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.

The Golden Girls Paintings

After I faced my fears, and finally painted Murder, she wrote's Jessica Fletcher, I was relieved, sure. But there was still a feeling of something being incomplete, and deep down, I knew what it was. So, after months of trying to muster up some courage, I finally started on my illustrations of the Golden Girls, and boy has it been stressful.
I feel about the Golden Girls how most people no doubt feel about their own mothers. I have a love for that show so deep that its almost embarrassing (luckily for me I have absolutely no shame whatsoever.) It is the comfort blanket that I reach for when I'm feeling down, that reliable friend you can call at 2am in the morning when you can't get to sleep and there's nobody else around.
And so I didn't want to paint them because I didn't want to let them down. I couldn't let them down. But then I had to paint them because if I didn't I was letting us all down (yes this all really went on inside my head, yes, I'm being serious, yes, I'm incredibly lonely).

And here are the results.
If you think they're not completely hideous then you can buy one (or the entire set at a discounted price) here in my shop, and that would make me completely happy (and maybe not so lonely feeling.)

Thanks for being a friend, guys (sorry, that was cheap. I haven't spoken to anybody for a really long time.)

 

year

i. I am inside a small room and have been asked to sit on the side of the bed. Two or three people tap their fingers up and down my back like seagulls on grass. There is sudden coldness from a stethoscope. An efficient and rehearsed apology. I giggle. I actually giggle, coquettish in my nervousness. The room is suddenly still, I think, though the rattling of metallic equipment continues somewhere behind me. Kathy, the no nonsense mother of a friend, comes through swinging doors in navy scrubs. Her hair is short. She touches my hand. I smile. My face is heavy as wet sheets. “This is my friend” she tells a nurse, her accent peppered with beats of her Scottishness. She's the woman you'd have wanted with you during the Blitz, I have always thought. A no muss, no fuss, get the job done sort of a woman, but who would still wrap her arms around your own and sing lullabies over the sounds of bombs falling outside. I want her to sing to me now.
I am clicking my fingers in my lap but the pads of my hands are clammy and cold and they only make a weighted scuff sound that drops to the floor like a stone.
A round nurse with a ponytail puts her hand on my shoulder, and the intimacy of it makes my cheeks flush. She explains what will happen next, but I have had operations before. The part that the patient plays is most often the same; the character that drives the plot forward, the reason everyone is gathered around the table. I don’t hear what she says.
The same nurse wipes my hand with a cold, stinging cloth and pulls a needle from a paper bag.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I say,
“I’m not very brave.” I say.
“You’re doing fine.” She says.
She smiles and then I smile. The room becomes foggy. I am crying and I am trying not to cry.
I am doing fine, I tell myself.
I am flat now, with a cushion beneath my legs. My glasses are on a tray that Kathy has put some place else, and the man in front of my face is a shining puzzle of pink shapes.
“You’ll be asleep soon” he is saying, as my body fills from bottom to top with an ice cold stillness.

ii. It is the afternoon. I am back on the ward and my parents are sitting next to my bed. I eat a potato that is microwave warm and foamy in my mouth.

It wasn’t all that hard in the end, I catch myself thinking. Tomorrow I will be home. Mum will make me sandwiches. I will turn on movies in the afternoon that I will sleep through unapologetically. I am a patient, I catch myself thinking. I have to rest.
Debbie and Sheridan come armed with magazines and I laugh now about how nervous I had been in those minutes before, as though I am describing a TV show. It is partly an act now, already just a story I am telling. I show them all how well my new hip works, walking aided by crutches to the toilet next to my room. I can hear them clapping. I stand in the toilet but I can’t go, a lingering effect of the anaesthetic that won’t loosen its grip until late into the night. I walk slowly back. I sit on my bed. I am going to be sick. Debbie holds back my hair and hums “Oh sweetheart” near to my sticky face. I spit into the bowl she is holding under my chin.

iii. January. Three months have passed and I am back at the hospital. I have a condition I am told. My bones are growing extra bone, they say, the space between my joints slowly becoming smaller until there will be no space left at all.

“It explains why you’ve had to have your hip replaced at such a young age.” They say. They are matter of fact, the way doctors often are, pointing the tip of their pen at my x-ray as though they are telling the weather.
"Yes." I say.
It is funny, I suppose, that I have spent my life petrified of death, and now can feel my body aging minute by minute as it whimpers towards a finale. My body is speaking my mind, I catch myself thinking, recalling the title of a book I had skimmed through once. I have spent so much time being frightened that now my body is an ancient ruin. Fear has scratched and scratched at my insides like flint onto a wall, until I have become what I had always been scared of; I am broken.

iv. They give me a pill that I am to take every day. It is a buffer, I guess. A triangular, green cushion between me and the constant ache that is by now as familiar as family.

I am uneasy in this body. It is an ill-fitting suit jacket, a long car journey, a city street in summer. I am awkward corners that jut and fold and creek in the night time.
The pain I had long ago surrendered to is no longer asomatous. I can see it now. Him. He, a constant companion I am almost reticent to let go of. I have grown uncomfortably comfortable in his company, weaving the two of us so tightly together I'm convinced I cannot exist aside from him.
I take the pills anyway. Days turn over into weeks and that familiar, unending ache becomes a sporadic beat, every now and again ba-booming a broken circuit through my middle. At once I fall into light, balmy summer evenings, distracted by candlelit picnics between busy roads and breath stealing laughter. Amidst this dizzying rebirth, I am distracted by the memory of myself, before him, fuzzing back into focus like a developing photograph.

Joan - a tribute

Summer went.

Summer went. I waved my hand as it past; a gesture that sprang to mind in the spur of the moment. It came quickly, you see. Or went. And I waved as though a friend had called my name from a moving car.

It's maybe a little dramatic to describe it as a death, that feeling that I felt. But it is a death I suppose. A death of sorts at least.

Dark evenings skulked in, silent as a cat, until it seemed all at once that night began again before the day had even ended.
As insidious as Winter can sometimes be, Autumn is often crueler, I caught myself thinking. A liminal space that wraps everything in crisp, umber reminders that the world is cartwheeling through endless reams of nothingness. There is birth. There is light. There is a soft, gentle winding down into stillness.

I am on my bed now, listening to yesterday whisper a warning to the night outside.
Something is always ending, it is saying, before getting caught up in the twisting winds and blowing upwards into blank sky.

Robin

I've been reading about him all day. Reading quotes and interviews. So many things that in the light (the darkness I suppose) of everything have become something else. Something entirely new. Saturated suddenly with all this aching meaning. An opened door. A closed door.

I tried to ignore the porridge oaty lump in my throat as I read a Twitter conversation he had had once.
"Thank you Robin Williams for making me laugh so fucking hard. I needed that." the man had said.
"I needed your tweet. Thank you!" he had replied.
Cried a quiet cry at my work desk.
Wiped tears from my face.
Ate an apple.

Thought about seeing Aladdin for the first time. Watching Mrs Doubtfire, Patch Adams. Jumanji.
I smiled for a second.
I remembered again.

He lived with a camera between him and the world, I thought. A world that was too much of everything (too little of everything? Constantly bubbling over. Boiling dry. Repeat.)

I tried not to think about the hours before but imagined him there in his home. Drinking a glass of water. Walking up the stairs. Being still. I thought about his eyes, his downwards mouth, his fingers scratching through his hair. I thought about his heart, a clenched fist punching red in his chest.
I thought about his insides. The loud, unending shout in his head.
I thought about his life before, by then just a distant echo, a quiet, low hum he could no longer hear above the scrambling noise.