Tag: September

Playlist: September 2017

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Late night listening to the sound of the planets :::soundtrack::: Adult Sadness Vol. 2. The sky is a dark green borrowed from a pen I once had that smelt quite rotten, not unlike the algae in the Queen’s Park pond you can’t touch because it’s poison bloom. A sign tells you. Underuse of racing ink. Toy cars with ferric metal. Lungs clotted orange. Weather for ducks. Earnest shrills in the steam//screwed repression. The feathers in my window shiver in the draught and there are many fibrous villi around my ribs that stir, muscle and sinew twitching.

Maryhill is lovely in autumn, all brick and scaffold, all concrete and leaves. Struggle of unfolding, furls come slowly their upward petals turned sunward for silk in lieu of caress. Lights glimmer vague at dusk but among rust and green there are delicious marbles of red, tiny gleams. Tin cans in windows. Glass reflects this wool coat, its pale blue shape containing my body. A scratch, diskette release. Let me know what you think of winter; it’s something I suspect we’ll disagree on. Church bells ring in distances, always three minutes out of sync. 1,2,3 (!) My alarm clock feels ornamental, like the inessential flourish of an amateur artist. Precious, the ephemeral perfection of certain ~simple~ things. Sufjan singing amethysts and flowers on the table and the gathering of leaves in dry cold fingers. A honey-tinged moment of regress. When she died we built a house out of sticks and acorns. They say they won’t break your bones. Most of us snap limbs climbing trees. Karmatic trauma of perilous branches, the wounded arborescence conveying refuscent regret.

I am sorry we both suffered. Tinge of tears: mostly the sting of decayed mascara, delayed asterism of accounts, of admin. A sort of mourning when you peel at the bark with your chipped fingernails, the roughness because you never learned to file. You liked black paint, the name ‘Lamp Black’. Technically I would stand at filing machines with a block of mahogany and a terror in my gut that I might shave off the first flesh of my knuckles if I was not careful, if my attention lapsed for a second—which of course it was liable to do. Cloud patterns, sand particles, root of palm. The tender, meaty abrasions. A leaf in the window. A fudge of trunk. A windmill pirouette in split sycamore seedling. A man at a gig with a fidget spinner, reenacting the gleeful vacuity of a faraway childhood. He likes the repetitive beat, has a fiend in each pupil. In a dream I did nothing for days and loved it.

They shoved yellow bricks on the topsoil, building a road. Composed monotony of Sunday morning, purplish as old Cadbury wrappers, melting to grey in the blinds, the unfinished business. The city got thinner; people lived off vegetable scraps, acidic drinks. The lovely vodka was tonic for the soul. Add cranberry and stir with three wishes. Lime dash, cheap taste of the bitter quarry. Trust me, this can all go away. Tartly. The beauty of how easy it can all go away. Close your eyes and reach for the dead, a charnel miasma of dark and brilliant matter. Check lunar spells, the pulpy, rhythmic etcetera. The smarted tongue of demethylated plasma. The visceral, cavernous depths of Nick Cave’s deranged baritone, the dripping blood that seeps between two tunings. My face without water. Apocalyptic nothing. Dawn skin, imitation foundation, polished silver. Wasn’t it some ride w/ flashing lights and a siren that shredded the nerves in your spine? Things recall home. A patience.

Find myself besotted by violins and even bagpipes for the first time in my life—something about the possible soaring. The violet sublime of imaginary mountains, 23 minutes from KO to summit. Duplicity. A very weird light on the river amorphous, the narrow rapture that glimpses distance. Glasgow is O so grey and so close(d), except for special streets where sky can be seen. Washed-out autumnals, palette of eyeshadow crushed upon absent downs. The baby fly drawn to the white screen light. Flicker of water. Cradling. Give it your interest, invest in gifts. Conduct flowcharts, erect monumental spreadsheets. Working for eloquent pennies and smiling at genuine occasions, deferring the plunge of a vast anxiety.

Chance encounters with beloved people. It’s getting chilly; I notice the wisps of gold on your fingers. Tiny clatter of teaspoon, agreement. Just the want of nourishing. Can I help you with…? Careless loungewear. Languidly envisioning bike rides and the sweet nicotine of his neck, maybe not present or else a taurine sunset burst harsh on canals. Walking hours just for circling. Euphoria of autumn, the crapulent auroras of thought. Remember me here and here alone. Deepen the nauseous voices with chlorine, the temporal wound of music which eked out several nights, no grace. Brain fog(?) / darling the chosen cottage was swamped in starlings. She wants it! In my milky cocoon I slip into sea. A truly invisible misery that flourishes with absence of sunlight. Yet these have been glorious days, phantasmic fall. Lagoons of jewelline, arboreal beauty. How far the pretty trees seem, so close to fading. These are the first weeks. A new leaf being this fragile contusion, gilded with flavanols.

September a full month, fat on Lindt-rich dusks, transitioning through ending. (Un)start a record. What we write being less than unwanted dreams of childhood bedrooms. A still-written diary, a remark of childish handwriting. Sometimes the sound of the lock recalls being young and waiting at a table with homework, the dog snoring. Absence wafts through floorboards; the city flats have hallways that smell of spices and home-cooked food. The luxury of illusions. Homegrown squash from the neighbour’s garden; a generous, ministerial grin. Star Trek boxsets. Subway blasting ersatz fumes of bread. Give us our (daily) bread, your most aesthetic cucumber shred. Flour turns to flower in the whirl of a trip, slappy hour calyx. Fetishistic love for cigarettes; loathed tobacco discount nausea. Too long among clouds of nitrate, butane. Stealing the stuff in bars when hungry, letting the soothing crunch give seconds of life. Keep walking, look focused. Be watery, light. Release apophenic reactions to overwhelming reverie. Let the glassy-eyed night remain hypothetical, lull your throat with cinnamon tea. Play for 2hrs+ and expect no refunds.

A coruscating, honest energy; a heartbreak falsetto. Be mine, be mine. It’s a love-heart candy or Spinning Coin song or a leaf trampled wax-red in the rain. The gleaming of  complexions fed on beta-carotene. Waiting for the top to stop, its twirl collapses the triplet realities. Trap pop and unripe nectarines, paring of skin. Wake me up when. The haunting/ed seventh circle. Shellac memories comb trellising mystery. The Lynchian roar of Mercury’s industry. Chewing dates for luck, mulling imminent (Pause) the solitary red-berried rowans at church. Each apparition of Sebaldian land: the Suffolk coast, the labyrinth; the breathlessness of melancholics. Krapp’s remembered lighthouse, Sarah Palmer’s ceiling fan. Again, the twirling. Things that keep me awake, the static turning geometric shapes. Cyclonic diagrams of elsewhere tornados. Gently, side to side, a new tossed pound from the mint. A fresh pack of gum going stale in the rucksack. Suspense! Many day trips or nights you hoped might go on. Graveyard hookups. Rain lashes, splashes, makes it deluge a cache of murmuring sound, of hypnotic water, a lariat looping nutritious conditionals. I listen in sleep, I fall asleep to rainymood and its ambient coolness unsettles the sheets, loses the cookies. Precipitation is a quality of the tongue, without moving a lively swill of ice, of breezy smiles. Full in the no-going, the onward falling. Tell me your everything. Swaying skeletal trees are absurd. If you were in a flat and on someone’s floor and the furniture spoke to you. Be mine, be mine. September’s coming soon / blinded by the moon. Things which trigger the shifting year. Seasons are an art form in letting go of an Earth; molecular moves manifest as scent, burnish, colour. Smoke gets in your eyes, the squint-making light. Rush of the somewhere tap, free cold water, accompanied nights.

Close out. Pluto a drone in the back of my mind, the x-rays made of millioning crystals, lattices cut on the frost of midnight. At what time, the secret ossified entry beckons. Baudrillard winks with a follow me, as if he knew the currency of emoji. Emotional seduction. I say it in loathing, stuck on the affluent salt of my copper-hued cravings. You are an apple pie with a crust of ashes, you are the zone of the saddest parties/pastries. Someone taught me Jupiter’s salad of flames, or gestured towards her salubrious eye. The sky retains that tip of fire, spilt ink of other-terrestrial planes. Sonorous longing, your favourite spooky IPA. We need a holiday and a coffee, a combined electricity of homeostasis. Human profusion: a pool of Buckfast, VHS reels, vacant pleasures. Layered bodies, microbials enmeshed. SmoOoo00oth. Hatched exactitudes coke residue lumps of OCD. All good people are slowly leaving. New ecosystems persist less algorithmic than ferns, but equal to measure of possible lushness, the spiral and point of rising life. These addictions enriched with chromatic schemes of arguments and gin, or whatever the superlative spice. A price on each arrogant lacquer, a month out of season, already stewing. Braeburns juice the pallid enamel, keep us up stung without sleep. Tell me I’m leaving.

*

Car Seat Headrest – Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales

The Pastels – If I Could Tell You

The Delgados – The Past That Suits You Best

Roddy Woomble – Every Line of a Long Moment

Savage Mansion – Do You Say Hello To Your Neighbours?

Spinning Coin – Albany

Angel Olsen – Special

Frightened Rabbit feat. Julien Baker – How It Gets In

Jane Weaver – Modern Kosmology

Four Tet – Lush

Gross Net – Citadel Ghosts

Slowdive – Trellisaze

LCD Soundsystem – black screen

Bob Dylan – Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

The Horrors – Gathering

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Push The Sky Away

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Sunflowers

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The glow of the oil lamp
melts through the misting dust
that coats the light in the kitchen,
all airy, greyish, mossy and ochre
as the painted walls

(…In the evenings and mornings there are the same
slants of sun or moon, geometries of the cosmic
playing games upon the carpet).

Two weeks ago, the gloom was cut
with a bunch of sunflowers, hacked clean with a knife;
their extravagant heads all smiles and brightness.

They lifted the mood when you entered the room,
skin acquiring that olivine hue
from the plants and the shadows;
reflection of the radio, whose channels
remain static, always, in lieu
of music, or a television crackling,
or a body that would clutch
you so tight in its sadness
as to suck away your own.

Crumbs from the dead hours
grow a fur of mould; the pages curl
on a stack of magazines,
whose gloss lacks immunity to dust,
which scuttles and settles
between the pages, closely closing
leaf after leaf, an army of tiny hermit creatures—
Frankenstein splices of insect shells, fragments of lashes,
fibre and skin.

To sweep it would be merely
to cast a new dance of twirling particles.

It is exhausting, keeping things clean;
exhausting
to warm the stove, to watch the hours
unfurling
through the clock on the wall.

The sunflowers fade now; it is properly autumn,
bronze and darkening green.
Their time has been
and I collect the topaz petals, shrivelled slightly
as they catch on the carpet, the stacks of magazines.

September spreads its beautiful disease through the streets
as the leaves begin to fall, oozing soft fire,
the sweep sap of decay.

In the window, the sunflowers have lost their vigour.
They drop; their heads slump down,
defeated, as if shy at their deaths.
Their filaments wither, every yellow floret
sinks, crisp; a victim of gravity.

Every entrance to the room augments their sorrow.
We have forgotten the day we bought them,
or even where they were from.
There is just the slant of light, the green and ochre
smell of cooking, the smoke across the road,
and the knowing that probably
I will throw those flowers away tomorrow.

— 23/9/16

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Wasps

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Wasps 

I heard a dull, sizzling thump and a wasp fell into my room. It fell through a crack at the top of my window and disappeared among the sunflowers, shivering, then stopped dead, seemingly. I was not bothered at first, because I thought the thump was merely a moth, or a postcard dropped off from the wall. Then the wasp appeared again. I saw it whizzing out of the flowers and it hovered round the glow of my computer. It was inches from my face.

Naturally, I panicked. I stepped back as if someone in front of me was holding a gun.

Seconds later, six more wasps swarmed at my window, pelting themselves against the glass. I could hear their angry buzzing humming in my ears, which were already ringing from a gig that night. Quickly I leapt up to shut the window, but another two got in somehow.

I ran out the room. Everywhere I looked, I could see things flitting around me. I don’t know if they were real or imagined. It was like standing in a forest, surrounded by the glitter motes of midges, only not half as pretty and in fact pretty freaky. I thought I was hallucinating. I could feel the flutter in my chest, like the insects themselves had gotten into my ribcage and were seething to get out. I was only a little bit drunk.

Gutted my flat for the fly spray. Thank god I found it.

They were crawling about in my lampshade when I tentatively opened the door. Three of them, glutted on light, their tiny bodies blown up to absurd proportion through the illuminated paper. I stood stock still and waited. They didn’t seem to want to leave; they’d found their paradise up their in that giant orb, lovers of sun that they are, like the elderly expats of Benidorm. So I pounced with the spray, gushing it upon them, tearing through the paper with all those solvent chemicals.

I thought how kids might sniff this stuff to get high.

I thought how I might kill the plants by accident.

How one wasp was still lingering, so close to a pot of aloe vera.

Then it joined the rest.

Could I smell the burning of their furless bodies?

They fizzled out, drunkenly, from the lampshade, stumbling through the air and dropping to the carpet, one by one. Brutally I crushed their writhing bodies with the bottom of a mug, mashing them into the pieces of notepad that covered my floor. The stains of their deaths would remain, irrevocably, tiny, upon those pages, like just so many slight smears of grease. Traces of vague terror, like a half-remembered dream.

Is it bad to kill animals? Even these pointless, evil creatures? Of course it is. I felt guilty, but there you are, survival of the fittest. 

My head swam from the smell of the fly spray, just so much butane and strong perfume.

I thought: why is it that we humans are so frightened by things so little? I was stung many times as a child, but you’d think I’d get over the fear, the same way I got over my terror of talking on the phone or eating olive oil or standing up in class to give a presentation. Maybe it’s like death, a fear you can’t shake off. I see a miniature demon in the matte black eyes of each of those wasps. It’s like they’re from another world, sent here to torture us. Whole lunchtimes at school we spent trying to slay the bastards, usually to no avail. They just descend on you in September and August, haunt the bins like a bad smell.

They came into my room, the three wasps, confronting me with their strangeness. How ugly they are, shrivelled and wispy and probably a bit crunchy if you dared eat one. Where do they come from? What mulch is chewed in the elaboration of their nests?

I had to scoop up the triptych of their carcasses from my carpet, toss them in with the compost.

Every prickle of skin, each brush of hair or fibre on my bare limbs, I thought was another one, crawling along my pores.

What does it feel like, to have your whole body shudder with the intoxication of pyrethrins? Odour of chrysanthemums. Surely they were only looking for the sun, diving for my window at 2am which was the only lit window in the block? Did my human habits deceive them, fools that they are, for an early sunrise, a portal to a new dawn? Did they want the delicious, golden sap of my desktop sunflowers? I hate them, I hate them. Is it so very bad to hate them?

Maybe somewhere there is a very pure and generous person, who nourishes wasps with banquets of aphids and caterpillars, who smiles at the yellow-black beasties and lets them inside. Who maybe even harvests their nests, provides comfort for the queens in winter, makes good use of the moulded warmth of a soft, unused loft. Who tries to welcome them to their city.

In another life, there’s a feral child of the forest or street, letting them creep up and down her arms; welcoming their buzzing, contrapuntal to her own sweet breathing. She’s not me.

I wouldn’t harm a fly, I wouldn’t touch a bee. Maybe I’d even feed it honey. My friend used to nurse them back to life when they were dying on the pavement.

Wasps though, wasps are something else entirely.

They can cling to the carrion of the suburbs and schoolyards all they like, enjoy the spoils of autumn’s decay, the fading of other insects among fallen leaves and shrunken bracken, the tattered remains of crisp packets. Still, if they come in my room again I will kill them with spray. I am that sincere in my cruelty, that human, that absolutely succumbed to stupid, distorted fear.

And will I ever open my window again; create that rectangle of air that forges its gateway to the morning rain, the telephone wires, the birdsong and greenery of the garden?