He bought me oil pastels for my birthday
but my fingers don’t work anymore.
Every thing is lost in translation .
The split tree image in my mind, harried
with rooks and blackening skies
becomes a childish howl,
a lun a tics perambulations.
And each word travelling
away from mind thru fingertip
to inky scrawl finds itself pedestrian,
lost in a wannabes script of half-cocked contemplation.
I wonder if it would be easier
to let semblance go, to listen to the voices.
In nearly spring
I kept expecting
someone would save me
yet when I spun around
deranged and foolish I saw only shadows.
The smell the weight the touch of him
should anchor love but Sisyphus patrols my life
and underneath it all
absurdity lies like sediment.
The right words will never come.
The balance between mouth and tongue
and sound so perfect in minds silence,
clatters and jars in outside air.
The perfect colours
proclaiming the inked depth of his hair
or the raw blue in a lovers touch
are elusive hues, buried hidden .
Let pitys sake tie me in a sack
as hasping cloth rough chokes my lungs.
Watch in slow silence as she drowns me like a kitten.
.
I know some people eschew Valentine’s day. They hate it with a plush velvet loathing, portraying it as some card pumping, capitalistic, coupley- schmaltz-fest of syrup and chocolates and cheap pink knickers. I know what they mean. I think like that too. I hate shopping, I don’t care for consumerism, I’m not even keen on red as a colour unless it’s blood or peonies. But the quixotic side of me, the one that swoons at the thought of a romantic hero with eyes which pry me open and hands that liquefy; the young shy girl inside of me, cannot help but watch it surreptitiously through only feigned indifference. I used to spout anti-valentine venom along with the best of them , yet secretly I haven’t changed from the whimsical teenager who longed for a card that arrived two days before her birthday but wasn’t from a rickety aunt. I’ve heard all the arguments, it’s a card company conspiracy, the ‘ you can tell-show someone you love them any day of the year ‘ reasoning and I don’t dispute them. But when I see his writing, I mean his real hand writing written in ink-pen on paper my heart really does soar and I’m transported 176 miles and I can hear his voice saying my name. I can see his fingers holding the pen as his hair darkly covers his brow and I don’t care if I am gauche and unfashionable. I can’t help but think of courtly love and initials carved in trees and arms, of love spoons and smouldering eyes. I want to twine mallow in our hair and tie ourselves in knots, a shakira of Lupercalian celebrations. I want to write him poems and lay myself out like a feast. I remember thrilling when the words amor vincit omnia were first deciphered to me and Larkin’s lines are a beautiful weight in my stomach. Love is the polar opposite of cynicism and I’m sure Philip knew that when he wrote, ‘what will survive of us is love’.*
We may struggle in solitary anguish, but the desire for love is hardwired…
…………..In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures, an immense slackening ache..
and so, if you have no-one to love right now, if no-one loves you, please try not to be too cynical for you are. love a ble. . .. and if I could make myself big enough, if I could spread myself far enough I would like to ease that ache, to kiss those lips, to press you close and upon your neck in warm breath whispers make everything seem just so.
x x x
* because even Mr Larkin was a lover …..http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article389123.ece
.
Sometimes I don’t like my job so much. Or what I should say is sometimes I’m almost ashamed of my job. At its simplest form it’s buying and selling. That is to say, I go out into the world and I buy things and then I sell them onto to other people. And because the things I sell are mainly unnecessary on somedays it can all feel a little shallow, superficial and materialistic. It’s not a noble profession, I don’t fix bodies or expand minds, I don’t care for the young or the old or the scared. I don’t take away peoples rubbish or mend their pipes. But, it can be thrilling, on some days I can feel like a treasure hunter. The best thing is that each object found, generates a story, it holds its own history and when it leaves me it begins a new one.
I sell a fair amount of books. It’s always interesting to see which book will go with which person. I have stories and stories about books. And sometimes, the way in which they come to me is unusual. Let me tell you of one such time. But first let me tell you about last Sunday, because they are in fact connected by a book. A man came into the shop, around one o’clock. Probably the second or third customer of the day. He said a perfunctory hello as he walked past me and up into the tiny room-full of books. A good time passed ( I like to notice just how long a person will spend looking, whether it’s a sweeping search or a methodical spine by spine ) and when he came back down he held a book of the works of Laura Knight. It was priced at £15, but he told me how he’d forgotten his wallet when he changed his trousers that morning and only had £10 on him, and, could I save it for him until next week ? The books are all second-hand, it’s up to me what to charge. I liked his gentle and archaic manner, his eyes were very close together and they danced. I told him the book could be £10. I said I didn’t know much about Laura Knight and suddenly he transformed before my eyes. This reserved and stiffly dressed older gentleman relaxed into an animated storyteller. For the next half an hour or so he beguiled me with tales of Staithes and the Newlyn school. With memories of his first love and how on cold winters mornings as a child he would take his sketch book to the stables and draw the horses. He told me that when he was ten years old he met Alfred Munnings in the car park of the Red Fox at Ferry Bridge, cycling at break neck speed from his grandma’s to meet ‘the great man’ and when he greeted him he was astonished to discover that Munnings had but one eye. He made the characters he had studied all his life come alive with anecdotes of summer sun and suicides. All of a sudden a cold and wet Sunday afternoon didn’t feel so grey.
And so to the time a great quantity of books came my way. A houseful of books. Books stacked on shelves, piled on the floor, cloaked in black bin bags hidden in musty wardrobes and sunk in dank cupboards. It is a sad story but one which opened up new things to me. A woman called me about her Dad’s books. She didn’t want them, no-one she knew wanted them and so she decided to sell them. When people call to sell me things I sometimes feel I am buying a life. The house I visited was a small council house on the straggled edges of a run down northern town. There was a broken pram by the gate and dog shit in the shared garden where the only flowers were yellow dandelions. The house was filthy inside. Each room had a meandering narrow pathway to the door but everywhere else was piled high. With books, with clothes, with newspapers and picture frames. The walls were yellow with nicotine and the carpet stuck to the soles of my shoes as I walked. Sticky with sweet tea spills and greasy black from dropped fag-ash, the trails led from chair to cooker, from sink to bed. As we wandered from room to room she told me a little about her father. He had been a miner with a voracious appetite for books and art. Over the past ten years his health had declined and he had refused her attempts to clean and care for him. He had had a form of dementia and she said that for the last two years he hadn’t even picked up one of his beloved books. I could sense his diminshment within those walls and wondered if the towers of books tightening around his dirty armchair had felt like bars or wings. It took three days to empty the house. Many of the books were beyond redemption, damp and warped and so sticky with grime their pages were clumped and fetid. But there were also shelves and shelves of wonderful books. Bin bags full of books bought and unread, virgin and untouched. He had been an autodidact and his love was chiefly art ( the Laura Knight book had been his ) and modern literature, especially American. Through him I was introduced to John Fante and Alexander Trocchi, Richard Brautigan and Jim Dodge. Reading some of the books he owned I have often felt as if his life dripped into mine , that our paths touched and twined and that from the most unlikely place I found sustenance.
Now at home I have two things which remind me of a man I never met. A black and white photograph I found between the pages of a book on Henry Moore. It is of a desk before a darkened window, grainy in monochrome with a calender which shows the year to be 1969 and the month to be February. I have it on my desk and I look at it everyday. The other is a framed print taken from the pages of an art catalogue , a quirky and surreal little painting of three men surrounded by cabbage clouds, by Cecil Collins. It hangs next to my kitchen window and sometimes, when I put the kettle on to make a cup of tea I gaze at it , at fools or kings , I’m never sure, and it often strikes me how strange life is.
One day I’m going back to my typewriter old and stiff, a sit up and beg in enamelled iron because my eyes are fired of flickerscreen and stumbling. Random acts that click and wrench and lead me down draughty alleyways or into sad and bloody halls. It’s ages since I felt clean. There’s too much sexgore and introspection, too much middle-lite pontificating when I could be be bony backed against hard wood chair and stare-search from keys into bright light fieldroam. Pull words from inside and onto crisp white tangible sheets rather than spill and trawl into web and ether. I don’t want to know anymore, about this and that, about them and him and her, it’s picking like a scab and perpetuating the itch. Updating until refreshing is a drag .
I remember looking at the knobby calloused lump on my middle finger, stained with ink from fountain pen scratchings and nic-o-tine from late night ramblings. I stayed up all night to watch the clouds pass over the moon as I wrote a story about a girl who was loved by the Sun. By the end of the night as the light pushed open the sky my writing was deranged, thick and loopy coils on sheaves of paper with stars and annotations because each image lead me somewhere else. The callous is smoother now and the yellow stain has faded away along with the tobacco tin and paper skins. And now I wonder that my words are held, contained inside a locked metal box which springs to life with electricity. I think I preferred the paper and the old lined notebooks. The sprawls on my desk. I could take a match and watch them burn. More dramatic than ‘delete’.
I wanted words and sex combined. I wrote down my perversions, teeming in my seat with clenched thighs, watching thoughts spread like welts across the page . In the gloam of summer evenings I’d glisten with words as images paraded before me. Face side bent to wooden desk and palms spread as he dismantled me from behind. Cruel and hard, his control empowered me while he recited my illicit lines between swell and surge. The sound of his voice, the smell of wood and ink and paper mixed with lust were mechanical and bygone triumphs over cut and paste, compose and send.
Sex overtakes her ( me (us))
Give me your
hardpushing into seawet walls
She cries
until I am cavernous expanses swimming underground,
breath-holding in the
to-ing and the fro-ing
and all he knows is a hardness
centered on plundering.
Shaking foundations, distended with desire
until her voice speaks to his blood and to her very bones.
In moon phases and on inky seas
I have thought of devastating conversations.
But you know sometimes she just wants talk
of cock and wetness in licked words.
The pretence is what we are ,
what we choose to display in those fluttered silk
underthings because imitation is the highest form
of something else. Listen, when carnal appears
in finger-tipped blue-bloom bruises,
let sensual provoke a sigh.
And at the end of the night
as brown-eyes bear witness to my collapse
we’ll (mis)judge
whether this recondite hunt has sated
all our basest meanderings,
whether fulfillments have been
with mind or cock’n'cunt.
When I think of him living alone, sometimes I am envious. Of the quiet, of the solitude. But sometimes I imagine him everyday with no human touch and it’s as if he is going outside in the cold without a coat.
I saw a young girl pushing her mum in a wheelchair. She was maybe fifteen. It was obvious she was an old hand at it even though her skin was fresh and new like the downy inside of a rabbits ear. It made me feel ashamed. Ashamed that I feel sorry for myself when at least my mum can barely walk with a stick.
I hate the word snippet. Of course it reminds me of scissors , of metallic cuts and tiny things which lead nowhere, but also it reminds me of the word tissue and the way some people say it with emphasis on the double s and this chills me much more than any nails down blackboards.
When I walk through streets I think my thoughts are harder than when I walk through fields.The words which appear are more sullen and contained than words thought with grass and mud underneath my feet. And barefoot walking in summertime might produce the most melted thoughts.
The beginnings of a story are easy. They are like shiny seeds, full of potential. Planting them is fun too, fingers in warm earth ideas and the sprinkled arc of water falling to feed like inspiration. Keeping them going is harder , after they have pushed tender green shoots, after they have given their first flowers they need more attention and a dedication which always seems to elude me.
I like to read new words . Words that I have to copy and paste and look up in an online dictionary. But really I like it more to write them down and get the big thick dictionary with tiss(h)ue thin pages and lick my finger and look it up and then read the definition out loud slowly. The last word I did this with was fatidical.
I am never sure whether I should use that or which. That is flat and hard , which is softer like whisper and breath and usually, I decide that way. Do I want it hard or soft.
There’s a lady who works in the ice-cream shop where sometimes I buy a coffee when I’m at work. She is tall and walks with a slight stoop. She doesn’t wear make-up and she has brown eyes which always seem embarrassed, even a little scared. She wears a wedding ring and a thin gold chain with a tiny cross around her neck and I can’t help but wonder whether her eyes look like this as she makes love.
I like to bleed in harmony with the moon. And when this happens, when I watch pinkness swirl away in water down the plughole in the shower, it seems as if bricks and mortar are swept away and that perhaps I could be living in the woods with a bed of moss and at night the stars would be my bedside lamp.
