words that loiter

Stream of consciousness

2012-02-13T22:57:00.001Z

You have cherry brandy and sticky fingers and a cold; you are alone. Quiet, don't disturb the shadows darting in the corners of the empty house. It's better this way. Sniff the air, tend to your subdued nostrils. The pink, rabbity patch beneath your nose. Poor girl, thrashing and screaming and begging for company. Or perhaps not. Perhaps that, like every other time, is a lie. This is a relief, no, to be alone? You can think of wide flower-basketed streets and not be interrupted by chatter. You can make eyes at the moon. Your foolishness is your own regard: nothing to abide by or apologise for. The cherry brandy is sweet on your tongue, too sweet, but the red wine is in the shop and the shop is far. Actually, not so far, but enough that it is outside and you have not yet quite learned to trust outside. Not now the darkness has fallen. It was one thing when it was afternoon and you were early in the day and brave with plans; it is another now you have lived with yourself for hours and seen the creature you are around the house. How to stare into the shopkeepers eyes and conduct transactions, how to make your feet step one before the other in a direction worthy of destinations: these are the problems you struggle with. No. Better to stick with the tongue-numbing cherry brandy and cackle at yourself while on the stove the potatoes bubble. Better to wait, lick your lips, run the tips of your fingers across the pads of your thumbs. Poor girl, feeling sorry for yourself because you are sickly, feeling impatient with the world because it is there. But stop: smell the burning beneath your phlegm, girl. Stop this ever-indulgent typing and take yourself to the stove.

A small room

2012-02-13T16:57:00.001Z

It is a small room, a squat, pokey room, with cushions scattered on the floor like carbuncles. It's not where you want to come back to at the end of the day. Sure, the floor is there for lounging, but something about the place seems malevolent. Something in the angle of the light, prodding its way through the windowpanes. Something about the texture of the carpet, too squidgy, like mud in the ocean. Anything could be lurking there. Waiting for your toes.

So you decide to stay out longer. You ignore the tugging of your weary body and the seductive whispers of sleep. That way madness lies. The prospect of lying with your eyes firmly shut, trying to convince yourself its nighttime, are not appealing. The prospect of waking up halfway through the night with a terrifying number of hours to wait out until sunlight. No. Better still to drink and spin until something claims you, lose your keys, toss them over your shoulder with a tinkling laugh and an eye for the gutter. Do not wait for the plop, do not think of coathangers. Run from the waiting room and find a new place to wait this black dog out.

Look: the man in the corner. His eyes are soft; his knuckles look like they have seldom been clenched. If you close your eyes, things happen faster (so the man in the fairground whispered). You are damaged goods these days. They can smell the milk curdling on your collarbones. That is why the shop assistants shirk. The best you can hope for is one that won't hurt.

Hi, you say, hey there.

Up close he is old and wrinkled. This is ok. Old men need less. Maybe? Maybe he is tired too. Maybe you can go home together and use each other's bodies to block out the silence of the night. You can take it in turns to purr a low static hum. You can swaddle yourselves in the sounds of one another's breath.

What are you drinking, you say. I'm drinking gin, you say.

You have read enough articles to know how you are supposed to behave and you can see right through them. You know about craigslist, the men who demand.

wanted: filthy cum slut fr daddym, I will satesfy you're deepest desires

Sometimes you spend hours reading them, breathless, aghast at the words spilling out like sergeant's marching orders, the list of filth, this, the same as your body, the things that you think of, the things you will do.

But he is not like this, this man, this bar is not like this. It is a nice place, the lights are dimmed to a soft, buttery glow. There are no stains on the counter. You don't squat over the toilet seat, tensing your skin not to touch.

The man, who is old and quiet and probably listens to plays on the radio, looks up at you. This is what you would like: a man who listens to plays on the radio. A man who knows the difference between ruby and tawny port. A man with soft, unhurried knuckles which close around door handles and see you through.

A gin, huh?

Yes, a gin. And tonic, and lime. Unless you think they do a gin fizz here? I've never had a gin fizz. I always used to wonder what was in a gin fizz. Do you know? Didn't you always wonder what was in a gin fizz?

Your voice is bright polished plastic. Too bright for this room. There is colour rising in your cheeks. You wonder for a moment, but this is not the kind of man who wants to see that. You do not want another one that thinks about the red rising up in your cheeks. You are exhausted. Suddenly the last thing you want is another drink. The bubbles would riot and shriek in your stomach. The blood in your neck would pulse.

Home is a small room, a squat, pokey room, with cushions scattered on the floor like carbuncles and after what happened there you are hiding, hiding from the stains he left, hiding from yours, hiding from the sound of your own voice moaning Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes.

The things that went on there are waiting for you when you wake up and you would rather be in the company of strangers, in a room with a radio play, with (if you could hope for it) coffee brewing. Pastries, even. A room with an old man, who will not look for much, who won't demand. A man who will fall asleep, soon enough.

I saw you from across the room, you say. I thought I’d come over and say hi.

New Years Resolutions That Worked Out, Part 1.

2012-02-07T10:17:00.007Z

finish more letters and get round to sending them (I have a drawer of half-written letters and unsent postcards, which are now hopelessly out of date in their news).

Tom Robbins wrote back to me. He is my hero. He told me good things about the whirlwind and the left-handed path, urged me to persist with these words of mine, and said, "Phrases such as 'New York is poised beneath a pinata full of rhinestones and laughing gas...' are among the most exciting things I've read since social networking crippled the Language Wheel." He also felt-tipped red and blue stripes on the envelope to make it airmail.

Everything is about to gallop (I am). Everything is about to explode.

The Hop

2012-02-07T10:15:00.000Z

There, listen quiet, to the moment before the hop. Knees bent, sinews gathering: the tendons are rigid and the blood posts close to the skin. Yes, there is snow on the foothills, a promise that we have not yet fled from our winter chassis. Yet. If you strain it is there: a preparation, an intake of breath, a momentary tautening before the coil kicks off. Shush. Try harder. Are you there? Are you close?

There is this: we are waiting to be sprung, to catapult our sitting room weary bodies into a sun speckled year. No more fearful indoor lurking. No sofa duvets. No naps. We are frogs who have been waiting, legs crooked, for months; we are frogs who never wanted for a kiss but will see our princesses and ping skyward. The princesses will gasp but shut up! This is not about pursed lips or brocade or golden balls rolling toward the well. This is about the sinews and the moment when our amphibian brains start to think about flight.

Snowdrops and daffodils are erupting from the soil; the sun is clawing to a point higher in the sky; and all around, wherever you look, the bears are waking up. The hummingbirds have shed their torpor. And our knees are about to straighten, our poor froglike knees giddy for the hop. We aren’t frozen; this isn’t stasis. Everything is about to happen…now.

The Wind Turbines

2012-02-01T15:18:00.003Z

New fiction at Bartleby Snopes about a girl who gets over her broken heart by going to Greece and having an affair with one of these.

Jobs? Jobs. Jobs...

2012-01-31T19:43:00.008Z

I came back from the countryside with sharp revelations, as grating as the crests of these insistent wisdom teeth: I don’t like working! I really don’t! I need to work out some other fashion of tending to my days. And, of course, tending to the other needs: martinis, trips to Alton Towers, late returned book library fines, organic stoneground heritage flour for loaves. I want to try and need less; I am learning. But still, there have to be better ways to fund this life of mine.

I have tried many, many things, which make my mother wonder how to explain to me to the neighbours. I slant and slip and struggle over attempts to herd off a career. I am ever-fearful of waking up trapped in conventional employment, pulling on unsnagged tights for the office, painting my face in a vestige of the normal woman.

So many jobs I have slithered into: Switzerland silver service waitress, barkeep, kitchen manager, token NY hipster bar Scot, Scottish Water site quality control technician, venue founder/manager, business director, European Voluntary Service project manager, arts collective administrator, mentor, used underwear saleswoman, $5 per 500 words article writer, tutor, proofreader, ebook composer, writer, writer, writer.

Actually, I like to pretend the writing is a job. The money I have made from it adds up, over the past decade, as something in the region of three grand. I hear the yelp of the dayjob howling at my coat tatters; I start typing CVs at my computer lest I have to face the world outside; I become immersed in other people’s semi-colons and develop a fury over the written word.

I thought I had sorted out what I want here, but there is a deeply wedged splinter in my palms that whines it’s inappropriate to get a first class Masters in Philosophy and then do nothing, do little, do service industry positions.

I think it is wrong. I know it is. All I want to do it make things up. I am yearning for time, an empty head, no more computers. I wish the entrails of the internet would explode. I wish I would stop making excuses.

I am grateful for small things, however. I work in long pink socks and neon skirts, I work in lingerie, I work naked under a downy January duvet that keeps the draughts from my toes. I am going to stop now and take myself to a public house to spend money I didn't make today because I was besotted with the wrong internet things.

I know, I know! But I have a good feeling things are going to work out fine.

This afternoon at 15.45

2012-01-27T13:41:00.003Z

There is this story by me on Radio 4!

Tune in, listen, dust flour, bake bread, and forgive everyone everything.

A Week In The Countryside

2012-01-26T17:00:00.005Z

I wrote and I raked and I tended the gardens. I finished stories that needed finishing. I started new ones that needed told. I also drank booze and kept ridiculous diaries. Here are some choice excerpts:

Thursday

Well Jane. Here you are. Here is something new. I have a great idea (from now on, all great ideas must be pre-announced to the abyss, a hangover from too long living with someone else, someone oblivious to the myriad of crazy that flitters through my brain. I am traversing endless tundra, leaping from precarious rocks of inclination to jagged hooks of ideas. Sometimes everything goes so fast and so far from the original conversation I feel I have to justify things, like stepping out your door and your disobedient feet carrying on their way until they show up all the way across town, like seeing someone there you know, like saying hi, like them asking what you’re doing, like having to tell them in words that aren’t quite true but just the best approximation of reasons that can be passed on like cards, downturned lest you see the face. Anyway), a new project…

Friday

Alone, I feel I want to talk about the strangeness of my own body, mine again, not in a filthy way: I mean mine to cut onions. I mean a new kitchen, different drawers, no half-finished bottles, no old dazed dried herbs. A brand new thing with only that which I place into it. Do you understand? It’s everything. It’s no chopping board, me cutting on a plate, slipping with the knife. It’s a lack of stock: the cubes or the metaphor, the simmering things that stick around, adding flavour. I am alone in the kitchen and I feel powerful. I see myself without splashes of balsamic and dashes of worcestershire and I cook, and I am impressed. I feel like a powerful creature, scooped from my cosy home. This is how I feel away from my sourdough starters and spice drawers: strong. I feel like a woman who has etched her slate clean and is starting again and can do it. This is the way I feel too, when I pin scarves and frocks to the wall when we check into soulless hotels. But no thought of that now. What I am trying to say is that I would like to talk of women starting again. Of blank, beige walls. Of what you find when you open a door to an empty room. Of when it stays that way. Of the first moment, the intake of breath, looking around: this is mine now. My mistakes are my own decisions.

Saturday

I wonder about taking the duvet into this room and putting down on my hands and my knees and pushing my head beneath it, pretending to be a cat. No one would need to see me and it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t make a very good cat, I could just get down there and roll on the carpet. The duvet would feel soft against my head. I could tease the air. Me and the duvet could be other things: not human. It would be a duvet and I would be a cat. I know it doesn’t need me to go in on this to pretend to be part of it, but I cross my fingers anyway and hope that when I go through there and ask, it will be open to the idea, it will be excited, it will be willing to say YES. That is all I am looking for, in truth. For the inanimate objects around me to agree to my terms, for a while at least. For them to say ok. For us to curl together instead of fighting and know that we are not cats, neither of us, but we are on the floor, rolling, laughing, coughing, confused, falling asleep.

Sunday

Cast deep into the woods, I was bewitched by fire. Hello Prometheus, I smell your bulb of fennel, scorched and of the earth. Come close, lickety orange tongues: come closer. Let me feel your breath of my face. Let me taunt you with my curves and caresses. Let me plunge my wrists deep into your waiting embrace. I am giddy for the smell, feral for it, wild dogs and blood. I want to set things alight. Who could blame me? I nearly died, I tell you, I nearly died. We gagged on smoke. I cannot tell this story enough. Sometimes I think it is my only story, my defining moment: I nearly died. You do not understand because you have never nearly died. Or if you have: you do not understand because you cannot understand other stories, you only have one story, your story of how you nearly died. How is it so bright, so orange, a cracked ring of light around the rock in the embers? Hack, hiss, pssst, furor. God, I want my teeth in flesh. I am bored of London. I was never besotted by its streets. This city does not smell like home. I want to draw blood. Not my own. Someone else can draw that. I would also like to be destroyed; I would like to feel my life is still capable of destroying. I know my life is capable of destruction. Goddamit, just let me scream.

Monday

Re-calibrating. I like this thought. I think of Mary Gaitskill talking of being a prostitute: I didn’t do much writing then. I was working on reforming my personality. Sometimes we need to step back and reboot. That is fine. I can’t fucking believe how beige this room is. If anything, the few tiny things make it worse. Teapots in the shelves. Fuck that. My next room will be the most gaudy thing you have ever seen. There, my soul might be quiet. There will be pink neon and red light bulbs and all kinds of tat and trash. I will have a wind-up radio and feather boas nailed to the walls. Ostrich feathers! Anyway. I feel rebooted. So much thinking. What else to do? My god, these walls are beige…

…Sitting on worksurfaces makes me feel fabulous. More of this please. I think my brain is happy to be getting drunk early on a Monday night. I am scrurried and delightful, crosslegged in the kitchen. I am setting fire to matches to see how long I can hold them for; I am sniffing them exuberantly. I love the Strokes! I remember being fifteen. I thought this album would last forever. Oh that feeling. I wanted everything I have now and now I am thinking of then with envy. Imagine telling that Jane about the things you did in New York. She would lose her hyperbolic, delicious, teenage mind.

Tuesday

You are lonely: let me tell you about the smell of the rain. I know you keep your doors closed tight in a storm like this, windows buttoned; I know how you plug the gaps to keep out the drips and draughts. You needn’t. The rain will never hurt you, little thing, even if you leave a crack for it to penetrate. Did you ever think: maybe the rain is lonely too? Well, no. The rain is not lonely. The rain is something that needs nothing. This is all you want: to be something that needs nothing. But here you are, stuck with your body, endlessly hungering, thirsting, longing, roaring. You try to be still and small and unobserved, but here you are, needing.

Feel that drip? That drip is for you. Hear the purr and patter? Those are for you. Smell the rain. Breathe in its heavy, mineral scent. The smell of the slithering moss on the back wall of the cave, of dank forest, undisturbed. That is for you.

Nobody is asking you to hide. You are not something that needs nothing--so go, scream and wail and gnash your teeth, yowl with the wind, gather your bulk like the thickening clouds. Grab and snatch, take take take with your small-knuckled hands. Or just collapse before them and demand that they see: you are something that needs, oh God, you are something that needs. Tell them this, make them see. Let yourself fall upon the earth, thunderously, like rain.

Wednesday

Here is something to say: I am done with the working week. Done. Let’s put Kate Bush on the stereo. Let’s run up hills in the raging storms; let’s fling our heads and let the hailstones tangle in our curls. Are you really happy with this all, this? Can you hold your ever-throbbing heart up to the light and see the beams shine through its sinews and say “yes, it’s enough”? You can? Well: fuck you. I want a million things more. I want to be raging, I want to tornado along the point where the waves meet the sand--the twilight scorching holes in the hems of our frocks, the rum trickling down our chins. Time to gather our tasks and our tax returns, to stack them and douse them and tango round the pyre. Sweetheart, it’s time. No more fucking around. Let’s yoke our fate to the wriggle of the charmed snake, rising from the basket. Let’s cast our die with the degenerates, the decadents, the howling wolves with blood on their muzzles. Areeow! Please: take me some place I can rip out my bones and fling them in the ocean, leave them to be battered by tempests till they wash up bleached and perfect on the shore. Take me to the crater where the guts of the Earth roil, so I can lean over and cackle and wait for everything to erupt. I don’t think this is too much to ask. I am sick of: pretending to be normal; career negotiations; considered email replies. Goddamit, I am bored of the Internet. From now on, I am eschewing Wikipedia in favour of constellations, ley lines, and filthy gossip. I am giving up Google and taking up pawing the soil.

Can someone buy me this book please?

2012-01-18T13:34:00.003Z

via erosblog

What today was about.

2012-01-16T19:22:00.003Z

Builders, too early, playing xylophone with scaffolding rods; fresh baked bagels with prosciutto, mozzarella, and vine tomatoes; morello cherry hair dye, smears on my face, redhead Jane; an endless scalding bath with baobab/bubbles; a package in the post to Mark; Stereo Total!; the swooning reality of seeing this online; a mission to find the perfect martini ratio; oh my martini; this typing is going nowhere; other things; wow, catholics, you kinksters; udon noodle prawn mushroom broth; STEREO TOTAL!

please do not cut your negatives into singles

2012-01-11T19:50:00.002Z

We request that you keep your negatives in one large chunk, all the better to debilitate yourself with. None of this whittling down, please, none of the culture of bite-by-bite. We’ve watched you; we’ve seen your sort of game.

Please do not allocate favours to your weary body at the crest of a long, long day. No hot bath, no vervain and peppermint tea, no well-lit amateur pornography, no directionless piano tinkling, no rubs—foot, head, or otherwise—, no oversized beanbag cushion spilling your body to the floor.

Stand erect, sit hunched. Fight your muscles to keep your body heavy and tight. Run your tongue across the texture of your teeth until it blisters. Wage a hate campaign with the flavour of your mouth. Swear with small, bitter capers, sat in vinegar too long.

See the point where the skin on your thumb meets your nail? Feel that smug, satisfied corner of flesh? Pick it off. Peel slivers of skin until a ruby of blood forms. Chastise yourself. Pick it more.

Please do not cut your negatives into singles. Remain false; stay quiet. Get back to work.

Good things in things: a list.

2012-01-10T17:56:00.002Z

Cotton buds in the ears; boys in superhero pants; toys in a hot shower; books in the bath.

Postcards in letterboxes; work in the past tense; red bulbs in spotlights; loo rolls in the loo.

Fountain pen in the pocket; bookmarks in your place; over-the-knee socks in the bedroom.

Mushrooms in a wet field; red apple in a pig’s mouth; Trout Fishing in America.

how soon is now

2012-01-10T14:08:00.003Z

Burrowing my way out from the beginning of the year, trying to break through the surface into space. I have been scrabbling; the soft dirt keeps capsizing on my face. All the work I thought was finished has been returned—post haste!—to edit again.

Unspace the em-dashes! Chicago-style citations! Thuses and therefores, suchlikes and neverthelesses. I swear, I would be happy if I never read the words “this writer thinks” again.

I am choking on this work, I am knackered, I feel not fit for this world. Everything crumbles like chalk that can’t handle the foundations, like Victorian plasterwork trying to stand up to the drill. I’ve been drinking too much the moment the laptop lid finally closes and I’ve been tamping peppermint and ginger on the nauseous mornings. Veering from delirium to dejection at another 10,000 words to go.

However, there is also the knowledge that this is not forever. I am taking a break now. I am thinking of metaphors. The characters I have tucked in the desk drawer have been mewling, scrubbling, yowling for attention. “Hush hush,” I’ve been saying. “I’ll be there soon.”

Well, an etymological aside: the word soon was the Anglo-Saxon word for now, it’s just that years of people saying “I’ll do it soon” and taking a while left it meaning something else. Same with moment, the smallest conceivable amount of time; same with anon, Old English for instantly. Soon, soon will mean in the future, then some day we’ll wake up and it’ll be never.

I fucking love etymology, but I’m tired of contributing to the creep.

Time to stem this, reclaim the soon as now. Time to get back to the things that keep me whole: hot oven loaves, over-stretched metaphors, handwritten postcards, outdoor swimming, gruyere.

I’m off to the countryside to dig flowerbeds and conjure words from the air.

arreowwww.

2012-01-03T11:59:00.007Z

For Hogmanay, I wore a full dalmatian suit, made a fire in the woods, and howled at the cockerels and the moon. The trees seemed pretty benevolent to me. Leaning over us and chuckling great belly laughs. Muttering about mycelium.

Whenever we wandered from our clearing (I did not do this much; I was chief keeper of the flames) the fire beckoned us back with a spill of rubies and amber, with coiled fairy lights, with a glow and a grin.

It was the right way to end a year, for sure.

This year has been mighty pleasurable. In January I moved to London, pretending it was because of a job interview, realising it was about a boy. I filled his bedroom with polaroids and red silk shoes and naked photographs of myself. I got a desk. I wrote stories and poems and filled the windowsills with flowerpots to look at. We kept going on holiday and all the flowers kept dying. It was worth it: the holidays were delightful.

I got acceptances from dancing girl press, wigleaf, Bartleby Snopes, the delinquent, Bound Off, Subtle Fiction, Metazen, Wilderness House Literary Review, Gutter, and Foundling Review and I got commissioned to write things by the BBC and Conveyor Arts magazine and I got personal rejections with compliments from some places I yearn for, including Glimmer Train. I think the fact I am excited about rejections makes me a better writer than this time last year.

I'm reminding myself of these things now because there was so much time this year spent screaming into the abyss and wondering if what was coming back was an echo or a response. Sometimes, it seems pointless to bother. There are so so so many more rejections than otherwise, and truthfully, I'd rather be making up tales than peddling them. But! It is so very nice when it all works out.

And now resolutions:

* go on more dates with myself and my notebook. Boys are all very nice, but I miss hanging out with myself.

* take a writing retreat holiday to a cheap cottage/room somewhere internet-free and finish my book.

* learn to brew beer and wine.

* take more showers. (I forget that I like running water and stay curled in old warm clothes all day, never quite waking up, dosing myself with coffee.)

* buy more Euthymol toothpaste (let's face it, mint is a rubbish way for a mouth to taste).

* have stories published in The Collagist and PANK.

* do some readings in London and some in Berlin.

* stop skimming over Latin quotations, poetry and lists in books.

* finish more letters and get round to sending them (I have a drawer of half-written letters and unsent postcards, which are now hopelessly out of date in their news).

Happy 2012 anyway, I hope you spent the eve of it delirious and the rest of it delighted.

wigleaf!

2011-12-28T17:52:00.002Z

Here is a short piece about caterpillars, peacocks and the new world.

Enjoy and happy christmas and new year and other things you like.

Subtle Fiction

2011-12-19T14:37:00.002Z

New work online, at Subtle Fiction, shaazaaam!

also, I just finished all my editing work before Christmas!

also, I just got an acceptance from Bartleby Snopes! (on this year's lust-list for publishing things)

also, there is this picture of a buffalo swimming:

the delinquent!

2011-12-14T10:19:00.005Z

Get your hands on issue 16 here and read some poems of mine.

who can?

2011-11-29T20:36:00.001Z

It’s dark so early. Who can concentrate on work? I sit at my desk and watch the clouds conspire, and then all of a sudden the day is gone. I’ve barely looked over the business plan I’m supposed to be researching. Every time I try, I swoon with tedium. And I can’t-stop-clicking on the internet.

I bought new lightbulbs: red for the winter. Actually, ‘fireglow’. They are bayonet, a word which always seems too harsh for lampshades. They make our skin morello-cherry-lickable when we skulk back to bed in the afternoon. I pretend I’m a girl in an Amsterdam window; I reek of frankincense oil and rosemary from the afternoon in the bath.

So yes, who can concentrate on work?

Miranda July’s new book came in the post lately, and I am inordinately happy. She’s my favourite. There is this:

“I was writing a screenplay in the little house. I wrote it at the kitchen table, or in my old bed with its thrift-store sheets. Or, as anyone who has tried to write anything recently knows, these are the places where I set the stage for writing but instead looked things up online. Some of this could be justified because one of the characters in my screenplay was also trying to make something, a dance, but instead of dancing she looked up dances on YouTube. So, in a way, this procrastination was research. As if I didn’t already know how it felt: like watching myself drift out to sea, too captivated by the waves to call for help. I was jealous of older writers who had gotten more of a toehold on their discipline before the web came. I had gotten to write only one script and one book before this happened.”

Nevertheless, I’m feeling happy in the company of words. Suddenly I don’t have any deadlines for writing and I have innumerable deadlines for work, so obviously I am writing writing writing, entering anthology contests, making up new words, and new plots, and character people.

Also, I read some of the novel I wrote a few Novembers ago and felt heady for those kind of word flurries. It wasn’t as bad as I had worried it might be. Maybe one of these days, I’ll start the edit.

slut myth

2011-11-29T12:33:00.004Z

Hurrah & hell yes.

the soil, the sky.

2011-11-27T19:22:00.001Z

An orange airplane is accelerating across a sky unsullied by weather. It revs its engine and the tailfin gets hooked in a catch in the atmosphere. Things start to unravel. The plane is a zip, the trails are teeth, and they part in a yawn from so many years of keeping mum. It is a belly yawn, a yawn for the pure of heart. No coy hands here, shading the tonsils. I try to feel horror: a chasm is spreading across the sky. We’re finally going to see what was behind the ziplock all along.

However, all I can think is, this soil is so quiet. This afternoon is not the right one for the apocalypse. Listen carefully, there’s no panic down there with the worms. Maybe it’s just an earthquake in the heavens. Maybe the angels grew tired of being so lofty. Maybe from now on, we’ll all be in this together.

Would you prefer, when it comes, for it to be the soil or the sky? Do you fear chasms beneath your feet or a fracture in the endless snowglobe? I can’t help but wonder what would happen if this ball of atmosphere were fumbled and a hairline crack appeared. First, small beads of condensation. A drip. A dribble. A flow. A gush. And then all of us spill into space, fire apart like mercury, giddy as Icarus, breathless as scuba divers, weightless, endless, dead.

Today, I feel like filament. Not sturdy enough for the world. I temper a three-day hangover with small kindnesses: Bolivian alpaca wool gloves, sweetcorn and cheddar fritters, sweet chilli tea with honey. I let myself reread my favourite short stories from the umpteenth time. I let myself use the word umpteenth. I wander idly through blog posts about kink, newspaper articles about scientists’ tattoos and wigleaf’s short short stories.

The tattoos are paltry. The smut is comforting. I am endlessly delighted by this.

good things happening soon

2011-11-22T11:50:00.003Z

I have stories and poems forthcoming in Subtle Fiction, the delinquet, Bound Off and wigleaf; I have pumpkin pie and creamed onions forthcoming in Thanksgiving dinner; I have kisses and coffee forthcoming in bed.

the water

2011-11-08T14:49:00.001Z

Right after everything ended, I started thinking about the future. There were kites, kites flying haphazardly around a sky punctuated by white puffs of cloud. The clouds were hookah rings waiting for their turn to lasso the sun. They did not elbow one another, they did not scramble. These were the most patient of clouds.

In their youth, the clouds had been trickles of spring water oozing from a shiny black rock on the mountaintop. They had beaded, gathered forces, pulled together into a seep. Started the long wander down like Moses descending with a carved stone, full of importance, realising, full of what was to come next.

The first drip was the Pied Piper marauding from a village that had wronged him. The next drips followed like slack-jawed children promised something better: a song. We cannot blame them; who could? Who wouldn't drop it all in favour of feet that could dance?

They tumbled down the mountain and they gathered. Soon, there were tiny waterfalls tumbling like glittered cloaks. Down the mountain, faster, feel your feet. They were still small, they burbled rather than gushed. But they were coming.

Over a precipice and into a pool. Hello, fellow stream. Where have you been, what have you seen, where are we going, what comes next? Gravity pushing like an ambitious mother, a hand in the small of your back. The ballet recital is about to commence. Your partner hasn't arrived. No worries. Move.

The water started to feel like it was on horseback. It heard its own rumble and it dreamt of the thunder of hooves. It thought of words like "inexorable" and "destiny". The water let itself believe in a bigger picture. We shiver to talk about the grand plan, about God, but this is what the water was thinking. Don't mock the water. You've never felt yourself rush like that, never felt yourself gush and current.

The water reached the place where things were flatter and it sighed and stretched out like an expat dabbing his lips after a thirteen-course Romanian banquet. The belt was loosened, the notches slipped. "Ahh," said the water, and it slipped on. And still it rolled downwards, gathering, giggling, head-over-heels-over-head, we're at a picnic, your knees are stained emerald, there's twigs in your hair, I kiss you, the earth wriggles, we cackle down the hill with our elbows tucked tight. There is no bottom for the kind of fall we are attempting.

The water found the delta. The water ran its hands over the surface skin of the earth and the water sought out places to probe. The lazier water sighed and sank into pillows of moss, closed its damp eyes, fell into a dream of flying, of clouds, of fog. The majority continued to stomp. Look, there: the sea.

In the distance was a horizon where the migrating water finally settled, finally bred. The water hurried. At the end of the scurry was the ultimate in writhing. The waters sloshed, they gurgled: hiccup, splish, glug. The sea was drenched. Sodden. The water ran under and over itself, the water soaked. The water exhaled a breath it had long been holding.

The sun would not stop beating. A punch drunk chef with his whisk in the eggs; an addled dartsman forever flinging to the bull. And the air grew warmer, and the compositions changed.

The water resisted. But the sun was hot and the water felt its heart grow lighter. And then the water wondered why it would ever pause, the water gasped, the water took off its steel toe-capped boots and let itself hover. The air was comfortable. A post-coital embrace. A hot bath after a difficult interview. Shortbread, warm from the oven and crumbling.

If the water had ever been scuba-diving and ever felt the moment of realisation of flying, controlling the rise and fall of its body with a balance of breath, if this, then the water would say that this feeling now, this is like that.

The water is rising, not as water, as mist. Air. Particles. The water cannot believe how blue the sky is and is almost embarrassed to think it will become part of that, it will stain it with its whimsy.

The water has reached the roof of the sky, and the water particles, embarrassed, are huddling together. It is like the beginning of an office away day bonding session where the organisers chirrup, “Split up from your friends, now, let's all form a new group, ready for the first exercise.” The water cannot bring itself to do it.

The water coddles together and becomes clouds and the clouds are the most patient in the sky. You have never seen such patient clouds, or maybe you have, maybe they all are, but you have never been this patient. The water has been drops of rain and it has fallen on mountains and it has become the tiniest stream and it has gathered and become more than that and it has carried on until they are all oceans and you listen to this like it is the corniest cliché you have ever heard and maybe you would be right, maybe you are, but my heart feels like it is caught in a bulldog clip and I am staring at the world, and I don't know. It feels like something, there is something happening. I feel I could be breathless. I look to the sky.

write like a motherfucker

2011-11-05T11:06:00.002Z

Advice you need to read, if you haven't already.

"Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig."

leaves

2011-11-05T10:52:00.001Z

November has started and I promised I’d write, so here are words, take them, remove them from my hands before I worry them like a matchbox in a pocket on a day of bad news.

I am giddy for autumn, delirious for the leaves. I don’t ever want it to stop. Their offerings seem paltry, here in the suburban streets. Pitiful bundles of rust and tangelo and amber, kicking around the ankles of cars. I need to flee to the forest.

Imagine they kept falling. Picture it in time-lapse photography. To the hubcaps; to the windows; over the roof. It is not like the purification of fresh snow. We let the city go to scrub and crackle.

The leaves are pages of Gideon’s bibles torn from the spine. Their words crumple into the streets, they are trodden on. They turn from gold to mud.

The leaves are the dandruff of the trees. The wind pummels and the trees dance furiously as the end of the party draws near. They thrash and toss their heads and the flecks scatter.

The leaves are telegrams sent from the branches to the wind, saying, “it’s over stop don’t send kisses stop forget me.” They send the same message every hour for a season. The wind finds no reason to pause.

Flee to the forest, that’s what we must do, wrap up with rabbit-fur muffs and flasks of hot, spiced wine. Pull our boots to our knees and our striped socks higher. My cheeks ruddy, my pockets full of pencils, my lips gnawed and cracked. Listen for the snap of leaves beneath your toes. Ask the undergrowth its plans for the fall.

my birthday: what I ate, in order of consumption

2011-10-31T11:47:00.002Z

a dill pickle bloody mary; three oysters with lemon and tabasco; blue cheese; labneh; black coffee; scrambled eggs with turkish bread and green tomato salsa; coffee infused tequila; tiramisu; another dill pickle bloody mary; gin and tonic; blue cheese infused bourbon; more coffee tequila; prawn crackers; prosecco; salt & pepper squid; chicken & sweetcorn soup; sweetcorn spring rolls; frogs legs with lemongrass and chilli; sliced beef pho with coriander, beansprouts and lime; king prawns in tamarind; breton cidre; vietnamese coffee; more gin; white wine; other things, other things, limoncello... sweet chilli chicken pizza and cider, sleep.

Budgeting

2011-10-26T20:10:00.002+01:00

We are trying to budget for winter, so when the spring comes we can flee. This means lentil stews so thick they purr; this means burrowed deep under duvet by sunset.

Our concept of hardship is wobbly and unstudied. I look upon misery like a spoilt Victorian child marvelling at the quaintness of poverty. I keep it at bay with my talismans: soft warm skin, woollen socks, fairylights in the fireplace.

The kitchen is still stacked with booze from the last party. “Let’s budget,” we say, while I mix rosemary vodka martinis. I am working more in the day: more tutoring, more manuscripts to edit. I remind myself to make time to write. I need to get up earlier, look to November as a prospect for thousands of words.

Today the BBC said they’d put the contract in the post, and I am giddy.

I reread Paul Auster’s Hand to Mouth and give up on the idea of needing to suffer. I let myself be looked after, let him do the dishes, or let them all stack up while we scurry to separate rooms and make the things we make. Loops from his studio are seeping through the walls.

Every jam jar in the house is full of things infusing: chilli chocolate tequila, lemongrass and ginger tequila, beetroot vodka, dill pickle jalapeno vodka, pecan butter bourbon, blue cheese bourbon, popcorn rum, brown butter cinnamon rum. The kitchen smells of charred popcorn and all the pans are dirty.

Dancing Girl Press said they’d send me the galleys mid-November, and everything is so fucking wonderful I am terrified to say it aloud, lest I jinx it all.

Tempelhof

2011-10-25T09:23:00.004+01:00

There is something about Berlin that feels like the future. I don’t mean the shiny future; I don’t mean the Tokyo one of spaceships and retina scanners and tailored silicon. I mean the post-future future where the streets become wide instead of tall, a freeshop is planted on every corner, tendrils of smoke trickle back to the bars and the keys of the city are handed to a team of shamanistic allstars. Perhaps, I am talking about Utopia.

/

We cycled to the abandoned airport, Tempelhof. Our bikes were solid and upright and moved with all the grace of a young drum major on her way to her first parade. We needed them. At the end of the runway, we revved our feet to the sun.

It was late in the afternoon and the light was golden and piercing, a light specific to the first cold snap of autumn (my favourite moment in the year). The sky was studded with kites of every colour so far away they looked like holes snipped out of the fabric of the world. Some of them were attached to skateboards and the kite-flyers swung their strings and danced across the runway: a foxtrot led by the wind.

At one end of the runways, two or three kilometres away, stood the airport building. It was a horseshoe shape, proud, sprawling; like the Toronto subway font, it seemed part of the past and the future all at once. But the Nazis built it, and these days the building is closed.

At the other end, in the tufts of grass between where the planes turned, the ground is taken over by ramshackle allotments. Broken bathtubs overgrown with cabbages. Packing crates wrenched apart and hammered into freestanding doorframes. CDs winking to the crows and the largest crop of parsley I’d ever seen. James said, When we live here, I’ll build you one. We talked about sugar snap peas and green tomato chutney and the thirty-five year waiting list we were handed by the London council. We turned towards the setting sun.

The wind was pelting down the runway but we three turned our bikes and revved our feet and hammered towards a horizon where sunbeams bounced like the arcades. Panting, thighs pumping, the wind hollering expletives. The Nazi building grew closer, infinitesimally, the kites had our backs. Then we got to the top and we turned.

There was something about Berlin that felt like the future. There, then, at that exact moment: suddenly the wind behind me, the airport given over to a post-apocalyptic utopia, plants tended in the cracks. I kept my tire to the white line. I pedalled. Faster. The world whipped past my peripheries and the hefty palms of the gales shoved in the small of my back. I cycled as far and as fast as I could, until the end of the runway where I stopped and circled and waited for the boys.

excellent news

2011-10-15T19:01:00.002+01:00

My poetry chapbook is going to be published by a beautiful Chicago press and I've been commissioned by the BBC to write a short story and it's about to be my birthday and I'm in Berlin and everything is utterly fantastic. Yes!

oh, amanda

2011-10-11T23:08:00.009+01:00

Sometimes I read too many Amanda Knox articles and it worries me. I start thinking that if I were ever near somewhere where something terrible happened, I’d react wrongly. Whatever did or didn’t happen, I’d be judged by kissing a boy afterwards or giggling when giggling was Not The Right Thing To Do.

I know my reactions to major events. I’ve been rescued from a burning building and I’ve stood on an altar and said, “I do.” I’ve had the one of those operations. I know my take on the serious things, the things where it’s been decided how ladies are supposed to react. I do it wrong.

You’re not supposed to come out of things too alive. Or too sexual. You’re not supposed to have been drunk in your past (or your present), you’re not supposed to flirt, you’re not supposed to smile, you’re not supposed to continue living with your flesh and salacious female existence.

I don’t mean that I’ve ever been stopped from doing these things. I’ve always been surrounded by the kind of degenerates and delightfuls who yank me from what life flings and pass the cava and stroke my hair and make it fine.

I also know obviously these are in no way comparable situations. That’s not the point. The point is that the things on which you can be judged are that you were once drunken on youtube or that you sought comfort in someone’s arms.

The fact is that the points in your life when you are vulnerable can be whipped out and polished like snowglobes, hardened, coated in a thick resin, and presented as who you truly are. And it turns out you’re evil.

A skirmish, a sunbeam, and a surrender

2011-09-23T11:07:00.005+01:00

A first nonsensical draft of something, just something, just words to get the day started like coffee. Without either I'm sluggish and my brain isn't the brain I want to be dealing with. My thoughts are old glue and stagnant puddles and melted butter left to congeal and tease fruit flies. Three thoughts this came from: the word "skirmish" as repeated on my tongue while brewing coffee, skirmish like scaramouch, like fandango. The sunbeam that has taken over my desk, mmmn, morning warmth. And a soft surrender, the good kind, like held wrists or falling eyelids.

-------------------------------------

A skirmish, a sunbeam, and a surrender. Grappling on the crest of the hill: eager paws, arse over tit, hands in the hair. She thinks that maybe she loves him and this could be it. Happiness. A giddy heart like sprawl of daisies, like a plastic tugboat in a summer puddle, like a promise folded between scented papers in the secret pocket at the side of her bag.

A skirmish, a sunbeam, and a surrender. Her shriek is a riot in the town of seagulls and when they kiss their gravities switch. They coo and capsize, down the hill, they tumble. Grass stains on her wrists like rope burns; grass in her hair. The bumblebees are sweating. When they bounce on the rocks, he kisses harder.

A skirmish, a sunbeam, and a surrender. You’re falling, girl, you’re head over heels, and at the bottom of the hill lie bruises. So, you pick yourself up by the scruff of your neck, shake your kittenish frame, and you carry the remains to where it’s shady, where you lay yourself down, where you sleep.

Conveyor Arts, part 2

2011-09-15T09:18:00.003+01:00

In the second part of the Words With Pictures project, I wrote a poem about skiving and Leif took this lush photo to go with it.

on writer's block

2011-09-15T09:14:00.003+01:00

"I'm not convinced that there's any such thing as "writer's block." I suspect that what we like to call "writer's block" is actually a failure of nerve or a failure of imagination, or both.

If you're willing to take chances, risk ridicule, and push the envelope, and if you've managed to hold on to your imagination (the single most important quality a writer can possess, even slightly more important than an itchy curiosity and a sense of humor), then you can dissolve any so-called block simply by imagining extraordinary, heretofore unthinkable solutions, and/or by playing around uninhibitedly with language. You can imagine a wordplay your way out of any impasse. That's assuming, of course, that you're talented in the first place."

Tom Robbins, asked by New Times: "What Do You Think Writer's Block Is and Have You Ever Had It?"

Shonen KNIFE!

2011-09-12T11:26:00.007+01:00

I got to see them last night at Scala and I nearly burst my stiches trying to dance on the spot and not mosh, then being overcome with tremulous sixteen-year-old-thrash excitement, chastised by Helen, bah-bah-bah KAPOW.

They do not bear serious review because they don't make me feel serious; I'm not going to analyse "I'm going to eat jelly jelly jelly jelly jelly jelly jelly jelly beans, you're going to eat cherry cherry cherry cherry cherry cherry cherry cherry drops!" because it is clear to me that is awesome and if you don't agree you've probably never been a teenage girl experiencing music as a series of electric shocks wired between your yelps and your skin.

I am also happy that my two favourite hyperactive girl groups (see also: Helen Love) have alternative universe lives as Ramones cover tribute bands (and that the encore last night was Sheena Is A Punk Rocker and Blitzkrieg Bop).

Things move quickly at that bpm, feet are happy, space foods are marshmallow, asparagus, ice cream!

Also, the singer is 51. What? They look seventeen.

the storm

2011-09-10T11:00:00.003+01:00

It is pouring outside, thick thunderstorm weather, growling skies. Weather like curds of cheese left in a muslin bag to rot. I can taste the rain. I can taste the meat of the earth on the water, the soil that has soaked into the clouds. Stinking, fetid weather like all the best things; ripe. Weather that howls in guttural tones. Air that bites back.

I am eating a hunk of meat while I watch the storm. The meat is barely cooked and there is blood dribbling down my chin like I have buried my lips in a menstrual Medusa. The crust was seared on a flame so hot the guardians of hell shivered at its sight: charred and black and crumbling. It is coal. It is the crusts of lava from a weeping volcano. I let it burn my tongue. My flesh sears with the meat and the blood oozes out to coat it like redemption. I baptise the soft pink skin of my mouth with the dead meat of the beast. We are wild and feral like that afternoon on Arthur's Seat, fucking in the undergrowth, mocking the skies to take us.

Remember shouting at lightning to get the better of it; remember immortality with a wire coathanger; remember, it won't get you unless you ask it to, and to ask you have to scream.

I am screaming out the window because I am tired of the cotton warmth of downy duvet home. I think of lashes and lashing rain. Demeter is pissed off. I have lightning bolts in a drawer that were crafted from the bones of dead goats and voodoo incantations. If the neighbours complain I will smite them. Their hair will sizzle and their eyes will roll back in their heads until they can see the thoughts which swim behind the blanket. Like Lot's wife, they are not fit to handle such sights. I will lick their salt when they freeze and it will pickle the flesh around my teeth. My burnt gums will crumble like soil left to the worms. My teeth will slump in their sockets. I will end up staring at the pavement in horror and delight, wondering at the mess I have got myself into.

Barking like a fucking dog, growling like the bear that got the man's head in his teeth. I hear they were picking shards of the bear's incisors out for weeks. His skull was studded, no thoughts left in his brain that do not jangle.

I am looking at the sky and it seems bigger than me and I'm scared: too much lairy behaviour, such a loose tongue with the Gods. I know if it chose to it could lift me up with a creased tongue and scoop my remains to the cumulonimbus, toss this shaken body around its electric trampolines.

I'll bounce back.

‘I've got elastic bands for bones,’ I yell, ‘my skin is mercury, my balls scatter and reform.’

While the sky listens to me shrieking, and sighs.

Conveyor Arts

2011-09-07T19:00:00.005+01:00

I was asked to do some writing for Conveyor Arts magazine's Words With Pictures project:

Words with Pictures is a weekly two-part post that pairs photographers and writers. The first week, a writer is given a photograph to inspire the creation of a new piece of writing. The following week the photographer is given a piece of writing and responds with a new photographic piece. This series is curated by Conveyor Editor Dominica Paige.

Read my writing and look at Leif Huron's photograph here.

sick, sick, sick

2011-09-06T18:30:00.004+01:00

I've been sick, which is not something I'm used to. I mean, not really.

I am familiar (hand-in-hand, skipping-through-the-field familiar) with hangover sick. I know first-thing-in-the-morning sick, I know dehydrated eyes and slack tongues and a fear of facing the world. I know you-don't-brush-your-teeth-enough, your-gums-are-bleeding sick and ate-all-the-bad-Vietnamese sick and third world travel dyspepsia. Thick head colds to tease out with steaming lentil soup rife with garlic. Cat-claws in the back of the throat. Shivery sweats making Rosarsch patterns on the bedsheets. But...

I've not been hospital sick before and this week I was because my appendix exploded. I ignored it because I have an innate and foolish belief that most all illness can be cured by solitude, quiet, herbal tea, and soup. I figure if I stop taunting my immune system with sleeplessness and espresso and whisky when it whines, then it will take heed and sort me out. Unfortunately not.

Anyway, I will be at home for a while convalescing and writing, propped up in bed with too many pillows, affecting a wan 19th-century-heroine expression (instead of going to Bestival and dancing around like a loon). I plan to write an essay about pain and edit together some delirious night-sweat notes into something poemlike, and see how my body reacts to a week off the booze. I may also eat large quantities of ice cream, particularly this one.

collaborate

2011-08-22T16:06:00.003+01:00

Does anyone want to? Pictures/music/words/film/challenges/postcards/cartoons. Etc. I could do with the impetus for productivity and also, it's really really fun.

some good things

2011-08-17T14:22:00.006+01:00

I am feeling dapper about writing at the moment, which is fortunate, because the world of work seems to have taken a hiatus: cancelled copyediting projects; children no longer in need of a tutor; online interviews that tag back and forth and haggle and confirm, before disappearing one morning into the internet abyss, never to answer their emails again.

I am a little tired of 'competing' in an 'online marketplace' as if writing was a scrap to the bottom dollar. I am sick of people asking me to write articles at $3 for 500 words (minus agency fees and exchange rates and withdrawal costs) and looking at Bangladeshi copywriters who charge $1.11 an hour. I am bored of chasing jobs to prove my worth and businessmen who will haggle and chip away at my fee and then hand me their eBook to edit where they discuss how they made six million dollars last year (clue: by haggling and chipping away at the money they give to anyone for anything).

BUT!

It's not all bad because really work is only the thing that keeps me in liquor and holidays, and once the schools are back there will be more teaching to teach, and a nice boy has promised me rent-free living in exchange for kisses and lazy takeout evenings in exchange for soup.

The other nice thing is that I have become quite ridiculously domesticated and have been making all manner of foodstuffs, in a hoardy, winter-is-coming kind of way. Like chutney and bread and whisky liqueur with brambles from the marshes. I have discovered the cure for all internet malaise is to pummel some dough into quivering submission, or to ride my bike to the fields and forage for berries and come home with scratches and nettle stings on my skirted knees.

As well as this, there are also words and writing, of course.

Recent projects:

Reading poetry to the good people of Resonance FM, drinking whisky in the radio studio, talking about masturbation in bookstores.

Writing for photographers to take pictures of my words and making words of photographers pictures for New Jersey's Conveyor Arts.

Finishing a poetry chapbook and sending it to potential publishers. Watch this handcrafted, fingerfolded space.

Being asked to read at the last ever Golden Hour in Edinburgh's Fringe Festival. Actually, this kind of makes me ecstatic and gutted and many other things which will likely remain inexpressible until I am sitting drunkenly amongst some of my favourite people, remembering all of the last four years of tour. If it wasn't for the Golden Hour/Forest Publications/Ryan, well, everything would be very different for me as a writer and person and there will be tears before bedtime, and gin, I'm sure.

I have also been feeling good about positive rejections. There haven't been any acceptances recently, sure, but I'm trying to aim higher y'see and only send to places I really really want to be in. And also take rejections with a nod to try harder: either try harder to make the writing better, or try harder to research where I'm sending things and only put them places they belong.

This month I have heard: "No, but...

...we were impressed with the very evocative imagery in both of them"

...Although I liked the writing, I'm afraid this piece is not quite right for us"

...it's a well-crafted and well-told short story. Unfortunately ... this piece is simply far too much in the so-called "literary" style for us to really have much need of it."

This is a distinct mark up from "We've read it carefully. Unfortunately, we didn't feel it was quite right for us. If you have something else you think is right for our magazine, please feel free to try us again in the future."

Also, another small good thing: I'm learning to make cheese.

Resonance FM

2011-08-16T15:47:00.003+01:00

I am going to be reading poems/talking about poetry on the radio tonight!

9.30pm on 104.4fm.

Tune your dials.

x

best acronym ever

2011-08-15T22:19:00.002+01:00

I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym

Woken

2011-08-12T13:12:00.005+01:00

“Please don’t,” I implored. It was too early to think. I was sailing through a dream of the Gypsy captain with rugged fingers, stitching partridge feathers to the underside of the canoe. I petted the feathers as if they were the shaggy coat of a squalid dog.
They curled around my fingers and we shook small hands.

The door buzzed again, yanking me harder from the wallows. I was hurtling back to normality in a flurry of tiny realisations. In a flurry of gnats, or snowstorms.
I could feel a kink in my spine; somewhere a dog barked.
And again, louder.
A hand placed itself in the cave of my back and shoved.
A voice hissed, “LOOK.”
My treacherous eyes opened, and I lay in bed, awake.

I didn’t want to be woken. I’d been waltzing a filth match with the boys from Beirut, I’d been tumblestiltzken, head over heels. There was candy cane sugar corn handcuffs in the dream, softer than the venus flytrap’s velvet tongue.

“Please don’t,” I asked the day and it heehawed back, no sympathy for the swatches of my sleep.

I didn’t want to be woken. But the world oozed in to oil Morpheus’ palms and I slithered from his grasp and it was morning. I was catapulted from the snug. I woke up. It was daytime and I was lost to my dreams.

RIP Hotel Chelsea

2011-08-03T19:20:00.009+01:00

I spent one night barefoot running through your corridors in a crimson silk ballgown, playing kiss chase with a camcorder, placing polaroids on the walls.

We had black eyes for the boys and bourbon for the girls. Champagne and powder, lipstick, neon. A bathtub for sleepover sudsing. Bedsprings for leapfrog. A walk-in wardrobe as empty as an envelope from a love letter thrown away in spring.

Can you believe the sign, can you believe we’re here, doesn’t your heart feel like a velvet drawstring purse full of rubies, tripped and spilling on the floor?

I wrestled in evening gloves for the very first time and six months later, the teeth marks hadn’t faded: six months tattooed with a postcard from a past self, signed wish you were here.

Long before I let my heart break its ankle running down the stairs, I was on a balcony trying to lasso the Empire State spire with a smoke ring. I was clattering down a stairwell windswept with giggles.

I let the histories trample my own corridors on their slipshod feet. I believed in all the clichés. I ran so fast the modern world hadn’t a hope for my coattails.

I love the Chelsea Hotel. This news made me sigh.

Why such a prude, google?

2011-08-02T12:24:00.005+01:00

Google autosuggest has never been up for a good time. Try this fun experiment.

Type clitor into google.

Watch google suggest you research "clitoridectomy" ("A Nineteenth Century Answer To Masturbation" i.e. cutting off your clitoris) or maybe "clitoromegaly" ("an abnormal enlargement of the clitoris"). Thanks Google! This is despite these returning 139,000 results and 101,000 results apiece compared to the 23,700,000 results clitoris gets. Even if you type in clitori, google will pretend not to know what you're talking about.

For the Google autosuggest, a clitois gone wrong or chopped off is fine. But the clitoris itself? Too filthy! Too filthy for safesearch!

Now try typing in "how to kid" and see what it suggests.
And "how to build a bom"
And other surely-worse-than-clitoris things

Hmmn...

Google will also auto-suggest you look up Jeffrey Dahmer (serial killer/cannibal/rapist: 1,250,000 results) but will censor the far more popular Violet Blue (sex blogger/porn for woman enthusiast: 17,800,000 results) (from erosblog, who are really good at being pissed off at the Google prudes).

Anyway, now Google have released "What Do You Love", some tedious way of bringing all the Google apps together into one big happy search. Try it out for yourselves and see what happens if you love what Google thinks you shouldn't be loving.

This list is from the hacked Google source code and shows everything they won't let you look for and is HILARIOUS.

Wanky? Donkeyribber? Smut?

On the delightful "What Do You Love", you can "Plan Your Murder Events" and "Access kill all gays stuff on the web, faster" if that's what you're into. If you type in "rape" it will suggest you email someone with the topic line "I love rape" (No, seriously...)

It won't let you love sex though.

Or, for that matter, booooobs.

helen love

2011-07-30T11:58:00.003+01:00

I’m not a reviewer; I don’t know how to form the words for anything in the midst of the gamut between gack and glory. Scathing or swooning: that’s your lot.

Swooning I find more fun.

So: Helen Love. Do you know Helen Love? They are the best. Girls from Swansea singing bubblegum punk pop disco and obsessing over Joey Ramone. Yeow! Go listen.

They sound like the kind of girls who draw pixelated hearts in the squared paper of their math jotters and make mixtapes for boys with dirty hair and decorate their fingernails with tippex and pink highlighters.

They sound like the scuff-kneed offspring of a casiotone and a spaceship, drunk on espresso and cherry lambrini, dancing in a basement in the Welsh bit of New York City.

They sound like the feeling in your stomach on the loop-the-loop rollercoaster on the last day of summer, full of sherbet fountains and pink candyfloss and dolly mixtures.

Here are some choice lyrics:

He’s been under medication and heavy sedation, 
Since Kula Shaker came along, 
‘Cos he couldn’t believe everyone in the world,
 Liked their songs 

and

Her name is Claire, she's an office executive, 
She wears white linen dresses with flair,
 She lives with a policeman,
 Plays squash on Thursday evenings, 
She's in love with Billy Joel,
 That's enough to kick her head in

and

See that girl lying under the bar,
 She used to be a rock'n'roll star, 
Smoked cigarettes with Joan Jett in America  

She got her picture in Rolling Stone, 
She was third from the left behind Joey Ramone,
 You couldn't see her face, 
But I'm sure she looked great anyway

  She lives in a flat halfway up in the sky,
 Goes out with her boy into the MC5s, 
She'd be OK if he didn't hit her,
 Or go to bed with the babysitter

and

Who's that boy with the ocean green eyes
 In Rough Trade every Saturday,
 Don't he look cute in his eighties track suit 
I wish I hadn't thrown mine away

and

Spent all my money on a cocktail dress with matching silver shoes
 And a purple souped-up travellator David Bowie used to use
 We bought some drugs and we hit the road on the hottest summer day
 But he left me for a singer in a disco band in a nightclub in L.A.

MIAOW! They are sunshine and music and everything you need to hear right now.

the ladies pond

2011-07-28T21:23:00.002+01:00

A very quick poem about today. I have a new favoured place.

---

There are
NO MEN BEYOND THIS POINT
just women, in the pond.

No butter-slathered shrieks, no
exploratory toes dipped and
leapt back,
breasts punting
like volleyballs in the sun.

There is a dearth of giggles.

The heads glide the surface
like boules from the palms
of French pensioners,
leaving a wake in the sand.

These bodies churn bugs for the
ducks to lunch upon,

but we ignore the ducks,
as we ignore the elbow tug
of the working world.

In the water, we are all penguins,
belly-first on the ice.

We dive like coins dropped
in wishing wells, float like
oak leaves suspended in puddles,

and before the oily cold seizes my skin
to demand I towel and clad and
emerge, before this

I am a giddy seal, pirouetting,
drunk on the lard
which keeps me afloat.

BBC 4

2011-07-25T21:43:00.005+01:00

want to cut the number of short stories they do. Hmmmph.

>>read

>>object

dirt.

2011-07-25T20:59:00.009+01:00

Sometimes I think about doing a Creative Writing Masters and how wonderful it would be: a year of writing, deadlines, workshops, tasks, inspirations, time. Umnn. It would be delicious, so delicious. I would make words upon words. But then I look at UCL and see it costs (£4,000 pa part time) and realise that this is not going to happen any time soon.

Instead, I have been contacting writing groups in the hope of finding the workshops and joining a library in place of learned tutors and setting myself assignments instead of waiting for someone else to do so for me.

Today I repotted all the plants and decided to think about dirt.

----

Out of the earth too long, my palms began to itch. I am tired of all this surface breathing. I start to think that maybe it’s time to scrabble.

Let me tell you about the soil.

The soil here is always wet. It’s cake batter. It’s toothpaste with a bistre stain, it’s thick, it’s gacky. I want to crawl inside. Arms up to the pits. Worms bumping blind against me. Wriggling my fingers, trying to reach the centre.

I think of closing my fist upon what’s down there. Maybe there will be the lazy femur of a dead badger, shag mouldering in the soil, scavenging long forgotten. A lost gold chain interlacing like smoke rings blown upon each other by a lazy tongue. Or a feisty oak root, curved like the handle of a cellar door, waiting for me to reach around and tug.

So: I pull. The door opens. The resting earth capsizes. Everything I am sitting upon begins to shift

and-then-all-of-a-sudden we are falling, like a teen queen talking about love-crushes, like a harlot on heels going head-over, like sunsets and autumn leaves and share prices and ink (on a blank white page which has been waiting for the words you have chosen)

we are falling, arms first, head second, the feet and tail waiting behind for a moment, considering whether this is or not the best idea, before the topple takes over

And then, it is quiet in the earth.

It is quiet down here. I can hear the wobble of oxygen settling in my lungs, like raspberry jelly on sherry-soaked fruit. My ribcage is the crystal bowl my mother used for trifle. My breath stops.

There is dirt in my eyes. When I squeeze my lids open, grains of coffee spill into my sight. Everything is tobacco, mahogany, burnt sienna. I see a thousand shades of brown, I see umber and chocolate and walnut and Vandyke, cinnamon and African sunlit shoulders. The dirt is a weathered terracotta roof tile on a cloudy evening in February. It is the unloved picket of an unpainted fence in a storm. Broken ale bottles in a school playground after hours. Brown.

I do not breathe, but the bouquet slithers through my skin. The soil does not smell like death. It is like the spray of the ocean but warmer, a tang of seared flesh. Fragments of blood and the sap of a broken green twig. A bite of placenta. And something beyond description: a jiggling something, a thing that darts and embraces all at once. It smells like a football field toppling over the Niagara Falls.

There is more to say, but I am snug and suspended in a pike dive in the earth.

Around me the dirt is composing symphonies for the centipedes.

My old bike died

2011-07-21T00:46:00.005+01:00

But now I have a new friend.
Hello Hercules!

tinkering and thinking

2011-07-19T21:20:00.006+01:00

I’ve been editing too much recently, or not too much actually, a worthwhile amount, a great amount, the room is covered in flurries of paper: double-spaced, courier font, scribbled, rescribbled, printed again. I’m glad I’m editing because for a while the sentence ‘Yes, I’m working on my first short story collection’ was just a stopgap masking the fact I was doing anything but.

Spring always seems to whack me with great wallops of new inspirations: April! Poem a day! Sunshine again and bikerides and long amiable wanders with the thoughts in my own brain for company. Which is good but I want to finish something more than a story here or there, a credit on a website suspended in html, someone’s screen somewhere blinking back my words, even a finely bound anthology where I snuggle between real writers and decide I am one myself in the process.

I want a book, goddamit, and I don’t get a book until I finish writing one.

This is what I remember when I speak to Ryan and Nick; this is what I forget when I spend too much time meandering the back-catalogues and credits of other writer girls, thinking they should belong to me.

But yes, so I’m editing. It’s a new pleasure, this deep tissue editing of my own words. I’ve done it to other people but never hacked myself so thoroughly. Hack hack hack like a drunken haircut. I think it’s killing my brain a bit though. It’s making it hard to get to the end of new sentences: they seem so naked and fallible. I have to remember that this is what I am when I write -- naked, fallible -- and it’s ok.

So here I am:

Five stories finished and published in a state that makes me happy (though still to be edited again, of course, once you get started it’s impossible, nothing is ever finished, but still): The Passenger in Gutter; Flamingoes in The Golden Hour Book 2; The Parade in Jonny America; The Idea Groves in Neon; and The Cats’ Gravity as a chapbook published by Forest Publications.

Four stories finished and begging like puppies on the desks of editors: Asking For It; The Wind Turbines; The Stars of Track and Field; and Carbon. Some of these are at their fifth or sixth destination, a little bruised by such rejection, but essentially better for it. One is shortlisted in a very good place indeed, waiting for a final decision in October. This is something to remind myself of when the others bounce back.

Three stories published which weren’t really ready to be: Missed Connections in the SBT anthology; The Purse Thief in Litmocracy’s anthology; and Comet Girl in The Medulla Review. Oops. Sorry world. I'll come back to these soon with a red and heavy pen.

Two stories on a third or fourth redrafting, close and delicious, which I am enjoying the ravaging of: one about snowglobes, full of brittle, white language, viewpoints bouncing like refracted light; and one about an immortal man obsessed with a female commuter on the Roosevelt Island Tram. They are obsessive stories that have been bouncing around my head a long time. I am frightened of calling them finished.

And then there is a first draft of an erotic car crash story which is fun to play with but surely so Ballard derivative that it makes me blush. (Though there is a kernel of idea in it which fascinates me – to persuade a woman with amnesia that you were lovers and have her respond: I remember. How and when and whether would you call her on the lie?)

There is also an orange grove in Greece that smells of pith and erotic games, a girl who leaves home with the dream of becoming a whirling dervish, Rapunzel in her bathtub eating cold baked beans from the can, and the metaphor lodged in my head of a concrete mixer. All these girls, always, running through my stories, trying to escape, dreaming of whirling, dancing, dancing, terrified to stop. I am besotted with concrete mixers driving miles, always turning. If they stopped they would harden, useless, and it would be impossible to start the turning again and bring it back to life.

This is how my heart and my feet feel sometimes.

These are the things I am writing about.

I have a website!

2011-07-16T15:15:00.005+01:00

and I am inordinately proud.

LOOK AT IT, SO PRETTY, SO SHINY

now I will sit back and wait to become a superstar.

good morning words

2011-07-15T11:38:00.003+01:00

The internet broken first thing is a gift, like a sunbeam presented on the pillow by a self-satisfied morning, saying you couldn’t work if you wanted to so why not roll belly up, get toasty, and wait for the words to come.

I am writing about delicious words to start this day, in the hope that they will seep into my brain and rest there like chutney. The words will come together like onions and bay leaves and sugar and spice, until there are no defined boundaries, no Platonic essence of things, until they are as hard to differentiate as lovers’ tongues in a wine-sodden kiss.

But what now, slow up, this isn’t entirely what I meant. I mean, yes, things must percolate, but I’m not just waiting for the words to come together and fit happily and merge into fine and delicious phrases. I’m also looking for other words which won’t be content, the emeralds you could immerse in onions all you pleased and still they’d be the anomaly in the jam jar. I’m trying to take these tense black symbols like a butterfly net and capture something that’s rare, that I can stun and mount with tiny pins and look back upon and think yes, that’s it.

I’m not sure the best way to go about this. I’ve thought about sitting very quietly on the bed with my legs lotus style and trying to put all the other words out of my head so there is a quiet perch upon which a fresh idea could land. It’s tough though, I’m not very good at silence. My brain is ever-awash with chatter – work, plans, boys, breakfast – it’s filthy in there, I don’t know who’d wander in and settle, besides, I find it tough to prop the door open with all these winds whistling.

So I’ve been listening to Pablo Picasso on this one: when inspiration comes I want it to find me working.

What kind of work is this drivel you say? Listing each and every inane thought that pops into your head before the first coffee? A fine job, if you can get it.

Well yes, it is a fine thing, to wait like a child in a sandpit with a fat plastic truck taking the crest of a dune, shouting BRRUMMM BRRUMMMM, as busy as it gets at this time of day, thoughts racing, thinking of desert storms, waiting for chutney, looking up words, just writing something, anything at least, just writing to be writing at the beginning of the day so that whatever comes next can fit in this funnel.

WORDS

arquebusade (noun) a lotion for shotgun wounds

aspectabund (adjective) having a face that shows emotions clearly

apricate (verb) to bask in the sun

absterge (verb) to wipe; to cleanse; to purge

whirl! whirl! whirl!

2011-07-14T11:00:00.003+01:00

toss your scarf to the gyromancer, dearest.
step the circumference, spin till you stumble,
there is fortune in your footfall to divine.

go now: leave this town, be a dervish
whirl your rings like Saturn. you are liquid matter,
though your heft casts a pall in the sky.

I want to run away from this town and become a whirling dervish; I have dreams of it every night. Imagine me, painted pretty, aloft with my magicians hat of scarves, whirling like Saturn’s rings, like Jupiter.

I’d make believe that I was solid, I’d play sky-father and patron deity, but in truth I’d be composed of exhaled hookah clouds, lighter than a wink across a sandstorm.

I’d smell like the smoke of cherry bombs. I’d taste like liquorice and burnt sugar. When you kissed me, you would see eternity.

When I kissed you, you’d understand
the secret scriptures
of the underside of the moon.

Have I ever told you about rainbow trout? There is a disease in their young called whirling disease. The parasites eat their brains and chew their skeletons, until they cripple over for eternity, chasing their own tails forever.

Forgetting themselves, forgetting their futures and the merry leap upstream.

Whirling whirling whirling…

The parasites are hard to kill. They can survive in minus-twenty degree temperatures for three months at a time. It’s hard to quit the urge. I can feel my own parasites begging for a twirl, for a spin.

Close your eyes.
Stretch your hands out. Lean backwards.
Don’t worry, I’ll hold on tight.

Remember when we did that in the field? When we recalibrated gravity so there was a new centre dwelling at the moment our hands touched? We were weightless forces, orbiting our hands, our hands holding.

Back then, I believed if you let go I would tumble to the moon.

On sleep paralysis

2011-07-13T11:20:00.006+01:00

Yesterday didn’t exist.

When I’d tried to sleep the night, I was paralysed. My limbs were anaesthetised tree trunks trying to recoil from the chainsaw’s grimace. I could hear it biting the air and I tried to scream in tandem for help but he wasn’t listening, he was asleep, and besides my lips were entangled in the tentacles of the swamp, and I couldn’t pull them apart.

I fell out of bed. I watched myself slither, shoulder-first, to the floor. Gravity was furious with the levitations I’d been attempting in the sepia corners of my dreams. Gravity knew I’d been trying to wriggle from its grasp, aided by powders and potions, sleepless nights and meditation. It hacked my scruff and forced my face to the floorboards and it pushed until I felt metal blood circle the caverns of my mouth like a pike.

I thrashed in a straightjacket sewn from shadows and I balled fists. My screams were subterranean. Sheets entangled between my feet, wet with sweats and horror. James was still asleep when I found a footing on the riverbed and wrenched my sodden limbs back. The room was still murky and tinged with malice. I lay in sweats and screams and tried to wait for my heart to subside.

After a time, the fingers found me again. Shh, it’s fine, it’s fine, close your eyes, it’s fine, close your eyes, it’s bedtime, and I fell and I was still again, I was lying in the bed, but my eyes were open.

I shouldn’t have felt such terror. All that was wrong was the notes of the scale running up and down like footsteps on stairs beneath the bed; all that was wrong was my muscles tranquilized and incapable of flight; all that was wrong was a clawing, crone-fingered horror that massaged my skin, deep into the tissue, fingering for my fall.

It went on all night long.

I strained against the softness of eyelids; I fled the denizens of dreams. I waited for morning to escape. I slipped up. I slipped inside again. I screamed; I was silent. When I woke, it was with defibrillation. I was scared of shadows and scared of sleep.

So yesterday didn’t exist. Or I didn’t exist for it. There were slugs under my tongue instead of words. It was too tedious to recount. I was wallpaper paste and old tapioca. Humn. Wet terry-towelling clinging to the concrete breaker. Who cares?

I’m awake now, though. I’m drinking coffee.

Crank up the Shonen Knife.

SPACE FOODS ARE MARSHMALLOWS, APSPARAGUS, ICE CREAM!

I’m going to write some stories now. Write a poem about the corners of clouds, about fondue and Rimbaud, passport controls and gyromancy.

GO!

2011-07-06T11:53:00.004+01:00

It's hardly even worth taking the time to mention that this blog is (and will always be) fits and spurts, months of words which tumble like the mating of cherry blossoms/sea spray/broken leaves/snow storms, a season at a time, followed by silence. So it is.

A brief summary of the last while then, before I start again...

- Lebanon: Beirut made of Armani and bomb detritus, octopus sandwiches, orange-tinted dreams of Tripoli, hiphop Syrian beatbox poets, mosques imbibed with a chandelier silence, my beloved Golden Hour drunken and dancing in the safety of the cedars beside the Arab Spring

- Istanbul: my new favourite city. More later.

- Barcelona: cava and chorizo, Pulp, Belle and Sebastian, Suicide, Einzenstaure Neubauten, PIL. You know it is a finely curated festival when Nick Cave and PJ Harvey are the lowlights.

- Port Aventura. I love rides.

- The best vanilla milkshake in the world at Trinity Buoy Wharf

- Camping in Aboyne and Ballater with the Queen's butcher and so much venison, so many sausages.

- Kelburn Garden Party, my favourite festival in all the world. Waterfalls and music and castle graffiti and secret forests to stumble upon. We were goblins for four days in the undergrowth with the last of September's harvest; we played music and found new fans; we nibbled each other in the hay and communed with alpacas, it was delicious. It was nice to go home.

Time to write some poems about these things, time to think about moving to berlin, time to save this draft as gibberish and get back to work...

soft things, soft me

2011-05-05T18:38:00.003+01:00

I have started pawing around contentment like a skittish tomcat, unsure if I’m ready for domestication. The bed is soft and warm and burrowed; it is easy to curl there. The days are spacious, carved by yogic craftsmen who understand the need for particular curves and sanded corner. I’m not used to such simplicity, or at least such softness.

It’s not just the bed, either. I’ve become softer too. Blame a boy who appreciates the feast like I do; blame that long winter tucked undercover with cava and horror movies and angles of skin.

We are more squidgy than when we met. The past while has been: sticky, rust-coloured onions caramelising into boozy soup &

fresh-baked rosemary and walnut loafs, torn from the oven, pillows of dough, steam-train puffs of heat &

fragrant laksas, sour with nam pla, padded with rice, coriander ballerinas composing pirouettes on the surface &

buffalo mozzarella, strangely sweet, slightly sweated, ripped into shreds and desiccated with black peppercorn &

homemade pesto: sweet with basil, soft with oil, sharp with wild garlic leaves, bound together with parmesan, umnn…

… plump, slithering gnocchi wet with sage butter, rotund with simmered fungi guts &

all manner of baked pies and pastries, pirate chests stuffed with treasure &

crinkled walnuts swathed in rank feral stiltons &

midnight feasts & crumbs in the bed &

oysters like the spray from the prow of the ship.

I am a pig in all things, in booze and books and sex and words and flowers and, especially, in food, and I am looking forward to Lebanon next week and all the feasts that are yet to come.

30: Trains

2011-05-02T17:33:00.004+01:00

the trains were like telescopes
pointed to another horizon

we could look through and see
the past in sharp focus

a slim file tucked in
the lining of a citrine suitcase

pages fit for scattering
like tickertape in a gale

spilt scotch on a pressed
trouser leg, a torn pocket

a ring that no longer slips
over her fat knuckle

a tryst, a snatch in her stocking
a high-arched lost shoe

and the howl of the whistle at dusk

asking the marshes, listen
to the stories contained in the carriage.

Things you might like to read

2011-05-02T16:20:00.003+01:00

On that vein, some stories I have been enjoying this year:

Before My Change Jar Went Missing by Drew Jackson.

"Wendy explains that clip joint girls aren't whores. Clip joint girls take it off for jack offs who can't touch them.

I listen, but what I don't say is this: I know."

I, excited, always say too much; this strike me as a perfect level of saying just enough.

The Man From The Circus by Kirsty Logan.

"I stepped out for a cigarette halfway through the girl-on-the-pony show. I liked the idea of the girl-on-the-pony show, but the reality of it depressed me. I could see the gobs of glue holding on the horse's plume, and the girl had lipstick on her teeth."

I am insanely jealous of this story. I read it a lot and wish I had written it.

Dreaming In Mink by Jane Hammons

"They aren't gossiping. They are figuring it out."

Again: restraint. This is delicious.

On literary citizenship

2011-05-02T16:00:00.003+01:00

"Don't be a turd person"

I'm going to try and say more about other words because sometimes I feel like I have nothing to say and sometimes all there is is "oh wow", but this is ok, I love to hear "oh wow".

Blake Butler via Matt Bell at the Collagist:

1) When you read something you like, in any form, write the author and tell them. You don’t have to gush or take forever. Just tell them you saw it, you read it, you liked it. It’s a supportive feeling. It’s better than not saying anything.

2) Write reviews of books you like. Short review/long review, whatever. It’s not that hard. It takes a little work to think about it clearly, but what goes around comes around. You can’t expect to be recognized for your work if you aren’t recognizing others for their work. Open the doors.

3) Interview writers. New writers or well known writers. You like somebody’s work a lot? Ask to do an interview with them. It doesn’t take a ton of effort. Write up some questions. Let them talk. Spread the word. Talk. Say. Get. Eat.

4) If you have free time, start an online journal. Start a blog, a review, an anything. If you don’t know how I’ll help you. Say stuff. Mean what you say.

5) If you have a journal already, respond faster. Pay attention to your inbox. When someone asks a question that feels dumb or unnecessary maybe, answer it anyway. Don’t be a fuck. Yeah, we’re all busy. Yeah, things take time. Work to take less time. It’s okay to move forward at a wicked pace. (And yes, as an editor, I too struggle to adhere to this advice, but I struggle at least, everyone struggles, but you can always struggle more. I am so tired of seeing journals with 200+ days response time, why do you even exist? Does it really take that long to like something? People should stop sending to these places. Seriously. Just stop sending.

Yeah I know the flood comes strong. Stand in the flood. (Me too.)

To everyone: Push the fucking envelope even harder than you do. Be an open node.

29: Ponies

2011-04-30T11:18:00.002+01:00

Our bikes were feral ponies,
kicking divots from the ground.

You trotted out a circus trick like
the demonstration of a
mathematical proof,
your stirrups spun,
and you reared at the moon.

“You’re a maverick,
they never understood!
Spin on, spin on, my son!”

Before his singularity of purpose
you were humbled, you
vowed to try harder, strip
your own life of baubles:

“The moon is a monk,”

you said.

I didn’t know what you meant, except
that your heart was ripe for spinning,

so I stayed silent as we galloped
to the horizon you whispered
the sun slept tucked beneath.

28: Playing ring-a-ring-a-roses by the canalside in May

2011-04-29T12:25:00.003+01:00

lover, let’s to the canal!

cheeks rouged & vows forged
to the mayflies, the reeds

for a houseboat to host us
in our gypsy curls

we’ll play roses and rings
as Saturn capsizes

and we’ll fall for one more
of gravity’s girls

26: Appointments

2011-04-28T19:54:00.003+01:00

her finger is clammy and plastic inside and
I have never liked that feeling like
fucking a dentist, goblets of antiseptic
spilt on the checkerboard floor and

this is why
I’m here
I guess

the pills dissolve and it is worse than
those wisdoms out; it hurts a bass hurt
a thud a floor-shaker, the battlecry of
a fault line proposing to Richter and

I breathe
in, I
breathe out

my gums bleed often but my heart
is a starched white mask as I squash
the toothpaste tube, squeeze harder
till the last scarlet blob oozes out

and I am laughing-gas giddy

as light as a champagne bubble
dissolved in the gravity of the moon

25: 2001, What I wanted

2011-04-28T02:44:00.004+01:00

2001: What I wanted

A cough syrup that would make me jabber
Lester Bangs style, cavalcades of words, and
a road that went all the way to Mexico.

A green light for the dock of my dreams;
a Humbert who would see my skin as a ream of silk
fed to the typewriter
for his inky letters to press upon.

Fingers round my neck,
a boy’s name in my jotter,
a ticket to places so far and so wild
the night hadn’t a name for them yet.

A small death of a small town and
feet that would run until their soles were
pages of Gideon’s Bibles,
worn too thin to touch, but still

running, still searching for
a kiss and a sunset and a cliché.

Bruises of life like carnations on my thighs.

Reasons for hyperbole and hysterics.

These days, I want for all this to be new
and not taste like two-day-old bedside water,

quenching my small thirst
in that small, dead way.

24: Polly

2011-04-28T02:01:00.003+01:00

Brace yourself, Polly,
for the next thing;
you were my
my dayglo schizo
archetype for the

FUCKYOU

to a thousand happy radios,
pressing pause on
the seismic shift.

I’d like to plait neon
through the hair of your
cosmic ghost,
I’d like to
kiss you,
I’d like to scream the globe to fuck
and reverb in the squall of the
next storm.

I miss you,
already.

I’m playing
Oh Bondage
in the kitchen
Polly.

23: Dream Logic

2011-04-27T18:30:00.005+01:00

We were at the crest
of the mountain writing
poems for your sister’s
debutante apocalypse when
a lick of pink fire
leapt from the side of the sun
and beckoned us,
the haggard finger
of the whorehouse’s
oldest madam.

You were singing a shanty
for her wedding; you had
promised the kittens to the Queen.

It was 5a.m. when the
sea hollered to hurry and
you packed our wicker,
trimmed our wicks so
the candles wouldn’t
sputter on the deck.

We set off for the party
on the spine of an albino
lizard who’d promised us
Moroccan scrolls,
strawberry sandwiches
for our troubles.

Delirious for one last
adventure, one more dip
at the apple bob, we whooped,
we leapt; we knew that
sooner or later
a hump
in the road
would wake us.

22: good morning

2011-04-23T09:36:00.003+01:00

I’m tired of all this scrambling for the right words and the right volume of white space surrounding them, so today I’m just going to howl like a Shakespearean monkey and barter with the keys until they give me something worth putting down; I’m not going to stop typing until I’m three coffees to the breeze and that sunbeam has clamped up the hatch and poked its nose inside to snuffle at my calves.

I’m watching you sleeping in a bed that I’m not lying in any more. If you had got out first, I would have sprawled like a weather vane and claimed the corners. I’d ransack the sheets, stake a flag in each town my skin landed, tell the mayor to prepare a banquet for my pilgrim toes, my discovery.

Not you.

Your body is still on your side of the bed like a comma punctuating the last thought of your dreams and waiting for the next clause. Your body waits patiently for my body’s return without a list of reconciliation demands, just a post-it note addendum on the pillow observing, “You can come back now, come inside, it’s warm.”

I am holding my breath because this time of the day is perfect. You aren’t saying a word and have a window fit for gazing from, I have coffee to worry my eyes like the fists of small children, preparing for boxing matches they are bound to lose.

I am sitting here waiting for that sunbeam and waiting for some words and waiting for more coffee to brew. I guess we’ll see how that all works out.

21: I don't even know the way this makes me feel anymore

2011-04-22T22:32:00.002+01:00

We’re going to be superstars, can’t you feel it?

Dipped hand-in-hand in molten silver;
elbows linked, clanking like chains…

There’s not even need to scramble!

We’ll bounce, spunk-drunk nymphs,
up Pan’s mountain,

plenty time to pause, dip our toes
in the nail-polish pools
spilt on the hilltop carpet.

We’re going head over heels for the Milky Way.

There’s a world sprawled out with
matchbox Manhattans, waiting for the
flint and the spark.

I’m holding it out to you in an envelope
of lipstick moons and biro and

I’m holding out for a change of mind, I’m holding
my heart in my hands and
it’s heavy and

you haven’t

said yes yet.

20: Trainspotter

2011-04-22T22:25:00.002+01:00

I kissed a trainspotter
on the Piccadilly line.

His hands were closing doors,
his lower lip a chair I dared not
rest my heels upon.

We missed my stop in
favour of spun sugar and
the rumour of camomile
on the breeze.

We missed his
while he taught me
to mind the gap.

19: Girl On A Bike

2011-04-20T23:00:00.002+01:00

I’ve been watching the girl who cycles,
linen sundress tugging the breeze.

Her silhouette is a flag of surrender,
a dapper handkerchief on the deck
of a maiden voyage, and

she is unfazed by cobblestones.

I dream of what may cause her destruction:

a zeppelin exploding,
a terrier afroth at the lips,
a tipsy dragonfly, falling into her gaze.

I spy the skitter of the wheel as her
attention catches
like a thread on a screw.

I have been thinking all week about
pebbles embedded in her knee,
a bulbous scab to worry.

I’ve been watching the girl who cycles;
I’ve been trying not to shriek at bends.

It isn’t quite all of me
that is longing for the fall.

18: Dorothy Arnold

2011-04-18T16:11:00.005+01:00

Fascinated today by Dorothy Arnold, a perfume heiress who disappeared one day in Manhattan after buying a pound of candy and a book of epigrams. I think this needs rewriting as there is much much more to say, and better. But anyway...

-----------------

Mother, I’m sorry.

I didn’t die, I’m not hacked
into thick, meatific chunks
bobbing round the reservoir.

There was no botched abortion.

The World lied, I wasn’t hypnotised
to leap like a streamer from the deck
of the Fall River side-wheeler
overnight crossing.

I read the newspapers.

I discovered my penchant for
soirees and epigrams, I learned
my bones are lofty, my eyes serene.

They didn’t dare accuse Daddy.

He dreaded notoriety, but
there’s no silence as soft
as your daughter, no peace

as sweet as her skin.

Mother, I’m sorry.

I thought disappearance was easy.
I didn’t understand
it would cause such a scene.

17: Citadel

2011-04-18T13:44:00.003+01:00

Last night we slept with books in the bed.

We crafted a citadel of their spines;
the hardy chapters served as parapets

to defend our dreams from the warriors of the night.

We made a mortar of conjunctions
to help the turret bricks to hold, and

rabid alligators circled a moat that swished,
commas beneath their claws.

They swam until the first sunbeam crested
our Ishtar Gate and roused the city from its slumber.

By the time we got out of bed, all the alligators had gone.

DESK

2011-04-18T12:35:00.005+01:00

For the first time in my life I own a proper writing desk.

For a long time I eschewed desks. My desk as a child had faced shelves full of ringbiders and school notes and by the time I got my own flat I decided that instead of a desk I would have a nest: a computer tucked away in a small corner behind the wardrobe with a den of cushions. I curled up on the floor and spilled red wine on the carpet and tapped away.

When I moved into my last flat I created a boudoir that was for loving, not for working. Everything was red-lit and soft and horizontal, silken fabrics and taxidermy, an embarrassment of mirrors, polaroids stuck to the walls. I wrote in bed in my underwear or sunk in a squidgy red sofa or occasionally, when it seemed like the work was too tedious to sully my room with, at the kitchen table. I didn't have a particular place to write but at the same time I had a place for hiding when I wanted to. I pasted a Virginia Woolf quote to the door and shut it and hung out with the words.

Now I live with someone it's different, of course. I have never been successful at writing in kitchens (distractions: cheese, coffee, dishes) and I no longer start the day at my laptop in bed (distraction: flesh). I needed somewhere new to sit.

I coveted this desk for a long time. We would take the train to London Fields of a sunbeam Saturday morning and we would look at it longingly in the vintage furniture shop, whispering schoolgirl fantasies, leaning over to 'examine the hinges'. Every time it would still be £110 and I would leave it.

Then I spent a week copyediting a 220,000 word novel about an apiarist called William who hated alcohol, premarital sex, cursed marijuana and bad language (other than the word 'bally'). His moralistic tedium reverberated from every line. I tried to write and couldn't be bothered with words; words had become a plodding chore and I longed for picnics and silence. When I finally finished I decided to take some of the money from that work and turn it into a Small, Nice Thing.

I am sitting at this desk now staring out the window. The cherry blossom has almost all blown off the trees and I am about to write some poems. Later I will fill the book shelves beside me with Strunk & White and thesauruses (thesauri?) and all the publications I am published in. I will stick polaroid pictures of my old typerwriter to the wall and quotes that I will typewriter-type on yellowed paper. Every Sunday I will cycle to Columbia Road flower market and buy a fresh bunch to sniff at.

I am very happy. This is all.

16: Bad Sleep

2011-04-17T19:36:00.004+01:00

Last night we slept like soldiers
leaping over the last battlement.

I kicked and cawed and your skin
was no respite from the day,

your touch was a Turkish bath,
sticks lashing my back.

Last night I dreamt of fire escapes,
of Manhattan, of iced coffee cups

pressed against my forehead like
a cold compress: you just relax now,

relax. I did not want to hate you.
I wanted to be breaking through the

contact-lens surface of a cold, cold
lake, I wanted to sink, to sleep,

mud oozing between my toes
but I couldn’t get there.

I dreamt of the furnace, instead.

I dreamt I didn’t sleep.

15: That Girl

2011-04-16T12:18:00.002+01:00

There are girls like her, in the glacial north.

They have the patience of roadworks, they learned
to fold flowers and wait.

No bared teeth here, worried in flesh;
she lacks my predilection for howls.

She sits with Penelope’s quiet hyperbole
and weaves the downy duvet of home.

When his pinball rattled my neons,
I pitied her silken devotion, but

there is something in her poise which sticks
now that the gaudy is gone.

14: Conduits

2011-04-16T11:02:00.003+01:00

You are on me and we are atop the mountain, hitchhiking to
another summit, wet eyes to the monsoon.

We holler at fate to strike us lickety-flick,
make the camera flash explode, we holler

and we’ve been up here five nights this week,
feet bare, shirts wet,
coathangers pointing up.

We are waiting for the bang, we are still
scurrying, we are termites
hurtling through the ocean
in the wood of the hull.

Your palm smashes the emergency glass
and my ears swallow the alarm,
red imprint glowing on my cheek.

We quiver while the storm clouds gather, and
I open my mouth to scream.

13: Bikeshed

2011-04-15T19:25:00.004+01:00

She had copper penny eyes; she spent
summer trading glances for drinks.

At the local they called her
Kiss Chase Kate, they sold her

pints on the promise of a peek,
a snatch, a snapshot carved into a keyhole,
a freezeframe of the zoetrope, and

though she thought she’d left that all behind,
behind the bikeshed, she obliged;

the town was small and
there wasn’t much else, besides.

12: Zombie Girl

2011-04-15T15:06:00.003+01:00

I don’t know what it is about you, zombie girl,
but I’d let you worm your stumps in

the soils of my shoulders, press me close
till your melon flesh oozed into mine.

I’d nibble upon the bits that crumble,
watch you dissolve beneath my sigh as
a sandcastle in gusts of April’s wind.

Zombie girl, let me bury myself in the
rot of your belly, wriggle in your meat and inhale;

let’s kiss, open-mouthed, sweet and putrid,
with our drunken-larvae tongues entwined.

11: Leap out of the window

2011-04-14T13:06:00.004+01:00

Build your home beneath the pylon.
The pressure is higher there,
the magnetic field keeps
your brain bound as
a Chinese slipper.

Don’t let yourself
slip and slather;
this afternoon isn’t
yours to send
awry, so

keep your gaze taut,
don’t fritter,
and don’t
be a bumblebee
dizzied by blossom,
giddy with
liquorice
nectar.

Back to work, leave the crooked-finger lure of the windowpane,

or just
fling your prudence
and close the laptop lid
and

10: One Butterfly Morning

2011-04-14T11:16:00.003+01:00

We woke up, pawed the dozy covers from our eyes
and discovered somewhere in slump of sleep
we had transformed ourselves into butterflies.

You didn’t believe it was possible.
You were caterpillar-brained from the start and our
gaudiness made you blush and stutter.

We had seven days for flapping, seven days
to jitterbug and somersault and ricochet,
and challenge the Azaleas to leapfrog.

We woke up and we were whirlpools of spilt turquoise oil
with wings for flying, and

you pressed your eyes shut and rolled over
without so much as a flap.

9: Better Spent Time

2011-04-14T10:09:00.002+01:00

I am listening to your day-tales,
though I wonder that
this time might be better spent

mistranslating health warnings
from foreign cigarettes and
pasting them to a gallery wall

or, perhaps,

composing a biro haiku
on the arch of a foot, proclaiming:

there is a tunnel
between your skin and the ground
for kisses to crawl.

I could be weaving a perpetual motion machine
from the hair of the girl in the typing pool
(she calls herself Rapunzel
and waits by a lidded phone
for no one to ring);

I could be staring at the sky as if it was a
Mercator map of the world,
firing an arrow like a pin
to pick the cloud
I would land upon.

I could, but I am here instead
with the heavy end of your day,
which is a quieter way to whisper
how I like you.

8: Wrapping a halo of daisies around your skull

2011-04-11T11:28:00.005+01:00

I made you a daisy-chain halo to still the pylon’s electricity
as it squatted on your picnic and gnarled at your lobes.

A ring of white-skirted Maypole dancers intertwined their arms,
designated your skull the village green on Whitsunday afternoon.

They spun until their linens clung damp on their calves, until
they were limp and languid and briar-scratched ankles.

By seven o’clock they wilted.

You took them to the spot where the railway bridge crosses the river
and you crumpled them in your palms.

When they landed on the surface, they scampered off atop a current.

They became pond skaters hunting for the pledge of summer.

7: Pigeon Savant

2011-04-08T11:51:00.003+01:00

Three days unslept, unshaven, wary.

That pigeon on Piazza Navona
- most streetwise of sky rats -
is holding communion for the hordes.

He kowtows, septic skull to the pavement.
eyes crusting with small, yellow horrors.

His body convulses.

That pigeon is a pigeon savant, clad in manky rags;
I can tell by the butt of his head.

He has travelled through the Inferno
where the eye-gougers holler and the snakes of fire
flicker and lick.

He has pecked the unravelling of the sublime.

On my forehead, the concrete is cold and
a benevolent nurse hushes,
presses the compress to my skin.

The cackles begin to recede
and I kneel alongside him and wait.

6: Bunking Off

2011-04-06T21:54:00.002+01:00

I bunked off today.

I closed the laptop lid and cooed, “Hush child, stay here; I promise I'll return.”

The sun had already sucked the water from the marshland. All that was left was spittle, dandelion clocks, and fragments of glass glittering like the mosaics of waterfalls.

A Hasidic Jew cycled by through the grass. It was strange to see him there, so far from town. He looked like a black paper doorway pasted onto a painting of summer.

I did not try to step through him.

I was busy counting the buttercups and the daisies and recording their tallies in a squared maths jotter. So far, the daisies were trouncing the buttercups seventy-nine to forty and it seemed the buttercups were losing faith, preparing themselves for the button-lipped disappointment of the car ride home.

I was holding out, however, even allowing a jaunty cirrus to distract me from a daisy clump or two: “Aloha, buddy! How's the view up there?”

- I have always had a thing for the underdog.

At the end of the marshes lay an octopus tree beckoning for a hug with his open arms. There was nothing to do but clamber, scuff-kneed, into the boughs.

I found a nook to rest my cheek against and breathed in the smell of broken pencils. I knew I would be safe here from the protestations of the working week, from its spindly, tyrannous fingers.

I knew, if I wanted it, the afternoon was mine. I was free as a feather to play kiss chase with my brain.

5: A love letter to the glasgow transport system

2011-04-05T12:41:00.001+01:00

Zip your cardigan close.

Skulk like a lovespun spider in a record store corner
on the orange formica subway car.

Ride clockwise in the afternoon. Write a poem about your heart
spinning like a waltzer and make a promise that summer will last

forever. Tell the boy with the cassette kisses about your sugarcane castle,
tell the tulip merchant you have polished the patent of your shoes.

You are ready to take to the fields of rapeseed, ready for the pollen
to dust your nose like a pillowfight between the sherbet fountain factions

warring in the candy quarrel. You have time to glue contact lenses
to the petals of roses, and help the flowers find the focus they are

seeking. Quick: to the hot house,
let’s blow our allowance on postcards to the bees, let’s

spend it all on honey.

4: Dewey

2011-04-04T12:18:00.005+01:00

I want to create a Dewey Decimal
of caresses

383.02 for her lower lip flitting over his collar, like a dormouse
trepanning for gold

and

081.6, filed deep in the school of classics: his hands on her wrists
with a declaration of war.

I want to spend a hot, dusty summer indoors, ducking
between the shelves
a barefooted child who has no truck with sports.

There is a thumbed spine, towards the back, out of sight
of the front-desk blouse.

I want to slip its dust jacket off, unfurl the pages,
bury my nose in the fold,
and inhale.

The Sufis said God was a secret who longed to be known,
so he created the cosmos

and I built these library shelves to ask for a kiss.

3: Ransacking Your Dreams

2011-04-03T12:43:00.002+01:00

I am watching you, twitching.

Yesterday, you plied open your sticky lids, whispered in my ear the things you’d seen.

You had spent the night traversing a mighty sand dune towards the Bedouin’s daughter; the grains turned to stardust beneath your toes, set you tumbling through the blown glass tick-tock of time.

She opened her fingers and blinked peacock-tail eyes. She winked topaz and jade and

you realised you knew how to fly and you could talk to the elephants and the desert was a Mobius strip unravelling and the daughter

kissed like kaleidoscopes in the eyes of cats.

My dreams had been shelving unstacked and restacked, and I hated you.

I want to crawl inside your skin and

hijack the carpet, ransack your gems, embed them in the soft spots of my brain

for somewhere to escape to

when the lights go out.

2: Flight 571

2011-04-02T11:59:00.003+01:00

A black and white photograph,
the fuselage proclaiming

Fuerza Aerea

to the snow, but
these tundra don’t listen
to a word.

If we were stranded in
white corridors of the Andes, then

I would worry my teeth in your shank
and scythe your sweetest meats
for supper. If it had to be done,

I would parmesan my feast with shavings
mandolined from the crook of your arm, I’d
munch upon your cheeks and the pads of your palms.

I think of your shoulder adorned
with scarlet crescents, bubbling
with blood, I think of biting.

I wake from visions of
your flesh worked over by my tongue and

I pray for the crash.

1: Baking Bread

2011-04-01T12:32:00.005+01:00

It's poem-a-day month! Whee!

here is an ode to bread baking.

......

We are waiting for the bread to rise the way
a bushwalker may wait
for the moon.
But our skies are black.

The yeast yowls a toast, raises a
glass and a serenade. Beneath the dishcloth
there is revelry:

whoopee!

and the champagne foam cascades
like cherry blossom ensnared in the
first gales of spring.

The bubbles snicker. The hands grope beneath
the Jacuzzi foam, the roof is rising.
We have not exchanged a word.

The skin of the dough quivers
like your sullen lip and I ball a fist and wallop,
knock the wind out, wallop again,

with a WHAP and a BAM and a DOOF.

I pound, eyes down, until my forehead beads
sweat, my knuckles bruise, until the dough
is limp and cowed. I don’t stop until your hands
are on my wrists.

I look up, and there is flour on your nose.
You kiss me dustily.

sharp teeth

2011-03-31T01:13:00.006+01:00

She doesn’t know why she can’t stop. Can’t stop inhaling, can’t stop worrying at the scraps of life. Her teeth are too sharp in her mouth.

She wonders how it is inside those damp, pink caves of other people. She’s sure it is softer there. At times, there have been kisses when her pointed tongue has darted inside.

Sometimes it seems like the time to catch her breath has been trimmed too short: a bad haircut. However, she is not, and has never been, the type to leave the barbers in tears. This girl swallows, promises herself life will grow out. But she is still waiting for the ends to soften.

In the mirrors of her dreams, feathered bangs dance on the first breeze of spring.

One night she finds a boy and takes his hand, pretending that perhaps his palm is a swatch of the finest silk which she can drape around her. She folds it gently and tucks it away into her pocket. She is terrified that maybe she will spill something and the red will blotch up like drunken wine on cheekbones.

Neither of them says a word. The walk home takes a long time without conversation to sharpen their skates. When they arrive at the door she feels sure she will need to explain, or ask, or invite. She opens her lips to do so, and he leans forward.

His face is softer than anything she has ever seen before. She has never kissed a blond boy. The wisps of his fringe tickle her nose.

When their lips meet, she is suddenly transported to Aberdeen, 1997. She is sitting with her best friend and they are listening to Placebo and drinking red wine, while her friend’s mother washes dishes in the other room. They are talking about bohemia and her friend giggles, and suddenly everything is soft and downy. Her kiss is like cherry blossom gusting on the breeze.

When they pull apart they are almost afraid to look one another in the eye.

This isn’t what she wants. She doesn’t know how to say no. His skin feels like pebbledash yet his lips chafe velvet. She knows she is melting, but she feels more like the churning innards of volcanoes than caramelised sugar. She tries to make her mind quiet.

When he comes, he howls inside her.

She doesn’t know why she can’t stop. She wishes she could be left alone by everyone; she wants to lock her skin away and promise it no more probing. Her soul feels like helium inside a leaking balloon.

He doesn’t call, and she feels like her heart is breaking.

lady writers are hot

2011-03-02T09:33:00.003Z

oh YUM hinton, your hair is PERFECT

the courtesan

2011-02-28T10:05:00.002Z

They said if she loved him, she would hang

up her nipple tassels, bury the red sequins

into a cardboard box for

no more winking.

She would have no need of

the anointments and unctuants

she employs; the bordello’s

curtains would collapse.

So: the courtesan retired,

folded her butterfly limbs into

their grey onion sheaths, set her

bawdy ruffles to rest, but

her lacquered lashes

began to droop; her curls

limped like cut

dandelions in

a crystal tumbler.

Without the UV glare of gazes,

her skin lost its sheen.

She forgot the seduction

of the angle of her instep

and he left her, for a dancer

who sparkled

like a rhinestone

cupcake,

iced with the cape

of a supernova.

barbara gowdy on provocation

2011-02-27T10:33:00.001Z

Any provocative thought, if you act upon it, seems to set you on a trajectory.

summer recipes

2011-02-26T17:05:00.002Z

You do not need to follow the recipe precisely. Be creative, and the results will surprise you.

Substitute the sundried tomatoes for a warm rock on a late summer afternoon.

Instead of julienning the fava beans you could, instead, slip your linen shirt off your pink shoulders and hang it on a tree branch like a white flag yelling “I don’t want to fight anymore, goddamit, this aftenoon is beautiful.”

Bubble the mixture on a long, low flame until the air caramelizes and the hum of mosquitoes sticks to your damp patches of skin.

You do not need to keep a close eye on proceedings. Relax. Leave everything to infuse, let the butter sweat the onions until they are translucent kisses waiting to be wiped away by the back of his hand.

Do not stir the pot.

Distract yourself with brie and half-completed crossword puzzles and refrain from lifting the lid to see. It will be ready when the sun ducks under the leaves’ canopy and the breeze raises the hairs on your forearms.

You will notice that you are ready to eat.

Leave it to cool until it is just right, then chew slowly

and thoughtfully

and have patience with your tongue.

feb 21st

2011-02-21T18:35:00.002Z

It's february 21st which surely is some kind of solstice, so it seems a cruel trick that it just got bitter-cold again and we're huddled for warmth, fingerless gloves for fingering in, Turkish pide to keep our tongues warm. This fortnight has come around with an upsurge in work and a downturn in caressing by the canal, oyster afternoons and gin fizz. This is disappointing, but I have a hankering that March is going to be a delight.

tom robbins on writing

2011-02-17T13:32:00.001Z

"Never be afraid to make a fool of yourself. The furthest out you can go is the best place to be. "

mmpphhth

2011-02-17T12:59:00.003Z

Overnight, a briar patch has thickened
in the chasm between sleepfulness
and waking. I have no gloves to
trim the thorns and

morning is a shrill harridan
in another room, shrieking ceaselessly
about the chores
afternoon has to offer.

It is going to take
an Ethiopia of coffee
to slough the skin from my stare.

mary gaitskill on writing

2011-02-15T14:00:00.005Z

"Writing is being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page."

Thieving the Moon

2011-02-15T13:53:00.011Z

A little more soppy than usual. Fear not, regular filth levels will soon be resumed.

The New Scientist explained that
if aliens stole the moon
the tides would set to slumber.

Earth would loom to a new
axis: half the year
we would shiver, six months
we would burn, and

the migration of moths
would cease.

There is, on the crook
of your neck, a swatch of
silken skin which tugs
at my gravity and yesterday
on the bus I felt

without it there is
my own axis off-kilter.

Without it I lurch too close
to bright lights, my broken
moth wings too tricky

to orientate in the
absence of the
wink of the moon.

BRUISES!

2011-02-14T13:50:00.001Z

It is time we spoke out in praise of bruises. Those ten-tone firework displays spattered across skin. Those thickets of wildflowers blossoming just below the boundary of flesh. Bruises are blood gone wrong, a coagulation, the body's memory of the thwack it loved too much to let go. Bruises are a postcard to a future self spelled r-e-m-e-m-b-e-r-?. Bruises remind you: yes. You did.

There are few things that can be done to us perfectly poised between the temporary and the magnificent, no scar and gaping wound, just a Rorschach blot blossoming that spells out the secrets of the psyche in glorious technicolour.

I adore bruises. I wake after drunken nights with shins that swell with target practice escapades, and I marvel. I watch them mature and develop like children, parts of my own body who I can no longer dictate and control. I run my fingers over them and feel the lumpen textures that lurk beneath and I wonder about the worlds which exist deep inside my skin, to which I can never attain entry. Our only communication these smoke signals sent to the surface. Encoded in colours for my brain to decipher: what the fuck happened that night, how?

Of course, my favourite are sex bruises. When I stand behind the bar with four perfect fingerprint circles throbbing black and yellow in the muscle of my arm, and the customers ask me if I've been in a fight and I smile, I turn away, the perfect waitress, because what if I had? They always ask. This surprises me, as if by paying for their drinks they have earned some right to question where and what it is I do with my body. I wonder how they would react if I said Yes. I was attacked. I don't. I smile, and I turn away. Head chockfull of the thought of fingers and fucking and being clutched at. Mouth full of giggles.

The black eye is the ultimate bruise. Patti Smith understands:

"I thought that was the heaviest thing I ever saw - Anouk Aimee with that black eye. It made me always want to have a black eye forever. It made me want to get a guy to knock me around. I'd always look great"

Wow. Of course! Black & white photos of black & blue girls. Heavy. All the lacquer and the liner in the world is only an approximation we paste on daily, wondering how dreamy it would be to have an eye ensconced in blood. Miaow! Perhaps a feminist will punch me for this. I don't mean to condone abuse: God, no. It's aesthetic, not ethics. I've just always wanted one, that's all, and it's so hard to give to yourself...

There are always the slice of the blade and the slit of the wrists, they have their adherers, but that's so obvious, so instant, so purposeful. So personal and private. So intended. All the glory of the experience is caught up, then and there, in the enactment. The bruise hops among the undergrowth like Pan, tootling his flute, waiting to catch you unawares with the wallop. Most often, you don't even recognise the monkey until it's leapt on your back.

That's the beauty. They don't remind you, like scars, of the moments of hatred towards yourself and your skin. They sneak up in the agonies of ecstacy and the stumblings of drunks; they are a postcard to your future self signed the girl so delirious she couldn't control herself.

I love them!

More bruises please.

something old to start with

2011-02-11T11:15:00.001Z

You told me not to touch, but

I probed, I confess; it was so soft, so shiny, it was Christmas tree coral and my palm was wide. I tried, I folded my fingers, but I am sick to the stomach of this much me and then

there was that, taut as the bubble's skin. I wanted to quiver and my hands are pink-nosed moles, littering your lawn with clods. I'm sorry, you told me not to touch, but

as I sat on my palms distraught, curiosity worried my flaps of skin. I laid bare a crook of neck for the serpent's tongue to flicker. We flipped and flicked and we

fucked, no trimmed wicks on these candles, we sputtered like sparklers and we gorged. He tasted like all the gravy dripping from the boat,

staining the tablecloth. He tasted like Boxing Day.

new resolutes

2011-02-11T10:17:00.004Z

The past eight months have been pitiful in terms of updates, it's true, though this isn't from lack of writing. I've been concentrating on short stories, working with a mentor, putting together a collection which started with The Cats' Gravity almost two years ago and which I plan to complete in the next few months. Then I will find someone to publish it and I will embark on a grand adventure of promotion. I will camp out in Shakespeare & Co in Paris and Atlantis Books in Santorini and slip my book onto their shelves with dedications in the covers. I will sleep in cupboards surrounded by short story collections and dream of plotlines twisting through my curls (I will, finally, get a perm). I will go to NYC and recite fiction on the L train and become a cult hero and spend many evenings in Barcade becoming an expert at Ms Pacman (if I look for myself in craigslist's Missed Connections, I will be there, often). We'll drink bourbon under the bridges like it's January 2010 all over again, except I'll have sex with fewer men and more women. Miranda July will pick up a copy of my book in some cafe-cum-bookstore in Portland and be instantly charmed. She will call me up and we will start a writing project together which will involve vintage lingerie, woolen pom poms and biros.

I know you think this is unlikely but actually I am charmed and it will probably happen. A year and a half ago I thought wouldn't it be great if someone gave me a load of money so I could quit my job and go back to New York and write stories? So the Scottish Book Trust did, they wrote a cheque for £2000 and said have fun.

They also gave me a mentor and a voice coach and many schmoozing events with free canapes. I went to one of those events last night. My mentor told a woman from the BBC that my writing was exciting, dense and sparky, full of eroticism with a hint of menace. I read a story to a room full of industry people and they projected a picture of my face eating a bagel on the wall and a quote from my story. People knew who I was because my giant face was up there, eating that bagel. The people came and said hello and we drank champagne.

I have also recently had acceptances from places which impress me, like Gutter and Foundling Review and 3:AM and I have discovered a boy who thinks it's incredibly sexy when I get things published. This is not an essential motivation for writing, but a nice thing nonetheless. When I have my book published I will dress up in stockings and lace-trimmed knickers and red high heels with bows on the toes and I will sit on a high stool with my legs crossed at the knee reciting things I have written until I am ravished.

I suspect this will not take long.

Anyway, the point in this post is that I have been a pitiful bloggette and I am going come back for a while, because I like writing things that do not need to be perfect and complete. Trying for everyday updates for the rest of February, because if we can get through that it will be March again, and springtime. Yum!