free write – Page 2

At the Turn of the Hologram Clock

At the Turn of the Hologram Clock

[written this morning on the back of a terrible, asynchronous dream]

Returning to the town would entail a strangeness, of that she was certain. She knew the old walls, the grocers, the station store; knew how little they would have changed in the time she’d been away. Knew the same faces would glide by, new lines etched upon their skin but otherwise utterly familiar. She knew that deep dread would rise again, a sense of everything closing in. The square with the trampled flowers, the narrow streets. Even the trees, her mind’s flicker arborescent since 2015. The elms with their slender memory. The autumnal glut of rowan berries, so many beads of red. She knew the pavements where once she lay down, drunk on honey and love, orange and whisky. Blood vessels burst in her wide child’s eyes. Funny, she had never really been in love here. There was a boy once, but he was distant, deranged, slightly drugged. He rarely came down. All his thoughts were the gasp of a moonshine desire and his body was sullied with need, magnesium deficiency. He watched her always with a twinge of curiosity.

Back then when she ate, her veins rose like snarling vipers and she was ashamed. She ate to forget him.

All this gorgeous reverie was an incense stick piercing the soil, a night in the park, a stolen July. On the swings they sat, listening to the rhythmic glitch of the crickets. The space between them was ten years; ten years in which she had grown, her face bloomed like a rose. He learned a glossary of drugs and offered her his alien vocabulary. Eventually they lay on the tarmac, the moon encased by the skewed geometries of the climbing frame. Its colour and rust, the slow shed of its millioning flakes.

“This will be us in the future as we were before,” she murmured.

She had been running for hours to get here. Dropped the knife in a stranger’s garden, when she knew she was clear of the worst. She thought of that flat in the city; its musty smell, its entrapments, crumbs of cake. Her other half had kept her there, pierced needles through her flesh till she wept and bled. At the bus station, pleading with strangers for change, this place had seemed the single possibility. The town, the past; a promise in miniature.

She thought of the chestnut mare in the paddock south of the housing estate. Whether it was still there. She called him from a payphone; he had the same number, still lived with his parents. She thought of crooked ladies paddling around the health centre, swapping ill-informed platitudes on the state of the nation. The man who sold cigarettes from a van, emitting that scent of lust and vanilla ice cream whip.

She felt sick.

“We’re already who we are,” he replied.

“It’s not enough.”

Her body was constellated with pin-point scars. She let the straps slip down her shoulders, rolled over to face him. Something passed in the shadow of his eye, a midnight cloud; he was silently tracing the trajectories between each star, that map of her skin—sleeveless, arterial, easy. There was no ending to anything.

“Your eyes are like…” she wanted a meaningful statement. They had been here before. “Like summer meadows, emeralds. Freckled, sparkling, something. You’re so lovely.” She wanted a cigarette.

None of this really came through. Her words were transmissions, little shivers. The ground was so cold beneath them and soon they were falling, the black of it catching on the skin of their teeth. The past was there, alive in each blade of grass; singing its secret elegy, eerie in the leaves. It was so easy to slip back into sweet paralysis.

“You’re not as thin as you used to be,” he said, by way of breaking the dream.

“But I’m less solid,” she answered, turning through smoke, maybe to kiss him. For he was different now, and so was she.

Playlist: June 2017

A salt-water taffy stretch of a month with some sun; some wasted afternoons, park light gold and green, memory dappled like so much impress can you picture it, the wax press of light on the mind. Cherish this. Treasure, bittersweet conversations with no trajectory maybe the manner of space cadets like every direction plucked from some passing ethereal breeze. Too weird the feeling. Procrastination at its various extremes. Opening a page at random, waking up to construction groans, sleeping to evil seagulls. Surreal dreams, too much sense of the early; the precinct to late where we walk hand in hand in a daydream dazed, like looking in windows, like looking for light. Play truant for a day or two. Wine/whisky. Disappear into this fantasy space. I imagine a hallway, a series of doors. Your number etched on each one, till code or eye colour. I’ve remembered. Not much is that easy. I suspect he’s heftily medicated, some metallic blood-borne balm of the soul. There are light tunnels, there are patches of cirrus pulled apart by the bad breath of godly machinery. My stomach haunted by absent coffee. Terrible brew, extra blend. Gold and blue. The little coffee shop with the warm fire in winter. Let’s pretend that it’s summer. But even in summer this has been such a terrible grey. It’s heartbreaking to think of the seasons so out of joint, the failed slot of transcendent system, of coiled and invisible process. Like, imagine someone splitting the world’s greatest crystal of quartz, its milky opaline smoke spilling across what should be galaxy or sky or absent, beautiful blue or whatever. No clouds, just atmosphere. Hoary, gloomy, frost-mottled, dreary. My sombre face with the lines beneath the eyes, great shadows of stolen time. No sleep. We stay up all night with dawn our best friend floating by open windows; smoke drifting out in sinuous, snaking curls. I love it, love watching the smoke. It’s like the dramatisation of something opening, the stop-motion voyeur of a yawning flower. This serenity, the silky pieces of petals and sepals. All of them white, glistening eye whites. Egg whites. Fluffy matter. Solidifying objects. The turning secrecy of energy within. My body continues. It chemicals, processes, chemicals. The bitter taste with its sharp promise, O shard of six hours, shrapnel matter remembering freedom. Soft mulching Irn Bru gums. That forgetting, release. The June roses bloom so fat and sad; I wish them happy diets. Dripping rain, more rain. Slow-falling, luxurious rain. Green-sheen. The rain we can’t quite touch. Access. Restricted perception, reception. Notches on wood. The mole on my side like a miniature insect, sweat-glistening. Rain. We walk home in a daze for more chemicals. Gin. Feeling. Looking in windows. I know these streets more than the capillaries within me. Layering synths, familiar chords. Oh god the half-key octave twist, the little flicker of generous melody. Rain and rain. Return to Twin Peaks.

🌧

Johnny Jewel – Stardust

The Cactus Blossoms – Mississippi

Sufjan Stevens, James McAlister, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner – Jupiter

Marika Hackman – Violet

Big Thief – Dandelion

Beach Fossils – Sleep Apnea

Radiohead – Backdrifts

Portico Quartet – Endless

Slowdive – Sugar for the Pill

Sharon Van Etten – Every Time the Sun Comes Up

Elvis Costello – I’m In the Mood Again

Fleet Foxes – Fool’s Errand

Pond – The Weather

Lorde – Homemade Dynamite

Metronomy – Miami Logic

Japanese Breakfast – Machinist

Bonobo – Grains

The Door

She laughed at that, her maraschino heart would sweeten the moment with its tender syrup of lies.

“It’s just a door,” he said. The pair of them made a couple of magpies. She was green-hued, he was jewelled with blue.

They made their way through the suburbs, so easy the way they rolled along concrete with those slender legs. I have made a pinball of their trajectories. Soon they realised their mistake.

“We have to go back for the door,” she said. She was insisting. He admitted her this.

They carried the door along many streets. It was painted the colour of duck eggs, a pale blue paint that flaked in places. People stared, assuming they were a lovely young couple setting up their new home. Sometimes, she patted her pocket to make sure the stuff was still there. Later, they would huddle under the lilac in the rich person’s garden and count their dreams beneath panoplies of blackbirds. For now, there was the door.

“What shall we do with it?” he asked.

“It has a purpose.” She propped it up against the red brick wall of the old agora. It had beautiful windows, the kind of windows you imagine on doors in twee country houses, where nice mothers served sugar-bread to doorstep strangers.

“We could do anything with it.” They flirted with the idea of hacking it to bits, chopping for firewood. The forest was not far away; though really it was just a copse of trees, the undergrowth littered with cigarettes, sweet wrappers, needles. Not enough space to get lost in. You could hardly build a fire without alarming the neighbours.

When we are drawn out of nothing we are drawn into possibility. The couple knew the door was their portal, knew it as sure in their blood as they knew their daily hunger. Sometimes at night, she would let him scratch the sores on her skin, sending her off to sleep. She knew he spent those nights awake, scraping the bark off any hide he could, clotting the soil in his nails. They borrowed a suitcase, abandoned at a bus stop. An old lady’s worldly possessions treated them briefly to cardigans, palma violets, little nips of hip-flask whisky. They were warm for weeks, till the wool unravelled in winter’s first storm, till the liquor ran out one cold dark night.

Combustion or invitation. He gripped her arms and tried to shake her from every undulate leafy trembling. Her blood was beyond human; she had set up her fix long before sundown and this was wrong. He stayed with her through the worst of it, the 4am rattles and the toothache. If only the medicine worked, if only. Night-blooming flowers made cheap companions. An amazing array of skinny women would pass through the copse, the side alley that led to the 24 hour Spar, the petrol station. Cars would always pass regardless. The wholeness of the city was a great sprawl of this transitive passing.

And then the door.

She twisted the brass handle. The screw screamed in its lock, but nobody heard it.

(Can we always be stuck like this, honeycombing our bodies?)

It felt magnificent, holding him in the darkness as she always did, the frost forming rime on the skin of their lips. Somehow they knew the door was a separation. A transmutation of the flesh would occur in its fold, the way the pull-back of a hinge would sweep away time as they knew it. This was okay somehow, almost reassurance.

[…& continue].

Playlist: May 2017

May (not the prime minister) lived up to its sunshine and showers. Everything suddenly bloomed, full boughs of lilac and sweet yellow gorse. What was it Morton said about flowers? The thing about flowers is their monstrosity; the fact that they just grow regardless. It’s in their genetics; there’s not always a reason. Some days were so hot you could feel your face melt. When I laugh sometimes it’s like tasting peaches, though god knows are they even in season yet? Is it okay to laugh yet? The only thing I learned in a year / where I didn’t smile much not really…Ah Laura, she gets you every time. Walking around pinning two points of one’s lips to either side of one’s face, the smile is a fixture of attire that one can drop as soon as the customers aren’t looking. Customers…But then walking out the door, in the street; what is the etiquette to performing for these people? What if I bump into someone I know and they’re like what are you so happy about when you’re not even happy at all? When it is very sunny and there are things to look forward to, happiness perhaps comes naturally. Walk with confidence. Is that some maternal trick? The illusion of sanity…This was a month of giving presentations, of writing bibliographies, of procrastinating like crazy. Everything falling away. There used to be sense to everything happening but now it sprawls outwards, endlessly reaching for that elusive rivulet that sluices away beyond the grasp of my feeble mind. At night, I finely chop celery and listen carefully as if hearing dubstep through the walls. The tree outside my window has finally flourished. Everything green and clear. Maybe nice enough to listen to Arthur Russell, Love is Overtaking Me. If I was in a field, ears pressed the soft earth, listening for the corn…Aliens sweep through the universe. I look west like Kerouac, I fall about east in search for another city. Really I don’t leave my room. Seduced by songs from Barcelona; later, SWANS gave me the religious extravagance of sense-splitting sound. Sound you let literally wash over you, every wave of it carving invisible nicks in the skin, shuddering the ice in one’s glass to a petrified tinkle. Someone is still playing a flute beneath a weeping willow, two feet in the turquoise water. Someone is crying under a lilac tree, clutching a miniature bottle of Johnny Walker. There’s like, a whole lot of stuff in a month. I cut off like, half my hair. Nostalgia trips to 2007. I had to return that Jameson book with the red cover that looked so good propping up some pots of aloe vera. Nourishing crushes by starlight on the walk home from several gigs with one’s ears ringing with resonant echoes of songs once forgotten. What do I love about each face? What do I love about the window, the pattern on the sandstone, the feel of the cool leaves in the rain. The smell of all these blossoms, the sight of dog daisies lining the motorway. Spring rain is so luxurious. Hoping to stumble upon someone I know, night-lurking as I am. I feel like I’m falling into East Coker, Eliot in my head when I should be reading Keats or whatever. O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark. Six in the morning is nice to walk home in; the daylight burns like a glitch in the brain, so every vision is a flicker and the impending sleep will satisfy no element of consciousness if spent alone. You have to go with the thing that leaps in your chest like some terrible, thrilling foreign force. Elements. Filling my room with NatureWave for the purpose of what…free-writing, dreaming? Already Twin Peaks is consuming the shadows of reality and I see the weirdness in the corner of things. We have entered the time of Gemini. Soon it will be June/is it already? I may or may not have listened to any of these songs, for various reasons.

Mungo’s Hi Fi – Spring Shower Dub

Pronto Mama – All Your Insides

Ultimate Painting – Central Park Blues

Withered Hand – After the Rain

Spinning Coin – Raining on Hope Street

Slow Dive – Star Roving

The Cribs – I’m a Realist

The Mamas and Papas – California Dreamin’

C Duncan – Like You Do (Babe Remix)

Letherette – Cartoon Haunt

Severed Heads – Dead Eyes Opened

Talking Heads – (Nothing But) Flowers

Francobollo – Kinky Lola

Lana Del Rey – Coachella / Woodstock in My Mind

The Cactus Blossoms – Powder Blue

Laps – All the Kids

Marika Hackman – Violet

Fazerdaze – Shoulders

Chromatics – Shadow

The Weather Turns

[ a daily free write ]

The weather turns, ineluctable as that mist that mysteriously fogs up my glasses (Footnote: Why do I wear glasses? Something a man once said about parallax and the need for clarity of distance, the reassurance of one’s own substance). The city is a haze of something else today, foreign as a postcard marred with scratches of time and travel. Must I always be up to my neck in vapour, in unfinished melodies? They always catch: grooves on a record, gum on the pavement, hair snagged in a glue binding, specific as a bookmark; melody after melody. The notation would be very messy. I’m picturing spaghetti-tangles of quavers, misplaced on the staves with no home of their own. What of this note? oOoOooooooooOOOooOooaaAAAaaaaaAaoo……. Does it belong in the sonic realm of an F#? The problem is, I picture my life in A minor, every time. The soaring long echo of a siren call; so sad, so sad. Picture this, pretty fake glass vase, all containers of vapour, elaborated with black-printed Celtic patterns, impenetrable as ersatz ~internet~ Japanese.

One attempt at pottery is quite the attained luxury. I think I will try out something new. The raising of a blue hand in order to trace the pulse of purple veins. Not too bad for a hologram. This is sweet and clear and maybe okay. Like walking past the graveyard of pines. Must I call it that? Too long it has been since I’ve trailed through a cemetery. A habit picked up from my grandmother, I glance at the old headstones, my brain knotting in each line and crack and crumble. I forget dates; they fall away. When you realise that you are walking a few feet above the bodies of dead people, your heart does a turn and slips to your stomach. The ground is so soft and mossy. Flesh is a good fertiliser, it spreads lush bright vitamins to the soil. In fact, it might be quite nice to lie down in and dream.

If I slept in a graveyard, would I have reveries that channel the dead? It’s a distinct possibility, the amount of fragmentary matter that must float in the air like electricity. The hormone we release when we die: dimethyltryptamine, DMT. They say it makes us see fairies, elves and tunnels of light. Lost soulmates dwindling in the twining of shining limbs. Silver rings in a stranger’s nose. Near death, the liminal weirdness of the world crosses its own boundary. No wonder I have always loved the word psychotropic, its connotations of a spliced brain opening out like a Polly Pocket to uncover an island of swaying purple palms, a guava pink sea, an assortment of oozing neon beads. This great, gritty, sparkling geode. Would a brain like that bleed? Do brains in general even bleed? The lavish quality of this vision is undoubtedly a product of sugar cravings. The dangerous dip, the faint-headedness. Our bodies being an assortment of chemicals, it’s only natural that the synapses of our minds produce very queer imaginings indeed.

Pineal gland: essence of palm. The oil extract no longer lucrative in worldwide trade, though popular, cheap and downright nasty. Spread it on bread like honey and sweeten. It makes things swell, tighten.

Things to desire: serotonin, colour, daylight. There was a time where I substituted existence for an array of colours, the kind that come straight out the packet. The need for something pure and vivid, so vivid as to seem utterly distilled of all trace matter, was completely upon me. Splat after splat after splat. I could have squirted that colour on my tongue and hoped for the same result of a manic acid trip. I wanted to see the gravestones melt, the names shimmer and vaguely disappear, leaving scraps and lingerings of unfinished letters. Is it possible, really, that some expert kneeled in the moss and carved those names so beautifully?

Crack open the sky over the sea and tell me what you see. The bold aroma of a rainbow comes quickly and glows like some other sun is ripening behind it. A pale blue sun, perhaps, stolen from Mercury. Planets out there, swapping their radiations of time. Down below, the ocean groans under globules of oil, fat black spills which ooze and spread. Each secretion has its location hidden; sometimes gushing, sometimes slowly swirling. I think of butter melting into chocolate, ink being marbled in gelatinous jam. The favourite taste, all bonfires of strawberry. Some god is spinning the water with a cocktail stick, languid and bored like a hungry person in a bar, waiting for love. We hallucinate, don’t you see? There is a complete quality to what comes next, the fiery upturning of all this trace matter. Waste. Be flamboyant as an artwork. You pinch the thin skin of each of my fingers and the lightning shoots right through me.

Things to desire: rock pools of igneous glass, starfish, the dying white rose at the side of a grave.

I hear the knell from far away. Such tocsins call me back from the realm of the dead, though I am happy here, my body breaking down into succulent little pieces. The woman opposite me mutters litanies to herself; stickily, as if each word were cheaply enthroned in lipstick. Is there work still to be done? These days, I mix the colours. I like to see the vibrancy break down, meld into subtler hues, details you see only up close. The paint sticks in my brushes, the glitter of light in my lashes. It’s not mystifying anymore. The greyish haze is my outpourings of smoke, enough to cover the whole skyline, swallowing up what good is left of tomorrow. I inhale matter in wholes and halves. Like yesterday, it will be black (the city, that is): gilded, ink-ridden, brilliantly viscous. A whole ocean will roll from the distance and its golden ore will cover us, just so many bubbles of oil pasting our brains. For now, it rains.

***

Tag: free write