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.

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.