I am thinking of Deku leaves and swirls in the ochre night. Here we go with synonyms. ‘There may be lunch’, Anne Carson says, ‘Or we would eat / many more paintings’. As it stands, I order jasmine tea. The paint drips green from the edge of the lilypad, chromium oxide staining the lake. At some point I refused to live without sleep. I surrendered to what its depth could do. A man told me, every time you blink, you refresh your thoughts. I have my muscles set to Command+R with cool deliberation, but all that fluttering won’t get me served. The rain washed all the mascara away. So I order into warmth again. Tequila Maria, something bloody with spice and celery, black pepper’s vast and negentropic heart. Did I mean to say negative calories. Tom McCarthy has this essay about Toussaint called ‘Stabbing the Olive’: ‘We don’t want plot, depth or content; we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want patterns’. A flat asymmetry of energies. I used my pinkie to lick the rim of red dust from the glass, like the last of a meal. Circumferential intimations of love. I was hungry, the night was not warm. Moments of aloneness. Who is McCarthy’s ‘we’? All these lit-critics, clamouring to borrow the spirographs of the twentieth century. I lose a pen.
Thom Yorke is getting on a subway somewhere.
I thought that taste itself formed an interval, a thickening of presence. Crocheted objects appear on my wall like the lacery of untranslatable dreams. Red, blue and yellow. These are the primary materials of my current research:
- Instagram
- Gifted books with signatures
- Colours of sky and cloud
- Seagull transposition
- Conference sandwiches
- The question of ambience in poetry
- Oil pastels
- Clay
- Absences in friendship
- Tropical levels
- The inbox
- Scotrail
Paranoia is former. As if I could not align the tulips to the complementary turquoise wall, the lilt, the residual. The animals depart when we start writing, a narcissism for darkest_.
~
In the late Tesco he jumped me, the former doorman, halfway through a dj shift with the Haribo fizz and the bottles of whisky. I wondered what music he would play nextdoor. If you could make a vinyl of sunlight, how I would live for the interminable patterns of notches, solarity catching and catching on loop. Fingers tracing sugar dust over the records, a sourness in his mouth. I was wearing this purple-pleated skirt, five years ago, and a man outside Tesco, another Tesco, asked if I was pregnant. I only wanted the placenta of his mean stare and I wanted to salt it and eat it hard. My twenties recede without drop.
She describes the effects of gluten as a sanding down, an erasure; inside her the tangles made desert. We want clustering, sway of villi, performance. I eat bread and think less; my head fills up with fog.
Soreness in coccyx equals aporia. I awoke to the pent-up throb of the washing machine. Let’s talk about the arbitrary constraint of 30 days. Clusters of black tights as the serpentine symbols in Turner.
~
Something from a solar poem, a thing for the solstice:
if I go
grassily
drunk in June
it’s just sky
in our lungs
What I meant was, maybe something in the difference between the length of our breaths, and is this a question of the daylight hours, a quantified tiredness, or is it the smoke. My laconic lungs suck in. The grass comes away in tufts where we pull it, like the fluff from a dog’s back in moulting season. I have this dream about reaching the end of a lawn, like I’m staying in a house where the garden is seen from the window only, it looks unreal. You could not exhaust it. Anne Carson says a pilgrim always seeks a horizon, is never satisfied. The dog I had would run round and round, until the grass wore down into dirt. There would be a ring, a halo of ruined earth. She was not looking for anything particular. Instead, she ran around.
I remember the basement party where I sat between two boys, holding a sparkler and watching the smoke trails recede.
I am thinking about foam, immortality, fractal gifs. Coffee opens me up, so I don’t have to look.
No-one knows. On Fridays I listen to Gardeners’ Question Time, I cut rice cakes into quarters.
~
There was this girl, she lived in the orange-painted room. Her name sounds something like citrus. A long time ago, I wrote a story about her. I was in the library with a stack of philosophy books. I can’t do it. She skips ballet class to eat blueberry muffins in the local café, to flirt with the waiter. She wears a yellow raincoat, even when it’s sunny, and he calls it her famous raincoat. She never gets the joke but she likes how he twists a smile at the same time as he twists his break-time cigarette into something thin and perfect. He always wears blue, regardless of uniform. She wants to be that cigarette, she wants to be rolled into one straight line, but she likes her sugar too much. His smile, surely, is for her alone; it looks delicious. She imagines the taste of ash, smouldering in her mouth if she kissed him and the trace of the cigarette and the one before that would glow like the orange in her room.
Adrianne Lenker sings of ‘fragile orange wind in the garden’.
Should we go outside? And for what.
There was a time when every story had to end, which was fiction. Poetry is getting to have your loops, to sweeten and eat them profusely with silver spoons: imitation privilege. I could keep stirring and stirring until they melt into milk, this miasma of found words, of nourishing.
Kathleen Fraser:
Everything is so agreeable, tangential, so light
of foot.
Tangerine, all pungent with its leaves intact.
The way the egg yolks look when they split, the shit on a watch face, the intimate pixels of a harp up close, a part song. Selective arpeggio carriage to morning. I’m so grateful I’m basically grapefruit, this single devourable bauble of flesh. My skin is thick and explicit. It’s a time in the month. That there, that’s not me. You can peel off the sticker to see.
In the park, the weekdays fill up with hormones.
~
I played Everything. I was a mushroom, a jet-ski, a palm tree, a planet, a hawk and an oil rig. I rolled and shuffled; scale itself became a sort of music. At once, I soared in threes and sevens. My favourite world was streaked with pink, cacti and celadon rivers. Time was a trick of the hard-drive.
We collect the cherry-chocolate cake. Later he says something like, The ocean is an orca. Which is much better than, We are all Earth; or, I am what I eat. The literalism is looping its way around cornfields and train delays, better to solder the evening with marmalade light and a buttery spread of new messages.
~
I have hardly been listening to music at all.
~
The weather was briefly incidental.
Vague plans to read Plato’s Timaeus
scarpered by the way the roses look
in ache, my dream alarm of cascade
is softened by limbs and transport.
We take a lot of time to take the river
in us, hungering girls in old movies
as though they could speak the end
of a call, prior to numbers. We eat
plainly in several vegetal airs, our
cutlery shines like a weather vane.
The intermediary function of skin
is just this much. You glow inside
a tentative plan, the sparkle of re-
grettable voice. I paint my nails a
venus flytrap green. Who decides
what grows inside you. Should eat.
~
We reply, that it is the receptacle, and in a manner the nurse, of all generation. I have spoken the truth; but I must express myself in clearer language, and this will be an arduous task for many reasons, and in particular because I must first raise questions concerning fire and the other elements, and determine what each of them is; for to say, with any probability or certitude, which of them should be called water rather than fire, and which should be called any of them rather than all or some one of them, is a difficult matter.
— Socrates
The secret mysticism of nicknames
and particle physics. If we are just water.
And what if this water never smells like shame.
And what if the water turns red
like Topshop lipstick, or the gilded cover
of my Kathleen Fraser. Chili flakes assemble
upon the soft lawn of your fruit, a stone
falls out in lieu of the heart. I try particulars:
99p filter coffee, office politics, the milk
chocolate bunnies on campus. I mean they were real
as morning. Star power. When the beach breaks out
to cure, the lovely scrambling of a darkness shared.
Say a soundtrack feels special because it bristles.
I fell asleep in the workshop. My hair all huge
in the hotel mirror. We collect red words for green
and call it geometry. The trad effects of earnestness
and other lyric qualities of indie
I tried to recede like my twenties
I tried halloumi, salt, breakfast vodka.
The longest day of the year
was shorter than anything
I could bother to write.
~
On my birthday we visited the island, eight of us on the ferry. Kitsch displays of gifts without crystals, trying to fit ourselves into the minigolf. We shared red wine on a jetty, alas not spiralled; we wrote a poem, according to the economy of one red word for a sip.
sultry walks seem elusive to those players of croquet taking milliseconds out of capitalism or inducing epilepsy, throwing linguini into darkness and leaving finite symphorophilia to the gannets
The water was cold and clear, the barnacles softened the soles of my feet. The sky broke an almost symmetry of peachy leakings, yellow colours spilled on the sea. Gloria stood with her scarf to the wind; we brushed the horizon on the swings. I sang and sang. We ran for the last ferry, in usual fashion, salt and Tennents. The tide came in.
We sat on the picnic bench of the terminal, singing ethereal Judee lyrics. Heavy in my throat, a halo; the mists. A pleasurable tiredness.
~
A. describes how the glaciers are moving. The surface of the planet rearranges itself, and my impression of the continents sinks like wax. I melt the very edge of a tectonics, craving stories. The citrus girl is so much older and younger, she exists as though only in song. Her raincoat is made of honeybees.
A rushing sound I attributed to rain but then not.
She sits in three kinds of tree and fingers her decorative suggestion of dawn, worn as a necklace. I can’t sleep for the gulls and the lines of unmannered flight, the concept of ‘politics’ filling the air of my kitchen. The pearls burst everywhere. I draw a radio silence around each project, I try to choose.
~
Never have I ever asked Siri.
~
I get stuck on a train. We move south, but only gradually.
~
Pip Blom – Daddy Issues
Holiday Ghosts – Thinking of You
Bat for Lashes – Kids in the Dark
Katie Dey – Solipsisting
Jay Som – Superbike
Beach Fossils – Be Nothing
Hop Along – Waitress
(Sandy) Alex G – Gretel
Jai Paul – Do You Love Her Now
Thom Yorke – Twist
Gross Net – Gentrification
Sylvan Esso – Die Young
DOPE LEMON – Salt & Pepper
Crake – Glycerin
Big Thief – Orange
Silver Jews – The Wild Kindness
Jessica Pratt – Mother Big River
Claire Cronin – Wolfman
Yo La Tengo – Green Arrow
Galaxie 500 – Summertime
Kelly Moran – Water Music
Yohuna – Fades to Blue
Karen Dalton – Something on Your Mind
Judee Sill – The Kiss
Manchester Orchestra – My Backwards Walk (Frightened Rabbit cover)
mariaology 