season – mariaology

cute entry // yellow tulips

cute entry / / yellow tulips
London, April 2024

I was out somewhere reciting my love for Adidas with wishes thrice – décolletage! – and music, the train arrived on time. I wanted to ask about your shoulder and you said there was so much Guinness after the football, the rest of the world was a rumour. We had all these non-sequiturs to like, communicate the fizzy little spirals. I was like an ice cream sky for you! A spring-rush blossom you! Tapering, tapering. Went to buy salad from downstairs, went to run around putting jeans on. New jeans. Matte suede lips. Blue Sunday. Covent Garden was glistening with consumerism and the new good weather. Every time I’m in London it’s sunnier, warmer, more deniable; so much the smell of pollution & impossible flowers, pollution & impossible flowers
the city I really learned to love was so expensive you could only love so much before the money felt
mouth garbage
of gorgeous surplus:
What I kept feeling about London was…what I had kept of something & nothing a type of ‘neutral metabolic beverage’ bought at room temperature in the clothing store – spontaneous purchase!
Questions to fall in love to……what’s your favourite checkout compulsion? To shoplift gum? To flirt with cashier? To buy an oaten flute and play it to god? I was so concerned about the woman in Asda with the bleeding nailbeds and I kept recommending apricot oil and lots of sleep, I’d been through it too, and my Nan from the chemo. What our nails tell us. Mine used to be silver striped and blood-let-violet, now they are cracked with the memory.

The rain came out the day I went home. Lucky I got to bring my book to London. Oh god it was beautiful the matinee I was nervously also on Guinness and lots of intersections of arrival, read first, took ponytail out like to say she is me now. Cinders. The night before, D. and I had gone to see some bands at the George Tavern and we talked through a few sets just because it had been so long since we’d talked and I wanted to know all about work and love and she said something amazing about how it gets better every day, like you just want to find out so much about the person, you want to figure out the total every degree of how they think and what they feel about something – this plenitude. I said that to my friend last night like the thing about a successful relationship is surely that every day it gets better in that you change together, you change each other, you discover things about yourself that would irrevocably not be possible to discover unless you met this person and you change each other’s day and daily and that’s not like tree branches curled around each other it’s more like mycelia underground, so much unseen, more like alchemy. So when you break apart, you never really sever. You are cellular bonded. Their energy surges in you – what – a bus ride home, a voice note, a quiet cry in the night. Something said, something unspoken. Unexpected holding of hands. Curly little yes.

I reread The Hour of the Star over breakfast sauerkraut and the flicker of lighter-light out at the end was it. So easy ideation; not to say I made plans, just that the impulse had become my little sister. You have to find your light.

I was lighting up to go to the next thing.

‘Beautiful though it is, it’s just walking really,’ said the woman behind me on the train, talking about the countryside.

She also said:

99% of people who study to be dentists end up being dentists
99% of people who study art don’t end up being artists

My brother and I stay up til 2am listening to hardstyle and reminiscing 2000s absurdism like it’s our good soft history and I suppose it is. Castles in the sky, pretty green eyes, quiver, save me, braveheart, moonlight, sunshine after the rain, bits and pieces, concrete angel, true love never dies.

I want to exhibit gelatinous entrails of everything we ever said.

Someone not new I met again talked about making love in a cornfield, listening to Sting. That the not-not-new of it all shared love for Eva Cassidy broke a little nerve platonism so much that I would melt into what we made awhile. Nightcap. Fortuitous timing of trains.

J. said I looked about twelve in the picture. I said this is my heartwood: surly, surly.

The readings:

Jane’s brilliant poise – poetry delivers the body.
Ellis’s infinite – I was so elated to meet them finally ❤
Rob’s plasma poems enamoured and the fuck devastation of elegy.
Karenjit’s percussive grace.

The readings were gems I will live with. I took videos but for some reason couldn’t upload them anywhere, but I have them.

Noodles at Silk Road backscattering miso. Hospitality stories. Stafford yellow fields. Lambs around Penrith.

Intimate fish tank of the Zoom reading with my Krupskaya label mates. I nearly read with the AR halo. Two in one day.

I slept thick treacle.

“kept swelling with the sense of this year as the best, it keeps getting better”
“wonderful”
“Oh rly?”

The other maria.

Playlist: August 2022

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…

The Corrs – Breathless

Alice in Chains – Tears

Hand Habits – No Difference

Beth Orton – Weather Alive

Belle & Sebastian – Working Boy in New York City

Sharon Van Etten – Darkness Fades

Baths – Tropical Laurel

Doja Cat – Love to Dream

Adios Nervosa – cloudcover

Drugdealer – Madison

Thee Oh Sees – Chem-Farmer

The 1975 – Part of the Band

June11 – Who is Still Dreaming?

Regina Spektor – Loveology

Cowboy Gardening

It was supposed to snow in the night and the not snowing was sore as a missed period. I awoke with two crescent-shaped moons in the palm of my hand and thought of a sacrifice unwittingly given in dreamland. Said Jesus. Peridot phlegm and the scratchy sensation, knowing that speech too could be cool, historical, safe. Could not see beyond pellucid rivulets, Omicron my windows, my streaming January. January

streams from every well-known orifice of the world. Its colour is shamelessly stone. I seem to be allergic to inexplicable moments and so keep to the edge of the polyphony of yellow. I am cared for. The Great Barrier Reef dissolves in my dreams the substrate of yellow. It goes far. Pieces of the GBR are washed ashore in Ayr, Singapore, Los Angeles, Greenland. I go to these places by holding a polished boiled candy in my mouth, like the women in Céline and Julie Go Boating. My ankles licked by truest shores / but January didn’t fucking happen.

❤

Put together the orange-purple rose, your possible outcomes are red or gold (if you are lucky). Two reds together, with the golden watering can, could result in the rare blue rose. A novel rose. Black velvet roses grow in the old woman’s garden because she has infinite time to tend them. I’m not saying she’s immortal, like the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish; only that she doesn’t exist in our time. It’s rude to assume so. I’m not saying the lines of her face are asemic writing — nobody did that to her, or scarred her. She’s not scared. She just lives and dies all the time. She waters the roses.

Sometimes I imagine her in fisherman’s clothes, in meshy nightclub outfits of neon flavours, in extravagant ballgowns, blue boilersuits. Sometimes I’ve seen her before. The only way I can see her is to climb a few steps on the ladder by the village store, its red paint flaking, and I hang my body upside down the other side, risking exposure. I never eat before doing this. She doesn’t see me; she doesn’t see her roses either, not the blooms. In the village, people walk around with handfuls of rose seeds sometimes strung in little hemp bags. These are the currency of care. I have tended the young with haircuts and watched the flourishing of teenage roses. They say I am an old lady in the garb or garbage of former actresses. I hear them sing to me their stories. “Remember
she shot the guy who brought the astrograss”.
What they don’t remember, whippersnappers, is the incorrigible realism of that turf. Fuck it,
I have done nothing wrong. I perform for them my cowboy gardening. Broadcast the surplus value of our mutual twilight. Halloween roses for everyone. Every night I wake up from someone else’s childbirth and the world is so sore, the wound in the sky the snow wants to fall through. They bandaged it with realism. I need to go far. Do you remember the last time you awoke and felt like a person?

❤

The roses grow up in the gaps of the cattlegrid, knowing they will be trodden on. Again and again. We can’t stop them from doing this and they do it so often we have to account for a portion of Waste. Kissing you is itself a trellis. But we are propped and grown sideways with the vines strung betwixt our ribs. We are babies.

I like the tired way the roses intonate colour. The economics of the roses. Their euphemistic fetish. I tried to avow my commitment to rosehood the day I saw your calves all torn, and saw about women getting their labias reduced, and the red, blood roses sold on the internet, and rest. I lay this on your grave, the world.

My love, as a redness in our rosette
That’s newly worn in June
O my love, like the melt
That’s sweetly played in turbines

So fairway artery thou, my bonnie lasso
Defiled in love as I
Will love thee still, my decade
Tinged as the seas are garlanded dry

Tinged all the seas as thee, my decanter
At the romantic menagerie of sunset
I will luminary still, a debutante
Of the lighthouse sarcophagi

And plough thee well, my only lathe!
And plough thee well, awhile!
And I will come again, my love
Though it were ten thousand millennium.

My love’s rose-coloured highlighter really hurt the extra-textual, and thus booked trains to bed. I had an identity. I knew what you had done to the text. Austerity of the meadow to blame for ongoing culling of kin. You are abandonable as you have always been. Saplings for pronouns.

I feel wild and sad.

I feel pieces together stirring inside the world. Little bits of coral awake in
my throat, the shape of eight billion sun-spike proteins I was dumb
enough to swallow. It is not my fault but in my dreams
I get product emails like, Forget-me-not
a pair of jeans, high-waisted Levi’s
as if to wear at the end of the month
we keep saying sorry for delay, embroidered
our thighs with spiders
excuses to use lighters
without smoking
does it make us vectors
the warning of snow and ice still issued
from inside the snow globe of the rosehip
changes as it withers, glass shards
pissed from acid clouds in all colours:
black, blue, burgundy, cherry brandy, coral
cream, dark pink, green, lavender, light pink,
lilac, orange, peach, purple’s timeless red,
salmon, Hollywood white & yellow, rainbow
chosen for the significant other, a masculine flower
dipped in fortified light, I’m thankful
I look good lying down, the long unconditional stem
aka Lemonade, l-l-l-lemonade, l-l-l-lemonade…….

Playlist: May 2021

There is much I cannot tell you. I’m not going to be autobiographical. I want to be “bio.”
— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. by Stefan Tobler

Hidden gardens where a bioluminescent frisbee, in imitation of the mysterious diskettes that roam the deepest zones of ocean, drifts upon the late May breeze. It is unseasonably cold. We take pleasure in relishing the ‘unseasonably cold’, as to say something is unreasonable or unforgivably it. The thing. The heating is on all through the month of May. Rain-sodden trainers left to dry on radiators. A documentary about nudibranchs had revealed to us the secrets of experts. Experts in general. How you really have to hate the thing you study, in order to love it. The thing has to perpetually withhold from you what you want, not knowing what it is, but always in pursuit of it. So the nudibranch in question, this pinkish one, does what is told as a ‘dance’ for the diver, who has gone too deep in the song. The sea tells nothing after the bridge. It is barely a chorus.

I am a heart beating at fish time, deep in the abyssopelagic city along with the dumbo octopus, the cookiecutter shark, the shrimp. I will not say much about these animals and how they came to adapt to such aphotic lifestyles. I myself was once a chaser of light. We are circus anomalies, dependent on a phrase of unseasonable coldness. The freak quality of not-to-want oxygen or like, having been left here then stubbornly I will stay here. Make of my heart what you want — a jewel or rock, a piece of cold life, swallowed. Bare and beating. Something is getting dark around us. Darker yet.

And so never to leave the perpetual lockdown of the not capital city, and so to leave it for gorse and blue realms and the haar of what is by the sea, in a wavelet transformation. Having to go inland to escape it. And so to give up one’s limbs for the personal study of human impossibility, as if we had also been persons all along. I wear a delicious, impermeable bracelet of kelp. The order of adjectives tends towards certain qualities, for instance when I say a blonde soft hair it is wrong somehow, touching the thing in a wrong order, when everyone wants a soft blonde hair as delicacy. To be in this month and spearing the secret fish of the story, one after the other meandering down this channel. At the bottom of everything, when you see it. When you see the story.

Let us go deeper yet. I have these new glasses, you have these hands that will brush away masses of silt and sand. You have the order of words corrected. Living in a grammar of ceaseless helium. Lamentation of the soft urban fox you were once, once were. The frisbee glows quietly in the grass at night. At dinner, J. gives the lowdown on *********** and various fish glow quietly in their sadness and having been farmed to believe I too am in this story, eating. The very delicate scarce thing we would toss to the word of the mouth, the open wound of it, melted substance. Brushing a fork through soft blots of cream and saying is it so, deep sea, very scarcely. This instant, speared, you are the story also. Salt. Twice removed from the lavender thing twigged from the garden and drank in gin with soda, so the ice knows more than I do. So the ice clinks in the quiet night, which is never a night. So T. confesses the end of dark lunch. I read it.

The cold fresh lenses allow us to witness how the deer get sick, how the white deer especially are beautiful by any standard of “I love you” said between the innocent eyes of how we are also roes, taking our glasses off to see better the way faces exist when brushed together, clicked and twisted, kissed. And the gorse so yellow, sky so blue. Immediately, to have been tourist for mourning. The most disappointing best hot chocolate in the world has all the good sweet silt at the bottom. I finish it, feel sick as expected. Flush. I throw up my arms or something. Wash the cup, recycle it.

So the nudibranch’s name is derived from the Greek words ‘nudus’ and ‘brankhia’, meaning naked gills. They have no special skill in discerning between light and dark, often using chemical signals to locate what is needed: food and each other. They possess a pair of ‘oral tentacles’. Soft-bodied, dragon-like, losing their vestigial shell during a larval phase. The extreme vividity of their being works as advertisement. I am obsessed with them. The sap-sucking slugs, algae rich. They produce solar power from munching on corals, absorbing their chloroplasts to photosynthesise nutrients. Bright colours result from their diet. The month of May has a toothed structure that tongues the very campion and jewelled aurora that passes for what you want ‘pure total nature’ or sweet poisons, for which I take showers to exhume from this system.

The writing, at the bottom of everything, is colours. They come from what we eat.

Null cerise and sweet neutral grey, back into darkness again and gently.

Now it’s 10:29 of Sunday morning and last night’s song thrush and the afternoon skylark and none of this heard on a podcast exists — it is all true and continues. The frisbee flies sentences through the wan air and hark is it early to never want to leave, to always be entering the room spreading butter on toast and holding a glass up for persons, wild-cats, in a language the daylight speaks and speaks along, another dark lunch hidden from the universe only to be camembert nightmares of rosemary — whisky — do you remember this shadow man or his shadow step-daughter, do you remember the riot, do you remember the castle of gold, clearance and loneliness? This place is tricky to heat. Black tulips, white hyacinths. Coming up the stairs is the question.

A nudibranch bristles into coral and kelp bed. At the bottom of everything is the nudibranch. Do you see it? Do you see it?

I burn my tongue on the question. What will be coming
around the mountain of bleached consideration, haunted and lovely
through the haar and more blue to come
exists
as breath, underwater, this pause before each born
to scrub our hands with sea kelp soap from the isle of darkness and safety
trending in the United Kingdom
of the girl, with her voice of crunched glass
abolishing sky castles, sand castles
her salad days
her spectacular glands
her nudibranch heart

Arca – Brokeup

Nap Eyes, NNAMDÏ – Blood River

Burial – Space Cadet

Brian Eno – Little Fishes

A. G. Cook, Charli XCX – Xcxoplex

Katie Dey, Lonelyspeck – Darkness

Caroline Polachek – Breathless

Slayyyter – Troubled Paradise

SOPHIE – JUST LIKE WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE

Zoee – Host

Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen – Like I Used To

Judee Sill – Down Where the Valleys Are Low

Lana Del Rey – Blue Banisters

Bright Eyes – The Difference in the Shades

Playlist: April 2021

Last year’s April was a leap year. For every 29^th 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 29^th 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 28^th April 2019 (no entry for the 29^th), 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: November 2020

Surf Rock
for fred and kate

Lioness chained to hillsides of lavender       the sun
is streaming oversea entirely conceptual homeland
5G howl                                      like how a fractal glint
constitutes one or more endings                and is just
never never never never never
lavender exactly                   who unimaginable loses
when fox does                                    borrowed snouts
language of flowers          fuck this                       howl
again five dimensions

Is you said to me a common placard
stands vantablack in the manacles           jason cries
his heart broke in your jaw              I swam all night
to the motor show                  roseate perfume of the
problem                being born out of lobster wedlock
to be ravaged by the neo-marxist programme of
naming us wasp                and other wasp sadnesses
it is for me as I for you           better at swiss twilight
when               I was community

In the womb                  wept effort of what insomnia
does
from the latin meaning wandering
                             policy of “rural lust”        I will swim
I will swim through hedgerows I will swim I swim
this isn’t the song turn up your sleeves we enter the
chess in brightness mode I wanted the heat the reat
                                     skelped by autofictive descent
another coxcomb
texts you back                                                    O lariat

At that altitude paying the rent              in pale world
and even if she has lost control
what a car does                          in green light heaven
obscenity pedestrian    the ground here opal silicate
owing you a crush moratorium
cheques out after all
                                    this is just a modern rock song
adjusting   styles pane of my old wound, new wound
at clydebank the skycastles at four o’clock who are u

Harvest season was accordion sonnetry I lifted my
volta skirts for assholes feeling perennially strange
in melancholy chord progression of certified orange
is this out of the question              lazily in the grass
lexie and cecil and ariel               open your mouth
be lucid
corduroy when stevie sings
harmony on thursday morning exhaustion I thought
             just swish would do it

Could be 1995
how will I get there                            painting the ice-
course with fairways                          is all that I have
boygirlboygirl varieties of noodles
                                  bunny calls it cloudheartedness
be mute in serious leaf together
is falling
                          the same as time at all / it got claws
hi can I have some more bourgeois heroine pastry

Okay to just swim and arrive here                my salty
fiancé is a type of fish         did you enjoy The Shape
of Water and other films to which I might fuck
glitching in the real world
                          darling is a missing numbering
merely the sun                streaming feminine voices
never never
a century of the Laurieston & all of my guinnesses
are oxygen                                         saw another fox

And wherever you are I suppose the squirrels are
listening
as bartender came home w/ three crystal ocean
we stub the ashes out
we stub the ashes out                                     it’s him
that I am smashed mezzanine      phoning my dad
                                                         big blue energy
another song about the suburbs   /   mineral & gem
sometimes I can’t believe

Red lions and lionesses are not metaphors but love
laura no lies          & lilac passion in the first place
I wrote about you in my notebook: we might not
even be awake in the world is still in the kitchen
scratch at my socialist lichen
                         second paramore whose kisses are
madness         my counsellor said yeah
I like those mornings also
London fog, London fog

Oneohtrix Point Never — I Don’t Love Me Anymore

i_O — Castles In The Sky

Quirke — Luxury Red Pence

Mogwai — Dry Fantasy

Salem — Red River

Songs: Ohia — Lioness

Silver Jewels — Federal Dust

Johnny Flynn — Lost and Found

Keaton Hensen — Ontario

Life Without Buildings — Sorrow

Drop Nineteens – Winona

The National — Dark Side of the Gym

Weyes Blood — A Certain Kind

Marika Hackman — Playground Love (Air cover)

God Help the Girl — Pretty When The Wind Blows

Porridge Radio — 7 Seconds

Elliott Smith — True Love

A. G. Cook — Beautiful Superstar

Bat for Lashes — Peach Sky

Lemongrass — Sayonara

Tennis — Tender As A Tomb

The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)

Golden Mean — Midnight

Phoebe Bridgers, Rob Moose — Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)

Angel Olsen — New Love Cassette (Mark Ronson Remix)

Belle & Sebastian — This Is Just a Modern Rock Song

Playlist: June 2020

The daylight was like ordering pyjamas off the internet. Light blue. Sky broke for when it rained and the hills were seen as old pornographers watching us pass like gifs. I’m grown into us to reach for the kettle, for the internet, wearing my silks, something’s on the boil and it’s not quite tea. I think of some other season and know it is cornflower, not quite light, not quite blue of dawn because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the dawn. People are buying vintage files to play dialup connection. The old pornographers eat their cameras for warmth. I’ve seen them do it to be secret, fucking careful to be made up in a lovely afternoon with blusher, oranges and Russian vodka. It’s the same thing you lie down for, sometimes lying down because I can’t get a word, or a line, can’t catch or watch. You have to watch it for happening. The daylight was like that, then pulling on silks, moth-fringed, light blue it was like the colour of the internet turned inverse for ‘its’ children. They were still making artillery in the system, so we could sleep here peacefully and not be disturbed by the old pornographers and their bits of camera. The sexual motion / of foliage all up in my software. It wasn’t that we had any tension, there were other kinds of ars poetica, but something’s on the boil and it’s not quite tea.

There were other kinds of daylight the colour of the internet and not the quite blue of this tea. Because sky is making us pass like gifs in such loops as I can’t get a word. The deteriorating resolution of you are not bloodleaf. Because June is super lovely, moth-fringed, pulling on silks. You pass a lot of grasses, long-grown from their natural habitats, watching the drops fall out of the sky for what, for love. I don’t know what shape it is they make on the surface of water, but I watch. The old pornographers were making a nature documentary at the edge of the forest, which was inaccessible, badly rendered. So I could sleep here peacefully, I came out of the shower in cornflower to tell them the best blue spots they could film. The colour of the internet is touching a liquid, then it goes through the lens, fucking slow, so huge, it belongs to this season. Snapped. The tree was just that down the middle, sort of bruised where it had stood, not light blue, lightening out into favourite tone. The old pornographers scolded my aura and told me these pretty white lies. Like. Say your best tree was a willow and we do it lightly, willowy, that’s how I know what tallness is, like pulling on silks in London. It’s the same thing because I can’t get a word, moth-fringed my mouth is pushing up cobwebs. (*) The loop is very beautiful it feels like you are grasses, lots of them exist unmown for hours, how at dawn for the children, light blue, how they enter and trample; only the old pornographers trespass for profit.

Here look at the tiny bird nursing her young which are tinier still, it’s the same thing as knowing it rained and a goldcrest buoyed up on the birdbath, tiny thing, not quite vodka. Because I can’t get a word, there are gilded flakes in my colourless tipple – visceral realists! – like anything we had off the internet, like this particulate stuff that fell from the sky. I want to be fucking careful to light blue the mise en scene of this feeling, tell it slow to flicker. Be made up in a lovely or a line, can’t catch or not be disturbed by the old pornographers, whose interns were cameo sylphs of such beauty as to even sleep peacefully here, or inhabit the air. It was like the dream of Bloomsbury and the supermodels draped over carts that advertised mustard to the masses and it made no sense except mustard can boost your metabolism maybe, yellow it is, so I ride my bike beside them. I’m grown into us to reach tension, summer thinspiration, I dawn because it’s been a long kind of daylight to find this, pulling on silks, dust caps, yolks, some time since the colour of the internet turned up bits of camera. The contact sheet of ruinous cornflowers, raindrops stained; pinned animals appear in separate parcels, how it all looks side by side is not quite vodka. It is yet a shard. Archival. I’ve seen them do it for happening. Warmth. Freedom is the edible mischief of knowing poetry could never. Warmth, warmth is keeping a secret, local to cygnet, melt & forestry slenderness. The daylight blusher made love of your face, I’m fucked.

Sun Ra – Realm of Lightning

Run the Jewels – yankee and the brave (ep. 4)

Spellling – Dirty Desert Dreams

Noname – Song 33

Fleetwood Mac – Storms

Laura Nyro – Broken Rainbow

Connie Converse – Sad Lady

Ratboys – A Vision

Big Star – Dream Lover

Bright Eyes – Mariana Trench

Coma Cinema – Tall Grass

Gleemer – Brush Back

Feng Suave – People Wither

Tricky – Fall Please

Let’s Eat Grandma – Glittering

Soko – Being Sad Is Not a Crime

HAIM – Gasoline

Kelly Lee Owens – On

Tomberlin – Tornado

Slowdive – Some Velvet Morning (cover)

Mogwai – Take Me Somewhere Nice

Bing & Ruth – The Pressure of this Water

Ecco2k – Hi Fever

Lil Peep – driveway

Ashnikko – Cry (feat. Grimes)

Donny Hathaway – I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know

deeper – Pink Showers

Katie Dey – Dancing

Christine & the Queens – People, I’ve been sad

Thurston Moore – Hashish

Ian & Sylvia – Early Morning Rain

Robert Wyatt – Shipbuilding

Soft Machine – Why Are We Sleeping?

The Replacements – Can’t Hardly Wait

Songs: Ohia – Didn’t It Rain

Kath Bloom, Loren Connors – Wait For My Love

Lianne La Havas – Weird Fishes (cover)

Phoebe Bridgers – I Know the End

Poem: Chrome

Chrome

Wish you would tell me where we’re going
as though in a car, snaking down the road
instead of waiting for breakfast
waiting to say this and chewing your oats
It’s dark outside, gets darker every day
this isn’t supposed to happen
I only listen to radio on Fridays why is that
like a song or something
everyone is leaving the party already
afternoons are reminiscent
of last week’s afternoon, come over later
and tell me what you did
I feel quite sick when I think of a lyric
and a stranger asking if I have any filters
You could put a white tip at the end of the poem
like pushing oil into cuticles
Nobody glides down the rain like you do
Which is lifted all bent from a love song
milder than cheddar
You listen on Sundays for wine, she comes out
of the willow to speak to you
coyly undoing her hair or herself
There is no reply, I hold in my grammar
with a bell for the wheel of the eerie freedom
something better than nothing
is like aaah is like aaah
I think this is the song you wanted
me to send, edgewise
sounding the commute back to verb
and speaking in frail duration
send me the book
like send me the lemons in nets
I tear up my tights on your thorny gaze
said nobody ever
one or two poems to think of the future
coming all orange across my eyes, ode
to the hairbells, ode to spring
Nobody does better the song of your loss
becoming this twice
aligned with health, somebody calls
the corner out
Even circles of knitwear have their factions
This is what it is to order a reef
when the coral runs out
Nobody will visit
wherein all the albatrosses start to sing
of plastics, clattering outwards
the slick of your thong is a sorry
I did not want to include
in modes of deception, lesser
named firs for timelines
going on to wherever
the trees can’t stop like dubstep
I know he’s still alive because he updates his tumblr
with black and white versions of parisian film sets
What is the speed of your smile times time
I’m the you in the nobody, ask me a question
Twitter matters
Align with astral cancellation
very bad glasses occurring small
sweet sertraline as if we—
dream in which on the hill you kiss me
and I can’t call a doctor
rolling over the hunger
looking at anything for the memory
sparkle chips click in my eye like granite
Haven’t felt this good about feeling for ages
I could say there’s a veil
dragging the face into thrill of the lyric
repulsive sense just is
ice jam
made to appear like sickness
lifting weights in little reps
Always seven or ever eleven
salve for lateral acid
lifting my arms for the shape of you gone
I don’t want to leave the house today
I don’t want to stay
I don’t want to leave my dreams tomorrow
Who was it that wanted their post just so
and tripped over horses
how clean he looked, sans cigarettes
we look better like light I suppose
castles are glass apparitions
when pressed against cereal
somebody lighting a candle at noon
This final luxury, fold me fast
my wicked friend how are you how are you
I ate all the rotten satsumas
a cascade of raisins
You see of the sky is it stars
or loops of moon
coming everywhere over like fruit
A bike ride, spectacular orbit
undoing that future
share of negative, however pristine
you will your spirits
they glide, authentic
collapse is verse of vice
Dark logs in the fire of order
sharing a wary winter
therein you see me not as it seems
not as in dust or starry application
this diminishing
dictionary effect of your all-sorts
soft liquorice next
sorting the necklace
It got really great before it stopped being anything
the girls are just men
and the men are waves like william said
is it the string that fallates a sea
change in me
the cloud is light
the cloud is heavy
something comes on in the breath of the lethe
I wish I could write like her it seems
wingless to admit this
Drowning dreams me
A pallor of belly and sound
What we read then we read only as extract
locked in the lyre of mind
a fragile cant of flint and ticket
a voice comes out of the hurricane
like sugar and the serenity tint of your missive
I would be wreath and tea, I would be holly
and berry your eyes just so I like them
shinier on high apparitions of pills
pain-wise it’s easy to breathe
absently-minded the child again
sits on the hill, stirring a little
leaf with its fist
and singing of latitude, sisterhood
lustres of puberty hurt
a poem rolls up
a play in the middle like sequins of toffee
all cooked up
heroin-rich continuum
babies are blue and twirling their words
fertility is lyric
lately a georgic thought
updates the landscape, refresh of its disk
in embers, cabling dark a sigh
a fish hook, best to cock
one’s eye at the sun for money
evolving lizards
caress the sand
and scatter monopoly houses
if I were so young as a werewolf rage
and twang of your green-red tongue
and sunwise; no matter for affect
aphexxing light without face
and girls of the sea
and boys of the sound
resting, newness is blue and plenty
writ of the world for day
and rage, opening indie
pseudo confusions of listening
imperilled chicago
What nobody has is time
or velvet, less of you
is always the bulb of next year’s
failing spring
and how did the system get so notorious
coming everywhere glowing like solar
panels in squares of gardens
making this civic
bliss of the window, fifties
kiss-catching my way into the country again
how did it get this mild
cradling the absent children as lambs
the way we did then
sweet green midnight
je suis shepherdess
a ridiculous landscape
clatters upon the stereo, two hours ago
hold out for multiple eclipses, active now
man you taste like whisky I love you
better in nuclear energy
a plantain reply
it doesn’t matter which outlook you use
the tax is similar
season three was a language parasol
being small again eating polos off your toes
I’ll be in that bed forever
better apple of revolutionary england
did not occur
let milk shake
I hate to say all general evie
and everything made for you
everything hurts
A big star fell on your pillow again
traded the oolong for tooth
this is february fifth forever and ever
do you want to come under the duvet again
as if it was made of straws
do you want to come over
threading first storm of loss
the adequate tapestry
Mostly recyclables, hold out the phone
as saul does a melt
to speak as surface
gliding nightly a rare casino snow
soldering palms for oil
and dairy dream of cold pastoral
drunk radiation
flays me, such nexus flesh
equivalent fern
in the kitchen
lunarium death and starving time
the driver was listening to angel of harlem
a fair blue world
a bluer fur
who would crowd now the pale critique
closing all windows
the way you fell over.

— 5/2/19

Playlist: May 2018

If April is the sweetest or cruelest, May has become the strangest month. Not ever but ever at present. It is summer’s gatekeeper, but also something other. Nurse of darkness and grief, rushing in bright lines and new delusions. Keeper of shadows flickering among green. In previous years, the season when confusion blooms. A dull need that quickens with the light through dawn to dusk, that honeys the flesh and the flesh’s sense of itself as pearlescent. Coming to endings. I brush my hair smooth copper in a mirror and notice green rings beneath my eyes. My eyes turn green from the copper, the sun. Moss agates held to the light. My irises look less like little sad pools of ocean; more forest now, with secret capillaries. With vague fantasy, I keep planning day trips I don’t then take. The sense of this name or that, a train stop, a heady clifftop walk, is sometimes enough.

Alcohol does me favours, then doesn’t. That absolute sinking sensation of four in the morning, the day already blooming before you a pale lilac silver that streaks the sky and exacts a sort of spermicide resistance to the nourishment of sleep’s regeneration. So you are still electric, pacing at six, drenched in the ersatz light of the screen. White upon white. Straining fingers. I leave early one day to buy crystals, snapping photographs afterwards of bluebells in public gardens. The bluebells hide miniature universes. Still entranced by the fairies; the barmaid knows because she offers me absinthe, green bottle labelled with a delicate eye. The beer garden teeming; cradling sticky glassware back to the bar. Couples come out in the sun, as if so many never existed before it got light and warm. I’m very small, like a vulnerable child, but then swollen and huge altogether. I can’t help the Alice comparison: that sudden shrinkage or growth, beyond the normal bounds of the human. I lust for the fall—that’s all I want now. Air rushing quick around my skull, a delicious plunge. Shake out plumage, feel ridiculous. Everything limps.

It all started with a simple accident: flipping my bike off the road, the front wheels spun thrice, a smashed head smashed knee smashed hand and leg. Smashed brakes. The most extravagant black-purple bruise spread down my shins, clustering like a brand new galaxy around the bloody wounds of my knee. To bleed with gleaming garnet blood. Shocking the folk outside bars with my bleeding. To feel fresh and young at the sight of your insides red against the old old blue of flesh. This youth, this youth. I pedal forever to exact the same feeling, the rush of getting back on again, unlocking the city. I seem to be terribly in love with falling. The streets feel dizzy, the shapes and forms of things are not what they are. I sense they have changed without telling me. The world knows a secret I don’t.

Illness, as it hits. The invisible sickness. I become an overflowing jar of water when I drink, the brimming emotions about to spill—things I usually hide and quench and disguise. Need to piss in awkward situations. Things you can roll out with a bike ride, a cluster of lung sucks and cheek flush adrenaline. But when they get to the surface, they poison the air around you. I spend longer hours in bed in the morning, night shifts and gigs leaving me delirious. To unroll from the covers is an art hardly mastered. I spend hours drifting back into sleep’s coma: a settled levitation of uncertain images, which I try to translate upon waking. A friend and I keep a dream journal. I notice she is always noting faces in crowds: skins, layers, mirrors; juices and rinds and types of paring. My dreams grow more detailed over time, a side effect of writing them down, giving them the agency of language. They dance with image, they have additional emotional import.

I walk across the city, because sometimes that seems the only safe thing to do. The colours in the park just shy of midnight. Pastels brushed and blurred by a child’s ham-fist. Chalked sentences around Woodlands. Pick up your dog shit. My nails grow long and strong and I do not clip them. I want them to seem like a pianist’s, as if at any moment they might pluck out a symphony.

Something of grief scored into my bones. We lost someone we loved, after days of looking and sharing and fighting. My timelines overflow with collective sorrow and personal pain. I spend hours scrolling through tiny stories, slices of joy and memory’s catharsis. We have all been hurt in some way; there is a tear. What rushes in and scolds the fresh wound. It is the one grey drizzly day I remember of this May, utterly fitting. I walk along the Kelvin, listening to The Midnight Organ Fight over and over, hymn to my youth and so many others. The drone fills my blood; I do nothing to stop the rain dampening my hair, filling my shoes, dripping down my neck. Shake out my stolen Monet waterlily umbrella. Remember the bleak streets of Ayr, adolescence an age of cool slain time. Kicking litter, drinking. Rain. Falling into sick sick love then forgetting. The rain rain rain, the rain falling into the sea. It is a membrane I crave, the pale wet indifference to shroud my pain. Sand on skin. What glisters at the edge then beckons. I did not know it was possible to hurt so much for someone you barely knew. It hurt more, in a way, than forms of loss by blood. Family funerals. Toasts. Drunk, I walk back along bridges and try not to cry at the moon, the black black water. Something astride us, everlong waxing and waning. Photographs of plastic, closeup and swallowed in song.

I tore an elegy out of my hours in bed and maybe one day I’ll share it. Something in the darkness, heard.

By some miracle, I regain my night off to go see Phoebe Bridgers play Saint Luke’s. It is a warm night and I walk all the way from west to east; the football’s been on so the drunks stumble out of pubs in their green. She purrs something from the stage, like “So I heard y’all had a sports ball game on today”. We smile at the understatement, there’s a mesmerising space. I stand and my body is so weak my knees hurt and thighs burn and it takes every nerve in me to keep standing, to negate the presence of those around me. Her silvery voice slices through all that, makes perfect rivulets in my soul. When I think too much about it I can’t breathe. There’s a trembling of recognition, little swells of emotion that prick the whites of my eyes. What you thought you were over comes crashing again and over, over. The world whirrs and hurts. It’s barely enough to keep clinging. Walking home, seeing old friends, I felt exhausted: every pore stung but I was also exhilarated. Climbing the concrete city. That feeling of release. The sweet way her vowels lit up the Mark Kozalek cover, the encore. I imagine bright candles snuffed out one by one, the great murder and the guilt of afterwards. Cold and red. The soft caress of the senses, a temporary catlike imaginary. Darkness comes over, consumes the white space you left for happiness. You can’t have it without dreams; you can’t have dreams without darkness. I am dependent on this sorrow. Watching the Ohio river flow at night. These landscapes I know mostly through song, these burning reeds and the gilt-edged clouds over desert metropolis, lost coyotes.

I start writing a novella, set between Britain, Berlin and some mysterious American prairie. Think cheddar-red sunsets, unrequited desire, distance. The indigo swimming pool, covered in leaves.

Distracting myself from everyday idleness, I go to see vast quantities of decent indie, mostly at The Hug and Pint or Glad Café. I take a break from an all-dayer to sit atop a hill in Queen’s Park, south side, watching the sky grow peachy. Chew fruit bars. Drink gin to feel better, in soft medicinal quantities. Do not write as I wish I could. Leave gaps. The pages don’t fill as I’d like. Walk back alone.

I think I am okay but then I walk over water and think of the cold decision. My mouth sours as though filled with the juice of an apple and any word I might have dissolves in the acid, prior to speech.

Remember as kids we’d build dams in rivers? Inefficient structures of misshaped rocks. The cool cola feel of water, smooth through our fingers.

In some hot bright room of the CCA, practicing Oulipo techniques with Lynn Crawford and Josh Thorpe. I write a handful of sestinas, a process that feels akin to weaving. I am paring threads. In times of crisis, I used to sit and make friendship bracelets, focusing on the unconscious flicker and flow of my fingers. The particular colours woven thrice. Pick six words and make do with their pattern, the possible.

Iced Americano from Caffé Nero. Jolt of the nerves. Heat haze over Greenock.

A delay in the body akin to the moon. Waxing slow motion; glitch and lag; the sense of being dulled; the sense of being injured, cramped and twisted. Walk around, see friends, drink bright and early. Waves of hot agony. Go to poetry readings. The sparkle and trance of listening. Speaking. Record poems that settle a corridor of airwaves, signals, emoji. However the connection works.

Get haircut. Scalp massage. Brighter orange bleeds to gold. Sodium. Get on a train.

Loch Lomond never looked so good in green and gold and blue as it did that May of 2016. I lay in the bluebells taking pictures, feeling so restful, red-headed. Fire against green. Now I arrive and make it my imperative just to walk. Early evening of a Sunday and I want to walk my way out of a sorrow, past gaggles of boozy youths; the fresh wound of loss still there and irritating, itching and burning. It is hard to have ordinary conversations, so I take myself off. Everything is so green and the green is so necessary. My body is heat and then freezing. Later, he holds his cold fingers to my neck and we trade levels of shiver. Purple nails and tales of bad circulation. I trip up on my past and can’t help it, looking for the clavicle. The endless craving of a former body…

I parse more and more my botanical ignorance.

Missing the last train home from Edinburgh, after a poet’s birthday party. Doors slammed shut in our face from the carriage. We missed the margaritas, and then the disco. Drank beer in the Meadows, contemplated snow. Menthol vape smoke and cluttered streets, strangers playing tennis all through the dusk. Lovely people. Record collection, good books for miles, pizza. Conversations sweet & real & funny.

The maidenhair fern grows healthy again. I have had her for two years and she’s seen frazzled stages. Clipped back, green again. Does that boy drive? She asked, in the car to the garden centre. I miss the winding corridors of plants, the paint samples, colour cards, smell of wet pine and murmuring water features. May goes on, regardless.

A series of goodbyes. One friend moves back to Greece, the other to the Highlands. Life goes porous with the temporary emptiness that nonetheless lingers without supplement. Miss our wee chats at all ours, in stairwells or pink-tinted texts. Cascading games of our rucksacks swung. I listen to Josh telling Canadian ghost stories in the restaurant: tales of a bride burned alive by tea lights catching her luminous dress, doomed to forever haunt some hotel in the vast, faraway mountains. The geography remains vague in my mind. The customers come and go or don’t at all. I polish cutlery to a deathly sheen.

Festival atmosphere of everywhere in sun. A sunny day in Glasgow, then another one. Minor riots in the park. How are we so blessed, it’s amazing. Botanical taste at the back of my mouth forever. Bewitched house plants, buttered bread rolls, cold tea, slabs of Aviemore carrot cake, tarot readings in Thai restaurants. I wish I could be more glistening. The air in the park at night smells musky and sweet, weed smells and seeds and greening. Saying goodbye without babbling. I noticed the blue, two iris skies at the station.

The last card pulled a cosmic future.

Run across roads to see old friends, nearly get knocked over. Every day I regret not waking earlier. Not going to bed, the struggle to sleep and reset again. Scared of the endless bleed of days.

Feeling kinda weirdly low. I think he’s one of the biggest inspirations in my life right now. Can someone inspire you, I mean in the way they deal with feelings? I value an honesty I can’t offer myself. Not yet.

Rereading old Wordsworth and falling asleep while writing and leaving black dots of ink that seep through my diary. Opening scene of a whirlpool. Talk about Stonehenge with a singer from Portland I love very much. Something about the lapse of water, like every trickle another neglect. People walk round and round in circles, scrolling the whites of their phones as if in sync with the rolling traffic. In my childhood bedroom, I kept a framed photograph of the stones at sunset. I felt calm and serene and apart from myself, apart from time, when I looked at the stones.

I worked a 9-5 the day they found the body, his body. I was serving people with a smile I didn’t recognise and trembled all over and the sense of witnessing this alter-reality or shock, the opening of feelings I thought I’d forgotten. What went on inside the shell, a quivering. Hid behind crates of dirty glasses, in curtains. Tried not to cry on my lunch break, watching solo acoustic version of ‘Poke’ on my phone. Hugging everyone. Earnest conversations. Work is a family. Hot strong coffee takes the edge off. Sometimes no need to talk. The lyrics come again and they burn harder this time. I need to catch my breath. Regain metabolism.

Beautiful messages out of the blue.

Emotional hangover. Best cure, I dig among the piles of clothes in my room and pull out a hardback book: Sylvia Plath’s journals, Christmas gift from my mother in 2012. The book feels heavy and secure on my lap, like a complicated baby. Read her through sleep, while dinner is cooking. Steam, garlic scent, onions, steam. Her voice makes sluices through the fug of everything, so I can feel clear and real again. She mentions ‘the adrenaline of failure’, the up-and-down wavelengths of acceptance and rejection. A poet’s lot. Lust. Apple-bitten first encounters. Fears & jealousies, petty grievances. Genuine pain. Periods of drifting depression, absence of thought. Blood. Self-laceration. Womanhood. Fizzy inspiration, sociability. New challenges in life are a test of endurance. ‘Interesting’, she notes, as to whether she would ‘pass, keep myself intact’. How often are we aware of our everyday proximity to breakdown?

Saturday October 10th, 1959.

‘Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master’.

7.30pm Wednesday, October 17, 1959.

‘I don’t know why I should be so hideously gloomy, but I have that miserable “nobody-loves-me” feeling’.

Journal Fagment 31st December 1955 – 1st January 1956.

‘Sun well up, losing red and paling into blinding gold, air fresh and cold, essence of snow melting in sun, checking baggage and wandering toward the sea in a strange city’.

I will be flying to Munich in less than a week. The first time travelling alone without family. Somebody gift me with orientation. As though without sleep, the comedown slides across a map, egg yolk cool upon blue and green. My eyes won’t focus.

Leaving the flat after 4pm each day, I am a stranger in a world I recognise dearly then don’t. I am best in the early hours or late at night. Catching spiders on sidewalks. Everything between that is strange oscillation, is tuning in and out of social existence. What about when the words don’t come. So many trite feelings. A terrible love. The shapes of things. I’m walking with. All of Glasgow a building site, dust of destruction and foundations laid. Piles of concrete slab, churning tar; industrial scents lace the too-warm air.

Where once I would say, hey I’m addicted to chocolate. Honestly, 200g+ a day! Now, it’s a serotonin craving. Simple as. Deficient.

Playlists make better sense of these feelings. Thin black lace, an open window. Warmth.

Easier not to just clack and bite.

Go to prom re-enactment. Balloons and alcopops, rhinestones; blue velour and slacker rock. Fall asleep, nearly, on the night bus, passing airport and eerie business estates. The pool and the plastic palms. Walk home, low battery, ruinous sadness. Insomniac documentaries about Karen Carpenter. Milk cookie eyes and innocent villanelles. Her voice a creamy river, glossy brunette, hometown glory.

We enter Gemini season. The energy shifts. Borderlines and places I can’t cross in my dreams, lost people glinting in distance. Blue folds of tumblr embrace me again. Streams of midnight images, pastel landscapes and metallic objects melted to abstraction. Things split and twin and I miss all my soulmates, past and present. Editing, editing. I miss when the truth felt less of a shimmer. Sleep it off, sleep it off.

The loud loud noise of all these feeds.

Out in the hot dusty yard of SWG3, disco ball scintillating in the sun, I see LCD Soundsystem with my friends around me. For once, that’s totally enough. Stand between two brothers. Smile all through set. There is a sort of ultimate feeling. I can change I can change I can change. Synths blister through me. Drums. Feel drunk when I’m not. Feel heady. The old chandeliereal, teenage way. Sun glitters. Swap limbs. Burst memories are easy.

Wander home through herbaceous border. Covet her 3am poems, blog posts. We stay up all night discussing complex crushes, then I’m sad because endings are happening all around me. Withdrawals. Wilted tulips. Little flurries of unexpected messages, best sensation. Campari with soda or cherry brandy, amaretto on ice and sharing a seat, clinking glasses and feeling breezy. Sitting in dark galleries on hay bales, waiting. Clutching cigarettes I won’t smoke but stole anyway. Talk of literary idols, musicians and artists. Writing things down with conviction, like: I love the new Stephen Malkmus album, so much! Sparkle Hard! The dreamy subsistence of the suburbs at dusk. Those shoes are shinier than my future. I hope he’s okay. Plagiarise conversations. You could boil it all down to a haiku, May a tiny, significant bulb of gorse:

Luxury sadness
Twice for sale, gold and then green
Forget to mention.

Bob Dylan – Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You

Sharon Van Etten – The End of the World (Carpenters cover)

Cat Power – Metal Heart

The Twilight Sad – I Couldn’t Say It To Your Face (Arthur Russell cover)

Manchester Orchestra – Architect (feat. Scott Hutchison)

Harrison Whitford – Poltergeist Love

Pavement – Type Slowly

LUMP – Curse of the Contemporary

Bright Eyes – Coyote Song

Common Holly – If After All

Sufjan Stevens – Romulus

Milk Carton Kids – Wish You Were Here

Mark Kozalek – Good Nostalgia

Fossil Collective – Disarm

Nap Eyes – Every Time The Feeling

Arctic Monkeys – Star Treatment

Iceage – Beyondless

Parquet Courts – Violence

The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Animal Wisdom

Kendl Winter – Shades of Green

Big Star – Thirteen

Hatchie – Sleep

James Blake – Don’t Miss It

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Bike Lane

Sufjan Stevens – Make Out In My Car (Moses Sumney cover)

The Innocence Mission – Look out from Your Window

Frightened Rabbit – Head Rolls Off

LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends

Playlist: February 2018

The birds in the garden have been keeping me up again. Sleep slides in and out of the dark hour, for which I’ve been hoarding the lights in my room for a sunrise. I’m not very good at putting on records; they always jump at the wrong bit, glitching backwards. When you wake up because the moonlight is too bright. It is a question of paying attention. It is a question of living quiet. I wish I could sleep like you.

Spent a few days waiting on trains late into the night or the afternoon. My fingers making a conspiracy of amethyst, mottled with cold. There’s a little glass case you can stand in, twirling your body to get the light to switch on again. I’ve got my comforting songs pressed into my headphones. Funny things happen in my chest when I hear them. Sometimes it’s a release, other times it’s like you can see all the filaments of your blood and sinew twist and sprawl like delicate vines. It feels hot and temporary. I flicker through bad thoughts about what might happen to the people I love. I flicker through good thoughts about what we can do with the summer. It seems so distant.

Sometimes I fall literally into bed; it’s like someone is dropping me.

There are moments I pull very close. There are places where everyone is here at once. There are places where it’s just us and it’s finally warm and my mouth tastes of dark fruit cider and other people’s cigarettes I didn’t want in the first place. The curtains are always closed.

I keep thinking about how there are takeaway shops in the southside named after glistering techno bands and wondering what came before. In my head it is always the music, but then maybe that is something Leonard Cohen said, or didn’t. No, what was it, we are ugly / but we have the music. These shops look like dollhouse shops with all the tools and objects miniatured, but maybe this is just an effect of where I’m standing from across the street, short-sighted. I went out dressed in gingham shorts and other inappropriate quantities of yellow. To have music you sort of have to walk a bit more; you have to let rhythm and melody drop memory with muscle. I once said, leaving a party, I have to make tracks and he thought I meant laying down records. But in a way it is all just recording. When do we click off? Skip between beats.

There are signs of spring. I say this as it starts to snow. I mean a few days ago I could see buds on the trees, little yellow flowers. What happens now? Do they retreat inwards? I picture them shivering within precious membranes, cocoons, algorithms of promise interrupted. It’s okay, I’ll be buying less of these indulgent Lindt eggs from the Tesco round the corner. I’ll thin out eventually. Easter will come too early this year. Winter keeps us in its arms forever, shivering because like those buds we are children. Some people burst through. I admire the impulse. It’s like what, dancing naked in the snow. I used to listen to Sonic Youth when I was angry, whacking objects off dressers, now I close my eyes and try to visualise the colour blue. I get about as close as turquoise before everything melts to bliss. That would be the ideal effect. There’s something very beautiful and suggestive about the word lagoon. Is there a pill for this?

Recently I’ve been rediscovering canals. You see it’s actually been sunny. You have to walk along the motorway, cross several spaghetti roads to get over to the Phoenix Flowers—these sort of peculiar, half-lovely windmill structures. Then an underpass and up some steps. I follow a band of miscreant hipsters. A sign saying Urban Oasis. The canal looks good when the sun hits. I mean it looks sharp and glassy and properly blue. The trees glow ochre in the sun; the way they have faded all through winter seems refreshing now instead of exhausting. In a few months this should all be green. There’s still a fragility. Very little litter. You can see the stadium and the industrial buildings, warehouses and garages and houses. Everything over there gleams rust in the sun. I listen for whistles or song but the air is only as close as my headphones. I’m listening to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, remembering odd passages from Cider with Rosie and feeling regret for nights I could’ve made longer with more wholesome spirits. Waking up to bright clusters of strawberry jam on bread like blood on the sheets.

Nothing floats by on the canal, though there are boats tied at Applecross and then a few bottles bobbing their dark viridian messages. I write letters to friends in England, emails to friends in America.

Somewhere down the line, where does all this become ASCII?

I write an inordinate quantity of poetry about bruises and flowers and passing time. The year has stepped up its bicycle gear and I wish my bike was in order so I could fly down the Clyde like Brendan and May in Ruby/Sapphire. Most mornings are filled with flash fiction and occasional bouts of panic. I finish draft ten of an important application.

Daffodils on the kitchen table bloom overnight, just like that. They are marvellously, gorgeously yellow. I feel no shame in showering adjectives.

I dream a lot about the sea. Except we don’t reach it. Mostly it is a question of negotiating cliffs to find safe accommodation. I buy family-sized bags of crisps just for the taste of salt, then feel awful afterwards. This is probably normal.

I am drawn to a piece of teal-coloured scaffolding mesh that resembles a streak of kelp on the street.

It feels good to make coffees and twirl around tables. It feels good to be serving, to eke out a few hours on other people’s time. Sometimes I look forward to a long, long waitress’s summer. Sunlight, sparkling lager and indefinite afterparties. Reams of time to commit to writing in lieu of sleep. We hover at table six and salvage lost noughties culture, folding paper napkins to crisp blue lines. If everything was this chiasmic, easily given to compost.

Today’s Oblique Strategy pops up on my Twitter timeline: Make something implied more definite. Last year I got Tinder but ended up using it mostly to talk about Brian Eno to at least two strangers. I feel like I understand lust less; it is like clustering the silent hours with extra ambience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The snow outside my window right now is pretty pathetic. People are shaving the skin off clouds. It is really happening; the gaps are appearing. Sometime early nineties, year of the Rooster, hole in the ozone layer.

Being a sucker for charm, longing for the twilight of virtual swamplands where it is possible to cry again. An effect of atmospheric toxins. This is a slow-burner, just slip it on and trust me. You can see through the nacreous membranes, someone else’s confected scrolls of sugar, confession, snow.

Hookworms – Ullswater

Robert Rental, Thomas Leer – Day Breaks, Night Heals

Beth Orton, Four Tet – Carmella (Four Tet remix)

Kiasmos – Blurred (Bonobo remix)

Beach House – Lemon Glow

Agony – Beach Fossils

The Orielles – Old Stuff, New Glass

Japanese Breakfast – Soft Sounds from Another Planet

Martha Ffion – Baltimore

Cloud – Happer’s Laugh

Sun Kil Moon – Among the Leaves

Suuns – Make It Real

Brian Jonestown Massacre – Throbbing Gristle

Iceage – Catch It

Marnie – Lost Maps

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – The Lost Oasis

Neroche – Sycamore Trees

Grouper – Vapor Trails

Fieldhead – How Much I Love the Sea

Arthur Russell – Arm Around You

Mazzy Star – Five String Serenade

Yo La Tengo – Nowhere Near

There Will Be Fireworks – South Street

Tag: season