It’s almost autumn and I can’t stop listening to The Corrs. Something ringing in the falling rain a leaf-lorn runaway, never gonna stop falling, wish I could play the strings and not cry over a snapped shoelace that Saturday, wish I could never need name this. A fresh nostalgia for Flash player, a bad new year, kneeling in the car dirt of roadsides to fix my bike, the air all gone out of each tyre it’s tiring to be here / wish I could change. Not into other people but into the person I was, rosy-fingered sleepless rolling cinnamon skins and talking on the internet while in the other town this guy throws a mattress out of a window. If memory serves to fall out with it. Black lace and white corduroy out to the woods I’m happiest on the hill where I see this deer, evidently a teenage stag and I’m calling angel androgynies the very next stray. Fucked up salads of affect, afraid to go outside. Emma says everyone’s a poet. You just go.
Crying in the cobblers for other omens.
Girls in the nineties with strands of dark hair, box-dyed. The electricity all gone out. I was supposed to be planning a workshop, writing a lecture. The universe owns me, doesn’t owe me.
Across oceans of static, watching you typing…
I cycled past the cathedral and saw the sycamores blush orange as if in real-time metabolising their chlorophyll before me. I google the phrase ‘fall splendour’ in guilty luxuriance. A man on my street pisses against the wall, daylight screams; he pisses for so long I think he will disintegrate in dumb liquid gold. Can’t concentrate on this Zoom call. I’m missing something real of the days before me. Girl in old man bar is singing a ballad. Can you drink a black hole if you can’t drink a Guinness? Colin says Brian says you’d have to suck through a straw at the speed of light. Girl in old man bar is wearing tartan, a velvet headband, recently expired lipstick. I like her.
Singing Eliza Carthy, singing Amen Dunes…
I always want autumn too early and pine for spring. Trillions of magazines tell me it’s not cool having holes in my tights. It’s not cool having ragged cuticles.
Ten years of sleazy beauty.
A paintbrush yellowing in sordid water.
Forever down Cathcart Road.
Incurable bed mornings of limb ache and long illness, it’s fine like to say it’s totes, bring myself coffee in bed and emails filling me with autumn leaves and the fly infestation fed upon fruit and air…a red car rolling backwards up the street…
It used to be so easy to write these like it never mattered to write at all. The sky is still whey and there are new routes to get to the same old temples. I swirl my tongue in the google doc long enough to know how I’d touch you; the hopescape bristles with city pollution. My friends have been to Greece and Bali, the Hebrides. I have been to Edinburgh for work. Come down the wrong side of the hill among gorse and scramble, the rocks coming loose and my heart gone trash-eating in the nights of bad sleep again, all again, falling awake with the light on, spilled ink in my sheets. I met the same America on Netflix checking my brain, my gag reflex.
I heard the blood blister in that guitar riff and it was like vomiting behind the shopping mall in Kilmarnock, drunk on bus wine and the Alice in Chains of my arteries…you awake, say the word clavicle, touch my spine…
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)
There is a place where these supermassive roses might be planted. A harsh place that exists at thin resolution, we have to resample; I am doing the maths to know how 100gb permits her entrance. The process slows because this behaviour is not natural. Her entrance with the roses bundled in giant’s arms, and the long tresses of foam and seven neat words she has tucked in a satchel of crocheted pea proteins. She is attuned to a certain instant where it works that she plants the roses. They are gnarly, monstrous, thirsty. The roses are not sober. And the girl? She stumbles on her third negroni, abstracted, poured by the silent one who inhabits the hedgerows. Vermouth of sun, gin of moon, aperitif of the bitterwort and marshes, garnished with wedges of orange from overseas. These seven neat words I will not tell you with her lips sealed blood sugar, femme confection, a certain rain, a squall.
The clarity is lost a little when we adjust figures. But the girl is still there, in the corner maybe, bundled from sight with impossible flowers. What do we know of a girl and her flowers? She could be a waitress, a bridesmaid, a funeral attendant — but no, this is extravagance to belie all such professions. The flowers won’t fit in the picture this is. It is not merely to carry. Some say they are hyperobjects, but if so, what of the girl? She is also beyond human proportion; she would live a thousand years. Sprinkle hundreds and thousands of leap years merely upon breakfast, and yet at nineteen does she not look a million? If you were to splay the fine skin between her thumb and forefinger, you would begin to see the star stuff which flows in human capillaries. But at such resolution!
Of her face since nineteen, the narrator of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover [L’Amant] (1984) writes: ‘But my face hasn’t collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste’. So when the girl lay down for another of her size; they were a cloud, it rained, the girl awoke with child. But she gave birth to nothing but roses. She was a fixture of the processing plant. Initially, sealed in mousseline baubles, they were not even roses but rosehips clustered among thorned vines. And you would imagine these vines entwined with her spine, climbing them as if the destiny was always her neck. She would speak at night, tapping the fine glass, warming them as eggs. Give everything away: the rose-meat of petals and their pale, inward jam, hatching saps, their crying.
A cloud always passes, it creases the sky. Cars go in and out at night.
~
The fruit of rose, especially a wild kind when I write of a Mary Sue or brush her teeth, when she is more tall than willow and yet I have set her colours inverse so in reaching for rosehips she must reach into shadow and isn’t that all in the working day of dreams is deferral of Edenic cinema, she grows in wilderness also known as the fortress of lossy compression where trees are shaky with original pixels and her clothes are torn as mine would be crying forever by the sea with my dairy allergy for twilight ‘The blues are because you’re getting fat and maybe it’s been raining too long’ and if she is me then I am she rehearsing definitions for litany via prayer, supplication, complaint am I a melt vector on cutting board you call me aslant with the knife tucked close to cupid’s bow of my lips ‘she was noted for her command of dialogue’ but no one said anything lipsticks: sweet chestnut, amarena red tender rose and orange delight shaking the rosehips all night for Roman god of erotic love is just rare labour of the shepherds in pleasantview, saying sorry or what colour your blouse is, mine is damask you could press to make attar so I know how I love is mother puts glitter on a wreath of ivy and dying hydrangeas to hang on the door, entrance Mx I give you generally acceptable apples the shop called jazz, they are wrapped in plastic we look up to see the planets ‘almost touching’ but they are something else entirely easy, lucky or free. These green diamonds don’t occur in the wild; she makes them from slices of apple glitch effect plumbob oil of rose is condensation a playable simulation novelist in decline as I lick the sea wall cast this upwards to where another hour is ravished you start to read.
PART TWO: SACRED PORRIDGE
Perhaps this would be enough of the rose-girl if she would stop haunting me. I dreamed Bernadette Mayer wrote a novel overnight, it was midsummer, she was 27 and had a fountain pen the size of the Eiffel Tower. Tell me what she was smoking, was it Marlboro or lemongrass? Maybe cloves? I get mixed up, I’m darks and pastels, nobody likes me. Open a beer to share regardless / Crude oil streams from her words. I became suspicious the rose-girl was a fiction of Bernadette’s, that I was stuck in the internet fiction and whittled away. There was a poem called ‘Thorn’ about a penis. Brexit or no Brexit, I was anyway hoarding tins of beans in the hope they would get me somewhere – a similar purpose to breakfast. Recite to me from memory these stats about lactose, creatine, muscle enhancement. I lift my arms to reach you, I am hauled to the new wall painted mint to match the green iris tea of your eyes, it’s Greenwich Park / I am spent with apple pips and cauliflower hallways. I want to be hurled across continents sprightly / put acorn in pocket. I am not her but she is me, here, in a harsh place. You are the smoothest nut! What was the novel? I don’t know, I have this line: ‘the negative capability of raisins’. Don’t kill the squirrels! Sunday you make porridge with peanuts, sour cream, biscuit, honey, drops of chocolate, muscovado sugar, extra milk of oat – why not acorns? The rose-girl watches. Her breath is a draught.
She is so huge you would miss her. All December the faint scent of her pea satchel follows me so I know I couldn’t possibly have corona. Plunge my nose in vegetal folds. I would be the aura of plasma around her sun, that’s all and merely. Does it rot? The size of these roses, really, is impossible to measure. Expect several hundred metres or miles, stumbling in the world of error where we go to buy bread. Is it for months you have been a tile, a talking head? You are very delicate and I stroke your nice hair, which loosens through the screen to meet me waterfall. I climb to the top of the beanstalk we braided from eating well. We read Lee Harwood in the rain, As Your Eyes are Blue, and drink mulled wine. I guess I am riding horses to catch up with the size of these roses, blue ones also, fat and mellow. Jackie Wang calls this ‘outlaw jouissance’; a phrase I wrote in my notebook, quickly. The line gets whipped! I think about Cy Twombly. The horses are all kinds of colours, but mostly the pearlescence of inside seashells, or mollusc aurora’d in a way that seems Björk or genital. I suppose the rose-girl arranges them nightly as saints do, genial; I suppose it is like Sylvanian families. Sometimes from copses of rowans, the tops of the miniature or minotaur trees, red-berried painted I read her SylviaPlath. My poison voice must catch the wind exact, ‘The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea / And comes from a country far away as health’, as health shall be a human dimension, unrhymed, the rose-girl considers. She is the only one of us who has seen a corpse flower, in a third-floor apartment where somebody important had smuggled the seeds from Chicago, where was she. The corpse flower is not a singular flower but a cluster of blooms, and so is she. It all stinks, I say, so I don’t have corona. If you touch the flanks of these horses so smooth your hands will vanish in gossamer, they become other materials, still smell like hay. This viscosity to friction feels good, it’s lush with endorphins — why don’t you try it. The water is warmly you and me, like the sea; it comes from the eyes of the rose-girl, crying.
~
There’s still time to shop, you collect from store towards a possible come on let’s go of the literal it stings, who you would be in the dream not the enemy’s eye or the unripe banana I stayed in bed til mid-afternoon writing feel-thesis, correcting citations of Clarice Lispector it’s Christmas, you know I don’t have corona on the phone to Avanti the songs are played in such intervals of 45 seconds as to make you hate the very nature of a chord progression is desire’s deferral and will you secure a seat for us at motion sickness what is necessity feels like Velocity is I am washing my hair with tar shampoo and cider vinegar. Come close, wish soon, revese December. Should I call someone? It might be you, explaining multiplication to me, you carry the one and the two, and then I never do read my old diaries smelling of blood and sleep deprivation acrid bulimia, spray of A7 garlic mussels, scarlet muscles my brother says he will donate his plasma for medical causes, have I fear of needles? Lady bird shell collect bathroom dust, antibodies, I am clean and typeset like the stars. You open my coat because of this Reynauds, too cold to unbutton. My anhedonia is cyclical, I stick little poems to the wall they go like
once upon a midnight weary came the lovers on a ferry they were drunk and very old but never had they had a cold over the hills and overseas they could be you or even me
It’s like the Friday of 2019 I read Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant journals from low-res pdf festive darkness crying in trashland and couldn’t stop tasting purple for a week of otherwise phantosmia, what I smelled was the crushed illustrious rose of infinity pinned to my bittersweet nasal cavity as I am to watch corpse flower time-lapse resemble green diamond, they erect an umbrella and a rare titan arum bloom beneath you typing at the library am I bike spoke, a concept strike for closing the erstwhile windows? Click to know mood… We keep going We leap in a pool of pure negroni and my lungs keep coming up blossom of orange and call you “Hey everyone welcome back to the room, you can open your eyes now” Like probably I have told you before about the band I am starting, a synth-punk deathcore revivalist outfit called Yoga with Adriene I have her permission, she says May all beings be happy Move from a place of connect Present and awake Love your neighbour Things get better, they have to It’s a revolution of the muscular laxation of the life you find cored If you have apple belly thick-skinned of futurity, there will be a chorus and verse for this that goes like scream Motive, Trust, Floor, High, Kindle, Salve, Soften, Strength & Harmony My thighs are burning brightly, it’s the end friend of my Norwich or Brighton, Manchester, Glasgow and some kind of New York resemblance is ‘cracking America’ at the top of your list I have never been to the south coast of an average celestial body yet watering your houseplants I won’t go viral in the night with pills and tweets There’s no cheating in yoga, you make it your own as I do cartwheels on a leap day of acid comedown they say I do it too fast the flight gets in and distant cat miaows as I do kiss you a lot they say catharsis is found in the blues and green laps up the rest is stretching if you can only find it like the sweet spot asana with arm across chest I am become rowan tree, flexing queen of the prom you pluck fruit pastilles from inside me the sea, first try is easy.
PART THREE: TENDER ALPHABET
A. will write in the time of commute B. prefers spearmint toothpaste C. is inside of me D. the size of Paris cumulus E. is all you can eat, ecstasy F. who I love G. has grown H. the hendecasyllabic I fail to write I. doesn’t rightly exist J. sends endless emails K. is a joke L. for loosening jewellery M. with dark sweet cherries and doubles N. conspicuous passionate weekend O. checks the notification P. of classical pleasure Q. minds the gap R. is a rising rat-souled singer S. supposes the cognitive deficit T. exists in lyric saloon U. then driving me up the highway V. to frangible lust I am W. of shimmer lamb X. into cowbell rhythms we go Y. yellow warning of wind has been issued Z. is a property of citrus
PART FOUR: FLOWER SHOW
In The Besieged City (1948) by Clarice Lispector, ‘the flower was showing off […] it too was untouchable, the indirect world’, ‘exhausted’, ‘What is the flower made of if not of flower itself’.
OPEN LOOP ( BOUQUET ( ) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ) )
The flower exclaimed a soft orchestral impression of breathing. Adults no longer snack in movies. Spent five hours on a train, six on Zoom, three in the outside air is nice. A time-lapse corpse flower, the music being used, pace of light. Heat syncope of the sea, we dive. Someone is hired to recover her pearls or pears. My skin is peeling from sanity gels.
A fault language of shiningly happy teenagers. Rosettes for the nuclear pony. It’s all total showers today. Condensery of lemonade gemstone, sertraline, the lapwing massacre in a Sufjan track / so I am endlessly sorry.
PART FIVE: NATAL SMUDGE
When everything started to wilt, the moon was too late. Untouchable stem of a name, yet the rose-girl knew what to do. She swallowed the world like a gobstopper, a lightbulb, a tulip. The arrogance of sundown was only that it knew how to try.
Turning over, see the supermassive rose in her belly.
Superstitious gemstones include violets and opals, sleepflower, nightshade; don’t @ me if you think they are cruel or kind. Marlene drops cranberries from the wall and you piss twice as hard in Scarborough Fair, are you sad, buy me blue cheese, there is vigilance in the dead. Rosemary for memory, thyme for a life you led, who sells it. Marlene says she misses Alisha, that’s not-me. Pray you arrive here safely, smudge of tarragon, mushroom photography, lines of flight.
We, after Sophie, after Frank, say Ask for everything!
Regarding conjunction, something about publishing, spirituality, knowledge and authority figures. There will be tension with Aquarius principle. A slip of paper. I was born at 06:20, in a thunderstorm.
[Oh yes! x]
The rose-girl had an overture: she tore wedding pearls from her branch-sized clavicle, let them scatter from the tub where she lay and the tub was a cloud, the pearls were snow. At the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, she was a divorce child with her hair in two plaits we would climb up to kiss at the nape of her neck, that’s it, I play all my aces so we won’t die. These cards are beautiful, we turn them away. There will be no dying, not here or now. I thresh the rest of my skyluck, lager, my skylark. I’m lucky the mirror is showing up nowhere. Sometimes it is Freud’s voice, or an oil pastel. The foam from her brushed-down hair. Of the past you have given me everywhere, Andromeda, minipops, electronic renaissance. In writing the poem I am playing the cello, I am playing the cello of poem to death, why not?
It’s up to you It’s down to you
Don’t be so mournful…
PART SIX: SCENTED AND GENEROUS
I had a dream about the diary with the days mixed up. Each day had its own fragrance:
Cognac, cannabis, dill pickle, mown grass, libido enhancer, sweet vanilla, jasmine, ylang ylang, who shares all, heart notes of shrub, blackcurrant, oak moss, popcorn, peppermint candy, lavender, ginger castoreum, chypre, neroli, understory, wooded and tonka, ambery, orris, top note, emily brontë rose, cinnamon, hot shit, gold dust, brine of ocean, roast aubergine cologne near airstrip pheromone, oil pipe explosion, special cinders, vetiver, slots into psyche, balsam, absinthe, cassie, frangipani, saffron, strawflower aka immortelle, black liquorice, lactones, myrrh, sassafras, fruit loops, chocolate ice, pamplemousse or french for grapefruit martini and rockrose, peony, tobacco, peppercorn, petitgrain, scottish myrtle and soft fir, nutmeg, new car, coffee brew, pine needles, indole, musk of course.
Pitseleh means little one. Elliott Smith sings, ‘no one deserves it’.
I’m turning a petal to see you better / that I am someone’s difference.
Dear Alisha,
If we were to wed in the childhood memory where you circle the prairie with diet cola and you always know what to do, I see the cherryade reds in you, sanguineous of first degree and alacrity pitching your letter. The post office is closed. I eat more peanut butter than Elvis and nobody stops me, I get it from Aldi. The day feels closure and we edge towards lockdown, I’m texting, Starbucks is open on Christmas Day, will you bring me something? Again, like the time we ordered starlit capitalist fuck lattes and dusted methamphetamine before shift; we were exquisite, fruit toast, the nourishing glitter in our hair was ace; we served 200 covers, sixty quid in tips, and you were scarlet in the uniform poem called A Scarlet Letter. Not the one or the many, just any. I knew this already. We had written them all! You have to have dashes of green to make red, tell Hilary, which is why I am writing to you from my rowan tree, fred asks is this a rowan bush, I say a rosehip, I don’t know what to do; the inchplant is coming up fast, it will ingest the television, I look forward to it. Brockley Station, Nina Simone, stomach cramps, star flood. Must learn how to climb / the branches brightly.
Write to me of conspicuous passions, such as aging, or the fairy fountain with permissible agelessness. Crystal arpeggio. The various glacés of Rome, ornamental corpse flowers, pistachio and your deep, carnal desire to dance. I brush all the sea-foam from the rose-girl’s hair and she would collapse in panic. What the heck is in this carpet. Can you send me again the dimensions, dots per inch in terms of the plant, or planet? There is much to do. I am sewn a yellow word and kissing you cherries to lemonade, black to blues. Needing earth for it, rich stuff, thoughts on allotments. Omnidawn is the word, when the camera pans out and one million people have streamed this song, the credits come up. O blush, Love’s refrain in summer! 500,000 ampersands, can you imagine it? My new grand dreams of porny conjunction…
You taught me how to shoplift the various accessories of girlhood; I’ve given it up. See how my brows disapprove!
December is cruel, the dark green foliage of tinsel and shrubbery, poinsettias, it’s kitsch. I learn a blue-grey song on guitar but it sucks. Mum makes paella for xmas eve etc. Pantone named yellow-grey the colours of 2021, Katy is raging as I might too; I had a poem about this from before f-sharp, it was all about cycling, snapped ankles, absolute melt. Get to you. The way you arc your arms just so is centrepiece: everything will be the same as the sum of it was, serving us dinner. Cryptocurrency, wrong-name, Tony Blair of bad air was trending, you do it last-minute, pronounce it soft, you wear a blue velour lace thing, fka misty. These are the suburbs where doors were slammed, and these were offered cookies. Fuck a lawn. But you dip your feet in scant oasis, you break off a piece of the dark chocolate donut. I have dreamed of this. Stillnesses are not without purchase. Another spam mail arrives, dear pal—
I am going out to buy us blowsy hours, belong and casual distortion. Black forest gateau and log of the roasted poem, emitting steamiest lines, pleasure days, no breaks just ganache is that thick language. We lay together, birthday of shadow work, wrote sunlessness. I draw dark green liner on their eyes like vines. Wish holidays longer. We enter the alone wood with natural lights they are strung they are simple, leafage pressed between them. 1800 dpi, virus gone, unmute the sea. You are warmly invited.
~
Mermaid Chunky – Gemini Girls
‘Til Tuesday – Voices Carry
God Help the Girl – Down and Dusky Blonde
Sunflower Bean – Moment in the Sun
Phoebe Bridgers – Graceland Too
M83 – Karl
Tomberlin – Hours (Katie Dey remix)
Gia Margaret – apathy
Felicia Atkinson, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – And The Flower Have Time For Me
what if she entered the sliver of morning and haemorrhage left for her
on the rooftop, signal that someone was still coming in caustic shoes
theorising a free continuation of handsome disorder, to access the paywall and free us from pain
she could breathe here, just
to feel like getting trains, filming herself speak only to speed and lag
in practice of relative motion, to feel it
“how all the protests ceased” but not to look was to watch the hard tomatoes soften from green and the weight
to glow awhile, orange and I miss
a strategy of oratory whereby someone has a line from beautiful afternoon television, like “who would buy this house?” as if there were choices
next to the undiscovered shaven lawn
*
I’ve been having dreams about family and scaffolds
how she just lay there literally until the child began throwing soft toys at her in the 1990s
anyone could come to life and be numb
I want to read Graeber’s thesis on magic, slavery and politics
she didn’t say to me
do you ever feel free, for instance in fugue state when brushing your teeth
I’ve been dreaming about ancestors stuck on trains killing rabbits and eating crackers it was that easy
all season complaint of what’s coming, knowing nothing of photography
when you can’t measure the wind by the grass
she had this enormous laughter
*
dwindling into ambivalence if this isn’t a dream exposure
and we can’t enter houses
I’ve been trialling sentences, Bernadette Mayer says I’m not faulting being periodic but sentences with caps and end marks do seem so bloodless to me
You swing gazelle legs over the actual You wait in the room for the wine You pull collectives out of the sink
distracted, I watch through windows turn on my flash to lead workshops on trash and poetry as finance, like eons of speculation had brought us to nothing but numbers
and the anxious among us, cooking the numbers
I watch her slice an avocado in the dark and the police van opened to reveal us with leaves in our molars, perfect hello it’s autumn
in the bloodless sentence
*
dreamt I was tidying the rooms of siblings
this mad kind of everywhere acid I couldn’t clean up
in the panic of rich, linguistic Monday, you are part of the story, too smart for me
the interminable smell of pine resin, kimchi and menthol gum yes, just there
in lightness rimming
I made this commitment to sleeping ‘upstairs’
taking pleasure on my editor’s credit before the treehouse snapped
*
I can barely listen to music anymore it’s all error
describing her pain as shooting
when I smashed my thumbs in my eyes you kept going it was Jupiter
now
cruising down Alexandra Parade to send you the voice message of not seeing nightingales, a bathtub attached to a car I wish I could touch between times is when I most feel ‘we exist’ and just like that the cornflowers won’t die
and we can’t enter houses
and you end with the fresh heat of illusory commute
I could say anything new
in dumb, erotic anonymity where all this falls
*
she had lit up the sad remains of the tree
bound to other seasons, even look good
despite not hearing this live I like it, finally summer light on the same
even if we live
in adrenalised versions of trying to keep warm on the video call or wavelength
of audit continuum
she was all “it is up to the unassuming […] to represent reality” in The New York Times
and the well-oiled loss of taste
feels the same the shadow
years of tax avoidance edible sundown
*
what if she knew before all of us doubled in running away with me
I dream all my friends attending the burning
“where have you been”
and you could put this to archive
swipe left for the hidden indentation of nothing happening
20,000 years ago
mostly I worry if she lived in the dream I had to wake from
cradling the ersatz animal, sprigs of rosemary
having clambered reality over again and knowing you survived the scaffold GESTURES FOR LIVING AIR as the art was told “I just need to check your temperature” a rough kind of festival kiss that was listening
in the underpasses of everything prior to millennium
installs a magical feeling that :heart: you would be at the station
April, the quarantined month is sweet. Not cruellest, for that would be February. What is the human capacity for crying exactly? I had cried all 28 days to water the snowdrops, saved the 29th for one great, acidic cry of my life.
April, I dreamt you had leapt from the hole in my head / and the hole in my head from the length of your light.
April, we name our sadnesses arbitrarily. The sadness is a euphemism for what we are tired of saying, and even saying ‘these times’, and even saying the strangeness. To live in the sadness or strangeness, say
April, a shattering epiphany that I still
April, my kindest regards.
April, the dying narcissi.
April, I never signed on to be locked indoors, never signed on for these losses or debts. Never signed on for these sadnesses and yet they are happening, belonging to someone in pain upstairs, lending a movie, tending a wage.
April, the sadness of paragraphs.
April, I watch you teach at a distance, blue-dimming with cans of juice.
April, The Baudelaire Fractal.
April, the pedagogy of longing. I lose dull words. I teach myself not to need you. I learn to need the living itself. Lil Peep screams in my ear, ISN’T LIFE BEAUTIFUL / I THINK THAT LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. This is a kind of instruction.
April, the sarcasm of flowers.
April, I walk in the underpass reading the red paint, Make the rich pay. The president is everywhere and nowhere, confected aleatory; a bad rhizome, the president has bleached his words. Tap root political, it can’t get out. The water doesn’t flow here. There’s lead, but no leader.
April, I found a Jason Molina lyric buried in a poem by Peter Gizzi. I had been writing about the undersong but this was ‘Oversong’, the verb ‘to be’ eclipsing ‘me’.
April, I wander the lonely rhubarb clouds, an hour or so. The world on edge.
April, there’s lead in the water.
April, I would polish your cutlery.
April, someone on the radio is defending his advice on a bleachy digest.
April, say hi to Angela for me.
April, where are your showers?
April, what would I ask of your showers?
April, the poems. Mary Ruefle filling the 22nd with sunflower hearts, or was it her friend, ‘Please Read’. How I misread wilted for waited, waited for wilted. Seeds of words. How I knew nothing about the orange blossom excepting its smell, which I drunk so hard, not knowing the name but only how passing a top-note I wanted it all perfumed within me. This form of quietness akin to heat or light. Who would design this, and all that beauty.
April, the air is cherried with synonyms. You spit out the coolest noun for this.
April, I eat breakfast at six in the evening.
April, you are teasing me with readings and the old response; I have no ability. My year folds back into last, remembering the burn in my stomach, wanting to get there fast and slow, the scenery seen from a train. Manchester blossoms before Glasgow and the song about the orange room, the pinks in the street, the wondering. I did not know then that I would take you, carry a little seed in me.
April, I have so little to say.
April, sprained ankles.
April, the canal is glistening at dusk.
April, the supercut / us.
April, in these uncertain times, you are the discount. Please let me out for a walk, on all things said, the passing around of a line.
April, James Schuyler remembered you to a French pear and the sulphur-yellow bees. I was nostalgic also, pollinating the document with all my normals. What difference it made. They said a world.
April, the pollen set free.
April, the edge of the world is grey.
April, the sunlight’s adultery.
April, what sex?
April, fuck you, that was yesterday.
April, I’m reading Lee Harwood again for the sea that I miss. Infinite sea that I miss.
April, I want to run down the slope of the universe and think a single intelligent thought.
April, they are absolute units.
April, the rivers are so low I’m starting to think ‘they’ need sertraline. Sweet relief of the rain.
April, fuck it I love you.
April, it’s always somebody’s birthday and now they’re blowing out candles on Zoom.
April, you buy me groceries.
April, I’m starting to think I once met a girl called April. She wore her hair in elaborate braids, and the kirby grips shone in the sun the one day in July when I ate ice lollies by the fountain at the end of all I remember. The roses were over-watered, all colours of the sun. Generous, redundant, you tossed in bank notes to wish this was over.
April, Lee says ‘her beauty undresses the sea’. You picture that, the flicker where the dress is the same as the blue as she is the sea.
April, I wear blue and roll myself out where the sun would set.
April, I can’t stop quoting Clarice.
April, I want somebody else’s salt.
April, the pink moon, the Lyrid meteors.
April, there’s something I want to delete.
April, I was crying for the violinist on the radio, crying for those in her apartment, dying. Two of them, she said, barely in their forties, choking up.
April, I felt like a meme. A bad guy.
April, make the rich pay.
April, it was so on the nose the writing was giving me zits and I’m sorry. Keep thinking this is it this is it this is it and I’m sorry.
April, this stamina of maintaining the romance of living.
April, naming us yellowest flowers.
April, a lunar-resistant photography sings.
April, give me the negatives.
April, it all started on the eleventh. I went a ritualised cycle in the sweet warm rain, with flies stuck jewel-like to the sweat of my chest. I kept going and going until my heart gave out a charitable breathlessness.
April, you have a shark smile and I wonder what it is you might do to me.
April, I really miss Nice ‘n’ Sleazys, pints of Guinness, gigs & readings.
April, the air is a silver curve.
April, you are thousands of results.
April, the change I can’t have.
April, the little black cat tried to get in the door and for a while we sat there and then scooping her up I held her awhile, her wee beating heart next to mine. The warmest thing in weeks. Her glass eyes looked to the curve-glass moon and we both were momentary slivers. I went inside and washed my hands and the soap bubbles… and I hope she got home eventually.
April, oracular.
April, it felt stupid as a miracle.
April, consider the orchid.
April, it made of us talking heads. I dreamt I went through the screen and it was all a quiet darkness of matter, having read Karen Barad, having watched Twin Peaks. Is it that you go through your own eyes, zooming, watching to see what they’d do in the afterglow, repeating yourself. Here is the other Maria, etc. I watched you on someone else’s story, like a bad cartoon, the bad rehearsal of all of our laughter, a bad white powder.
April, I hate this.
April, my pins and needles.
April, Marianne Morris says ‘Never lay in the dirt elated’.
April, my dad sends me pictures of lambs.
April, it gets so I don’t want to call anymore because it hurts more not being with you in the summer, the summer, the amiable feeling.
April, the president says to try light and heat.
April, you are rice cakes, sadness and crushed velour.
April, the world is not primed or administered.
April, ‘they’ failed ‘us’, etc.
April, blue masks lay on the pavement like plasters afloat in the pools of my youth and I wonder whose wounding was minor, to take that off.
April, I swim in it.
April, a lesson.
April, I felt in the fortress of dreams the falling into after-this. On a spinning top at the park by the beach and we held on forever / and all my old friends were shining.
mariaology 