summer – Page 2 – mariaology

Bluebell Haiku

I label you un-
marked hyacinth, cleaner to
eat bluer tendrils.

A many-shadowed
platitude would bloom, what blood
then lulls the body.

Remedial ring
within a summoning to
sleep and sweetly die.

The gloomy bluebell
sleeps in the woods, so bluely
as to bewitch me.

All symbolic thought
of alkaloid flower, this
styptic aroma.

Beyond ornament
the imitated image
leaks its bulb of blue.

May’s sweet clustering
never wanted so many
luminous anew.

Criminal to pick
our thin green stems, to uproot
what kisses the wind.

Emily Brontë
dedicated her sorrow
to our purple breath.

Many lettering
delicate Atlas Mountains
stung with amethyst.

The unwritten trees
harbour our suckled bodies
in honey-gold pools.

Striations of blue
to red make feathery air
so cool, alchemic.

Our blooms affected
the nectarous scent; some shade
stipples the valley.

Take care: eliminate
sensitive weeds, following
spring we wilt and weep.

You will get leaves, then
five years before our flowers
startle the garden.

Mostly used in spells
of love and death, many haunt
the colourless graves.

Amid leaf litter
this saturnal air, ever
against bright details.

The ersatz scented
candle belonged to mother’s
old mantle, a cry.

Here in the richness
most fair-haired blue to boast the
days of mucilage

A dose of three grains
settles the diuretic soul’s
accorded longing.

Such abundant blue
with gummy heart, a mystic
of similar hue

Linnaeus’s great
west wind, plucked grief from the copse
of ancient longing.

Unfortunate name
of the poisoned glade, circle
a chant to miss you.

Our Spanish sisters
have no scent, we dwell here so
gently forever.

All photographs were taken in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, a slightly overcast day, the 22nd 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

To the Sea

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Watching the sea is like watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole
Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person

—Emily Berry

Richard Dawson’s ‘To the Sea’ opens with anxious strings, unearthly vocal drones and harmonised chants that carry across a darkening, eldritch bay. There’s a shiver in my heart and a sense of the waves chopping apart what constitutes the sea, the sea, the sea. How much sea do you need for it to be sea? Is every wave an incantation—and if so, whose? What if you took whole eons and chunks of the sea away, would you be left with puddles or rivers? That word that shudders: estuary. When does the sea become ocean? I feel it is to do with a feeling. To feel oceanic is different to feeling the sea. There’s an intimacy with the latter, its intimation of bitter-green waters, childhood memories, tidal flats on which you take off your shoes and wade towards the water. The sea is a mirror for our feelings, but they don’t stay still—you can’t just project them. They change like light; the water answers. The water has its own shanties, stirred up by night tides that lick at the edge of the land less like lovers than knives. A silver kiss of sharpness and silence, a tiredness.

How many times have we apostrophised the sea? Built into it myth, folded our cavernous longing through song and let ourselves out into the blue. The sea is a monster, a tyrant, a Leviathan; the sea is feminine, rippling, birthing and giving. We can never decide. The sea is the unseen foetus of sound in a shell, little figure as portal, an unwhorling. Imagine how its voice would look on a sonogram, the whispers. The sea is a place to blow away cobwebs, to unravel your hair and blink into wilderness. In ‘On the Sea’, Keats urges ‘Oh ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, / Feast them upon the wideness of the sea’. The sea is expanse, expansive, expanding. We can stand at the edge and be caressed by its urges; the catharsis in that. The elastic edges, islands and coastlands and cliffs that shift and zoom and shrink with parallax. We whisper and the wind carries forth our voices. It’s good to howl at the sea, alone on a beach.

Then there’s Charlotte Smith’s catchily titled, ‘Sonnet: On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic’. The sublime in this poem is born less from the sea itself, the Sussex Cliffs Smith walked all her life, than the ‘giant horrors’ of the man’s madness. A madness glimpsed readily enough by the speaker, at a distance: ‘He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know / The depth or duration of his woe’. His mind is the unseen deep of the sea. If reason is a curse, this state of nature in which the man has found himself can’t be so bad. He can only plunge through his days in a kind of ‘moody sadness’ of unknowing, an eddying through time: his ‘hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies / Murmuring responses to the dashing surf’. This primal communion between man and sea is met with the sensation of legend, adorned with a sonnet’s rhythm and rhyme.

But the sea, equally, is a haunted place for all of us. I remember being obsessed with this Los Campesinos! song at a time in my life when I was stuck in the city with unhealthy constancy, wanting to wail for the blue back home. There’s a burn in your chest, then indifference again. ‘The Sea is a Good Place to Think About the Future’ is a song about a broken girl, intimate with and yet distant to the singer, starving herself in response to grief. What could be a self-lacerating song, a depressing lament, is lifted by the strings, the joined-up shouts, the catharsis of those candid lyrics and the way they break into chorus, so loud:

And all you can hear is the sound of your own heart
And all you can feel is your lungs flood and the blood course
But oh I can see five hundred years dead set ahead of me
Five hundred behind, a thousand years in perfect symmetry

The song swirls with the clutter of contemporary culture, our fraught politics and virtual addictions; but it draws towards the deep time of the sea, the abyssal possibilities fringing Britain with mist and grey. What could be a desolate song of dwindling spirit, bursts into that thumping, rousing chorus and the release in that, the release so strong. Waves crashing ahead of you, the splash-backs spitting your face with salt tears so that just to stand there is to have a conversation with the sea, with what hurts in the Earth and might hurt forever in you, but that’s okay. An inhuman empathy; the human washed out of language.

Why is it we need the sea to look ‘just like the edge of the world’? Why is we need the horizon of apocalypse ahead of us? Does love always require the threat of the ending; does death have us thinking of forever beginnings? There is the question of translation. Are we all, like Charlotte Smith’s ‘lunatic’ (she must be forgiven for her eighteenth-century lack of political correctness) just muttering in our pain to the sea? Who will hear us? In Emily Berry’s poem, ‘Picnic’, communing with the sea is like the kinds of communication you do in therapy. Trying to pick out the pieces that make up the story of the sea, the pieces that make up the story of grief, then ‘polish’ those uncertain feelings before ‘a man in a room’, whose ahhs and mhms are perhaps no coherent than the whispers of the sea. Sometimes we just need someone—something—to listen. Sometimes we just need to listen.

Susurrations of the tongue and throat, the vowel sound sweetening eeeee. Sea, sea, sea.

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At the brink of most existential crises in my life, I revisit the sea. Summer 2016, I got a train to Cardross then walked a couple miles along a busy road, wildflowers growing in the verges past a cemetery, to Ardmore Point. The smell of the brine was like a drug: this vague area where the River Clyde becomes Firth and innumerable fragments of quartz are washed up on shore, residue of the sea’s mysterious industry. I looked across the water and I suppose I saw Greenock. There is so much of the jagged geography of westerly Scotland unfamiliar to me. The northness of names I have loved since childhood, the west coast forever of fishing villages, port towns, places of old time and tiny ruin: Luss, Arisaig, Applecross, Ullapool, Stornoway, Uist, Portree. A new indulgence in studying maps, mostly for a vague sense of where blue meets green. I have started to worry about sea levels. I keep a vague memory of my mother’s old home in Twickenham, where there are plaques to mark places where the river burst and flooded as high as the houses. The fields near my father’s house in Ayrshire become so easily sodden with water, a sunken valley where sheep sometimes drown. A favourite childhood memory is the single night we camped in Arisaig, and I’m sitting on a rock snapping fizzy laces between my teeth and watching a lurid strawberry sunset. Still I am filled with such sugary imaginings. The sand was so smooth, in the last light it seemed almost a mirror. It didn’t matter that we woke to torrential rain, with that sunset still within me.

I open my sky-blue edition of W.S. Graham’s (Greenock-born) New Collected Poems and find ‘Falling into the Sea’: ‘Breathing water is easy / If you put your mind to it’. I think it is maybe a poem about dying, about the changes in the body, scary at first, a metamorphosis you adjust to: ‘Breathe / Deeply and you will go down / Blowing your silver worlds’. It is a plunge through new emotions, learning how to float in the bubbling eternity you have blown for yourself. Is this a dream? Is this a survival guide for the drowned? When you arrive on the ‘sea / Floor’, Graham suggests, you will encounter a ‘lady’ from ‘the Great Kelp Wood’ who offers you good British hospitality then ‘asks you / If you come here often’. How many times do we pretend we are mermaids as children, harbouring some hope of adoption by the elements. I spread my dreams on the sea like butter on a scone, the way they glimmer in the light then go. Are we recalling some anthropogenic trauma, deep embedded blue and sea green in our genes? In every deja vu there is a song, a half-remembered line with a context long forgotten: ‘Go down to the sea / And tell me what it is that you wanna be’ (Swim Deep). The sea is possibility, maybe; summertimes and sweet jangly, insouciant indie. Singing the greys, the blues, the self in crisis. The backdrop to so many of our deepest conversations, the murmurings melodic. The backdrop to perfect silence. When things went wrong in our house, we’d drive out and take long walks along Maybole Shore. We often didn’t talk; it was the wind in our ears and the kicking up sand and the smell of the salt that cleared the air, that did the work of unspoken feelings. There was the night two friends and I took vodka down Prestwick Beach and talked our lives out and embraced in the drunken rain, the spray of the water. It was so cold it burned the blood from our fingers, but we didn’t care. We were so fucking pure.

Ten minutes listening to Drexciya in your living room and already I feel subaquatic again, 8am on a Sunday. Remember, we came from the sea. Our bodies are so much water and salt; we can hardly process any more of it. Crisping the lisp between here and there and what might drown. I was still a teenager when I sat by the harbour and twisted pink thrift into the plaits of my hair. I’d weave this space into a novel someday, the pain of the land sloshed up in geologic process; again the erosion, the sense of two worlds coming apart as a gaggle of teenagers stand lost in the waves, on the rocks and in water. It would all come to an end this way. I guess the bad techno thudded through every staccato chapter, the fault-lines of pointless dialogue. On a whim, I titled the whole thing West Coast Forever. Its universe was jagged, familiar and strange at once, self-destructive to the point of indulgence. I wrote it because I missed the sea, its harshness. I gave my twin protagonists eyes of green; two halves of what could be. I wanted to think about all the ways we are wild once, to try not to forget it. The sea is a lore we pass onto our children. The rocks we are not supposed to swim beyond, the orange buoys that mark the danger. The lives lost and loves found, the glitchy repetitions; the sand that thickens our mouths like overripe fruit, our words purpling and furring.

Then there are gentler lagoons, bays which float out and away into grander blues. Clear and liquid lyrics, drizzling like moonlight or syrup over some wide and distant surface, the panoramic sea. The finger-plucked acoustic soothes and tells us what to do in its melancholic verse. Cat Power’s ‘Sea of Love’, Julie Byrne’s ‘Sea As It Glides’. I am obsessed with how these songs might sound, crackling and passed down to us over a ship radio, the edges worn away. The uncertain rasp of tuning in. I think of ‘Above the road (Skies of Blue)’ by Fionn Regan, or Johnny Flynn’s ‘Heart Sunk Hank’: antique and between times; recordings on a Voice-o-Graph; all white noise and sparseness, the yearning words. When I was twelve, I spent four days on a little fishing boat, bobbing up and down the Sound of Mull, between Oban and Tobermory. I lived off a Pepsi cup full of pick’n’mix sweets for the most of it, my sugar levels spiking like the rise and fall of the tide around us. Back then, I rarely noticed the wax or wane of silver and night, flesh and bone, blood and milk; I was only just learning to treat my body in cycles. There were very little times in the journey when we couldn’t see land, but Oh the loneliness when it went away.

When the mist came and there was only the greys. I used to play this game as a child, embracing my Pisces moon, thrashing through the waves and swimming out so far that someone on the sand would be shouting me back, roaring my name. I rarely cried; I dealt with my emotions that way. I liked that fort-da play of presence and absence, testing boundaries; the idea that I might disappear and become something other. The running against what resisted. I liked the way the waves licked my arms and thighs and stung me, the sand in my pores still flaking away later when I stood in the shower. The body catches a taste for the other world. It unravels.

All weekend I’ve been listening to Frightened Rabbit, ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’, trying to heal the torn-apart strings of my heart. Ways we deal with loss, chasing the source. Some kinds of plunge are stilling, others sweep you up again and you’re back to before and the shock of it. You think you are okay but then again the sting behind your eyes, like somehow you let the sea in. This song will always feel new to me, a tune coming fresh out of hurt and to burst into something else altogether. There’s the rolling bass and energetic strums and the way the mood changes easy as weather between brilliant and bleak. I watch a YouTube video of Scott Hutchison singing an acoustic version in some courtyard; you can tell it’s spring from the two fire tulips that grow beside his bench. It’s spring like it is now, spring before the sunshine and colour felt wrong. There’s a helicopter flying overhead, so you know the world goes on and there are other bodies drifting into distance. And I miss him. I miss him.

And the water is taller than me
And the land is a marker line
All I have is a body adrift in water, salt and sky

Collapse again and again on the anaphora, the swirling, thirsty water. Who gets to wash up, who is vomiting their life and drying out on the sand and who presses a cool palm to their raging forehead? Why do we have these fantasies of saving someone from the sea? Is it a primitive fear: that we will lose everything we know that way; our life’s loves and possessions dragged away, river to firth to sound to sea. I flick through my Instagram stories this very morning, and my brother is filming the sea with his phone: an hour ago, ten seconds of grey-licking waves. He’s somewhere far away, I don’t remember—Bali, maybe. The sea is a trip-hop ballad, a rippling distance in which the ambient sounds don’t save me from thinking. The sea a great wash of the late 1990s, a millennial curve at the turn of distance. I think I think too much. Didn’t they worry, before 2000 came, that every system would collapse on zero? Didn’t Emily Berry describe the sea’s wee ripples as glitches? I long for the tidal flats and the drag of scavenging gulls in the skies above, howling some song that would save me. What are they hungry for, the circling birds? Arthur Russell is telling me to jump off the platform again; in the glimmer of that cello I can hear the echoes of a seascape blurred, pixelated to grey but alluring still. I plug myself in, deep in the chasms of sonic escape; here it is all wave and wave of shoegaze. The sea glows red before I sleep.

We need to break the waves, we need to break our minds. There’s a cleaving in there, hard as a diamond but liquid if you breathe deep enough the cold salt grey. It’s the saddest summer of my life and where was that aeroplane when I needed it, soft and sweet. Then neutral, oh so neutral; in all oceanic tang the lingering metallic taste. Do you miss me. I miss this. How blue the sea was from the air, so clear! One of maybe five songs I can play on guitar, the simple chord progression kills me still. How close his vocals are to the mic, that loudness an unabashed roar, a unified sound. My guitar strings are so old they sag like kelp strung across rocks deep below and in that looseness there’s a release, a new feeling. A lyric embrace which is the voice rising from platitude in earnest acrobatics and disappearing in a brass solo. The sway of the rhythm, I’m realising now, is a bit like the buoyed-up feeling of being on a boat, or watching the waves side-to-side from the land and finding your body a little seduced by the back and forth. Who is there on the shoreline, who waits? Before it gets dark, when we are still the sweet notes and the swaying trees. Little cross rhythms, a minor key and so far apart in our shadows and secrets. Ocean rain. I won’t say the name, I won’t say anything.

The sea is a darkness we hold under our tongues. Sometimes when I think of it too much, I see myself as a siren. But Oh the cost of screaming in the night. Elizabeth Fraser in ‘Song to the Siren’, haunting and flawless: ‘Here I am / Here I am’. The way her voice curls and shimmers, like a whirlpool coming into itself upon shipless waters, swallowing those foolish enough to break their bodies on the sea—‘Oh my heart / Shies from the sorrow’. In what lick of tide may we assert ourselves. I flip up the lid of my laptop, see the screen, and all is a glorious ersatz blue. A whole thalassic core of thought.

Berry again: ‘If a person standing still watched another person minutely moving would it / seem after a while as if they were watching the sea?’ How do we hold who we love in our vision, crawling at the brink of distance, disappearance? Why do they always become the sea? Why is there ever this scattering, and can that alone be the work of elegy—the between the between, the breezy, the needing?

Let go, for eternity
is too much with us
& not
with us yet.

—Francesca Lisette

Playlist: March 2018

I was turning all the lights off, trying to mute history. There were several moments in which it felt like things were changing, possibly blossoming for the better. The aftermath stung and went backwards again. There was a song about the M62 I followed briefly, thinking about motorways more generally and something expansive and grey, crossing the Pennines eventually. For a week, I wrote down descriptions of the sky. Mostly they read: the sky today is grey. I then started noting the patterns in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, which often begin with vignettes of the morning:

3rd February. A fine morning, the windows open at breakfast.
6th March. A pleasant morning, the sea white and bright.
26th May. A very fine morning.
31st May. A sweet mild rainy morning.
2nd June. A cold dry windy morning.

Mostly, she summarises the day. There is much letter-writing, Coleridge dining, William writing. Walking, cooking, taking guests. There is a rhythm and comfort to her entries, the circling of Ambleside, the sauntering in sun and air. Days condensed and hours expanded, cute little details in pastoral glimpses: ‘Pleasant to see the labourer on Sunday jump with the friskiness of a cow upon a sunny day’. She sees into the life of things. She inspires me to mark the simple, joyous moments of daily existence. Like walking home along Sauchiehall Street (the nice part towards Finnieston), close of midnight, seeing a couple in each other’s arms, sobbing, the man with a bunch of flowers held behind his back. They were not by any means striking flowers, probably bought cheap and last minute. I wonder what sort of gesture they were supposed to convey. At what point in the night did he decide to buy them; did he attain them from those wandering women who pray upon drunks with their floral wares? Did he cut himself, ever so slightly as he paid for those unlovely thorns? Is love always a form of apology for self? The self when it expands beyond too much of itself, hotly craving?

17th March. I do not remember this day.

It seems irrelevant to say, today is Easter Sunday. Jackdaws torment me in the expensive fruit of a wakeful morning. I imagine pomegranate seeds falling from a pale blue sky. These days unfold with wincing clarity, like the hypnotic drag of a Sharon Olds poem: ‘I could see you today as a small, impromptu / god of the partial’. There are things we are maybe not supposed to remember. As if survival were a constant act of lossy compression. Like a contract between two people, pinkie promise, except one of you has broken it. Has let out the glitches. Your dreams and daily reveries are full of the content you’re not meant to remember. You are clasping this thing as if it might live again, and indeed it might really. It is not easy to simply file away memory. Its particular phraseology of physical pain comes floating to the surface regardless. There are techniques of displacement. Letting yourself shimmer in the wind. It was one more step to be gone again. So every song I went to put on, clicking the laptop, he was like, stop, it’s too sad. When they ask what’s wrong and you’re smiling instead, worrying the edge of your lips into muscles you don’t recognise at all. The room was a singular bottle of beer and a breeziness to other people’s sweetness. They wear lots of glitter and laugh as we did once. They are singing. I feel like the oldest in a test of forever. But anyway this is all only temporary. Things break down but they do not go away.

30th March. Walked I know not where.

I watch a film about plastic in the ocean. They haul fish after fish, bird after bird, prise exorbitant quantities of bottle caps, ring pulls, microbeads and indiscernible fragments from stomachs and lungs. It is quite the display. Hopelessly choking. Seems obscene to describe that deep blue as ever pure again. There are patches of plastic in all its particles swirling. It makes not an island exactly, more like a moment in species collision. Whales absorb plastic in the blubber of their skins, digesting slowly the poisons that kill them. I wrote a story about a whale fall once. The protagonist trains in swimming, in underwater breathing, in order to enter other worlds: ‘This place is a deep black cacophony; you hear the noises, some noises, not all the noises, and you feel the pressure ripple pulling under you’. There have been bouts of sleeplessness this month that feel like dwelling inside a depleting carcass. If every thought dragged with subaquatic tempo. Blacking out at one’s desk into sleep. Forgetting in the glare of screen flickers. I meet people for coffee and feel briefly chirpy, stirring. There are pieces of colour, uncertain information, clinging to the shuddering form of my body. Do not brush my hands, for fear of the cold. I am so blue and when he squeezes my fingers my insides feel purple. The woman at the counter remarked on the cold of my hands. I am falling for the bluest shade of violet. How anyway in such situations I become the silent type as I never do elsewhere. So ever to cherish a bruise as violet or blue. I polish vast quantities of glassware, lingering over the rub and sheen. One song or another as 4.30am aesthetic.

Emily Berry: ‘All that year I visited a man in a room / I polished my feelings’.

The questions we ask ourselves at work form a sort of psychoanalysis, punctuated by kitchen bells and the demands of customers. What superpower would you have? The ability to live without fear of money. We laugh at ourselves as pathetic millennials. I have nothing to prove but my denial of snow, power-walking up Princes Street on the first bright day of the year. The sky is blue and the cold flushes red in my cheeks. But I am not a siren, by any means; I wish mostly for invisibility. The anthem for coming home the long way is ‘Coming in From The Cold’ by the Delgados, feeling the empathy in lost dreams and the slow descent into drunkenness that arrives as a beautiful warning. Like how he deliberately smashed his drink on the floor in the basement out of sheer frustration with everything. The ice was everywhere. As though saying it’s complicated was an explanation for that very same everything. The difficulty of cash machines. Emily Berry again: ‘I wanted to love the world’. In past tense we can lend shape to our feelings. Will I know in a week or more the perfect metaphor for this dread, this echo chamber of grey that longs to be called again? I punch in four numbers.

I covet my exhaustion in slow refrain. There are people whose presence is an instant comfort. There are people you’d like to kiss in the rain; there are people you’d kiss in the rain but never again. What of the gesture of that bouquet? Surprise or apology? The sky is catching the mood of our feelings. Is this a melancholic tone of regret, or maybe an assured and powerful one? I twist round the memory of a mood ring; its colours don’t fit. I photograph the rings beneath my eyes, finishing an eleven hour shift. She shoves rose-petal tea biscuits under my nose but I smell nothing. I watch the chefs at work, caressing their bundles of pastry and sorrow/sorrel and rocket. I climb many stairs and assemble the necessary detritus of another funeral. Sadness requires a great deal of caffeine.

I eat mushrooms on toast with Eileen Myles. I long for the lichens on the trees of Loch Lomond. I sleep for three hours in Glasgow airport, on and off, cricking my neck and drifting in and out of vicarious heartbreak. Lydia Davis is often perfect:

But now I hated this landscape. I needed to see thing that were ugly and sad. Anything beautiful seemed to be a thing I could not belong to. I wanted to the edges of everything to darken, turn brown, I wanted spots to appear on every surface, or a sort of thin film, so that it would be harder to see, the colours not as bright or distinct. […] I hated every place I had been with him.

(The End of the Story)

Must we coat the world in our feelings? What of the viscosity that catches and spreads on everything? There is an obscenity to beauty in the midst of defeat. Year after year, I find myself dragged into summertime sadness. There is so much hope in the months of June and May, soon to dwindle as July runs spent on its sticky rain. The lushness of a city in bloom, all fern and lime, is an excess beyond what dwells inside, the charred-out landscapes of endless numbness—or ever better, missing someone. We covet the world’s disease as externalisation of our hidden pain. Let things fragment and fall away; let there be a sign of change in motion. How hard it is to be happy around depleted friends; how hard it is to be sad among joyous friends. They pop ecstasy and go home for no reason. It is self-administered serotonin that mostly buoys up the souls of the lonely. There were songs from the mid-noughties that now sound like somebody shouting down a coal mine. I want to offer them a smile and a cup of coffee. It’s all I have, the wholesome concatenation of smooth flat-whites.

There is a song by Bright Eyes, ‘If Winter Ends’: ‘But I fell for the promise of a life with a purpose / But I know that that’s impossible now / And so I drink to stay warm / And to kill selected memories’. Winter’s demise in conditional form. Alcohol convinces us of a temporary rush into the future that blooms and is good, is better than before. The drinkers I know have muffled recollections, blotted out mostly by false nostalgia. We covet a swirling version of life in the present, its generous screen flickers, its spirals of affect. We pair off in the wrong. There are days when nothing will warm me up—not the dust-covered space heater, not the hot water bottle, not the star jumps that scratch heart-rates out of the hour. Was it the same sensation, hanging on for his vowels on a hazy afternoon, four o’clock stolen from whatever it was I was supposed to be doing?

Summer, however, is forever. It is supposed to be best. The clocks skip forward.

I learn to riso-print. To work with the uncertain blot and stealth of brighter inks. What results is a marvel in teal and burgundy, splashed with cyan. See it as past with glitters of future.

In a cramped, fourth floor hotel room in Amsterdam, I lay on my bed, leg-aching, listening to ‘Shades of Blue’. Yo La Tengo get it, the vaporous sprawl of the days upon days, days replacing days: ‘Painting my room to reflect my mood’. It is a kind of overlay, the new versions of blue which are deeper maybe than they ever were before. Which lend alter-visions to original blues, the ones you thought were bad before. I see my first IRL Yves Klein in the Stedalijk museum. Words elude this particular blue. It is deep and extravagant and more oceanic than the ocean would dream of. I have no idea what materials or dreams created this blue. Lazuli, sapphires, the pigmented stain of a rare amphibian? It is the steady, infinite eye of the Pacific. It is sorrow itself, the wound of the world. The Earth bleeds blue, not red. It is this kind of blue, a supranatural blue. After the first crisp cold of a new blue day, the rest of the week is brumous and mild. My feet get wet in a cemetery. I learn that Paradise Valley is an affluent town in Arizona, and not in fact merely a Grouper album. I drink mint tea all week to detox, then stay up all night when I get home. The gin sodas sparkle within me for days, but I’m feeling guilty.

The canals are parallel, the streets are winding. There are neon and fishnetted girls in windows, drolly sipping mysterious drinks. Their eyes are heavily lined. Nobody is looking. The air is warm and spicy at night. The tourists admire displays of various erotic paraphernalia; I take pictures of the lights splashed gold on the water. They say if you get to know the place, you can really settle into a meandering layout. A guy at work supplants my name for ‘Marijuana’. I wonder if ever I’ll be someone’s Mary Jane, and what that means in the long run. Feels like a Green Day song. Marijuana, they’ll say, Marijuana I miss you. There are pockets of Finnieston that waft forever between early summer and fullness of June; evenings hung by the scent of a stoned hour poised on forever. I stay sober. I think of the river, the people and dreams it steals. The world crystallises with ridges of cold, so I must sleep beneath sheets in my click&collect coat. Blue-fingered, shivering.

Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ has been lingering on my mind: ‘Consider that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us’. I keep writing out line after line, just for the sake of avoiding full stops. I’m not yet ready for that singular compression, even as it strikes in its simple beauty.

There was the massive, narcotic blue of the sky from the airplane. A blue you can cling to. A blue you descend through.

Lana Del Rey: ‘Blue is the colour of the planet from the view above’.

Pop singers these days are attuned to new scales. That Bright Eyes song opens with a whole lot of static and children shouting, rasping. It is like watching some black-and-white film in a museum, shudders of war or monsters in every low boom and flicker. There are ways we strum ourselves out of the mourning. It’s okay to be enraged and frustrated. Oh Conor, how I love you: ‘and I scream for the sunlight or car to take me anywhere’. So when things fall apart, fray at the edges, I’m thinking of myself as a place, a location elsewhere, ‘just take me there’, and the ridge of my spine is a highway that ends where the best palm glows afire by its imaginary desert. The curve of my neck and uncertain horizon, something of all this skimming around by the brink of etcetera. What else do I have to say but, ‘it’s gonna be alright’, not even realising when I am quoting something. It is hot here, adrift on this sofa, then cold again.

The walks grow ever more indulgent, Mark Kozalek humming in my ear. I think of all his familiars. I think of my younger self thinking of all his familiars. Is it cats or is it women. How many supplements do we make of lust?

The day afterwards, it’s best to drink again. Grapefruit is cleansing. You can order whole pitchers but I choose not to. A certain suffusion of gossip and horror, ice cubes crunched between teeth to ease up the gaps where I’m meant to speak. I see Hookworms play the Art School and they were incredible: they were a rush they were eons of dizzy vigour and sweetness, the music you want to surrender to. I stop giving customers straws with their orders. It snowed again. I wasn’t drinking; I was wearing green for Paddy’s Day. I was so tired my eyes felt bruised. I keep dreaming of islands, motorbikes, exes; broken tills and discos. The flavour of these dreams in surf noir; like even in the city it’s as if a tidal pull is directing everything. I don’t mind being sucked away into nothing; I don’t mind feeling the impulse of a pale blue dot. At least in my sleep. A good collapse. The order of pain is reducing.

29th June. It is an uncertain day, sunshine showers and wind.

This week I will find a hill for my vision. New forms of erasure. I see myself boarding a train.

Yo La Tengo – Shades of Blue

Bright Eyes – If Winter Ends

Iceage – Pain Killer

Tessela – Sorbet

Bjork, Arca, Lanark Artefax – Arisen My Senses (Lanark Artefax remix)

CZARFACE, MF DOOM – Nautical Depth

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Barefoot Desert

Grouper – I’m Clean Now

Sean Nicholas Savage – So It Appears

Snail Mail – Pristine

Little Comets – M62

Manchester Orchestra, Julien Baker – Bad Things to Such Good People

Hop Along – How Simple

Frankie Cosmos – Apathy

Sharon Van Etten – I Wish I Knew

Amen Dunes – Believe

Cornelius, Beach Fossils – The Spell of a Vanishing Loveliness

Sun Kil Moon – God Bless Ohio

Good Morning – Warned You

Lucy Dacus – Addictions

The Delgados – Coming in From the Cold

Belle & Sebastian – We Were Beautiful

Mark Kozalek – Leo and Luna

Pavement – Range Life

Firestations – Blue Marble

The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die – Heartbeat in the Brain

Manic Street Preachers – Dylan & Caitlin

Bob Dylan – Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

Crosby, Stills & Nash – Hopelessly Hoping

Courtney Marie Andrews – Long Road Back to You

Grateful Dead – Box of Rain

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

Playlist: August 2017

Start with the kernel of something. The year’s first fallen acorn I have not seen yet, though pinecones have been thrown in the direction of whoever. Hypothetically, my life as a typewriter, the body punctuated with the same mechanical violence. Clattering impression of symbol. A certain attention to gardens, as if in longing for confinement, safety. Time spent in Cambridge. Willows sweeping the skin of the river, an endless wandering the result of what. Hard work, long mornings in bed with the warm aluminal form of a laptop. White glow, silence. Someone mowing their lawn too early. Being what it is to be lonely not letting the light in except with broken blinds it comes fractured, skewed, something. The early fears abated, return to trust the body. Sun beaming through unfinished paint, the colour of mauve roses, faded hydrangeas. There is a hyperspace in which the dreams become apartments with balconies folding to abyss, you lean out singing it felt like a kiss the crystal taste which is what a violent text a certain whisky with peculiar salt with the flavour of drowning. Shades of cool. Allergic to punctuation after so much editing. Late night taste of Mogwai, Aphex Twin in the long long mornings. The perfect cupid’s bow of her lips. A geometry of light on the living room carpet. Sit in me, wheat-coloured pool of Vitamin D. The gunshot pulse of the stuttering track. I close my eyes for the White Lodge, the shrouding. Mountains come up and when we are at work we hum the Song of Healing while customers come and go in a panoply, in circuits; the moon too close like a lump of cheese with a million calories like terrible space debris coming. There’s an underpass where the dank canal flows thick as a black black oil, as molasses. Closer, the exact texture of fishnets. Something of your composition, a fear. The cold and lovely brass legato. Confessions in brown paper-bags. These are penny sweets, many regrets, many ice-coloured touch of the tongue that flickers its absence. A pleasant stasis, curled fingers which wait for the rise of the chest and the breath that is chemical alone, that is Tennents at seven in the morning on a lino floor. Berryish, bitten. Making no sense of Four Quartets but embracing the paganism, looking equinox ready with a garland of wilted daisies as if August never happened. The goddess in flesh, Lana Del Rey with her seamless fragility that adds joy to melancholy, etc. You know it. Conor Oberst telling stories about Woodie Guthrie and another life-changing duet on Lua. Voices as clear and pure as expensive vodka, distilled through a mountain stream in the elusive valleys of sadness. Somewhere south of America. I see a desert. There are plants needing repotting in my room. A 39-minute album. A mixed-up connotation, lumps of quartz from a beach near Cardross. I wonder about the temperature of water. Last year’s gatherings, the same melancholy. The absolute cool refreshment of this late-summer’s day. Remembering Lilt as a Thing! Train rides, shudderings, altered temperatures. So much goddamn analysis. Saying it like a litany, my goodness my goodness my goodness. Enacting mythology of objects surrounding. The glass of ice cubes precisely polished, a sequence of droplets. Clotted spectrums. The time it takes between ordering and serving, circling like ravens or trying to negate the game of waiting. Complaints. August being the flourishing stammer of a potentially bad dissertation. Potentially not. Sometimes salt and vinegar just tastes good. Wake up to the sting of your own tongue. Passing creepy, sapphire hot-tubs at four in the morning while old-school Coldplay floats on by mysteriously. Bones sinking like stones. Floating on home at 9am past phalanxes of school children and furious mothers. With all these roadworks, the pavement is but a treacherous ridge between spaces. Samuel Johnson kicking a stone to prove something. Philosophical brutality. Voyage to the capital for Tom McCarthy. Sunlight and absurd erotic fiction displayed in cardboard boxes. The boiling point of all these projects. Nectarines. How everything these days just feels like browsing. Are we yet ready for nostalgia and autumn, and whichever comes before the other? I keep re-watching the same old episodes.

LCD Soundsystem – tonite

Kiran Leonard – Could She Still Draw Back?

Big Thief – Masterpiece

Conor Oberst – Napalm

Girl Ray – Trouble

John Maus – Hey Moon

Clarence Clarity – Naysayer Godslayer

Four Tet – SW9 9SL

Oneohtrix Point Never – Music for Steamed Rocks

Mogwai – Coolverine

Lana Del Rey – Shades of Cool

Au Revoir Simone – Lark

Lomond Campbell – Father is a Craftsman (Modern Studies cover)

Julie Byrne – Morning Dove

Playlist: July 2017

July you are bright and sort of silent and usually I hate you, what with your sticky swamp flowers and pollen, the obnoxious abundance and every walk resulting in fly-stuck lips or the sizzling chill of unseasonable downpours yes I can’t help but hold you responsible for that summertime sadness that settles inevitably on the shoulders or most vulnerable skin like an insect’s membrane drawing me back to the cool…something happened this year you were not so bad there was all this bright light the showering sun through an open window somebody’s glitching hip hop taste of rollups [lost cloud storage] there were what we called damn good albums for the sake of imitation teenagers slurping milkshakes in diners discussing the hatred of certain words but you could preserve even disdained vocabulary for the sake of an opulent dictionary, trading in class for segments of orange which maybe indeed were euphemisms but for that you had gum and the regular exchange. Absolutely capital. Tesco looking quite different at six in the morning everything shelved and radiant, beautiful as even the nettles seemed this evening as even the wild garlic recalled the first day of June and walking the park amid fresh cut grass its strange perfume the dandelion motes in swirls the perfect steam to rise hypothetically from baths we were trying to lull ourselves back from the dead and all this trauma coped with / you just lean into me I will be soft as a yes before you would make me this sofa we sank in the fabric the television flicker was novelty to me the first time off the train stepped clear through the city. Radiohead, inevitably, were best they were close to sublime I think listening and seeing those lights was like how it must feel to experience pareidolia at the stroke of midnight with the stars kissing your shoulders the white milk of how it felt the (im)possibility of a black milk its atrocious calcite traces the way the brain would rise up and the whole park would shake as a crowd were electric then they were raising their phones the Pyramid Song with its eerie and reluctant chords / come back with your drink / and how it felt listening to it again a few weeks later in the car at 7am watching countryside slip past like a melting world and even in the judder of the bending road you’re like an aeroplane over the sea wearing jeans and wheat fields and the stall of piano a slow trembling pedal the rich foliage of so many ditches imaginary swim the astrally projected human features arranging on new lunar mantles the water beneath they never knew they never knew as I drew myself always finding myself sucked deep into the Spotify buffer in spin cycles mycelial I could gasp but everything is buffering and even watching the window the sky is buffering all afternoon cloud / I fell asleep last night listening to rain and dreamt of a desert where we were dead it was beautiful being metal our rusted surface lain down the absent oasis the strange aloes that cowered around us then epochally turned like woman with luminous tresses leaning over our skins they made us ripe and shining again. July July July I can’t help quote Sufjan but I’ll refrain he wrote an album about planets I think it is quite lovely [we’re all gonna die] I have seen the acned jewellery of my desert dream and I have seen the lack of fear and even if you preserve the virtual moment smiling in a crowd on a hillside sweat glistened smoking you will bear it again and again you will be just that luxurious pull of pensive strings and Jonny Greenwood’s best hair flip and something in your chest never felt before / / no hangover, just l o v e (?) or everybody ten years ago with tested vision the glassy-eyed light lost in a cave & listening to crunk I can hear the bass all the way from the river . . .

Kevin Morby – City Music

Feist – I Wish I Didn’t Miss You

Julien Baker – Distant Solar Systems

Portico Quartet – A Luminous Beam

Soko – Sweet Sound of Ignorance

Slowdive – Miranda

Penguin Cafe – Solaris (Cornelius Mix)

Radiohead – Pyramid Song

The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Going to Hell

The Kinks – Waterloo Sunset

Nico – These Days

Arthur Russell – Nobody Wants a Lonely Heart

The Weather Station – Thirty

Beck – Heart is a Drum

Belle & Sebastian – Marx and Engels

At the Turn of the Hologram Clock

At the Turn of the Hologram Clock

[written this morning on the back of a terrible, asynchronous dream]

Returning to the town would entail a strangeness, of that she was certain. She knew the old walls, the grocers, the station store; knew how little they would have changed in the time she’d been away. Knew the same faces would glide by, new lines etched upon their skin but otherwise utterly familiar. She knew that deep dread would rise again, a sense of everything closing in. The square with the trampled flowers, the narrow streets. Even the trees, her mind’s flicker arborescent since 2015. The elms with their slender memory. The autumnal glut of rowan berries, so many beads of red. She knew the pavements where once she lay down, drunk on honey and love, orange and whisky. Blood vessels burst in her wide child’s eyes. Funny, she had never really been in love here. There was a boy once, but he was distant, deranged, slightly drugged. He rarely came down. All his thoughts were the gasp of a moonshine desire and his body was sullied with need, magnesium deficiency. He watched her always with a twinge of curiosity.

Back then when she ate, her veins rose like snarling vipers and she was ashamed. She ate to forget him.

All this gorgeous reverie was an incense stick piercing the soil, a night in the park, a stolen July. On the swings they sat, listening to the rhythmic glitch of the crickets. The space between them was ten years; ten years in which she had grown, her face bloomed like a rose. He learned a glossary of drugs and offered her his alien vocabulary. Eventually they lay on the tarmac, the moon encased by the skewed geometries of the climbing frame. Its colour and rust, the slow shed of its millioning flakes.

“This will be us in the future as we were before,” she murmured.

She had been running for hours to get here. Dropped the knife in a stranger’s garden, when she knew she was clear of the worst. She thought of that flat in the city; its musty smell, its entrapments, crumbs of cake. Her other half had kept her there, pierced needles through her flesh till she wept and bled. At the bus station, pleading with strangers for change, this place had seemed the single possibility. The town, the past; a promise in miniature.

She thought of the chestnut mare in the paddock south of the housing estate. Whether it was still there. She called him from a payphone; he had the same number, still lived with his parents. She thought of crooked ladies paddling around the health centre, swapping ill-informed platitudes on the state of the nation. The man who sold cigarettes from a van, emitting that scent of lust and vanilla ice cream whip.

She felt sick.

“We’re already who we are,” he replied.

“It’s not enough.”

Her body was constellated with pin-point scars. She let the straps slip down her shoulders, rolled over to face him. Something passed in the shadow of his eye, a midnight cloud; he was silently tracing the trajectories between each star, that map of her skin—sleeveless, arterial, easy. There was no ending to anything.

“Your eyes are like…” she wanted a meaningful statement. They had been here before. “Like summer meadows, emeralds. Freckled, sparkling, something. You’re so lovely.” She wanted a cigarette.

None of this really came through. Her words were transmissions, little shivers. The ground was so cold beneath them and soon they were falling, the black of it catching on the skin of their teeth. The past was there, alive in each blade of grass; singing its secret elegy, eerie in the leaves. It was so easy to slip back into sweet paralysis.

“You’re not as thin as you used to be,” he said, by way of breaking the dream.

“But I’m less solid,” she answered, turning through smoke, maybe to kiss him. For he was different now, and so was she.

Playlist: June 2017

A salt-water taffy stretch of a month with some sun; some wasted afternoons, park light gold and green, memory dappled like so much impress can you picture it, the wax press of light on the mind. Cherish this. Treasure, bittersweet conversations with no trajectory maybe the manner of space cadets like every direction plucked from some passing ethereal breeze. Too weird the feeling. Procrastination at its various extremes. Opening a page at random, waking up to construction groans, sleeping to evil seagulls. Surreal dreams, too much sense of the early; the precinct to late where we walk hand in hand in a daydream dazed, like looking in windows, like looking for light. Play truant for a day or two. Wine/whisky. Disappear into this fantasy space. I imagine a hallway, a series of doors. Your number etched on each one, till code or eye colour. I’ve remembered. Not much is that easy. I suspect he’s heftily medicated, some metallic blood-borne balm of the soul. There are light tunnels, there are patches of cirrus pulled apart by the bad breath of godly machinery. My stomach haunted by absent coffee. Terrible brew, extra blend. Gold and blue. The little coffee shop with the warm fire in winter. Let’s pretend that it’s summer. But even in summer this has been such a terrible grey. It’s heartbreaking to think of the seasons so out of joint, the failed slot of transcendent system, of coiled and invisible process. Like, imagine someone splitting the world’s greatest crystal of quartz, its milky opaline smoke spilling across what should be galaxy or sky or absent, beautiful blue or whatever. No clouds, just atmosphere. Hoary, gloomy, frost-mottled, dreary. My sombre face with the lines beneath the eyes, great shadows of stolen time. No sleep. We stay up all night with dawn our best friend floating by open windows; smoke drifting out in sinuous, snaking curls. I love it, love watching the smoke. It’s like the dramatisation of something opening, the stop-motion voyeur of a yawning flower. This serenity, the silky pieces of petals and sepals. All of them white, glistening eye whites. Egg whites. Fluffy matter. Solidifying objects. The turning secrecy of energy within. My body continues. It chemicals, processes, chemicals. The bitter taste with its sharp promise, O shard of six hours, shrapnel matter remembering freedom. Soft mulching Irn Bru gums. That forgetting, release. The June roses bloom so fat and sad; I wish them happy diets. Dripping rain, more rain. Slow-falling, luxurious rain. Green-sheen. The rain we can’t quite touch. Access. Restricted perception, reception. Notches on wood. The mole on my side like a miniature insect, sweat-glistening. Rain. We walk home in a daze for more chemicals. Gin. Feeling. Looking in windows. I know these streets more than the capillaries within me. Layering synths, familiar chords. Oh god the half-key octave twist, the little flicker of generous melody. Rain and rain. Return to Twin Peaks.

🌧

Johnny Jewel – Stardust

The Cactus Blossoms – Mississippi

Sufjan Stevens, James McAlister, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner – Jupiter

Marika Hackman – Violet

Big Thief – Dandelion

Beach Fossils – Sleep Apnea

Radiohead – Backdrifts

Portico Quartet – Endless

Slowdive – Sugar for the Pill

Sharon Van Etten – Every Time the Sun Comes Up

Elvis Costello – I’m In the Mood Again

Fleet Foxes – Fool’s Errand

Pond – The Weather

Lorde – Homemade Dynamite

Metronomy – Miami Logic

Japanese Breakfast – Machinist

Bonobo – Grains

Layering

I woke up and the skin was peeling in the webbed bits round the fingers. Last night I’d soaked it in coconut oil from his ma’s spice cupboard but in the morning it made the pores feel all empty like they’d lost something. Still, the smell was nice. I just lay there and started scratching the wee red dots he gets on his arms from too much drinking, then he opened his eyes all red too like and says, You smell of summer. Sun-tan. Something.

His room is painted the colour of grass when it burns. It’s the blinds and that crap paint you get in Pound shops. I always look up and meet the eyes of Kurt Cobain on the wall and we share the feeling of being hurt; just for a second, the time it takes to yawn, then I roll over to kiss him but he’s sour-tasting on account of the whisky or something. A film on my tongue like when glue goes hard on your skin and you flake it off. His tongue feels furry too.

I reach to roll the first cigarette and tobacco gets on the bed and I know it makes him mad so I stop; my limbs unfold from the sheets and the cold rush clings to their bareness.

He makes this sound all like mhmheeh but I get up anyway and roll the cigarette sitting on the windowsill looking outside. The rain is coming on again and the glass is all stained like when you rub your eyes too hard and it’s all these lava lamp patterns swimming in your brain and nothing gets clear for a good full minute.

It’s February 23rd, just so you know. I keep thinking about that bit in Twin Peaks when the handsome detective is like reading a page torn from Laura Palmer’s diary and it says on that date, ‘Tonight is the night that I die’. Makes me feel a bit nauseous, especially after the phone call. The one from last night. When I get downstairs, softly-stepping so’s not to wake him, the phone is still off the hook where I dropped it and you can hear the woman saying please hang up and try again like she’s trying to make it into a techno song. There’s a loud ring when I slam it back on the receiver.

He finds me an hour later on the floor by the washing machine greeting even though I’m trying not to but he stands there and he runs his hand through his hair which I want to live in the way you could live in a meadow of long sweet grass in summer and he’s saying something like, You’re unravelling, Lara. I can’t help the puffiness and my face burns up when he leans down and I don’t want him to touch me. In fact I kick in protest but my foot gets cut on a broken floor tile that comes flying out in a bad joke. He laughs as the blood gels and already I’m thinking how good it will feel to peel off the scab like lichen from a tree.

Get up will you, he says. It’s in my chest rattling now; I’ve got it all hollow. Come on, get up.

There’s his guitar there’s the song about us there’s the yummy smell of coconut. It would be funny to eat your own fingers. He finds the mustard jumper wraps it round the shoulders pulls me up all bare as Eve and there’s the key in the lock his ma coming home too early.

Please hang up and try again.

The things needing done, the shame of it.

Tag: summer