bulging.shrinking.

every time i try to draw, i end up drawing worms. misshapen writhy wrigglies, grossly bulging maybe or famine-thin, depending on the end. they gather on a patch of page and wiggle there, never touching, bulging/shrinking outward until my thoughts go somewhere else and they are left behind, intestinelike on a paper.

they look as if they wish to go somewhere. i want to let them into the world. make them large and stencil worm-patches on the walls. brush them off my page and into a garden. perhaps just one could feed a baby bird.

cold, and the shapes of it.

often i think it is i who has been wrung out, and hung out to dry on the tideline. it would be easier that way, to lie and dry til the sea came to collect me, and nudge me higher or eat me whole. easier easier than this endless insufferable circle we are treading. we are frigid, we step in each others' snowy footprints, following, doubling, spiralling: further, further, further apart.

ice, too, on my forehead, a rectangular lump on a fresh purple egg in my hair. i am waiting to pass out, or vomit, or lose my mind, but my mind is addled anyway i think and probably it hardly matters.

i am numbing pain (the pain of being oceanless, the pain of unspooling circles, the pain, too, of non-conformist blocks of head-ice) with fairytales: cuddled in my bed with typer and a notebook, i catch the gossamer threads of another world and tie them to a page so they cannot float away. i hadn't realised how many threads there were, or how many pages they would claim.

i want to dye cream with turmeric and beetroot and thistles. i want to make a necklace of pomegranate seeds for my love. i want to be a tree, and sink my roots in some soil and arch my arms over somewhere bare and bricky. i want to join a forest. i want to grow a pod. i want someone to unpeg me from my tideline and take me somewhere else. not circular. not rectangular. or egg-shaped.

elegy two (the sea)

some small drowned creatures. wrung and hung out to dry on the tideline.
(stiff, matted birds. a blue-bloated rat.)
dispossessed plastic.
(lids, wheels, the sole of a shoe.)
a messageless bottle,
green-weedy sea-salad,
and the terrifying crown of a mer-king.

untitled (the roses)

between here and the beach there is a rosebush. a desert rose. or a beach rose. a sand-and-salt rose. its blooms the colour of surprised love, glowing at me in the twilight through the lace of their branches. i plucked some. (flower-thief. purloiner of petals.) they are in a vodka bottle in my room. inkyblue glass and five surprised lovers.

yearning/content

a seesaw. a pushmipullyu. exponential love and rage. that is our equation. perhaps even our destiny (though the word frightens me, with its leaden claim to predetermination); our souls twin magnets of vacillating polarity, sometimes repulsing, oftener close-cleaving in this strange asexual love of ours.

wodge: n. a large slice, eg a wodge of cake.
(i am eating)

i feel as though there is a novel agitating in my knuckles. dammed, and ballooning out my forearms. i feel it as a separate entity. an invasion of my self. because it is wordless. i can't comprehend it, so i can't translate it, so i can't write it, so it builds and builds and presses against my fingers as i type.

let it be said, i do not quite understand asexuality.

i am living my life on a petri dish, under my own dispassionate gaze. solitude magnifies every interaction to life-or-death dimensions. my eyes are burning with the intensity of the world, its radiation, swimmingly-outlined. i forget how to be; myself, with people, in place. yet i am strangely content. yet yearning. for an end to hermitage. to self-subjection. yearning. yet content.

aftermath.

it was the worst fight of our lives, him and i: born of a stomach-ache and suddenly sprung to epic proportions.

i screamed fuck you and quivered my door in its frame and cried and cried until mascara ran down my arms.

afterwards all i could think of to do was wash the dishes (violently. slammingly.) and my fingers puckered angry red while i tried (his teapot his cups) not to break anything.

because hating him is the antithesis of all that i am, i needed to be someone else. to smudge my eyes and stride in fishnet tights (shortdressheelsandcleavage) and find some lonely businessman to love me for the night.

i'm still deciding.