Tag: plant

Starlight & Bloglore

Maggie O’Sullivan, Palace of Reptiles (2003)

                           *

If you wanted to know, I’m from Mars, like men are, or in the order of things what a man doesn’t know the controverse of other waters, almost all of us exist as ice. Never to be ready for end, its artificial blush, to edit and close to the distance of light. 

That you await water or more, gone muscle of the month nothing happened, acres of pleasure gone and into the stadium, more or gone to wake pink and stinging the dream, everybody wants to. The many-stomached among us arrive and wearing lace. We eat bees, we half kiss

If it is a mall and if analogue. I begin to forget the difference between, how easy it is to order hard slushie, rewind and loop myself into the fretless moment, a whistle of football, a slow man. Test acids:

No cup of coffee is hot enough. You up, you accuse me of people, I seem to have revelled in the air for too long. Where did our liquid water go? The intriguing discovery of three buried lakes, surface bruises. Had I the famous grouse and soda of your eyes are bubbles, we sup on the luminous and blemish, generous language. “Lack of a substantial atmosphere” was our review. Not to advise a trip here. Wait.

But trip, you go. Sip peaches under the bleachers, three poems. Not up yet. Not bright, not early. Waiting on me for the thirst. Bloglore, blueness, periorbital circles. Why so much neon pigment, not sleep, you go bass it is sultry “just pretend they’re your friends”. Advantage of entering thirties is the austerity of early sanguine, no YOU go to bed at noon; I will iron your watercolour until it is warm. 

Victory to the internet so said privacy, party, my vice a nightly garment, smelt pain. At the left desk dream-amaze you save me, take pictures in natural formation, go see frog. Conflagrate lateral flow, high up in the sentence is forfeit, your sweat.

There is a courtyard on Mars where daylight, nay the leafminer, leaves scarification. No more raids. I have been here in flesh and blood to salsify, lightly the oyster plant is edible and does not grow. You do shrub mail, you don’t hot. Everything to do could else refuse. 

No more scare, cup ring, close your accent permanently. 

Plans for the Fall. Accounting.

Enrol to all that and wear a cloud, I want to write this you, to you, lower ourselves to parallel tarmacs; am I to speak the particulate deltas of this planet, no this one, you are a rainbow. We could be anywhere. Alice says ‘sad foam’, ‘Disappear’. 

The money forth comes, does not accommodate thought; it is the feeling that I saw a seal. Start your bitcoin emptiness and pyre of light; I wrote on afternoon this letter. Ocean goes away.

Fullness and not to floss sleep from prison but I think the Marxist rabbits are fucking released.

Maggie says of the urge to begin mistakes. A surprise that the flotsam arrived here, not of shape, are you the sleekit to enter say the sea isn’t real. 

We build whole houses with roofs of sequin. Desperado attic of saltheart, salvage flower. Meadow / Black / Wild / Yellow varieties. 

I deleted 54% of this article. 

Substantial genitalia of the not getting wet.

1.6% argon, we are gone
where softly the walls sag.

Knit you a fortress of seasonal transition. Khora my lame electron.

Martian quality relayed in me a voice, surface, can’t get a full-length mirror from you, get dressed, exit the internet. I exist in this flat and wait for the post. No more furnishing.

Lemonade also goes this way. 

How did I thinner the telescopic? Lop a water? Log into the apple? 

Well, it is Red.

Starfish suck excess from solar landmass. 

Sometimes gravity, shoots you up, does not come back. Inelegant hipbone blue and yonder. Sometimes very close to the ground I like spiders. Eat you up. You up. 

What did you think of your time alone?

Playlist: May 2019

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“I know I slept then though I can’t remember how I got to sleep & you’ll laugh when I tell you I had a great dream about sex in which it was raining milk because of the snow in a movie & next morning when I saw the sun I knew I remembered something that should fill me with either pleasure or fear but I felt like I do in dreams all the time & I couldnt be scared or notice any other sensations in my body, I just felt even like a body with a mind moving”

(Bernadette Mayer, Utopia).

The cleaving occurred one soft April night, with the Meadows all blossomed and calm, evening smell of other people’s auroras. The year will only be as specific as it will be. It was in the thwack of the tennis players twisting their muscles, the smell of yesterday’s rain. In an instant, I lost a sense of how hungry I was, bound to this sense of unfolding. It was in the air and the grass and the warm, elastic muscles that tightened inside me. There I was, moving forward, around, backwards; I became liquid in the split that tore, slowly, one portion of sky from the next. It was in the peach and the lilac, the reddish tinge of a blood I’d not recognised before, tainting each streak of cirrus. It was a vegetarian feeling, delirious and light; I wanted to taste the air and the grass and the new elastic muscles, which were hardly mine.

It was labyrinthine over, with an extra syllable.

It soon became sore, the raw sensation of this change, this tearing. Like when you start to eat and can’t stop, and the eating becomes something that is done to you, an automatic pull that works by a tensile hunger whose origins refuse to shake or cease. I would fill my mouth with snow and sigh, naming the curious pastel works which shimmered their way from existence. I would be hot then cold.

~

Time passed as it may into May, I forgot the French word for gold and ate less chocolate.

Every pin on the map looks like a jewel, but these destinations aren’t mine. I find myself in the Tower again, lonely and drinking tulsi tea. A false moss wall of a semi-colonic eve, the time before the time I can see you.

The slow train tastes less of its names, we drink things pale & bubbled & tall in the fading eve where everything around us starts to riot. Someone breaks glass, then breaks it again. Why is anything happening.

Mind the gap between paragraphs. She didn’t say please.

What do we think when we cannot think beyond each other.

~

We left all the art in the garden to melt, but wax resists water. Time was measured in sultry smokes. All of the paper became dessicated rainbow, a very good slug line. I was so sure of the day ahead that I drank all day to be further inside it. If you could just swish me around and around, I would spit foam on the grass, a blueish blot of it, like brushing your teeth at festivals.

Brushing the dark with your teeth in UV.

I felt a sort of grief at the edge of my senses, the vaguest outcome of the three-hour workshop in which they implored us to think very quickly in numerous phases. Do your worst to yourself, the woman said. I drew a diagram of knots and whorls and archipelagic clots of line; that was my PhD. Drawing felt more like flicking my wrist for performance’s sake. Okay so there may have been purpose. I saw a man on the Lothian bus, reading a catalogue of diagrams pertaining to pipes. He must’ve been some sort of plumber in training. His long silver ponytail reminded me of cat’s drool and other liquid enthusiasms.

‘I was interested in the silence of writing’, ‘We stopped talking about the poem as though someone were inside it’ (Renee Gladman).

Some of this month was not typed, but written. Especially dreams. This marked a deviation. I bought a new laptop but did not open it, for fear the words would not come within clear windows.

The months before the months that happened, happened.

Afterwards, I went to the waves.

~

The air here smells different. Hyperbole of salt and sand-scrunched toes, a whole new hunger. Short dark coffee of morning, cats around, slinky trees. What did I sketch of the sunset, the clouds you liked?

The month was something of a dream conundrum. I go to see the advanced practitioner.

~

Something happened!

A GLITTERING QUINTET.

Who calls out the lyric word for petrol? & all biodegradable tears and things?

~

All changes saved is the litany I could only respect.

~

This is a story about a girl called Brie. She is the erased one, but all girls tend full pelt towards that status. So anyone said, soft and milky. Brie would shoot holes in the blow-up dolphins to make the children shriek. Her exposed neck, with a fluttering of love-bites. Brie dropped pills in the pond to clear the water, so everyone else could swim in its fizz. Her friends knew all about the marks, the club, the dumb jazz soundtracks. Brie drank strawberry shakes that matched her cheeks; she did not go to the gym. On beautiful, vintage blouses, she’d hemorrhage money. Out on the porch in dragonfly season, the weekend, she was everyone’s hero. Brie could slip off a ring and swallow it. She knew what they meant when they mentioned halos or heros, the neighbourhood kids dealing hash on the side. She could sing the high notes alongside Joni Mitchell. The village green replies with hostile bunting. Everyone lies down by the fountain, regardless. It’s like it never gets warm here. She’s always finding rhymes for cunt and it’s funny. The story bisects with a strip of light, gilded circle that caught my glasses in the library toilets. Sliver of visible lashes, spiderlegs, shortbread of sugary spectral. Deja vu in the palace of plastic trees. It all made Brie want to puke. Let us breathe between neutral errors; Facebook says Create. I had to say sorry about the way I knew this. Anyone could sink their teeth into her, add ten pounds to their bellies. The dolphins existed in lieu of a virus. I mean they insisted. None of the children could actually swim, but they bobbed along in the watery dark like stars. Brie could care less; we all could more.

~

The playlist does not exist. A lavender-coloured succulent instead.

I thought of my body as a nexus of enzymes, a fricative intersection. Many little collisions buoyed the days, and sleep became a pharmakon.

What I dream of is poison or cure for you, or anyone really. There is the limerence I’d scrawl only on the back of an index card, the card to a fruit I could not write.

Some of us wear out the vacuum better.

~

She would soften between bread and ventricles. The yeast creeps into your sleep again, departures of salt and sweat. My nails grow long and strong again.

Brie sings, Sometimes I think you’re a filler. She dyes her hair blue to look like mould.

Why were there oranges all over the table?

Oranges split
full throat of constancy.

One of many several triplets.

~

“I was just so happy.”

My alarm goes off at 09:09.

~

He ate a whole grapefruit on the train, sticky excess of determination. The hills swept green and unreal behind us, I wanted to fuck up the clouds again. Where is my lilac pencil, a lack of regret

(Old friends bond over yonic fruit).

Love is a kind of echolocation.

~

Sometimes what we say or send is only what we could not know.

~

I remember last year when Scott died, A. messaged me a picture of the Finnish sunset, from her forest residency. It was good to know there were other places to be, places where news like this set on ice and spread into beautiful pinks and citruses and tiny changes.

I feel like I glow around you.

There has to be a word for increment, sweetness, immediacy; this 1975 song that uses the word ‘entropy’, why is it always stuck in my head?

~

Sync.sync.sync
Ope(n).

Why are we arguing about the intensity of cinnamon?

~

Futurity looks crinkle-cut, thick and delicious.
It is fucking cold, man. I bleed out
something cardinal and sigh.
I like this, I like this;
maybe just gladness.
You enter a door
and forget the internet.
Every hour devours this sand.
I was sending these messages
like frisbees or something,
pop hooks. The aeroplane
we love ascends from the sea.
You can shake out the salt crumbs,
pour gold on me. Forever is silent
so awkwardly sweet.

~

‘[I]n this time song holds loss. […] It travels as something layered, infiltrated, unconfused’ (Juliana Spahr).

Something to believe is a baritone, a pack of miniature bricks; expensive cigarettes, a crest of summer dawn.

~

So we sucked the sky back together again. It stuck in your teeth. Time hardly even passed. There was this cocktail called ‘Lollipop’, there was this oddly specific green tinge to the light, an almost-velvet, collapsible sleep…

*

Snapped Ankles – I Want My Minutes Back

Metronomy – The Look

Aisha Devi – I’m Not Always Where My Body Is

Lana Del Rey – Doin’ Time

Amen Dunes – Sixteen

Devendra Banhart – Daniel

Cate Le Bon – Daylight Matters

Karen Dalton – Something On your Mind

Frightened Rabbit – Holy

Alexi Murdoch – Orange Sky

Jessica Pratt – Back, Baby

Bob Dylan – I Threw It All Away

Gengahr – I’m So Tired

Elliott Smith – The Biggest Lie

The Pastels – I’m Alright With You

Angie McMahon – Pasta

Joanna Sternberg – This is Not Who I Want To Be

Weyes Blood – Seven Words

Rhye – Save Me

Talk Talk – After the Flood

The 1975 – I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)

Green Shoots

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For the third day in a row, Brian looked down while brushing his teeth and saw a tiny green shoot sprouting out of the drain. Only last night, at 2am no less, he had pulled the little fucker out and thrown it down the toilet.

“Miriam!” he shouted to his wife, who no doubt was still curled in bed. “The tree’s back!”

“Mhmh?” Cursing at her lack of interest, he spat out toothpaste and watched how the white foam flecked the two bright leaves of the shoot. Remnants of raisins and granola showered like rubble around it. He turned on both taps and washed it away, but the shoot remained.

On his commute to work, he noticed something was on fire at the side of the motorway. The flames were big, apocalyptic, and when he opened the passenger window the black stench of burning rubber filled his car. There wasn’t a scrapyard round here; there were no reasons to be burning rubber. This was the fucking countryside, not some rustbelt wasteland.

At the office, he turned in the financial reports that were due at 10am. He sat through a meeting which featured the usual pantomime antics of his boss, the kind of man whose entire career is based on imitating the flamboyance of a Disney character while necking enough coffee and bourbon to seem manically on form at every performance.

“What we are building up to,” he announced, “is the ultimate synergy.” His arms flailed back in grand gesture, nearly knocking over the pie chart drawing his assistant had etched on the flip chart. “Capital merging with capital, a clean abstraction, the upward surge of profit. Think of this as MarioKart. How many of you have played MarioKart?” His eyes narrowed as he surveyed his colleagues round the table.

There was much quivering, as only a handful of people raised their hands.

“Well, the chosen few will know what I mean by the Rainbow Road,” he continued. “We’re on that motherfucking Rainbow Road. One veer off and we plunge into space, the black void, and that’s that. So I can’t afford a single mishap, I don’t care what happens. We need to synthesise, synergise, synchronise. You hear me?”

Every week, the boss delivered a near-identical speech; the only thing that changed was the arbitrary cultural reference he dragged up, presumably from the stacks of CDs and video-games in his son’s bedroom.

At this point, the assistant stood up hastily. She was young for the job, a high achiever, reaching for those virtual stars in a pair of vicious heels.

“What we mean,” she said, trying to clarify, “is it’s important not to underestimate green shoots. Those little signs of growth. Shares in petroleum, in plastic, are rising nicely. Not to mention South American superfood angiosperms, part of a wider move towards elite organic harvests. While the economy flounders around us, clinging to the small things is what will help us reach that upward surge.”

“Thank you, Heidi.” The boss shot her an appreciative leer. “Now what the fuck is an angiosperm?”

On his lunch-break, Brian ate a sad desk sandwich with a fellow number-cruncher. The two of them were the runts of the litter, the ones that never got invited to the cloying, marathon lunches the boss often dragged the office out on. This meant they were never in line for promotion, but bore the advantage of letting them avoid the poisonous oysters and chardonnay which often left their colleagues retching all afternoon.

“You know Liam,” Brian mused, “I found a green shoot in my sink the other day. It’s still there, even though I thought I pulled it out.”

“What?” Liam was dim-witted and this was maybe why he never got called out to lunch.

“Like, an actual green shoot. I think it’s getting taller.”

“Maybe God’s trying to tell you something,” Liam said ominously.

Back home that evening, Brian found that the shoot had gotten much taller indeed. So tall that various branches curled out thirstily, wrapping themselves round the taps. Brian shrugged and didn’t bother brushing his teeth that night. He pressed himself into Miriam’s back but realised she was already asleep. It was what, nine o’clock?

He got up very early and left the flat straight away to get to work. The accounts were flying off his desk that morning.

“Good work Ben,” his boss said, floating past the desk, collecting his documents.

“I’m on the upward surge,” Brian nodded.

On his way out the door that night he gave Heidi a contrived and lustful glance. She looked at him with eyebrows raised, but this could mean anything. He decided to drive out to the spot where yesterday he’d seen the flames. It was a pit in the ground, a charred patch of grass gone black. He fancied there was some resemblance to a pie chart, the way the different shades of burnt matter lay, wedge-like, in the circle. He did some rearranging, moving shrivelled plastic and ash and wood chips around until they met satisfactory dimensions.

When he came home with soot all over his hands and face, Miriam said he looked beautiful. She was a Leo and had a thing for fire. He looked into her eyes for the first time in weeks. Her whole body seemed to pause, to start melting right in front of him. The light from the kitchen window made her skin so pale, except for a flash of orange across her face. He was about to kiss her, to fall into the molten mass of her body, when she reached straight for his belt buckle. This was a first.

Afterwards, he went into the bathroom to wash his face. The tree had taken over the entire bathroom. In just a few hours, the little green stems had become proper woven wooden branches. He had to climb over and around them just to take a piss. What came out of him was yellow, dark. The flames were inside him now, and the leaves of the tree shimmered around his body, bathing him in luxurious gold.

“Honey,” he heard Miriam’s voice at the door, glistening with the shrapnel of Heidi’s lisp. He realised he was still clutching his limp penis. “D’you think the world’s ending?”