Late October, Cycled home in my t-shirt, thru the industrial estate and beyond. you and I remember well the opening sequence, credits to all those sly cartoons who lived in colours not of their own choosing. what I’m trying to say is the warmth comes not explicable from crisis, to say ‘i was warmed by crisis’ seems wrong, and yet as I walk in a light denim jacket purchased on the day of the kenmure raid, people are still debating who was the OG lady of sadcore, adele or lana del rey? there are two versions of the skins episode where cassie escapes to new york and she runs through an impossibly empty city: one which plays an Adele track and another which plays ‘My Town, My City’ by an unidentified artist which now seems relegated to the half played halls of ancient youtube history, yet also the chorus that would seem to claim for its singer something of a belonging in cold despair. in memory the piano begins when she bites into the apple and starts crying but this could have happened in any dimension, especially considering every time i bite into an apple now my eyes smart, crunching into a moment straight from chris marker and sugar brushed with what he doesn’t know, bright red, i mean ordinary feminine pain, or like, the year 2007 in bristol. i didn’t know what UK garage classics were until i keyed my first car or like buzzed myself athletically through the other door where i would be welcomed as a stranger to victorian milk and honey, reversing the version where you can’t wear that necklace for it has bumped against her sternum and now something of a soul is dead. my friend died but ever since july i have compulsively worn purple. when i get synaesthesia it’s usually for songs, words, general emotions that in relation make up grids or curlicues surprisingly happy to coexist, like if i draw a lilac spiral where your name once is, i feel better, i feel better. it’s a schoolgirl trick of the selfsame like writing out names in our jotters, yours or mine, walking the perambulator back to the moon where exhausted mothers are calling their mothers to war. we benefited from working tax credits and educational maintenance allowance, i asked friends born with particular chromosomes to buy me yorkie bars, i remember the feel of warm summer tar against my skull better than i recall my first fuck tho a kiss was easy, it was like pulling another fish through a big comma soaked in bourbon and the bright lights were on and everyone watching? sometimes i have to go out a room to remember something like what are you doing here, now i have to walk around to even get writing or find eloquence in pavement slopes. where i live now you smell hops on mondays and thursdays the cats are not ginger, i let them nuzzle against my leg in exchange for a purr. tonight there were electrical failures in the library so i decided not to imagine my evening as a series of blocks defined by the hours locked upon flat surfaces. this house has a shed! if i listened to anything it was to the street lights twinkle as mushrooms do when stamped on, baby screeches, we come home with medical certificates and iron deficiencies with mouthfuls of words about aurora borealis and sandstone. thru the periurban and elderberry. i create a sequence and it forges a colour for itself, can’t be changed. i’m wearing a white t-shirt and it’s late in the autumn and i’m telling you this because the sky is purple, it’s 16 degrees and i want to change
Tag: music
Playlist: August 2021
Seasonal transition is a scream sample, chord suspended. Red berries u can’t eat.
Charlie XCX, Caroline Polachek — Tears
TeenCanteen — You’re So Analog
Angel Olsen — If You Leave
TOPS — Party Again
Broadcast — Colour Me In
Connan Mockasin, Ade — It’s Just Wind
Feng Suave — Unweaving the Rainbow Forever
Julia Holter — So Humble the Afternoon
Black Marble — Somewhere
aya, Iceboy Violet — Emley lights us moor
Half Waif, NNAMDÏ — Orange Blossoms (remix)
Dirty Projectors, Björk — No Embrace
Arthur Russell — All-Boy, All-Girl
Pinegrove — Orange
Songs: Ohia — Blue Chicago Moon
Love Battery — Out of Focus
Life Model — Sit Still
Grandaddy — Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance
Daniel Johnston — Walking the Cow
Grouper — Unclean Mind
Kiran Leonard — Old Threat Tale
A Breath
A BREATH
Writing in the gloaming I would even call meadow, its scorched-out centre you can probably see from a helicopter, a drone, should you choose the option of aerial photography and remote capture in a time of social distancing. Should you have access to that tech, perhaps in a speculative way; should you have access, the way children have access because they discuss so thoroughly the possibilities, and they do this illicitly into the night. My excellent stenography skills, if we are calling this shorthand, were honed from adolescent hours on Microsoft Instant Messenger, affectionately known as MSN. Any one of us born in that particular bracket of the fin de siècle will understand what it means to spend time in one’s room alone, not quite as in ‘Adam’s Song’, but touching the void through sign-ins, statuses, emoticons, nudges. To live in the delirium of many glimmering windows. I wanted to call you up from my bower, listening to ‘Lime Tree’ on repeat because it carries me away; I wanted to call you up, but could I bear to put down my pen for this. You will never know if I am writing or typing; ‘this kind of thing’ bears no performative ellipsis. Had I known anyway what you would say, as someone who needs access to their own face to talk, something is coming away for free. We have been watching each other watch our own expressions: as with emoticons, each manner of the face feels curated. Some of us collapse on the phone. In the fractal reality of self-isolation, I divvy up zoomy contingencies of speech. When was the last time I talked without seeing my own face. Deleuze and Guattari argue that faces ‘define zones of frequency or probability’: the face ‘constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of’. Hoping to give you a meadow — multifarious and mysterious plenty — I yet give you the wall or the screen. A zoomy contingency that you are happy, that you had signed out of the chat. Against it I file down my voice to its lower registers, taking the edge off an earnestness. If you could measure the frequency of sleep, perhaps architects of the dream-state would salve the true riddles of twenty-first century expression. I wanted to call you up with a slow, perfected drawl, relay how I was hanging upside down from my bower. How I imagine the song to end is a very beautiful flower, floating down the river, but that is only how the song begins. It really ends with a daydream, ‘now that living is no good’, and the singer is lost and found as they enter the woods, barefoot like a child. Why am I telling you all this, barefoot like a child, now that I cannot tell the woods from the trees in my nameless life. And Coleridge sings, this lime tree my prison, my prison / feels like prism. If a wood haloed the meadow, if a moat, if a liquid loop — arboreal, molten, stupid. Walking in the scorched-out meadow an hour or more to be here, sometimes dreaming of this place, needing to be here — no longer a meadow for having been burned. What occurred to ruin the centre. I want to bounce, bounce, bounce with it. All my friends active now and forever. I stumble on the grammar of an instant; are you online, are you online in the meadow, I am calling you up to say this. I am checking-in, the way people used to on Facebook. What is the name of this place? The meadow goes undocumented. What is the probability that your face means the shape of a grassland, a patch of unruly narcissi, a noticing gesture that I would say I have been here before. At least in dreams. Someone is trying to brand the meadow. In quarantine, my old longing for those messaging days recurs. We all talked on that singular platform, confessed under pseudonyms, and ever since I have been lost in the trees of each channel — their foliage concealing the one true thing. Someone is trying to sell the meadow. Infinite recursion of memes and secrets and finance. There was a purity to MSN, something about its frequency. Namelessness. You see what I mean? Sometimes in the poem, I mean the scorched-out cindering middle of the poem, you take grace enough to say fuck it, hiya, wait, no, I can’t hear you. You hold ‘us’ in brackets. If I could timestamp the start to end of that, like debt. One time C. messaged me on Instagram to ask what is really meant by the gloaming. What time of day was this asked, did that matter? I think gloaming would be different at four in the morning to noon; but what did I give as reply? A quick skim of the platforms comes up with nothing. Besides, soon my battery will die in the old archaeology of dissolving thought. There was a purpose in calling you up for this, and now ants are crawling all over my notebook. Nothing has touched me for weeks. I want to say I have a lascivious craving for seaweed flakes, tousled hair, disco kisses, regular breakfasts, offline status, cetirizine, romance and saffron cakes. I have been touching nothing; lately asking myself what is it we do that makes us fruit. The blossoms are stirring on Montague Street. And you click and collect, you drag us backwards. I know that faceless, somewhere you construct the wall. Last night I ran down Great Western Road, my Spotify shuffling back to ‘Adam’s Song’, ‘Tomorrow holds such better days’. I felt burdened by the days inside the days, their seeming neon-fold, ‘the time goes by’ in the flicker of your eyelid. Because my eyes are screen-burned, hot-taken, hypothetical, exhausted; because my eyes looked too long at the meadow. Its torrified heart reduced to this logo. Because your eyes held green astride creamy lindens, to only open the same elsewhere, ‘No sound is dissonant which tells of Life’, etc. I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of power chords, the lines about apple juice spilled in the hall, harmony, the burden of a loss the size of adolescence itself. St. John’s Wort doled in the morning, soft-bitter ersatz taste of the sunlight and sensitive. I have no heart for war but air. How did I get here, on the brink of my phone battery’s untimely death, filling my notebook in the moonless April? Otherwise it would happen, haze, my father posting endless on his wall, unbeknownst to the standard quota expected on the book of the face. This feels so banal and yet I am telling you the grass is beautiful, endless, strange. Marigolds cluster around glitching trees, impossible to reach. If I could I would give you a pool of marigolds. Only just realised pool is loop backwards. Yellow and / I drag into blue and backwards to call you. I’m sorry I’ve been listening to ‘Lime Tree’ again — it’s just that this song came out in 2007, I was only fourteen, yellow + blue make green, I was starving and ever since then I’ve thought of this story. Something you could cut out from inside you, could burn from the meadow. A little kernel of narrative you tap with your tongue and your teeth, you give to me slowly. I want to leave the message to assure you, ‘It’s done’. Would you know I was talking about the disease? I was coming down from my bower, coming down, breezeless and sleepy, wishing I could call you up and quote the line, ‘Don’t be so amazing / Or I’ll miss you too much’. I wish I could climb through a window to see you, smooth myself right through the glass. Could I miss what I had not yet touched, in April’s middling haze of something receding. All those years you had told me to eat. Oh you know and you know and you don’t. Remember those hours? If we could give them back, little gifts of death, as Derrida says, like an ethics. It’s only me. I’m sorry if calling freaked you out from inside the machine. What I wanted to say was, it made me ecstatic, on GWR, zoomy the song and the voice and I could see Venus so bright in the sky. And the sky was rich as ganache, thick filled with more sky; Matty would say like chocolate, or saffron, or debt. Such a spooky ecstasy! (<3) The calorific night…I write you this so as to cut into it, hazy, reflecting, give you a slice of my dreams. Whatever anyone says feels charged with history, so I want this to be utterly redundant, depletable, delectable, careless as crossing the road without cars in the city that now never wakes or sleeps, but only deletes. The adventitious device, zoning close to us, is taking a photo. Is this a kind of labour. There are such archives beyond access they try for. Here, I will be always the small green light in lieu of a meadow, the lyrical unfinishing of cringe to know this. A breath I took / You can just call me up.
— 17th April 2020
Sonnets for Hooch: Summertime Social
Sonnets for Hooch: Summertime Social is the sophomore offering of a four-part pamphlet series of sonnets attuned to the weirding seasons. Structured around 22 intervals of the day and its explosion, from golden hour to gloaming, breakfast to millennium, this bumper book of sonnets is full of clandestine snacks and wavy moments. In celebration of wasting time, biting into the lemon of attention and trading intimacies, this is a long, sweet hit of lilac to whet your utopian appetite. An ‘affordable metaphysics of care’ imagined at the scale of the world as ‘a dream governable / by beginning’, ‘a rare green / species of hooch’ and ‘this hypersonnet’ of ‘a lifetime on tape’. The poets of Summertime Social find comradeship in IDM producers, dedications to friends, calorific density and dreamwork; the brevity of the sonnet form affords ‘a sun net cutting over unfinished’. You want to ask, where does the sun set on the internet? What does it mean to be ‘rat ascendant’”? Here on the ‘skylark octave’, the hooch poets have really come into their own.
by Mau Baiocco, Kyle Lovell & Maria Sledmere
[100 pp. // A5 // Perfect-bound // Run of 100 ]
Order copies from Fathomsun Press for £8 here.
Playlist: July 2021
Have you followed me closely through the long four years of being caught into list like thistles do make this white stuff, fluffy July of it, caught pale against purple and green indelible sunsets. I appreciate all kinds of writing and sometimes a product has a good line like, rain and dark gold the podium and ringtone, we’ve got to get ready, there are some stones that remain. For memory and in VHS.
*
Something happened which I could not write about, and it was scary. Summer is smoky, you see it all around and when you don’t you know it’s still there, if you know what I mean, everywhere you look and don’t see it you know. The smoke grows lilac from the country song and it’s a new one, drawn from the old one, Waxahatchee is also known as Katie and I like how sobriety opens a songwriting and settles. Not that a loss does settle. This is a week and more soberly in the poem, reflecting the dust bits, it’s not clarity it’s cornflake crushed beneath foot. Tonight is my exhibition and a stupid person cutting the lawn, I try to look outside. The curtains are just gauze and Mau texts to say there’s something funny about ‘gossamer sounds / on the porch’ as a line and we agree all spiderwebs are kinky because ‘entrapment / constraint or binding’, and spiders eating their mates and like, how this conversation occurs mint green on lilac as in nature, bad NYC illustration, having whatsapped the last chalice or lapped from, critical, I owe you a whole month of blog there’s a backlog, the real foxes coming around the lot. Joey says a blog is useful if it has a playlist, music is useful. I’ve been reading his pamphlet again, let’s do it, which he wrote for / dedicated to our reading group, and thinking about poetry and collectivity and action. And what you can do on the face of loss. An old woman chides the speaker to not plant vegetables on private land and the speaker replies by ruminating on the conditions necessary for flourishing, I love this line ‘some people think its cool to have / shit / like a forest what the fuck but it doesn’t stop’. I am reading this poem for its labour and dreaming in a flat it’s not mine, for its fight and for what it makes me want to do, this it which is like the it of a pop song, more of a doing and pronoun, Ily, who do you think we are? What do foxes think about music? I hear a gate creak outside as I write this and imagine on the bare patch of grass where the bins are the block became meadowed and fred gets targeted ads for hydrangeas, having told the story of the hydrangea wars one time too many and I also want my targeted ads, if I must have them, to sell me wildflower seeds and the bulbs of potential vegetables. I bought an album and it had two flower bulbs and a cassette tape included, everything wrapped in beautiful tissue paper. Hungover I am thinking about that and about Joey’s writing on the pale yellow paper you sensed was artfully stolen. There are lots of important thoughts in this pamphlet like ‘it’s dreamy to dream when the real & necessary work / is ugly like steps clogged & knotty with nauseous / exhaustion’ and what does it mean to say something is dreamy, I wish I could ask Bernadette and get her poem for an answer like an answer machine where the words are crackled but everything you need to know is in the tone of the voice and the space between sound and how there is a breeze through the line, a wise one. Or just like, the 3 second double space between songs on a playlist where you turn to the other and know. Time pass. Calcined eclipsed as if I scrolled mortality site with its many many awful ads about products for tooth decay and viagra and thinking is this the absolute dramatisation of death on the internet, can we not have something clean, a kind of writing. After our phone call all my targeted ads are for lingerie no person would wear, it makes me alien to say so? Someone tells me that the databases are inordinately complex and there’s nothing a layperson could do to pull out that code and so you have to trust the abyssopelagic practice of software developers. The speaker wants to find things in the gaps and ‘that’s something’ like when knowing your neighbours, I smile at my neighbours say hi, my old neighbours were good we swapped books and furniture and talked about work and what we were reading, one of them was always reading long, historical muscular novels but he also loved Lispector like me. One of them a ceramicist’s apprentice. What of a poem encased in clay, all the animals of this room are poems, more than we could know, as I swallowed the memory of their crumble and form. This pamphlet of Joey’s is always worrying about what poems are and can do even as it stays true to the ethic of let’s do it, we keep pushing even as we question what it is we are doing; I like this, it’s what I want to call ongoingness. It’s poetry that makes me hungry a kind of lush hunger like the dew upon new gardens and sparkling water that is also natural, holding glass to the light and clink and chime, we share a bottle, we share blossom, ‘i only want to read with friends / in the actual field of experience / in the garden of ourselves / exactly not edenic since we built it / in the future’ I want to epigraph, keep this close, eternal bindweed in the garden of ourselves and something to build in the future, let’s do it, like kick off your trainers into the sun, it’s so funny but I’m crying and sneezing. Ever since I moved I keep Gloria’s poem, ‘dig it some no place’, ‘a real-time no-time edited response to Bernadette Mayer(BM)’s “Utopia”’, as a printout by my bedside. I got this from a Zarf launch G. read at back in 2019 at the Glasgow Women’s Library, and I remember wanting to live in this poem in a way that rarely happens, I wanted to understand its address and who was living in it, what was happening. It was a year of climate strikes and the fucked election. I didn’t see any butterflies for a whole year. Joey’s poems make me long for the good things we learned in lockdown and also to be with friends and doing ‘preparatory work’ which might mean learning to cook for ten people or just learning to hold space, be present, show face ‘& we hold it far away’, this garden we built and are building. What can this plant do. How do you like your tea. For a while it is a Zoom garden. The roadside wildflowers are great this year, tall and showy purples and yellows. I ride the wave of heat and instantly miss it to wake up shivering at unsent texts in my dreams; in the middle of being held or not held by you. I learn this Irish phrase about it being so hot the ground’s cracking open or it’s hot enough to split rocks, I don’t remember, and once or twice this has actually happened in the saying of the phrase. Kirsty works in a glasshouse library by a motorway. ‘back in june / when it felt like everything / was cracking open’ and the ‘visceral’ like how I read this poem in February along the canal, like how I walked with it and wanted to do something like punch thru glass or send an email, but mostly I wrote instead and to hover where that scream was, placeholder, what was inside the rock of the day, how I gave it to the air of the field in Lambhill, how I miss those walks. ‘Theories are ok, but what patterns of movements will we trace through the streets as we go about our lives, who will we pass there, and how will we pass them?’ Joey asks in let’s do it. Someone asks me the time and someone asks for directions and someone is asking can I stash my booze in your pannier bags to my friend. I watch the police call children away from the fountain and I sip water and cycle home. Sometimes like the speaker, Joey’s speaker, ‘I’m dissociating from the city’ and I don’t know anything about it, who built this, how am I gonna do a wash or refresh these conditions, how am I gonna drink coffee on a Friday morning and wake up to the songs that I want, how am I gonna tell or not tell you. Nothing anyone can say and being scattered, needing encouragement, our friends are elsewhere, we hold each other through words because it is the flowers we have, gifted or put there, not to wilt, speculative to put anything in the soil and see if it grows the way I write a paragraph on discord, that’s something. Heart fires tripled and inboxed. Joey’s poetry teaches me to go beyond realism but not be complacent about something in the present as if that was enough, the eruption itself as utopic. I’m excited about what happens next once we begin changing, as if by the inward and outward transformation we would get to the place, hug emoji, to speak on the radio against enclosure and the ‘no place’ of Gloria’s poem maybe where you ‘Leave page […] to begin this’, and what Joey says: ‘If this place is so radically unrecognisable that to get there we would lose ourselves, then perhaps this imaginative effort is the beginning of a willing self-transformation, which we might hold onto in the midst of all we do in the hope of its eventual collective completion’. I imagine my face in the mirrors of dust shop windows, becoming something else when you say in the dream We shouldn’t… There is nothing left to buy but time. I am still trying to write about that thing whose impossibility is the basic problem of how I can feel and look around and know you, know me, how we are here and still have breath and like food, and like mornings ahead of us still possible to hold and break fruit and run for trains, share music. I appreciate the way this work is a writing back to itself, as if to reclaim the errata and do more with the adjacent claims and forms and changes — to acknowledge that anything we write academically exists within a context, it has this limit, something weathers through it and what is afterwards done is gonna crash through the words. I wish I was cycling long and hard along the canal today, I wish I was breathless and flush. I like what Joey says of poetry’s ‘glittering / incomprehensibility’ and how it disrupts ‘capitalist (etc) subjectivity’ and how at the exhibition everybody wanted to eat the sparklehorse, Jack’s sparklehorse, like it was this giant animal-shaped sugar plum cake with hallucinatory and erotic properties if you just had a slice, a small bite, a scoop of the horse. People want to imbibe the air magic they want to transform and be more than flesh, I think that’s poetry also the wanting to tip all the glitter right down your throat and come up rosy, aura, in excess of yourself, beyond consumer. Morvern’s dream of white horses on the beach. To read this, you had to be born and you had to feel something opening, hydrated, sapped of sense. In the pamphlet one of my favourite things is the scribbles, curlicues, tumbleweed gestures drawn on some of the pages, the sight of photocopied handwriting turned asemic scrawl — this gesture of something in excess of the language, a tending of the page, a tender unknowing. That I made a mark and remarked it. It is something to long for. Whose hand do you hold when you say let’s do it, not to ask what follows but move into that shimmering space of the it, which is always in motion. I want to work harder, have stronger hands and language.
*
One day I will be champion at hula hoop or retire from the athleticism of the long poem, the turbulent manner of a short moan, long-term loan, poems to unravel barbed wire fences, and how I had the library book but they lost the library book, found it. Everything turns up sometime. The turnips are good this year is a financial statement for racoons all around us. I want to go slow but I keep speeding up. Riverside champagne and bicycle, some of your Guinness, Pinot Grigio, Cava and fern, curl inside me a thought of the night and night club, lilac book, not yet. Ice rub, hot flush. Everything good in my room is mint green and white and nightly
I want music to be everywhere, remembering
slenderly the first month in your new place
and all these milestones of
the lake at twilight, Elliott Smith
you say
“can you play it for me”
I’ve been here a month, I am getting to know the roads
I’m supposed to buy furniture
I get home
Kind of still drunk at 2am I watch that film about London, 2007, Giddy Stratospheres and it felt really lonely. I longed for more party scenes and more of the beginning running to ‘The Rat’ and you’ve got a nerve, more of a carelessness of the edge of history where you still have money or you don’t, sinking a wine and running for trains in the capital city and not falling asleep and the timeline’s messed up, how did we get there, landfill I die, the country is lonely. I love the whole boy/girl friendship and especially what it means to wait or go meet someone and the thrill of being out with them, swap hats, wrapped around each other, unconditional, laughing and wholesome and immune to other ppl. Platonic hold hands. I’m lucky to have had that. In 2007 I read NME every week and collected a sense of what was happening in London. Squat raves and indie discos and gigs that ended in broken glass and fights and the end of any sort of neoliberal consensus about to be voiced and soon. I was just walking the empty crossroads, smoking menthols. The girl Laura with the peach-orange hair is an artist and wants to claim club promotion as a kind of art, I get her, I get that she should be able to do that and contribute to the living as art, and nobody dies. Anagram of my name is ‘lame red armies’. Clubs always felt total elsewhere it seemed impossible that they really existed and now even more so, what is the fee, but I want to be in them. Who cares about satire it doesn’t care about anyone. You never see her without a hat and this is protection, wearing a beret against the world at the fierce mercy of cab drivers, “look after her yea?”. Everyone is wearing leopard print and looks good. We should be able to do this and nobody dies. Ventilation. The coloured tights and short skirts. Art school. When I cried at this film I cried for the twist, was I prepared for it, the way it screams something
against that hedonism, delusion, but they keep going on. The film isn’t sexy at all and the only sex hinted at is kind of gross, creepy or regrettable. I knew even drugged it had to be better but bad sex in films is so British. I felt the moral message was too strong. The boys in bands are more or less all annoying and druggy, sometimes endearing but mostly dumb, the long familiar ket nights of blurry talk. But the music is good and the guys are fun, it’s just acting. Besides, I miss that. To be a dumb boy in a band with the boys I alight from my slip and reach for the door, it’s always open, do you have a light. Now I go out alone if I go out at all. It’s a lonely film because something of the isolation of the pandemic overshadows it. What does it mean to care for someone? That I watched this on a sofa alone, that it was filmed in 2020 and they had to do artful camera things to simulate a bigger crowd, that we could only get one limited slice of the action. How to ask for help. I wanted bigger party scenes, more of the hedonism, rat sightings, I loved seeing people take drugs more or less constantly. I felt completely neutral, then indulgent, until I didn’t. The film confirmed my fear of bathtubs. That somehow you will never get out again. Some people feel like it’s a womb. And afterwards I was crying for the friend I lost. Everyone is wearing hats and I remember when Camden was full of hats you would go to just buy hats, and everyone looked cute and cared about clothes and music in this way that doesn’t seem possible now, wearing a bowler, there are so many ways to be serious now. What do you take from the film with you, having seen two decades compressed and the living room where you can always bounce.
*
The Long Blondes — Giddy Stratospheres
The Walkman — The Rat
Arcade Fire — Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)
Bleachers feat. Lana Del Rey — Secret Life
Angel Olsen — Gloria
Oneohtrix Point Never, ROSALÍA — Nothing’s Special
Caroline Polachek — Bunny Is A Rider
Porches — Okay
Sharon Van Etten, Fiona Apple — Love More (By Fiona Apple)
Faye Webster — I Know I’m Funny haha
Le Tigre — Hot Topic
Hole — Softer, Softest
The Sugarcubes — Birthday
Moon Duo — Sevens
St. Vincent — Sugarboy
Billie Eilish — Oxytocin
U.S. Girls — New Age Thriller
Dry Cleaning — Leafy
Prefab Sprout — I Trawl the Megahertz
Pop Matters free write: Episode 8
A sample of unedited free writing composed during a two hour Pop Matters workshop themed around Lorde, named ‘Homemade Dynamite, in May 2020.
PHASE ONE
There are types of explosion I could not accord to the usual violet.
I could not accord to the explosion the usual violet.
The usual violet, a secret violet. Lots of violets collect
on the edge of a screen share, meadowbank.
Collect document sensitivity, mute self.
Mute self. I do it myself, say I am faithful as Marianne
in the story I was the moment before and the tree is a jpeg
and if the tree is only a jpeg. The alchemical forestry of lorde and rain
and I wish I could get pissed with you forever in the perfect place, in the perfect universe
an alchemy life
aye ayeyayayeyeyeyayaeyaeyyaeya
it’s a type of kissing, it’s… perfect place? yeah I think I was googling to find the lots of violets. say we do this after the party, say we do this regardless, perfect place
only that I Wanted to see your face
only that I wanted the download to happen and sick of seeing myself in speech
sick of seeing myself in speech
I wanted everyone
the less sensitive arena of eden
first sprawl is lissom and I blow it up
celadon tenderness
turn up crushable, she fancy
the body’s soft pulp is
turn into colour how green your eyes are
kissingly blue as the skies are
doubtful hillsides
I slide into
not this
find + replace a call, that’s all
Blown kinds of killable power, I needed something, almost a sort of off-blue to perfect the moment in which I fall for another green-eyed loveliness and supernatural the first song was only as coasting my eyes
it is a coagulate love
it is clots
of the party feels over
sharing experience of shingles in bittersweetness
fire’s pale season is a sleeplessness say I did not read the full bio
I swear we had not read
the stress of white lines in the ice
whoever loves the beach
treat self, treat self
if the beach refuses to light, the soft
never trust of the sea
is thankful, like if there is ice in the sky this evening
our love is intrinsic
like dust
teething erasure
I felt like there were emotional haircuts to excerpt our truth from
soundless mindlessnessssssssssss
if soft
then lost etherea I see you
wherever I go is another
greennness
purest shoreless saints that we are
honey I’m honey I’m
the best merch
it’s cute that you still haven’t seen what I mean by the fringe of spirals
I want to tressel the air in a grass
is
in grass is
every congratulation in a frame is
treatable with smote
smote lotion; if you just cling to the lines
admitting to you, yeah, probably I compose by the music, bon iver or something
veins of my city
some of us teenage witchery the famous one
moment left I felt like quarantine was
in a separate heartland in a nettle mantle
a mantle of nettles
getting the train to wherever you want to be, queenless assertion say
anything liable of coins
~
I want to thrash around nude on the tennis with you
court a swan
you’re not the problem, I told you
I want to roll naked in the grass etc
and you’re so like, lilac
I hadn’t thought about it tilll now
it’s all I wanna see, see
carnage without care, yea
is it happiness active now ///// illuminate the liable for hours and hours, how beautiful is the fuck
this originary technicity of sleep
is it alchemical to wear these star-shaped glasses
this close to a sunset
wild, fluorescent, less of us listicle
be this dreamlessness
with oil with oil
neuro as ornament
I’ll be your neuro-ornament
if I’m not the problem, I’m the problem
is there a where or why you’d rather be
what colour are lorde’s eyes? my favourite painting is the one where
general wellbeing is almost
shrieking
cut of the shriek
of the shark
is hours I like to say
tangential and the only ones this planetary is Cassius
say anything to me like salt on the cosmic, the air of all other
directors
working from home the negative is only
correct playlist
agate, tinsel, less Cassius
eat city
yes/no/go slower/faster/more/clear all
54321
ghostlessness is the only soft feeling for every cartoon motion
an orbital affair
If only the interruption was intense as the smell of the garlic that first spring I was waking up and I felt myself. And it was this season of falling for you stupidly in lust and I think the human body is so easily susceptible to breathing and to the love that is almost cut of spice and if I had that same youth and if I had eaten my way through the wormholes only it would be the glow light peach upon the side of your face, some sort of discovery, someone now and then in the limelight, someone’s exercise, peach to spice to glory, I felt without glory I felt without the cute scenes of my englishness which was hardly even mine, which was hardly the pringle lace the lace of pringle kissing me by the sea, always by the sea and sea and sea I want to gauge the moment’s turf
I think the human body is as the smell of the garlic mind this time in life in and i liked when they were to the love that is almost without glory I felt without the sea and sea I want to cut of spice and if I side of your face, some sort of discovery, someone now and then not being able to know your yes naked into the sea yes we run straight into the sea was in us as it was hardly the pringle lace the lace the glow light peach upon the gauge the momentum if it’s like and all my blistering well and or sober as I felt I If only the interruption was intense my life I wish it was that first spring I was waking it was this season of falling not eating if it’s like when describing how it felt to strip ours not just this or us youth yes the sea-grey blue in I felt nothing but original sensation could be nailed red to the had that same youth and if in the limelight, someone’s exercise, peach to spice to glory, I felt was hardly even mine, which was for you stupidly in lust and so easily susceptible to breathing and the wormholes only it would be as you take off your clothes of pringle kissing me by the up and I felt myself. I felt myself. And I had eaten my way through cute scenes of my englishness which sea, always by the sea and participatory after eight is lush is feeling glean a sort of release it was in me as it feeling and sea-grey blue in the. Blue in the
wormholes I felt so easily
susceptible to englishness
in me the feeling release
sea-grey in a glean of blue
after cute scenes of myself
I felt I had eaten all peaches
to be so blister
philip glass for the charlatans
I felt wireless
Playlist: April 2021
Last year’s April was a leap year. For every 29th day I summoned to think of the hours as gifted, secret, strength. I spent the actual leap of February in somebody else’s bed, a cherished cliché: cradling sadness, cat-sitting, reading Anne Carson and rolling the word ‘tableaux’ around my stressy mouth, whose hostile environment required twice-daily salt-rinses. On the 29th of last year’s April, I wrote about vermillion and silverware, ‘the lint of your heart’ and hayfever. A friend and I exchanged tips on how to best work from the floor, how to make it your best work. I miss ‘working the floor’ in other senses.
What do you want is not the same as What would you like?
There was a reading group on Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal (2020), and the Zoom chat was elliptical pursuit, a good fuck pendant, fractal kissing and restless deferral. The word besmirch which isn’t a word search.
Those days
I remember cycling long into the hard sun; I recall better eyesight.
⋰
Okay, recently. Do you want to hear this? I spent a week of anticipation, languishing with migraines and digestive upsets and the kind of blues where mostly you curl foetally into the fantasy that really you, or this, doesn’t exist. Sip worry coffee and brush the hair, tweeze or shave, sit patiently on top of the abstract, waiting for something lucid to hatch. ‘Opening up’. A weekend bleeding, the minor cramp of womb in Autechre rhythm; then a further week of physical ailment whose primary treatments, according to the lore of reddit, included punching one’s spine, counting to ten, pinching between nose and lip and lying in hot baths. I did not have the baths, which seemed terrible and luxurious given how faint they could make me. I read two books by Samuel Beckett.
In Garments Against Women (2015), Anne Boyer writes that ‘Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing. We embarrass each other with comfort and justice, happiness or infirmity’. It is awkward to smile and to squirm. To be red-faced and faint after a luxury bath. To be found frowning in the Instagram reel of somebody else’s dreaming. To apologise, to dwell upon, to ask for help. To be the one clutching a hot water bottle in the Zoom call; to hide or show this. To sip beer, the migraine coming. To say “hello” from the room next door. To deem something luxury, to partake of it. ‘I have done so much to be ordinary’, writes Boyer, ‘and made a record of this’. Say I learned this month how to paint my nails grape soda, define hypercritique, appreciate the slept-in curls of my hair.
It is awkward to be unwell, to express this without clear definition. “Sorry it’s all late, I’ve been sick” and to not elaborate on that sickness, the specific ways it kept you up all night, kept you retching or clutching something tight inside yourself which seemed to want to give birth. A stray barb or small contaminant. A numb pill. Transpiration is the process of water movement through a plant and its evaporation from aerial parts. Plants are not awkward; they just grow. Sometimes upwards, sideways; sometimes back inside themselves. Wilt logic. ‘Let’s be happy insofar as we were for a few days not infirm’ (Boyer). The ecstasy of a new morning where the body stretches out, the mind clears and one is ready to work. Who gets these mornings? Can they be traded? Is their delicious ease somehow fungible? What would I give for more of them? Fungus, rot, the fangs of lilies.
Maybe it starts with crisp garments. But pretty soon the neat attainment of day will unbutton. Watch it happen in Lorenzo Thomas’ poem ‘Euphemysticism’:
Some happily sing
They have joy for white shirts
Singing “O white shirt!”
And that’s just the start
What ecstasy to declare the white shirt! What embarrassment! The chiaroscuro of lily-white shirt against the everyday’s dull shadows, but then showing up ‘baby pictures / Of pollution becoming disaster’ and Thomas’ poem is all about this. Disaster. Headlines, emissions, confusion. And that’s just the start. ‘A man crashes with his shadow’, perhaps because there is no one else. I did this for months on end because nothing else was safe. I could go the long walk for my safe grassy spot and crash there along with my shadow. I crashed in sunshine and rain. Crashland. Why did I bring the lily. It was like being fourteen again and walking for miles just to find a safe, anonymous place to smoke or weep. Sleep crash. ‘In the prickling grass in the afternoon in August, I kept trying to find a place where my blood could rush. That was the obsolete experience of hope’ (Lisa Robertson, XEclogue). It was like staring at the potential of Marlboro Golds tucked behind books and wondering what version of me they belong to. Synecdoche. Rising swirls. The poem burns out but also gets better. Blood rush and screen crash are lyric in pop songs. Sorry my windows. They are getting cleaned today.
Narrate my day again to you.
Thomas’ poem turns to the reader: ‘I’d like to check your influence / Over these ordinarily mysterious things’. The poem takes pictures or talks about it. What is a photographer responsible for? Do they re-enchant or estrange? If someone took a picture at this point or that point, if there was evidence, who would need to be told. How do you photograph pollution? Is this merely witnessing? In the past year and more, I have become witness to my own inability to really see. Disaster itself recedes into medial condition, blood swirls, scratching matter. I think of the way Sibylle Baier sings ‘I grow old’…
Some happily sing the white shirt and are they complacent with their conditions of work? Influence! ‘Desire is a snowscape on a placemat’ (Thomas). I trace its snowy lines in the stray thread of this weave. Ant-sized bloodstain. Am I to be made safe, or eat giant buttons? Put your plate on a place elsewhere and devour the rolling hills. Artificial snow is delicious. Crinkled thread. The white line curls around my tongue like spaghetti. Lila Matsumoto has a poem, ‘Trombone’, about hammering buttons. I unbutton the top three buttons of my blouse to walk around in fifteen degrees, absorbing/zorbing, and call the sunlight oil inside me.
‘There is a risk inherent in sliding all over the place’ (Boyer). This is what language does. There is a risk in crackle, in static, in the O shape of ‘sorry’ or ‘love’ or ‘alone’. Petition to upgrade for bubble emoji.
⋰
Last night, on the train back from another city I had not visited since August, I opened Sarah Bernstein’s new novel, The Coming Bad Days (2021). I did not close this novel again for several hours, except to pass through ticket gates or beyond groups of steaming men whose presence was vaguely threatening. They seemed cardboard cut-outs, stumbling towards me. When a migraine began burning my temples, I took paracetamol and kept walking, reading. When the light became gloam I walked faster. When I got home I sat at the table and opened the book again, like a schoolchild eager to begin their homework (as a ticket to freedom) or revisit a dream. It is risky to write about something you finished barely twelve hours ago. It’s embarrassing, the way talking about illness is, or happiness. To gush. You risk offering a raw piece of thought. Something has stuck to you and you are trying to convey the exact, impossible, vicious way in which you are changed by it. Still steaming.
This is what I understand by gorgeousness. As in, I gorged on it.
In the book’s last third occurs a fabular moment. The narrator is often telling their inner life through external surroundings — textures and fluctuations of weather. This is also to tell disaster. It is not the dramatic crash so much as a slow, implacable violence whose consequence ripples below and above the surface of our lives. Sometimes there is rupture: a cyclist is hit by a motorist, a storm occurs, an unspecified act of harm is committed, a life-changing conversation alluded to. But so much is in the insidious atmospheres which turn between dream and reality, which refuse to be nailed to the moment:
I dreamt of a landscape, overgrown grass, trees blanketing a hillside, leafy canopies moving against the sky, a deep river bisecting the scene. Fat berries pulling on their stems, apples weighing down their branches. Then a breeze came through with a slow hiss, and I knew it carried poison on its back. Here was a green abundance that I could not eat, a cold stream from which I could not drink. Take care, a voice said. Take care to call things by their names.
(Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days)
In this Edenic scene of harvest and green abundance, nothing is properly named. The landscape is unspecified, generic, anywhere. The voice belongs to anyone. It could be a serpent, a god, an angel, a person. Unlike Adam, the narrator cannot name things in nature. It is not their purpose. They came to Eden in dreams and after the fall. What fruits of knowledge exist are overripe and almost a burden to their branches and vines. In addition to the biblical resonance, this passage recalled for me the fig tree motif in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963),the poison tree of William Blake’s poem from Songs of Experience (1794). Wrath is in the air, and failure. I want to wrap around the passage like a kind of vine. Hold and be held in it. Is language a kind of taking care? A watering cruelty? What are the ecological arts of attention and tending to, towards, against?
I was struck by the possibility that Bernstein’s narrator embodied the abject and porous, slow and injured thought of an anthropocenic subject. This statement feels inevitable. The only abundance they could conjure was unconscious and laced with ‘poison’. It could not be imbibed; was not nourishing. But somehow such dreams nourish the text. For all its depiction of coldness, cruelty and the failure of communication, the cold stream of suffering, the weathering of Bernstein’s lyric prose effects a possible intimacy. Weathering, for Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, ‘names a practice or a tactic: to weather means to pay attention to how bodies and places respond to weather-worlds which they are also making’. I think of the narrator skittishly eating cheese sandwiches at the window of their office, every single day of the week. I eat this sandwich with them. What is it they see? Each iterative mention of the weather reminds us that the social and interpersonal dramas of the novel are part of the medial, immersive or remote dramas of climate. The agential presence of rain, frost, clouds and fog, the turn of the waves, the ‘glistening violet evenings’: it’s more than metaphor. It sinks into the prickling skin of Bernstein’s language. Maybe you’d want to call this a weathering realism.
This novel seized me to read with compulsion, the way a dream does come and the writing of the dream is luxuriance that only later you bathe in. Not quite vulnerable or resilient. Responsive. Exposed to something.
⋰
On the 28th April 2019 (no entry for the 29th), I wrote in purple ink:
We would do better to sleep now, I have been sleeping much better and trying to resist the pull of insomnia, trying to perfect a monologue. What comes and goes in a dream without noticing, whose handwriting on the sun you recognised chancing your luck with yellow corn and fields of trials against sensitive, colours of smear and floral obstacle. Hyperboreal data flow into the crinkle cut futurity. Applying for latitude, acid.
Not sure about ‘we’: did I mean the ‘we’ of me reading back, and the ‘me’ who was writing, there in the moment? Are you also included, reading this passage over one of my shoulders? Can we take care to name things in dreams? But when I dream of people — friends, loved-ones, family, colleagues the famous — as I often do, what happens when I write their names? Am I opening them up to something that could harm or exhaust them? Is their presence a giving over of energy? Am I to be persecuted by the purple, anonymous flower of somebody’s need? What if I didn’t even know? What if the mark-making of initials was key? Will it bloom or wilt?
Go back to sleep in the forest, soft cosmos of dissolving forms.
⋰
There is a sense of missing someone that grows an acorn in your belly. It hardens and rattles with new life. It burns out of place. Leaves you with a feeling of placelessness. Impregnates every word with the possible, the fizzy wake, the fear and hurt. Makes you grow sideways. Hey. To exist in no-time of not knowing when the feeling comes. Pastel vests are back in fashion. Pull over. Kisses. Rarest flower emoji that doesn’t exist. To be sometimes well and other times racked in a well-documented madness that pays various attention to weather. Something painful. A few days of goodness seized. I would leap out the door, do 15,000 steps each day; so I would name the colour chartreuse when I saw it. Watching for changing bone structures in Zoom tiles. Your hair grown long and lemon blonde. My internet broke for a whole day and night. I felt old-timey in the pdf archive. Phoned you.
~
Bebby Doll – Weeks
Ana Roxanne – I’m Every Sparkling Woman
Zoee – Microwave
Cowgirl Clue – Cherry Jubilee
Laurel Halo – Sun to Solar
trayer tryon, Julie Byrne – new forever
Life Without Buildings – Sorrow
Cocteau Twins – My Truth
Kelsey Lu, Yves Tumor, Kelly Moran, Moses Boyd, ‘let all the poisons that lurk in the mud seep out’
Iceage – Gold City
Le Tigre – Deceptacon
FKA twigs, Headie One, Fred again.. – Don’t Judge Me
Porridge Radio – Wet Road
Angel Olsen – Alive and Dying (Waving, Smiling)
Big Thief – Off You
Perfume Genius – Valley
Grouper – Poison Tree
Sonic Youth – Providence
U.S. Maple – The State Is Bad
Sky Ferreira – Sad Dream
Waxahatchee – Fruits of My Labor (Lucinda Williams cover)
The Felice Brothers – Inferno
Bright Eyes – Train Under Water
Weyes Blood – Titanic Risen
Lucinda Williams – Save Yourself (Sharon Van Etten cover)
Playlist: March 2021
musk wish
the orange in the middle of daffodils was a song and when I saw you thru the blossom portal say all is well, you weren’t saying much but when I saw you thru the well with pennies, when I threw in the well my pennies well are they heavy? I made a wish on the topic of better, getting light or better, patterns on the vase aren’t like pollution or lightning storm at the top of Blythe Hill, but I noticed the temperature in California is 26 degrees right now
is it always the mild wet winter of narco swing and blithely fixing your bike to be rare in comparison, zero rate exempt from tending the flowers. I want to be a raw kind of feeling you peel me from bed I am become rosemary or behind the wall is a spring it gives, who delivers, there is pollen to breathe or not to believe I am warm dry summer as a mattress tastes of
wanting to embody the reading, its sweat I listen back, the baroque life of water, agua viva and what cherished of haunting, not this, or more classical forms behold, memory dream on the back of march and not taking the air for granted, blisters and songs I would listen to what if I just get sick what if I am nausea after all
reality I have a cheat code for bearing the rain like Proust didn’t have to, I hate food, what name do you give these creases, I am less than and tenderly to live in grey now where seagulls are more specific or can you say a herring gull lands on my arm at night or the formerly known as movement
alights at the scene where you ask for more sauerkraut please, let’s pull over, at the very least did we come here shining delete the bell is a girl or rind or grapefruit or very becoming after word marvellous today is beautiful about today it wanted to change our lives but who would assemble that statement, not for police who look in the beehives but scintillation is like, everywhere we study of illumined tinnitus, toothache, their white light crushes but did I establish
taking the painkillers of chefs, being squeezed out of the area, I dream a fat free cottage for sale and is it your birthday I’m scared of the sound of bluetooth the bad grammar of science daily the refutations of rainfall where your city is better, blood-soft atmospheric I’m simmering gnocchi as we speak
the mile-deep plants beneath the ice of Greenland, birds-eye, closing the door, I fall for the novel corona warm salmon it is a cold-water wisdom dish in the arctic sponge cake taking my place off
the flowers! you held them outside the shut nightclub and from subatomic world you were lovely? I remember the irl as like endless page refresh not knowing which leaf would shake first or press water to go back, up, the ana-cathartic condition of touching my spine obsidian, you know everything
as some of us are in the gutter some of us are looking at mars I’m looking at you elongated and some of us wear musks of various species like white black or red musks my favourite is the red offering and to wear it with chilli tobacco and smoke out my window to spicy clouds will only work in lockdown
like forgetting to mute in shrine of noise be sufficiently cooked thru a planet does taste like the species of a sex of deer is it tender or am I to make this with butter and yellow as yellow does a lot for itself for orange and musky everyone
unlock with your face, where is nautical the ID
I want to know twilight
~
black midi – John L
Aphex Twin – Acrid Avid Jam Shred
Felicia Atkinson – Lighter Than Aluminium
Yellow Swans – Limited Space
Lee Gamble – Locked In
Aïsha Devi – Mavda
Porridge Radio – Pop Song (Clarence Clarity remix)
NNAMDÏ – ART SCHOOL CRUSH
illuminati hotties – melatonezone
Remember Sports – Tiny Planets
Kississippi – Indigo
Savage Mansion – Wig Wise
Squid – Paddling
Dry Cleaning – Oblivion (Grimes cover)
Jinosaur Jr. – I Ran Away
Indigo Sparke – The Day I Drove the Car Around the Block
Fugazi – Afterthought
Drop Nineteens – The Dead
Playlist: February 2021
you want snow, personally want to know will it end? The snow was a space it kept filling until the light went down and there was no song, just white in a sepia, sepia song. Was friday night, first night, and you could get a wine right now, a wish right now, you could fill it with wine. I do it all the time and there’s another card to prove it. Notifications softly accumulate in organic bright square. I have to stay awake; there are these bordered gardens I walk on the boardwalk I’m bored of walking I do it all the time; we stop sometimes (pensive) we watch each other not-smoke over the Zone. You want snow and I fill a glass of it, crisply; gushed from the tap but I still have precision, white grapes sour my organs hurting. We’re in the milk bar in some novel, some game, is it Clock Town? I am always taking you to Clock Town where the moon’s tears shimmer and there’s always a love affair to intercept with letters. Dearest…I meant, putting these shiny earrings in for you, quartz chips, I lost one? There is a proverb, a space; you fill it. Don’t fill anything right to the brim unless it’s coffee, I’ll drink it, overfull the stars and so on only as old as they think they are! We’re never too young for clubbing, the air is infectious you go out with mittens you glow — I am taking pictures of Kelvin Way, the avenue, the sorry trees. Likes of likes fill up like snow, like pc4pc like another moratorium on the heart react but you are bees. Drape inwards where the nape of a neck is pearl. We are weeping in the reading and we never were too young for this. Her version of treble mix in blackbird, favourite, a yellow call. Stereo. Some things a poem keeps secret. We’re in the milk bar and I am the tender of bar, a bar of milk (chocolate!) that gets you high, highest on wednesday’s the hump day pack it with double the sugar. Let’s grate hours upon hours, shredding plainsong, blackbirds, milk. The calorific value of daylight is only that you live it, don’t let anyone tell you they can harvest good will from the sun, it’s all watts, you know, I always fancied myself gentrified sunbeam for lunch but only on vicarious fridays, like I’m in love and it’s caused by coffee, something S. said once in a poem or essay, it’s easy, you take off your clothes and go swimming in the ice melt, SPACE, it’s sentence. We’re never too young for air, I’m greedy for oxygen like it’s 2014 and having moshed for sufficient number of hours in the outdoor crowd of this gentrified field I will take this body to the oxygen bar. You have the summer bod, the winter bod, the hot bod, the boy bod, the girl bod, the professional bod, the Zoom bod, the new bod, the non bod, the gains bod, the ghost bod, the fire bod, the ice bod, the willow bod, the swim bod, the shame bod. We sat in the oxygen bar anyhow, C. spent obnoxious amounts on a bottle of water that lasted forever, BPA-free, we cradled it all morn like our baby, she was, the clarity in that! Sparkling, milking, added vitamins. It is friday night on my desk there are innumerable pamphlets of poem, wires (no liquorice), f.’s glasses, a pink slab of crackle quartz, a coaster (forever unused) that says ‘please don’t leave’ inside a heart, melatonin pills (I will take one later), the bottle cap from a bottle of nye’s Classic Hooch, a lukewarm of tea (green), three-way pencil sharpener, hair clip, an orange pomander candle which I am horrified to say advertises itself as ‘Harmful to aquatic life with long lasting effects’ — so in any case you won’t catch me throwing this fire in the sea! Special aquarium babies we are. It contains limonene, geranyl acetate – the candle, not the sea – and asks to be disposed in an appropriate disposal site. A film called Dive in which I am force-fed squid in the back of a taxi, now where have we seen that one before? A. has a vegan fridge a white shelf a row of spices. Tell me where do we all go lay rest our candles, how to elegise that which symbolises elegy, say prayer. Is this merely to blog or to bathe in pond life, gentle aquaria, I see through other glasses the reflective lettrism of darknesses unknown to us! And you’re still reading! Snow person melts into people. There is melt poetics. I clip back the starry excess to say wait here, we’re on the brink of something is it the beach in the email the long bright stretch of waiting, white sand, gold sand, brown sand, blue sand under the moon (!) how long it’s been I hope you’re okay and other famous online statements the daffodils wilt too soon is sun they want so much blush pressure it’s barely gone february, melt and blush. A year ago today we all kissed I did cartwheels the vodka was long and delicious, the room was huge, our hearts acidic. Monopoly for dogs. Sharing a space, you hold. Is it to never feel correct in the body, what is correction? Not lighter fluid or erasers, not rubber bullets, silver bullets, see that spray you put in your tea or under the tongue? It’s sultry. Tip-Exx the sky of its sentences: And the man at the station asking about rizlas; I wanted to be inside the movie somehow; grunge boys in their teens wearing mum dresses. On the phone elsewhere I cry on the way to vaccine because of the wind is alarmist and two days later my arm is bruised but something is glowing we call it glitchflu. More like, what do we have energy? I am carelessly humanist transition I walk on pavements I pin my life to the side I kiss your brow I am kissed regardless the stars are yes say here the waves a glissy sensation a wine or is it the dawn so aeropressed. How long? I want a dial-in thesis, drive-by thesis, dive-bar thesis. Double shot — What exists? This is going to argue [that] I don’t dare ask to hold my breath I am falling from air, extra shots, impasse, salted caramel, the jag didn’t hurt a bit but all night the ache and a glandular longing to be again born on the brink of full moon the wires and coming along the Clyde coming up was almost the sea or when the air hit my face it was a whip it was west; I saw you in the loch in july. There is a bird and curlew, bless you, how many times we had to admit this was happening and pangs for an X and cutely go as it does then stain us. How easy to forget a persona. The shape contains us. I was even incubated as a baby for what, for not being able to breathe or die. What remains is the sand and the wind alacrity then scrap matters for how a throat hurts get so leafy. Breath. Swipe here a useless space. E. says I look languid I am wearing all white my hair hurts my breath hurts the glass is apparent, scalp clip, red-lipped to say you are blocked and so far outside and the subtleties in difference between silence and mute. Ecru! Career poetess of the sea except. How to protect yourself and others. The comment section filling with memory snow as the sky is a mattress, let’s bounce from it. There is time after time after time last seconds ago the edit came down from the rain and your tongue and shining. Don’t say it? Don’t say it at all? The arrangement of tulips a mathematics what do people in American movies really mean when they say Do you want to come over we’ll do some trig? Mothers not mothers arranging the vase it is glass the atoms are careless. You see the one yellow tulip had flopped down in the window this is the yellow we are a very strong yellow a limp yellow a lip, equilateral, let’s count stripes or feel inside they are silk, the trestle, assemble the trestle, the trellis. I’ll grow across pink suns to see you, extra life of the indolent, a quoted splendour; the dinner we coated with rain, with lexical deference, with delta waves, with petals, equations. Pass me cigar. I am propped against sunset. The smoke is to say
~
Hannah Diamond – Hi
SOPHIE – UNISIL
Janelle Monáe feat. Grimes – Pynk
CAN – Waiting for the Streetcar
Jeff Buckley – The Sky is a Landfill
Silver Jews – I’m Gonna Love the Hell Out of You
Judee Sill – Down Where the Valleys Are Low
Zella Day, Weyes Blood – Holocene
Porridge Radio, Piglet – Let’s Not Fight !
Julia Holter – Sea Calls Me Home
Dorothea Pass – Container
Cocteau Twins, Harold Budd – Ooze Out and Away, Anyhow
Playlist: January 2021
Not long ago a blog was destroyed. Inside the blog was a forest; what they called forest but by all intents and purposes was more the unknown contribution to chronology which made up many pages of codes and trees. Codes and trees. The liquor in a small pool was seemingly endless dirty martini, where olives float in lieu of lilies. I meant to say it was destroyed and the incident being customisable, now to look back, I see a particular man at sunset wielding buttons. Pop, pluck, glock. Boys share the same blouse as me. Then gingham and dungarees to write in the blog another hour or more, sleeves rolled, plunging seasons into seasons. Keep yourself sewn. Don’t get shot. This winter will you change your life. This summer will you lose it. All of the paper incineration. Sound of artificial camera flash in the dark, razor the code from the trees. This change, not the life, not necessarily. Scrolling the trees.
What will it take for the server to work? There was a dark room of my childhood filled with blinking lights, layer-bake hard drives, wires and cables. Bringing you coffee, I go there closing my eyes to the electronic warmth at the heart of the office. Whose office is this? How can I work there? Will you give me a job? I am a fine typist / I like the word ‘twilight’.
But not long ago, a blog was destroyed. We were in generic city, you know the one with buildings, and something swerved into us. I was scared at first, weren’t you? We kept left-clicking the breeze to stop, but the way your hair looked, lifted — I could’ve almost gone with it, the hum and song of the breeze just pink. Remembering lines like ‘January is endless’ and ‘the Northern Line is the loudest’ as I consent to give cookies, consent to be multiplied in the archive of giving me moments in capital city; where is my iPod? Small things you can do, exchange of fruit, the scale of it. Something swerved into us. I was scared at first, weren’t you? My blood was all scattering berries, clots, poisons. We knew the album was amazing. We said this many times. I said we have to see a doctor. Just a guess but the crescendo fucking kills me. I breathed too hard it was scary. The road was quiet but something swerved into us. Couldn’t tell if it was a truck or a set of emotions. Kisses from France. I was climbing to get to the good bit. This is a painful song coming on I won’t talk about further, being dull and adult, seeing old college friends lost. What is a moon. I said we have to see a doctor and we did, we got in line outside with our masks; it was a time before masks but I add them. Losing your pearls, losing your solace barometer. Remember X overmind of me. We were turned away at the last. Did not see doctor. Jellyfish. I wore the blouse that all the boys wore, proudly.
Driving to Brighton, not driving to Brighton.
The ocean washed up masses of cash, bank notes sticky with kelp and salt, tons of pennies in lieu of pebbles, bits of glass. I paid for a book of poems with a cheque signed on behalf of my father. I paid for my life. The blog lived inside of the sea. It was being destroyed and so the blog called tsunami. It had a world in it. Tsunami_93. Commission you tell me the endless failures of Wednesday, Thursday, watching the ants by the ocean accumulate broadband costs. Watching the ants and cash. Spiralling ants and cash. I said something swerved into us, it was fucking horrible. I saw it, the long hard crash of the numbers, upwards. The colony of allied ants just clicking away in the dark like we already knew them. A politician comes and goes from the hole where you fall through, nightly, clutching at sand. A burlesque of sleep. The patent glitter of policy, it gets in your body. The ants made a moat of the hospital.
Silently, you came to town in my closing dream which was killing our molars from kissing too much in any forsaken house by the sea, endless you climb inside me — figure this in, you figure this out. Sometimes the text at the bottom of the page just disappears. Tell you a blog was destroyed and my concern is for glutinous sentences, stretching. Planetary hardship was relative. Tell me, hold me. I write about dying in my diary, how will it feel to be six or five and not knowing about the dying, how will it feel to look back knowing you lived through it. Tear off the blouse the boys gave to me. There is a coming through of such dreams I have had, splashes of sick pink light, infinite distance — and can I say the animal I never met was nice, they were so nice, the album was amazing. The animal pronoun that therefore I am. Something swerved into us; it was the whole fat year of pink rain. Where a blog was destroyed, you put down the stone. It is shaped like a heart that needs convincing to beat.
Kept diaries of numbers kept easy job kept crying. Felt like portraits of femmes in rose blush and yellow and emerald green, leaking, felt like looking into you back from Matisse or wherever it was in generic city we saw what doesn’t is seen. Domestic bliss. I remember the wires in my childhood were totally opaque. Quiet symphony of dialup and call you. eBay and a “flurry of cosy ideas” says eye, closing for the last time, plated. Down a long gold tunnel and DNS error. “Are you alright? Are you alright?” I hate this question but whacking a drum and bass beat right HERE was good, if originally ballad but easy
to me, this song is less about a particular situation, and more about that feeling you get looking back
on things that have meant a lot to you, or you
feel could have meant more
I hide the application anyway. It is spring 2008, no forests exist, the bathroom sounds of lemongrass scent and harshest bleach. I’m sick. I’m sick of parks I want genuine forestry and a place to be lost and call you. I remember football on the low green, barging into silver, not knowing a wave meant more disease. Not knowing the waves as anything other than the earnest self-abuse of the sea. Salt heal. It hurt to listen by the long thin phrase of your cigarette, smoke getting up in the hours of my eyes. I remember kissing in tents / remember running home drunk from school. Remember who watched us. The man who squared-up for no good reason other than the sound his own voice made, which was a sound of bright cash howled from the sandy reminder. There are memory dunes where stuff piles up, stuff gets sucked or dragged away. Stuff gets pissed on. Something swerved into us and we did not phone the cops. I carried the hurt for a while instead. Walked from one end of the green to the other. Now in the city. On the mobile phone a big red sound passed beta-waves through us and you asked, “what was that?” and pleaded “please don’t die”. I minimise the year, I always reply. I fantasise portals to London.
Dreamt the prime minister was crying on Mars for the ninth time and it was a ninth wave and it was very bee loud it was glandular. Second wave, third wave, watch out for next winter. A man who swallowed all of the cash of the sea was blatant in wanting to touch this and ruin my life. It hurt to listen. A novelty sermon on visions, ecstasies, roses and bread. Something H.D. says about a jellyfish and will you sign up for infinity melt club — it requires the overmind, sad to miss, buoyed up by salt water always. We passed the number we wanted not to pass. Will Alexander writes that poetics is ‘a place where language becomes a fertilised concentration that explodes’. I’m talking about everything we used to do. Another life. Voice barely makes it to audible status. Every month I turn fifteen again and my mouth tastes of Yorkie bars, acid, ice cubes painted with crude sweet oil, Diet Coke, extra salt. Maria, it says, and I wonder. Someone is a shadow they are painting the walls with it, more and more, the paint fizzes up. Crude sweet oil, the blouse of the boys. Softly you bring me the water, more of it, enormous with cash, I hate it. I mix all the paint with us.
That person who used to work, I miss her. January is endless. Should the blog be destroyed? It was Platonic like kissing the stone at the place where sunflowers grew upside-down by a crumbled temple, they let us go. You say, “this is wretched” then turn on the radio. Elliott Smith in front of a mural, covering The Beatles. That I a girl from Maybole would like to be consulted; would like consultation. Because. The doctor turned us down. The river was frozen. Salt. Pretzels of fallopian tubes. Someone on the radio said poverty. The blog consolation of be love because you. Remarkably clean air I remember? What comes next is older and older, how early the cruel was, forecast, thinking in paradigms and not glassware. “You look young!” It might be I always hold out. Still you smash, the failures of Tuesday, no melatonin. Blissing Chamomile Mountain. Payne’s Gray, Davy’s Gray, Naples Yellow. Salacious impression of what is a gesture. I have all these dreams about ladders like—
å̷͈̳̉u̵̞̰͊̐̕ba̵̱̺͌͊̏de
The problem of the marry a cloud of the martyred morning
In the soft-touching laminate space of the morning
The promise of a landing, striped by the morning
We edit cumulus, collect yon fish by the morning
A rain passed wetly over our morning
The actual cat got into the morning
My proletarian alignment against the morning
Is only a maths class happening this morning
Did you want palaces in the light of this morning
To feel you never got hurt this morning
When it swerved into you in the morning
Of comparative hotness at morning
Equivalent to mattresses morning
That planets lie down inside us, warming
And the flowery agenda of what they would do to avoid this scarcity. Kept saying science, science like a car advert, £500, kept you awake at night. Salt. The technology trusts us! Liberating production to what freeing from labour a person being careful would order milkshake. Water this artificial strawberry. Audit the communal blog was destroyed. Salt and oil. A wheat field in a movie. I remember aspartame sunrise at which close to the not-top of Louise Bourgeois’ many ladders was a droplet of hooch blood, red-to-punk-pink. Under the fairy lit trails of Tuesday, I said FUCK YOU to the motorist, I said OUCH! Today is Blue Day, tomorrow is Green Day; expropriation of serotonin to Bad Day, it is quite a state; put back ice that you stay on, tulips; a sugar-lift etch to keep say [“I miss the nineties”] belong to my early days of still love indie. Weeks become necklaces I am choked inside them. Tending the forest, drive out of the city. Impossible tacos in landfills pass us, having never harmed animals. Nothing swerved ever in heaven; you get really close.
Study the lightning-shaped graze on my knee.
~
Burial – Chemz
SOPHIE – Is It Cold In the Water?
Honeyblood – Super Rat
Billie Eilish, ROSALÍA – Lo Vas A Olvidar
Sharon Van Etten – Serpents
Widowspeak – Sanguine
Infinity Knives – In The Mouth of Sadness
Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails Over The Country Club
Xiu Xiu, Liz Harris – A Bottle of Rum
Fishtalk – Hummingbirds
Los Campesinos! – Got Stendhal’s
Tim Heidecker, Weyes Blood – Oh How We Drift Away
The Antlers – Solstice – Edit
Songs: Ohia – Boys
Field Medic – chamomile
Vagabon, Courtney Barnett – Reason to Believe (Karen Dalton cover)
Sun June – Everything I had
Coma Cinema – In Lieu of Flowers
This Familiar Smile – Flawed Fables
Hamburger – Supersad
Donovan – Colours
The Velvet Underground – Sweet Jane
The Replacements – Skyway
mariaology 