so it is the most glorious day in the world because it is spring; it is molten sunshine and leaf-breath scurrying your skirts when you're lain down beneath a tree, on the fresh-wintered grass, sleeping for the joy of warm backs and the end of a politics lecture which you almost dozed off in. an ant tangles in your hair and when you get up you can't quite walk straight, because you're drunk on spring, spring, and the wind keeps knocking you sideways.

i've been thinking a lot about clitorises, because about 150 million women in the world don't have them anymore, and whenever i think about that i want to press my legs tight together and cross my arms above just for good measure.

i met a boy over a pool table the other night; the second we'd shaken hands we were at the edges of each others' skin like we'd just moved in to one another, how d'ye do, let's kiss each other silly in the smoke of cigarettes. a remembrance of jagermeister about his mouth and the old man tang of tobacco. we left it to fate to meet again; i am ever so slightly impatient at the slowness of her mechanisms.

there was an old italian man on my tram. eighty-six, and he wants to find a fourth wife, and his granddaughter is incredulous. in the days i am fine, he says. but in the nights i need someone to hold, someone to sleep with. you know what annoys me more than anything else? these women with children.

- but the glorious day is fading and i am sitting behind walls and white curtains, talking of old italian men. adieu!

relief stain

when you wake in the morning with blood on the mattress and stains all over your cute new knickers,
washing is the most glorious chore in the world.

chunky tuesday.

so this is where it's at.

i'm feeling ugly. not just out but in. ugly in, ugly out, even though i'm wearing cute japanese knickers i bought yesterday as a present to myself. and a journal won't do. i need to get this ugly out into the whole wide cyberworld.

i am considering new blog. ugly-blog. where i can be ugly each day, anonymously, with a different email so no one will know it is me.

today i got my period. i actually thanked out loud. god, a pill, providence, i don't know what i thanked but i thanked it. i've read all the leaflets, i've guilted the looks from doctors and chemists and tipped my chin at their professional frowns, and i know that this small blood may not be enough. that maybe the thankyou was premature, that maybe, yet, my body is beyond my knowing. that miniscule chance that i am fucking around with another life by fucking around with my own; god, that scares me.

the ugliness of hunger. last week i might have drunk a river, this week i could eat the moon on a plate. my insides yawn cavernous each morning, waking me early, flushing the coins from my wallet when i most want to save. my thighs look older, plumper already, a varicose vein popped out this morning behind my knee and japanese knickers just can't distract you from your first sign of ageing.

see, this is ugly, this is me at my worst and why i want some anonymous corner to uglify in when i need. i read a blog this morning, the blog of someone i only just know; his words made me angry but i was snared, snared by the need to be someone i hate, to write ugly opinions in cynical anonymous words, never answerable to anyone i know. i chafe at myself. i need to be so many people, and this one i am now i just don't want to know.

not stopped.

the truth is, i am shamefully undisciplined.
the truth is, i am just not interested in autobiography at the moment.

i caught myself reverting to a habitual melancholy the other day. an expectation of all being wrong; or at least, not all right. i tentatively turned it around. it was ridiculously simple.

so i am a sad-seeker. my grecian friend said to me one day that he thought i didn't always do everything i could to help myself in life. i was outraged. but there you go. i might have dedicated that joyful turnaround to him.

the truth is, i am a masochist. a masochist, a sad-seeker, and a teapot.

that said, i can also be a bubble. a flutter-tailed kite. punch-drunk on liquorice and cloudshine.

it's never relative. always exponential. and it's a conundrum. because melancholy sends me rushing for the keys. writing out my solace. filling the void with words. but when i am happy, i am free (isn't that all happiness is? momentary freedom?), free from the need to write. and, i am shamefully undisciplined.

it's a conundrum.

but i was listening to a glorious song today which ever since september has been matt's song. they played it at his wake, although i wasn't there, and ever since it has been his, his song, his album, and i cannot listen without tearing a bit. and i was full of the song and full of the sadness of him, who will never not be young, but, perhaps, never really was young either, and i thought, i am still going where other people have stopped. every moment is an addition to what could have been a stop. and i am so often grey-edged and world-weary that i can't hold back from these sugar-snap joys. and why should i? i am young. young, and not stopped.

silly scrumptious

today i was with my chicorina by a river. we gave each other books for christmas and wrote silly scrumptious things in the covers, and kneaded each other's backs for a bit. there was an epileptic worm on a twig of grass and two men fishing. we added the skin of an avocado and a wrung-dry lime to the wood-grain water, left some crumbs in the lawn, and went for chocolate coffee in a haunt.

i have my own personal lacan. what i don't like is how he dismantles me. we had a fight last night. an epic one, drawing deep on past sorrows, a too-late courage, a day-old sadness. afterwards i was wrung out, sick, laid out in all my component parts for me to put back together, again. i hate how he dissembles me. i just want to be whole. silly. and scrumptious. to wear umbrellas in my hair and cobwebs on my cheeks and know, from hour to hour, day to day, that i will stay that way, and not be broken, not have to reconstruct myself, once more and again, and again.

elegant/outrageous

it's a fine line that i like to tread.

hurt/healed

so now that our venom is spent, now that our weeks have condensed
and distilled two sets of tears;
now that we've peeled and hurt, hurt and healed,
and i've learned a new horror;
i think little has changed, and i don't know whether to be comforted, or afraid.