It's National Poetry Day and I wrote a poem

A woman is standing in a window and it is raining and the window is open like a door and she is a painting.

I see her because my train is stopped and she sees the train but she doesn't see me.

At least I don't think she does.

Later I see a waitress with a stack of dirty plates like a baby in her arms,
but she disappears as quick as clicking.

I'm too dumb to believe in ghosts.

Lauren

I suppose I am in with love Lauren Conrad. It is an unsettling sort of in love that brings with it a knot of confused feelings that I am often blindsided by when I’m doing something boring like counting change in my hand. It is unsettling I guess because the concept is alien. I have not met Lauren Conrad. I was once in a place she had been a day or two before. I don’t know where she was when I was there. In fact I don’t remember knowing she had been there at all. I saw it in a magazine after the fact maybe. It isn’t important.

It’s an expanding sort of in love that rises like dough in my chest, and it is light like dough too and sometimes it feels like I’m flying. Other times it is a lead weight. Sometimes it is feverishly hot. Often I cannot recognise myself inside of it. It has grown beyond me into someplace else, you see.  

When I was seventeen Lauren was eighteen. I am twenty eight now and she is twenty nine now and she is married and sometimes on her Instagram account she posts pictures of her dogs or her husband. Once, she posted a picture of her sitting in a doorway with an effortless ponytail that was bleached in a salon to make it look like it was bleached by the Californian sun. My hair has been bleached by the Californian sun before, but my hair looked uneasy there and I looked uneasy there too. I was a square peg trying not to be a square peg. She is breezy and shaped liked the Pacific and her teeth are white and they are probably bleached too.

That Californian sun has somehow made its way inside of her and she glows that light that happens right before the sun sets. That sudden burst of gold. She is a sudden burst of gold, and it must follow then that I am filled with rain.

I am a cupboard beneath the stairs and she is a roof terrace where people come to throw parties to celebrate getting good news. We’re having a baby. I got a new job. The cancer is gone.   

Once, she chose a boy instead of a summer in Paris. Maybe she wants to forget that now. Perhaps she already has. Or perhaps everything she has done since have been stepping stones to get her further away from the girl who would choose a boy instead of a summer in Paris, but probably not. I wonder if she ever thinks about him. Jason. Ever looks him up on Facebook, or lets herself imagine, just for a second what it all would have been if that summer hadn’t collapsed under its own weight. Maybe she does, but most likely she doesn’t. She is too happy for the frivolities of her early twenties now. And besides, so much has changed, so much of herself is already different.

I have often wondered if she would like me were we to meet. She is prissy and private and I am prone to crying in the gym. My clothes have holes in them. I am difficult and loud and sometimes I am quiet, and recently I swore in a church without meaning to because also I swear but not because I think it’s clever. I am needy if I don’t get attention, and I am needy when I am getting attention because I am frightened of not having it again. I don’t always want it though, but you won’t know that because I am not always good at explaining how I feel. I have spent most of my time on the outside of most things and even if she liked me I wouldn’t believe her when she said she did. I am deeply flawed and she is breezy and shaped like the Pacific.

But I am kind and I try my best to be good, except for when I can’t because my stomach is filled with the giant-ness of the world and I feel too small. Recently, I’ve felt too small more often than I haven’t and that can be disappointing. Lauren Conrad makes me feel small sometimes but really it isn’t her, it is me reflected back on myself.

She is just a girl in California making the most of things after all, and I am just a boy filled with bad weather trying to figure out why he’s not doing the same.

10/09/15

It is easy to imagine him waiting for you when you get home, the way it is easy to think about something that obviously isn’t.

A polar bear in a swimming pool.

A carnival ride on a hill.

A boy in a dressing gown handing you a drink as you hang up your keys on a hook by the door.

You are both ordinary.

You were being a petulant child when you saw him the Monday before last because you were wearing a jumper you’d bought when you had been a fractious child.

Perhaps it was the jumper the whole time, you think. Perhaps you were just a child inside a petulant sweater that ate your hands and your waist.  

Maybe you had already been happy.

You suppose you could paint the walls grey.

18 year Elijah Project, year two

Elijah turned two in July and here is the second portrait in the series that I promised him on his first birthday. He is doing his 'special smile' and I'm pretty chuffed about the whole thing honestly. He's still the best human being.

18 year Elijah Project

I have a nephew called Elijah. He is the best human being that probably exists. I promised to paint his portrait every year for his birthday for the first 18 years of his life. Here is last years portrait. Elijah is two in July and I have this afternoon started the second in the series. It reminded me that I never posted the first one. Here it is. He's nearly not one anymore though.

Self Portrait

Personal commission

Terrie

portrait

a portrait of two people looking happy 

portrait

A recently commissioned portrait. 

A portrait with a cat. 

A girl with a recently commissioned portrait. 

A portrait with a cat. 

 

tiny drawings

I made nine tiny drawings and posted them around Hastings Old Town and if you find one you can have one.

a poem for a girl

She survived a famine, and then a love as fast as a flood (though all water must go somewhere eventually, or else it sits still as a lizard until it stinks heavy of ending.)  

He was the cascading gush, the big bang, a flower bursting crimson at her bedside, corporeal lashes like lightening strikes, a hole cut from within.

Each day began with the opening of windows, an assault of fresh air beneath sheets weary with sweat. Her heart was a home and he was a pillow on which to rest her bones.

I suppose green is the colour of loss. It is a bud after all. A sudden space to fill with other. Shoots out of soil like birth. She is a universe being born, a girl kissing with her mouth open. A bird. She is a flicked switch and a dancing flame at once, electric and fire in the dark.

But if she is to find herself in her lostness, she will need to keep swimming in circles.  

dream

Where the line ends

The park by the Mall is an easy place to be by yourself. I have a book and music is playing from inside my bag and it’s a soundtrack as I walk further from the roads. Music played that way can sometimes be a barrier when you’re walking. It is sometimes a closed door. But today it is a window. The squirrels in the park by the Mall scurry up to the people. Man and beast reach out with their hands and exchange nuts like coloured jewels. The squirrels’ feet are clasped around the railings and they push the nuts into their mouths and leap towards the pond with the firework fountain in its middle. The people are amused then and some of them point as the squirrels disappear behind green leaves, and some laugh and others put their hands into their pockets or into another hand. In time they all walk away, back to wherever it was they were going before. Some of them take photographs with their phones or with their cameras. One couple asks a passing man in a mackintosh to take a photograph of them both, the city behind an open fan. Their faces are the same, their features bobbing on the surface like a boat.  
If I had a coffee in my hand then I would know what to do with my hand, the one that isn’t holding my book. As it is, it languishes in my lap, turns pages when necessary, scratches at my face, pushes up my glasses. The palm settles facing upwards and then twists beneath my coat. It is restless and I think maybe that I am too.

Last night a boy in a club danced cartwheels with his arms and we drank beer and got pushed against one another in the crowd. The boy is different to me. He is easy and I am a difficult confusion of knots. He wasn’t wearing a hat but when I think about last night he is wearing a hat and it gets knocked to the floor by the people dancing. When I think about last night his eyes are closed and his mouth is turned upwards at the sides and we are two different people than we are but we are still two boys, in a crowd of dancing people with paint on their faces.  

I remember another boy then, one from my past who seemed easy but wasn’t. I think about a summer that in the wake of summers since has grown cold and ordinary. I think about my hand in his hair and it prickles now. It didn’t before but it prickles now. And another before him, as wet as paste in my memory. Time can often be cruel I suppose. It often dulls the shine of things that were once new.

I’ve become adept at projecting a personality onto a person I do not yet know. It is a way of saving time predominately. I can write the story of our life together through to its finishing point, and before we have said hello I am already leaving through the front door of the house we once shared, a final box of belongings in my arms (your blue tie, your grey t-shirt, that drawing of two coyotes or foxes or dogs you made on the plane; those things, that once stacked up upon one another build a life). It is childish to partake in such frivolity but I am a nervous adult who often needs the comfort of child’s play.   

I’m having a hard time not being in love then; or a harder time perhaps believing that it is a venture worth while. ‘Everything ends’ reads a note I found this morning in my phone as I skipped between my car and an appointment in a different town. I wonder what prompted such grandiose finality and the words become a tornado swirl of jumbled letters on the inside of my head. Everything is always ending I am realising now, but that in turn allows new things to begin. We each are forever starting over.     

I am on a train and it is dark and the train is empty except for me and the conductor. The conductor walks up and then down the aisle; his job to leave and then come back again, to constantly be between two places. In a different reality I would strike up a conversation with this man, who looks weary and ready to call it a night. In a different reality I would say to him that we were the same, him and I; both between places, both going and coming back again. If this had been a different train, and I had perhaps been a little less concerned of becoming the late night travelling cliché I have often been told that I am, I would have said something that would maybe have brought us both a little comfort on a cold Sunday in January.

The train pulls into the station and I get off. I am at home, where the line ends.  

When we go back to the sea

I found this. It is about the sea and some things that I remember. I wrote it in 2013 and today it appeared, shining like an emerald.

When we go back to the sea

I am sixteen and standing waist deep in the water. It is May but it is cold and the sky and the sea are the same colour and the line between them both is gone. She and him are there too; we are standing in a triangle, far enough away from each other that we have to shout to be heard. The wind is howling and she ties her hair up behind her head and tucks the hanging strands behind her ears. We can see the White Rock from where we’re standing, a row of shops selling spades and tee shirts and jobs.
“Ready” he shouts and she shouts “Ready” and I shout “Ready” and we all start to pee. We have finished our exams and we are free and we are tip toeing on the line between childhood and adulthood and he said we should go to the ocean and then someone said we should pee inside of it and we’re still young and the idea seems sort of a perfect way to start our new lives. We’ll be friends forever, I remember thinking, this means we’ll be friends forever.

I am twenty now. Or twenty-one. I have been sat in George Street for two hours nursing one hot chocolate that has gone cold and sort of separated. My legs hurt, the bottom of my back is beating, beating, I can feel each of my toes as if each is an arm. They are twitching. My heart is heavy inside my chest. I can feel it when I breathe. My neck is stiff as board, my eyes burn when I blink, when I close them. They are tired of crying. I am tired of crying. I am tired.
I write “I release my pain” onto a piece of paper torn out of an old book in my rucksack and I fold it five times between my fingers, there beside the water and the fishing boats covered in rope. The water laps over my feet and my shoes are wet and then my socks are wet and my fist is gripped around the piece of paper folded into the shape of a stone and I close my eyes and take a deep breath and then another and I can feel my heart and I whisper “I release my pain, I release my pain” and the sound gets caught up in the wind and takes off like a bird. I can hear its wings now, clapping like oars in the sky and I open my eyes because I think I might see it but it is only me, with my fist still clenched. I raise it up and throw the paper stone into the sea. It’s big enough to take on all of my hurting, I think. It is stronger than I am.

We have spent the night in the Old Town but with you it all seems new. I am late at first and you are waiting and you look as if you would wait for me forever so I slow down my walking because I want you to, but you see me and I stop because I am nervous. I am nervous under the weight of what this could be. I am nervous because I’ve forgotten how I would usually greet a person I am meeting for the first time. For a second I think I might call you champ but I don’t.
We laugh that night and I drink lemonade because my car is by the Crazy Golf and you say you want to go for a drive and I grab my keys and you try to change the music but I don’t like that so I turn it off. And you turn it on. And I laugh but it isn’t funny. We stop near the pier and you run across the road and I’m behind you, walking cautiously. It is dark and the sea is a still, black velvet blanket and the stones are just sounds under our feet. We walk beneath the scorched frame because you want to show me the silhouette made by the moon and it’s beautiful and I’m not scared though I hear people in the blackness. You put your arms around my shoulders and they are warm and porous and sip up my cold. You turn me and kiss me on my mouth and it feels new but entirely familiar and your hands are on my back now, holding me. Holding me up. Tonight is the beginning and the end but I don’t know that, not yet.

Rock-A-Nore is syrupy with sunshine and she is carrying my bags because the orange-red hair is blowing in my face and, for that day at least, I am somebody and I can’t carry my own bags. The sun is bright and everything is yellow, even the sea, and the sequins on the mermaid costume I am wearing glitter like a hundred tiny camera flashes. The yellow water crashes against rocks and I let myself think that the ocean is applauding me, and for a while I believe it. I sing out to King Triton and to the sky and she takes photos and I sing and I sing. Later the ocean, like a spilled drink, pours in all of a sudden and the rocks are bobbing like ice cubes in a glass. We grab at our things but the mermaid costume is tight around my legs and the water comes in. I imagine dying here. I imagine my father’s face when he discovers his youngest son dead on a beach dressed as a Princess. I imagine the front page of the newspaper, my spot on the local news. I hear the conversations in office staffrooms, in playgrounds, in churches. I imagine becoming an anecdote, an invisible victim, a “do you remember when…?”, I imagine dying before I’ve become anyone at all, before the town knows my name. I imagine being forgotten. The sun is shining amber and for a moment I am amber too and I disappear into the cliff. Into the sand. Into the water.

This town that is my soil

I was reminded of this thing that I wrote two years ago about Hastings. I never posted it on here and I'm not sure why. What I do know is that if you replace my age then (twenty six) with my age now (twenty eight) then the sentiment is pretty much the same, everything always comes back around.

This town that is my soil

I didn’t leave. I stayed and then my mind went to Europe and it went to Dorset and Japan and to your bed with the views of the school and the light that bled through the blind until it drowned us in that room, away from the beginning, from all of the beginnings. I stayed because I am not sure who I am without this place, the place that fed me and filled me up. Not sure who I am without everything that it took away, the people it stole, the days that I spent with them, without them, alone.
I sit on the edge of a cliff, in the concave of a rock that recognises my back; because I have been here before perhaps, once some time ago with him and a woman we both knew who was still a girl but not to us. I have been here over and over. A circle working its way to the top; and then down again. I have been here with the sand between my fingers and the sand beneath my nails. I have been here and my name is carved into the side of a rock beneath his and above hers, somewhere in the middle of it all.
The tide is heavy today and it looks like a tongue and the sky is the roof of a mouth and the town that seems so tiny now because I am twenty-six is going to be swallowed, I’m sure of it. I imagine it not being here. I imagine a hole in its place, a bite mark on a map, the concave of a rock that recognises my back and me, alone with a past that doesn’t exist anymore.
My grandmother didn’t grow up here. I don’t think she did. She grew her children here though, my mother, my aunt, my uncles. I’m chasing her down roads where their houses were once. I see her at the grocers, running around fishing huts, feeding ducks at the park. I find myself walking inside her footsteps and I never saw her feet and it’s all imaginary I guess. But perhaps she was here. Trying to get someplace else, constantly trying to go forward.
I imagine this town with hands that grab at me when I get to its corners. I imagine them around my waist and on my arms. Sometimes I wonder if they’re pulling me back or pushing me out. The arms of the person you love can change from pillows to rope in an instant. That is this town, I sometimes think; a comfort and an uncomfortable comfort.
I wonder if I am the best of myself with you, this town that is my soil. I wonder if I shrunk down so I could fit inside it still. I wonder if I kept my mouth shut for too long, if I was quiet and meek and let the changes happen to me when I should have been the change instead.
I am on the West Hill now and I am looking at the East Hill and an ice cream van is stuck like a sticker to its side and people run like ants and do cartwheels and I can hear them laughing and I’m really sure I can hear them laughing. I think about calling something out to them, something that might echo across to where they are. I think it should be my name at first and then I think it should be the names of my parents or the date when they met. I think about it but I never say it and the moon starts to steam up into the sky. An old fingerprint on glass. The houses beneath me, like boxes filled with things and stacked in piles, begin to light up and I start to see a pattern in the way the lights turn on although I know really that I don’t. More people coming home. Another day done. I am sitting on the grass, the grass that I ran across once on my way to the cliff, on my way to the sea, on my way down to start again at the beginning.
I look across at the pier, a charred skeleton balancing in grey, crashing waves. I think about what it was once, my cousin serving ice creams at its entrance and holidays and coin machines and chips. I imagine it having a heart inside that burnt frame. I think about it beating. I think about it beating.
I take my hand and place it over my eyes. I try to imagine myself someplace else. Europe, Dorset, Japan, your bed; but the town just won’t let go, its fingers pulling on my own, asking me to open up my eyes again.