My midnight

liminal spaces are more real, more realistic,
than those road-crossings announcing heres or theres.
beginnings and endings are pretty myths of hindsight,
a retrospective patterning of mess.
i do like this about sunny autumn days.
i like how these months point down while
springtime points inexorably up and up
(you can't wipe her smile off her face!).
the beautiful things i see are almost always dark,
greyed out like the knit on my back;
so, i guess, the in-betweens are mine -
mostly in a gorgeous fraying decay.
my mind is a racing one, a soft dark cave full
of abstractly-rendered projections and premonitions.
some passages are built up and round;
some narratives are threadbare loose.
this is ok.

Welcome to the Window

It's all up to you, my friend.
It might be what you always wanted but
You might not recognise it
Straight away.
You see?

Close and lips and
Cheeks heavily brushed
Blushed, touched but
It's not quite real or it's in fuzzy focus
At least.

For my part? Nobody knows
Except the King and he's worrying about
Other things and that's
Good for the world,
Which likes generally to turn.

I have so many conversations.
I spill and speak. And
It's hard to make out the register
Of these date-stamped improvisations.
You know?

There are makeshift moments that my eyes
Distort behind the scenes.
I can't say where will and wont
come in in all of this.
It's probably nothing.

on love songs

who do you write songs for now that you have tossed me aside? whose words do you steal now that you have no right to mine?

Liar.

"Private assurances are terribly easy to break; they evaporate like the morning dew. After all, it is only your word against mine when I say that you misunderstood me and I didn't really say or mean what you thought. We are deeply prone to self-deception in this area above all."

From a book by Christopher Ash that was lying on Eirian's bedside table the night before she got married. On why marriage needs to be a public act.

anon.

all my words are bloated with other people's words, and i hate that you made me a cliché.

Letters.

i imagined myself with a new name

Life in the past.

There are roses. And heart-shaped balloons and
confetti type things that
are annoying because they get everywhere in all the little
small crevasses and gaps, all the in-betweens.
There are days set aside and tied up in sentimental sentiment
and also ribbons.
There are scribbled graffittied blue-lined
notebooks that say nothing except how much we all want to
bridge the white space of the page that's like the white space
both denied and admitted with a childish ever-after,
a word,
used by everyone and the biggest most obnoxious
cliche in the whole wide world. Yet
exactly what I mean. You
and a blank space and me and some air making the car
windows fog up with messy alphabets.
There's no epiphany here not even a grassroots one not
even and then a whispered prayer.
You hold me from so so far away.

a missed telephone call.

trust that as soon as it really comes to crunch time with my thesis, i look back to this neglected little interweb scrap.

the final lines of the title story in the collection i'm analysing for my thesis (or supposed to be analysing, right now) read:

"I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."

i'm having one of those hearing-heart days. the beating is conspicuous, and i can feel it - it's trapped and uptight. an ugly, tired feeling.

one unexpected offer that is as unsettling as it is exciting.
one hope for more guidance than i expect He'll give.
one hopeless wish; one love with a head full of hard and sad things that can't get out or over, and that i can't fix with all the beautiful words in the world.
one growing sense of panic at the largeness of this thing i've agreed to do.

too many ones. i know it's childish but i want you to decide and end all these, please. i'm not grown up enough for all these adult-sized dot to dots.

how much.

my mind is constantly occupied with finding inventive ways to describe this - constantly because none ever satisfies. it is really quite fun. it's liberating to move beyond the realm of the easily explainable and therefore codified, controlled, boxed and ribbon-tied. we are anything but that, and it's fantastic.

p.s. thomas and isobel are finally dating. this is very cute.

heavily backwards

I want to tell you what it feels like to stand defiant and small against the wind.

And what it feels like to do too many things and then to stop and awkwardly catch breath but not quite enough so you still feel sort of tight and without.

It's not like in the movies. But then you all know that already.

I want to tell you about the day all the words became cliches.

water and some other things

unstable and over-thinking, thinking so much i no longer think at all, atop a messy wave, blown to and fro by imaginary winds, wanting quick assurance, doubting you, without need, without cause, without. this without that i negotiate so poorly. having received so much and known so deeply and been filled so full, but feeling so scattered, forgetting the things of five minutes past, unable to pierce a murky view, UP and (down) always, bobbing. breakable. vulnerable. living inside a man-made box that's all misfiring cerebral circuits, and conjured conversations that never were or will be - at least not exactly. and that's the point? the spontaneity? cluttered chaos of spoken movements in the "instance". the thrill of the chase of words across the air and imprisoned on the page...you you you. i'm heeding His word but needing your guarantee. (this makes no sense, and you know it. you do.) x. answer respond reply rejoin react. keeping it courteous and aloof maybe / except i can't do polite and beige. only operating overthetop. in ter act.

bright

take my hand - take me up,
move me above the suburbs,
above the grid-mapped day to day.
higher than winter-tinged clotheslines
and copper-coloured rooftops,
leaving meandering white marks
like a wayward scrawling skywriter in the blue.
we're dreaming above in a vibrant now.
there's you and me and a patch of grass
and the landscape shifts while the sun slips;
we're sitting in the sky.
there's crumbs in our pockets
(and flowers in my hair)
an elevated picnic:
we're parked in mid-air.

some leisurely cafe-penned poetry that stutters and stumbles, trying to tell the tiny things that make this this. small, flat symbols pressed on torn paper, gleaming behind this computer screen - little flighty figments, indentations insufficient to capture thoughts and words and looks. but words are addictive.

landlocked behind rolled up windows. you say good bye a million times but you don't leave.

a today psalm

i wish i had written this.

trying to explain

growing twelve hours older in an empty field. surrounds coloured sepia and some murky swaying trees, in slow motion, in half-light. spinning time with easy words and held hands. sampling an increasing repertoire of memories and in-jokes; keeping the volume low. exactly.

"what are you thinking about?"

at home in a sleeping park with bare feet. tripping toes to a lazy beat across grass punctured with suspicious bindi shapes: a rock? a little white flower?

sight muddied by night but the landscape is surprisingly clear and it's that one a.m. kind of lucid.

"you don't think i planned this?"

ok so

i often write cryptic notes to myself on scraps of paper, post-its, open notepads. invariably i can't decipher them later. i think perhaps i am a genius in those scribbled moments but then i forget how to be a genius all the other times. ok bye.

walking to the station

i'm constructing beautiful, careful sentences to convince you. but i'm realising that i don't have the persuasive skills, or more accurately, the necessary range of expression. i'm working within an inadequate medium, because merely horizontal. flat.

speaking across the suburbs

I made a phone call to speed sleep.

Last week in history I learnt about liminality: a doorway, a threshold, an in-between space of both liberty and risk. Travelers are said to absent themselves from normal life; to step outside society and to thrust themselves into this unregulated, uncertain space.

I know that we are still just friends, and I will continue to know this until you tell me otherwise.

Some hand-written speech in my notebook, from around me today. Politely interrupting myself, shelving some errant thoughts in rough alphabetical order. I may borrow them out later.

Time? As slow as we make it, right now. A messy clock, almost marking the dates.

heart work

yes great reasons but frustrating, disappointing. more disappointed than i expected to be. that may not be true actually; i expected, in the event, that i would be disappointed. so now i am, and now i need to work out some things inside. because i don't want to be playing a waiting game by myself, without any other players. standing alone in a field, or something.

but not now and maybe later - these are sharp, shaky words. words on the edge of a precipice, threatening to fall: blowing in the wind, sitting and passive and vulnerable, before a gust. maybe is a dangerous, open-ended thing to say, to hear, and to believe in. it is imminent and distant, which means it is indeterminate. too close and too far - that is - both tempting and trivial. and those words don't flatten my feelings just by the saying. his speech does not do the work that i need to do, which begins after, later. now - i need to sink, settle, i need to be ok with this and move away from this. both.

writing is better for thinking and dealing. it is a gift left for me.

university

I AM WHISPERING BECAUSE I SHOULDN'T SPEAK RIGHT NOW. I WANT SUNNY, LIGHTLY CLOUDED DAYS IN A BLUR, COFFEE AND COMPANY, AND MAYBE MORE SPECIFICALLY YOU. THERE ARE LYRICS COLLECTING IN MY HEAD THAT DON'T QUITE DESCRIBE ME, EXTRICATED FROM SONGS THAT DOCUMENT EMOTIONS THAT WERE PROBABLY IMAGINATIVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. THIS THING WE ALMOST AND PERHAPS AND COULD HAVE IS UNEXPECTED AND QUIET AND NICE.

island

steps outside well-structured sentences
flirts with ill-placed verbs and inefficient adjectives
wants slender fingers beautiful with acoustic sounds
writes lyrics to nowhere and notes to the world
finds low-slung jeans and a childish smile
watches conversation falling to the floor around them
keeps the window down -
so she can remember herself when he's there
half-hearted, half-speaking half-thoughts, in half-moods.

(i'm sorry i couldn't invite you.)