Tuesday 30 March 2010

What are we gonna do?

Sit in dark rooms, drinking red wine out of mugs, and writing books about the disintegration of human communication, and staring absent mindedly out of dusty windows and spending hours tying shoelaces in perfect bows, and photographing birds on telephone wires, taking long hot baths and cold showers, staying silent in public, and writing all thoughts down on paper

Yellow Bath Water

I searched for images of death for so long, but then I realised that only I could know what death really meant, what death meant to me, and why it was impossible to find a representation within a photograph. Why is it so fucking impossible, and why is it that every time my blind eyes stumble upon a likeness, I must look back to confirm if it is correct - if it is true -, and by this point the likeness is so unbearable that I must confine myself to bed sheets and darkness and cry like a baby. For it is only the taste of tears that I enjoy; the salt, the sad wound that seeps life blood from the circulating system, and pushes the feelings out of the pores into my lap, and when my lap is soaked through with the ocean water, I must change my trousers in the half light and continue. When my father reads the poems, he complains that they always have to end in death;, why don’t you just leave it at that, there’s no need for the moral suicides, but I cannot help myself, it is the undiscovered country, and we all want to know, and we can’t. Perhaps, when someone dies, a star fades out and dies too. Perhaps it drops from the sky in a sombre downwards leap of faith. It is so difficult to describe, and yet I still force myself not to cry in public. Those days which bring nothing but the bland and the ordinary, the conventional everyday doom and gloom whose course we all must follow, and cannot swerve away from, they surround us and pull us down with them, down into those murky black corridors, leading to endless black staircases where blackbirds gather to take their first flight and die from fear of height before they have even left the ground. Those scratched surfaces along which I ran my fingernails, stunted growth, will remind me of that childhood which ended in a forced groan of anger, pushed from dizzying heights into my young freckled face, and made me lie face down on the bathroom floor for hours until the pattern of the lino forced its way onto my left cheek. And it is with some fondness that I recollect those few, jumbled moments of ecstasy, but to be only a child and not remember fully her face, her hair, her voice; it leaves me with such hot red agony in my gut, and however much I bring photographs so close to my face that they blur and make cross shapes, I cannot escape the fact that I never got the chance to say good bye. When you are young you do not understand consequence - the wild, crazy devil runs laps of the running track around your head -, and you care not for the outcome. We could jump off corrugated tin roofs; we could climb rope ladders into the oak tree, whose pinnacle, from the ground looked higher than Everest, but still we were not afraid. But now I must face the ordinary. The inability to move forwards without a limb or two remaining under the wet earth with you grabs me with huge boxing glove hands, pummelling me like a cotton doll, smashing out the eyes, tugging at the stringy hair and the knitted dress. So dark was that afternoon when they told me you had left without anyone being there apart from the white clad nurses and spectacled science boys with clipboards and heavy hearts, wishing that they hadn’t gone to university to learn how to save lives, because when they don’t, it forces their insides through an office paper shredder. Dying alone, is that what we are all so scared of? I would rather die alone. I think that I would inject myself with all of the rare and glutinous substances in glass bottles in the ward, and lock the door, and pop the question; we must all take this route, but will it be the scenic one? and curl up into myself and imagine that I was eight years old again, compressed into a ball in that pile of brown leaves under that same sky.

Thursday 25 March 2010

Little Bodies

i tried to write a haiku, but it spilled over into something else


shrunk into delight
i watch with eyes in mirror,
you comb my wet hair

in city sleepers,
silent cabinets echo
your name: johanna

cold hands and bathtime
towel turban. keep us warm -
soft drips on shoulders

outside the window
night erodes the garden, with
plushy yellow moon

not even the tap
is heard. midnight air chills us
to the very core

of being. damp cheeks
burn with cold; i hear the siren,
the rugged tyres

diesel bomb drops loud;
explodes. squeeze shut the exit.
exit wound, quiet death