Grapevine

Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain. 

— Natalie Mering

Of course, the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world are one.

— Catherine Malabou

Morning brings indigo gluttony of the night’s dim prizes. I remember a night in February of 2019, the brightest stars in my life we saw above a kirkyard eating chocolate for all the stars. Looking for tickets to see you again, star stuff for popcorn synecdoche of eating the bones of what you believe at the movies, infinity pool, the liminal alimony of the heart you have. I pay it all back which is why skylines exist. At this time of year, we make our own light. I text you all day and all night the text pings resonate without me, though I’m still conscious. This is how I listen to music. Harvest the ricochets until my synapse nozzles are ripe and sweet.

“It’s too difficult” 

the beautiful song in my ear
The Butterfly splitfin will go extinct this year 

“My plastic girlhood obligatory 
wrote a novel you’d never know
elemental love for the noise of horses” 

Electra pastel of giving the lecture

Its voice never falters

Spotify should hire poets to replace the algorithm with iambs

A perfect way to respond?

The album cover of Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow features a glowing heart which is the idiosyncrasy of love song, gentle and melodic and good and wrong. There is something we say at breakfast about the inexplicable intimacy of an interval, this bit in the song where the chords do this or that and suddenly your heart’s aflutter. Why is that? I feel vulnerable and unclasped by music like the locket of a promise necklace snapped open, opulent. When are you gonna feel okay? 

I like it best when I don’t expect it.

/

Designing the conditions for crying is easy these days. A tiny fly lands on my wet nail polish and departs as lavender.

I used to wander the abandoned golf course and around the monument to see the snowcapped hills and feel it. 

Perished by screaming clouds in my brain.

I am in love with the music of Weyes Blood, we share the same birthday. 

At a recent gig the singer said “thank you all for being alive”. Some people describe these songs as hymns. Last year in the climate rush of COP26 I was cycling around with my bones on fire and freezing. I would show up to the job being stared at, horrible mess of myself couldn’t hide, what do you think of this poem I said it’s a lot to unpack. Why don’t we leave those tools in the box? He says toolbox isn’t so bad. You could just improvise. I don’t look to these men to be mentors but menthols were my first cigarettes, a clothing brand called MEN is like SHEIN you could have MENOUT or menagerie, mispronounced as shine, a giraffe made of glass or a tiny glass seal with whiskers of onyx, weeping. MELATONIN or MENACING, MENDACITY / my avuncular muses of more money have outraged, they will never understand candida. A spanner in the works. No more lies. I’m most men when in lingerie maybe or styling my old surprise, the giant window in a dream wouldn’t close after I’d opened it so I had to go looking for a man to help me, high-vis or high waters our time would come to close it, not until I had escaped. Fled is that happiness. Look at it hardcore. No more lies, no more dying. Your arms in the air.

I heard catastrophe on the grapevine which was snipping guitar strings all the better to hear the lyre underneath, the union makes us strong, picket-cold and trellises our kitten hearts are growing, Natalie as in a new flower or the Minecraft roses coming up fast this year to be eaten by the dreams of spiders. Nicky Melville poem says if you’re a soft person you just get squashed, Sarah once read it aloud at the picket. I pictured a soft orange in the principal’s pocket. Roses last forever even when past their superlative. Shedding their petals to cover our eyes. Bunny put them in cubes to exhibit. Smooth wax skin.

Violet roses.

Ever since my friend with the purple aura died I’ve worn so much purple to find a flame of them, purple flame of my Raynaud’s and holy flux of traumas. What’s the point of poetry, it’s purple. I lilac therefore I lamb. I am on the lamb, I am lambing seasons, turn me into a leaf on the riptide, for I am lost. The clouds are glamorous, in pursuit of beauty’s excreta, a bad era, the best

negentropy saves us from losing everything

Secret blue note.

Wine-dark reverie of the quiet escapade, my late heart 
blooms for the red, the read receipt 
staining your tongue. 

Catherine Malabou says ‘The body becomes worthy of philosophical examination when it is no longer a question of the body but of my body’. Descartes dripping wax on his robes, a lecturer pouring a pan of boiling pasta over his hand in rehearsal; the red welts between two moments, my horrible bleeding thumb. Scarlet clustering of old blood. Say it feels personal, say it is orange or purple. When it started inside me I felt the glow in my chest handed down by hyleticism of data from song: the body electric or incarnate. Menstrual tripping, I saw Kate Winslet literally on fire in fantasy after watching Romance & Cigarettes but she was invincible, what’s this script, literally the fire coming out of her in waves was my love of music. I harboured desires to stub cigarettes out on the wrists of saplings, light them and throw them barely smoked on the street; imagine my child self, scurrying around to collect them, smoking wholeheartedly the barely unsmouldered, especially rose ones. Lemonade’s infinity sunflower. I was so guilty in my treehouse for getting high, higher, highest of them all to bioluminesce in lieu of sunsets, fuck it. The cruelty displayed to our cousins was a lonesome one. What’s that word for when a word is hinged between two things, like flesh stitches that keep skin together and then dissolve inside you — a word that makes sentences make sense in this precious knitted way. What’s Latin. 

Butterfly notifications in my dopamine receptors.

Coffee luxuriance and pillowslips ink-stained with diary slumbering. There are too many images trying to bed us. A stage whisper for the saints. I was born from a chrysalis of synths swaddled in melody all the better to tell you. 

The discourse is banana-bruised and overly ripe in your bag.

Perfect oracle rosehip tea.

You can’t fully vanquish chaos but 
on the phone
at a planetary scale 
your mouth an aquarium, spilling numbers.

It’s okay that I died, and you died a little bit that night
we all did, really.

A friend is on the phone trying to renew medication. The record-breaking temperatures have lost their meaning, as in a lost glom of mercury swallowed by me. The Butterfly splitfin is in jeopardy. I have never fixed on a form for these cramps in language. The males intensify in colour when excited. The young are entirely silvery. I want to go on the profiles of the gentle ones and swim with them; you don’t need these comments, you didn’t need these things. The internship of being elegant more insect is fading. At some point

I wanted to drive. I was a girl toy and thought of many plastic cassette cases filling up the doors, the backseats with sugar. The idea of analogue as shadow, scrolling magnetic and stopping. I’m glitched by the ache which is lightening, gloss, disquietude, gelid. Girl drivers filling the roads, pouring concrete from their jars of face creams into the sea and beckoning 

to make love on the white lines, almost drifting

you were there, you were swimming, 

our worlds elided

I wanted to drive you to the sea cliffs of skyward to breakfast on blue. 

Natalie and Lana sing of the body California incarnate, plasticity glowing emails,
eyeshadow blue as in Bowie

my exospore of the hokum knowhow, excessive sentiment, hearts aglow

That house over there. That home over there. A palm. Analgesia of the sea.

Ghost for your thot

organology of a negative situationship

Catharsis polaroid still develops in my purse of us, you’re blowing out blue smoke in the dream, I’m bowing out. The eye emoji, heart stun soft mote. 

And in the darkness…

It’s good to be soft when they push you down

[…]

Such a curse to be so hard

Lightning bolt award for being born at all.

I used to chew beads and often swallow them

C. said so inside you it’s like the anthropocene

many plastiglomerate organ marias 

menstruating rainbows

What someone called my emotional Teflon was melted by your white-hot non-logic, almost like heroin of the pain I was in, as if to have a little blister polishing her oysters. Why is there no word for girl-come

or the tragedy of icepacks.

Kept panic-crying at the idea of sleeping

and did it until the blood vessels burst around my eyes 

which are sea-coloured and colourless, unseeing.

Divine & oversized teardrop:

I bought this not on etsy but via the estuary, quartz time, I dreamt a skipped ad and heard myself in the rearview mirror bound in leather. Here is a lilac wine and the name of that bone in your chest, flagrant sternum of the lonely highway, pulling your jacket to keep warm

picking pearls off your shoulders, all the better to lick this neck

in the flesh of the road

Bernard Stiegler says the relation entropy/negentropy is really the question of life par excellence

a pair of glowing red eyes

Buying more dreams at the pharmacy

of lurid blue

your poor wee cold sore

sky porn falls into humming. It’s free, it has to be. 

Anything lost at the point of service.

There’s so much I wanna say about this album

holding me tight

I wanna tie the lights

and go off to hear it shimmering beneath the moon, whose memory 

bruises 

rosemary

real blood from your forehead

and the shadow of the one who 

was yours

a long plague 

season of neutral sensation

new motor neurons at the cosmic dawn

tripping cured my parosmia somewhat I could smell sauerkraut, frying onions, coffee, kerosene my only name the body odour of the shadow you loved 

I can’t tell the trees from the shape of lightning

in subtitles

spiralise my love for the seventies 

in edible language

flares in the highlands

the problem is not being affectless

but totally loving too much

all the tautology of stardust

let’s take the motorway route to ride our souls 

under sunblock and metal sculpture

you feel balmy here, less exposed, fear of 

merging

what we are

white hot collision

emotional whiplash

Emerging triumphant the dawn is a fog machine it is only October, none of us a sweetheart neckline could finish the sentence 

swishing our way to ceremony

music makes sense

instead: a down & dirty musical set in the world of italicised starlings

which are assholes

because of radiance

for the love of original mud which connotes the whole story

they had to take flight

The body of both selves is ochre like in Husserl the real world is everything

a dialectician of starlight

Morning gluttony. Grasping. A worm in your blessing

fragile apples on the counter / collect to rot.

The real era was gradient and dependent on what Merleau-Ponty calls illness, ‘a complete form of existence’. I lost a normal form but what I found was the shimmer conundrum of the shape of you, California, a rice harvest of shiny red-blue tears to grow a purple flower, you guessed it. 

Possession. 

Pearly beads, the slasher heartfire of a bold new vision 

touching me soft jealous of cornfields

Hellbound in egress, dark glow, December’s acupuncture of clouds. 

How can something so big feel so cosy?

The creature is god.

Told myself I’d scrub mould from the bathroom today. Flux glow from the dirt that is given us to know the worst.

A given thing: music is grieving.

I wrap the vine around me in the hope of fruiting, or any violet outcome is fine. You bake a good pastiche like an electric goddess, cancelling plans all the better to scream at the stars. 
Loop trope. 
Hold yourself soft or hard, by the collar or hand, by moonlight
tripping in Finnieston
and in Yorkhill and by the masticated night 
which is always online 
in the digest of even the worst
‘The Flower Called Nowhere’

Mothering the subgenre of oblong buildings, bliss our heart this hurt. You essay your way to music but is it not your allergies that crystallise accomplice to the throat of time? Thank you, thank you for the mystery. It’s so late.

And we love this crescent moon 

for all intelligence is the art of rupture

Falling asleep at the movies 

And I am choking for a sweetness that really sees me.

~

Some italics are lyrics taken from Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow (2022).

Playlist: February 2019

As I was a permanent client of stars, awaiting that moment before contract to fold back, edge of the page that was prior to birth. The sky is that page where everything saucy happens. If I feel ‘switched on’ it’s in fear of the light, scraping cutlery together to start fires with little intention of correct extinguishing. This is just an indulgent way of saying ‘fuck you’ to the spinney where I dropped a whole packet of sour cherry sweets that day after school with the song in my head. ‘Fuck you’ to the trees, like they own me forever. As I was defined by the willow I cried by, circa 2009. You only say ‘fuck you’, truly, to these sorts of vicarious parents, dragging their entrails along the water. They come in plurals; they have to eat each other just to exist. Something Eileen Myles says of a person, they can’t fully flourish till the mother tree falls. What was the one I saw by the golf course, Maybole, spear of the monument? Granite is war is radiation.

Someone replaced their tongue with a leaf of mint. They spoke in sprigs.

Things written in lieu of a nature poem:

  • A letter to washing machines all over the world
  • The lyrics to ‘Florida Kilos’
  • A list of snoring faces
  • Imitations of archived Twitter
  • Requiem for a useless wedding
  • Things I once wanted from the Argos catalogue
  • An inventory of much-despised artificial flavours
  • Amnesia’s archive of MySpace bulletins
  • Plagiarised ‘Daffodils’
  • Impressions of Shoreditch
  • An amateur walkthrough to ‘Star Light Zone: Act 3’
  • Homage to retro screensavers
  • Flyers for drugs
  • Hieroglyphs of ring-collecting sound effects
  • Many novelisable addictions
  • Screeds of abrasive html
  • Reasons why X should get paid more
  • Moderate to good assortment of sexual confessions

___The night in the casino felt like gold was butter, gold bars of the house we were chipping apart from the ingot. We hadn’t spoken in a very long time, so it seemed, galaxies of the year had passed already. In a land where I only reserve soft lyrics, hoard Milky Ways, know nothing of your suffering in that time except what you showed.

Taxidermic language, wrapping up the undead for the accidental. Reels of my body, scented magnolia layers beneath. ‘As for love’, Clarice says, ‘they weren’t in love, of course’. This is ‘The Message’.

Off the train the air was clear, smelled manicured. Click of the tape deck. He scorns me at the checkout, 2:am, buying my lightbulb. I could not live through the night without light. Haggard in Tesco blue he called me a moth and bared his teeth; I smiled and stepped into temperate February. Just flick the switch before you leave, that’s all. I’ll be a while, it’s no use waiting. My 1:09 Transpennine got stuck at Bellshill for hours and hours. I drank with a woman who did not know my name, as I lacked hers; we laughed at the pensioner commentaries, ordered drinks. We learned so much about trains in that time. I arrived back in the grey and longed for LED, Cornish horizons, the shape of his jaw like the edge of a country I might not visit.  

It seemed impossible that I would ever fall asleep again. Veers of the wrist[?]

 

My sick heart is a small blue swollen ball. 

In the novel I read there were always these nocturnal women, pacing around in foreign cities. They stayed in hotel rooms but could not last the night, they would slip softly into Parisian spring and trail the streets. It was often Paris, which rose in the back of my mind like something unfinished. It needed rendering. All I remembered was the razoring cold, the leers of buildings, needing to piss for hours and hours. The taste of cow’s milk, morning ache. Sometimes fancying the accordion song, impossible to exorcise.

[ The wreck contained mustard and scarlet, teal and rose.
We wriggled a little. Missed a bit. ]

John Hall: ‘Can’t you see why I couldn’t be doing anything else?’

Tracing such palimpsests of light, we ask of the week a question. Will you stay this mild forever? Little interlude, it’s okay to feel nice for a while. That’s what he said, this is nice. The daffodils are out. Kneading the dough of a belly, I over-sleep each day until the hollows of my eyes smooth into cream. Life is a cheeky rose. Perhaps no one is in love as James on his album. Picture him at the window, clipping the extraneous stems from various houseplants, watching the syrup drip onto the leaves. Think of this synthwise. Maybe that is a loneliness, so absolute in your feeling. Imagine him paring his Joycean fingernails, the man at the window whose name was Blake with a kytten for history. There was nothing so bright as that. You could not say, hailing it, kytten, kytten! It was extra literary. It was sooo much of everything before even alive, hey.

__The kytten was made of milk. It was bound to leak out someday.

We’ve not had a chance at everything yet. We’ve burned it all! At dawn we drank algorithms and the well-bronzed man still kissing away on the fire escape. As if all of this happened, expensive drams and learning the words for variable clouds. We enter the storage facility. Your da, your da, your da sells—That bit where Don Draper gets all misty-eyed over Hershey’s. At the end I’m crumbling a little white cookie, Karen is wailing the way she feels, the inward razoring, and it’s all I can do to remember the bees.

[…]

Dyeing my hair with fresh cherries, yayo yayo, yeah they say it’s excess to do this again. She runs the punnet under a cold tap, rubs them clean with her fingers then scrunches them, crushes them luxuriously over my scalp till it all runs down and I’m shining again. There’s a baby at the back of my eye that screams and screams, maybe I pretend I don’t know her. The cherry girl in the bar was trapped in a basket. Lana says nobody dies in Miami! I remember the harsh sunsets of your Playstation 2, smashing ourselves into several pixelated seas. Rank best to worst our beliefs, this night that got away again. We looked up the cheats and looked into the future, pressed x’s and triangles together. I mixed up my consoles, remembering it. A hook, a hook.

It took me six months to write and then I scrunched that mess back into a planet!

Notes from my diary:

Today I’m heading south to learn about trees
I could easily sit in a spoons and weep. 

Goddamn stars what am I supposed to owe you! Held sequins in palm to insufflate, insitu. There was so much oil in my salad it looked unethical. Walking through the park at night, say this is balmy, so warm for the season but I don’t want to say unseasonable, and so feel like the narrator of another bored and beautiful New York novel. Don’t like the tonic in gin. Pay without debit; display songs in nested form. There are so many themes up my sleeve! Leave your key at front desk, darling I’m trying to reach it; white lines on the road wherever the silkworms—

~

Aldous Harding — The Barrel

Julia Holter — Les Jeux to You

Weyes Blood — Andromeda

Todd Rundgren — I Saw The Light

Judee Sill — Enchanted Sky Machines

hand habits — placeholder

Red House Painters — Golden

Big Thief — UFOF

Tiny Ruins — Cold Enough to Climb

Karen Dalton — Katie Cruel

Arthur Russell — Not Checking Up

The Tammys — His Actions Speak Louder than Words