I unearth some memory from a recent past yesterday, and reconnecting with the person I once was never felt so surreal. There is nothing like a list from the past about the future to confront you in the face, stark with its presence and… highly dystopic.
It was somewhere between the tip of the paper which started with 1 to the end where I signed off. It was somewhere between the last days of innocence in mucous green uniform and disillusioned denial (though still in mucous green). I suppose I wrote it only because it was an aspiration workshop and they wouldn’t actually release you till they had some self charity of belief that they’ve aspired you-
Things like ‘get into DEP!’, ‘break at JGs!’, ‘top 5 ranking!’ seem childish, a rudimentary guide I valued my self worth in. And then comes the more solid, tangible things I now check my future failures across. 4 A level As, H3 lit, Angus Ross (cue laughter). I wonder what possessed my 14 year old soul to wax such crazy lyrical on paper. Perhaps at 14 I had not yet known the cold grip of fear and longing resonating dormant within me.
Internship results out (latest) Tuesday. Meaning I haven’t gotten anything in my inbox. Yet. Maybe. Perhaps. Forever.
She’s the kind of girl who gets her slings and arrows from the dumpster
The kind who tells you she’s bipolar just to make you trust her
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs,
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes,
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
If i could I would make a mixed Bard tape and leave it under your desk like a bag of Shakespearean chocolates (because they always grow old with age) for you to unravel, slowly speaking and forming the shape of the vowels in your mouth.
(it’s okay if you stutter)
Filed under: y'all get scared now, ya hear! | Tags: John Lennon, Lolita, the dresden dolls
You are the cat i let out of the bag, one double Chinese period a few days ago. I let you roam the space between my table and Sam’s, under the hum of verb talk and algebra; I let you do your little liberation jig on my lashes and then I packed you back up, in that bag inside my head. Safe keeping.
I wonder why i bother to revisit dusty memories of you, no matter how painful, passionately intense and very, very vague.
This is my drug induced stupor of menthol sweets and caffeine, 6 days before promos. I do not notice my friends attending the night race on Saturday without me because my promos start even after they’ve ended, and because Fiona’s rich new rugger boyfriend got us all tickets. I do not notice that I have so much to gain and everything to lose here and now this truly is infinity in the palm of my hands.
I am waiting for something big to happen, some sweet catastrophe; beautiful disaster and many more oxymorons to befall upon me. I am adverting from your eyes down by the corridor because even though I’ve been saving smiles for you I am so terrified for your gaze to meet my sin; my soul.
For when you do I increasingly become less of your future and more of your past and it is this present that i am gifting to you to slowly unwrap. Like an onion. Perhaps you’d cry.
only angels have wings
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
the falcon cannot hear the falconer
I have an affinity with staircases.
There is magic in that place, a harsh gray sky concrete- the twists and turns and baby you never know what’s around the corner.
When I was 2 I tumbled down a flight of stairs, and nothing has ever been the same. I wear the scar on my lips, and its not just the shadow of your past but a physical jagged slash right down the side if you look close enough. Remnants of a deeper purity.
They are more than just the scent of dirty lovers chancing upon a sad song; And oh, oh cosmic bloody madness; your apparition before me. Still. For that one split moment I wonder if it was really a dream in this casual foreplay of rouge love with your eyes-
Yet they are but sublime, but significant, but desperately important among the inward and private equivalents of poetry and photography, among the transfigured memories and strangely transposed sensations that constitutes the universe of our dreams-
For going up those stairs is always long, always tedious and when I slip just a bit baby the free fall is so much more comfortable than I’d expected and I am lying in concrete dust again.
I would give up all my vulgar moments on the stairs for just one more of today’s.
I’ve been held back by something
Yeah. You said to me quietly on the stairs,
Filed under: future future future perfect | Tags: Bat for Lashes, Dave Matthews, Fringe Guy, Oasis
Once upon a time
When the world was just a pancake
Fears would arise
That if you went too far you’d fall
But with the passage of time
It all became more of a ball.
We’re as sure of that
As we all once were when the world was flat
$193 in prepaid credit expires in a week, and i could tell you so, so many stories with that amount of credit, and it will never grow old; we will never grow old- for as long as the night is in the colour of the sky and there is nothing to break the lingering of your whispers in my ear we are free. This is my truth and the truth won’t save me now, i know.
What truth is there in the story, morning glory? I wish i could find meaning, remnants of a deeper purity in the blissful oblivion of our giggly lives. There has to be something more than the scribbles over lecture notes in that cool new erasable pen or trying hard not to make it obvious that we are talking about Fringe Guy even though he is only 3 classes down and starts to fix his Fringe the moment we start discussing it-
There is an old sex in this place, and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.
I’ve been everybody’s girl, I wonder when it’s time for me to start being my own.
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor.
they called a horse out of the woodland.
take her there, through the desert shores
Filed under: Jesus wants me for a sunbeam | Tags: Frank O'Hara, Mayakosvky
1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!
then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.
2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.
I’ve always wanted to be named after one of those great women in the bible. Because then maybe, I would, through some divine intervention, inherit all the beauty and splendor they are described with.
My mother named me after a Christian Doughnut Man tape.
I am Heidi, I am the girl in the tape who got lost after getting icecream from a truck- and i’ve been lost ever since. The year I started reading, I received 3 different copies of Heidi. I’ve read every single version and they’ve only ever talked about the precocious girl with curls on the mountains saving some lame girl from a horrid boy. I’ve grown up now, and all the Heidi i read is some half naked supermodel.
I guess it’s supposed to mean noble one- and some gift shop cleverly picked out an apt bible verse to print along with it on those little name cards you buy apiece for eighty cents. Strength and honour are her clothing and she shall rejoice in times to come. I would know, I have that card in my wallet to remind me what it means to be me every time I indulge further into my consumerism driven life.
I wish i had a lot less pride and a lot more honour in me. I wish i had the power to keep my gob shut 98% of the time it is open. I wish i were a better person. but i am not.
This is what it means to be me, these are the fragments of my benediction that I am too ashamed to tell you in the corridors at school or on the lonely bus rides with an indie playlist for company. I could make your heart go faster. I guess.
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
Filed under: y'all get scared now, ya hear! | Tags: Jellyfish, Poetry, Sarah Kay
And somewhere in between then and now
Irony slipped its way into my vocabulary
Laughter became an anecdote for guilt
Sacrifice grew to be a band-aid for shame and
Unnecessary death became a nightmare
That rode me in piggyback
Somewhere in between then and now I learnt
That every move you make echoes outwards from your body
Like ripples on the ocean from a skipping stone
This is what it’s taught me
That karma is as tangible as the taste of seawater
Somebody somewhere has a scorecard so that
An eye for an eye
Tooth for a tooth
Really comes around to bite you in the ass
And what is it about in mortality
But the right sword and shield we think we can fend off
Anger
Fear and
Hatred
If our legs are fast enough we think we can outrun
Age
Loss and
Death
That we could always truly live as master of all the jellyfish
There was no repentance, I had no guilt
I was risking life and limb to protect everything i knew to be sacred
and you have to understand
I really believed it was so
Filed under: Jesus wants me for a sunbeam | Tags: Konstantine, Something Corporate
what systems we arrange for intimacy, small
disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth. not
what I’d anticipated. softer. to begin with,
I should tell the truth more. I could miss you,
and that’s a liability.
We’re in for the ride of our lives. We are waking up to days that end at 2pm and lives that start only after- we are counting down to the ring of the bell that signifies your elevation to the fifth floor and my demise, down the golden brick road of self dillusioned happiness.
We are still obsessed over the poem on Yoke Mun’s blog. We are still listening to Transition on repeat. We are still this wave of technicolour dreams and melodies; and I should really be asleep.
And so what. So what if i am colouring rainbows in the crazy loops that is you in my head?
I wish i could write something more adequate, more eloquent, more understandable than this alexithymic prose; I wish i could tell you things back when the person I was could have loved you. I miss you, but I can’t find the right words for it.
And if this is what it takes
Just to lie in my mistakes
