Confidence is something a person can have and own. Like something to pack in a suitcase to take with them. Although it feels less like an object than a set of instructions, much lighter in your hand luggage. A comprehensive manual on processing all kinds of inputs shone in from the outside world, and kneading them back into self-assured outputs. Actions and gestures and languages. A kind of secret recipe for making delicious assertive brain waves. But a secret recipe has a secret ingredient, something a little heavier to pack. A special flavour that without, confidence is going to shrink into merely show-of-confidence. And everyone that tastes it will see through its subtle blandness. They won’t know quite how. No dimension of it will seem missing enough on its own to arouse suspicion, but the collage of slight, below-radar imperfections will accumulate under their senses into an eerie feeling that something is somehow off. But, nothing will say why. You need the secret ingredient that works as both a flourish and a foundation, for any of your assurance to land. Because, the best part of confidence is feeling it truly strapped to your bones, and you won’t convince anyone of something you don’t believe. And to be clear, believing isn’t even enough. Rallying raw belief without your ingredient is just trying to fool yourself first so you can fool everyone else later. True confidence (as far as I can see, as someone often lacking) comes from having all the instructions, the inputs, and crucially that one thing that primes you, that oxygenates your environment to a state where you can set yourself on fire.
Before You Open Your Eyes
Some days become too practical.
You sink into the quicksand of old quarries.
Tasks that you just have to do.
You can’t argue with them any more, they have no ears to hear your reasoning.
They aren’t too heavy for you, just extremely awkwardly shaped.
Take a flat breath and blink for several seconds longer than usual.
Move your muscles before you open your eyes.
Some things aren’t really worth looking at.
Mixing Our Salts
Wish I packed a bigger jacket
As I break the news
Like waves that try to swell past
Their muscling unstable mass
And spray my eyes in their crash
Mixing our salts
As my truths foam and aerate
With reactions stricken as you shape
Your rebooting face
Running an impulse late
And we both end up sorry
In opposite ways
Laughing Gas
I found the rage, alone in the middle of the night. Balancing on the crumbling rim of sleep, I wobbled and leant on thoughts from spent days. The fan strummed my leg hairs and the heat didn’t respond. I proved like dough under a dampening duvet and my thoughts grew to double their size. Their conflicting scripts cancelled into thick droning noise, and I knew it meant that really I was empty inside. It was a single ply of psychic wallpaper pasted cheaply over giant holes in my structure. I gave hours to impulses. Impulses give nothing back. The hollow should be allowed to sleep.
And then, a back-bench nerve tingles from an undisclosed location. The audacity. Yet, I am without surprise. youcouldfeelbetter. And this is why I don’t. youwillnotfeelbetterwithoutsleepyoucouldgetyourselfsomeeasysleep. I know in myself that the ease is the emptiness. thiswillfeelgoodandyouneedtofeelgood. I will feel worse when I’m done, but I do feel lousy already. feelingbetterisnothardyoucanmakeyourselfbetterwheneveryouneed. I wish I felt something at all, I’m so empty. youdonothavetoremainunsatisfiedyouarechoosingtoanditishurting. I just want to feel something, maybe…
This is the trap, and the part that really shreds my dignity on every entrance is that I recognise this ditch. From each of my desperate flails in. From each injured crawl back out. Selling energy and respect for cheap, impurely cut slabs of dopamine. It might as well be laughing gas, it’s so funny, dissipates so quickly, and is really more anaesthetic than anything else. As its warm tide washes back it carries off your own warmth with it.
A Picture Made Of The Absence
Shot through with a hole
Shot up with hot oatmeal
Paste over gaps in me
Unseen injuries
Echoing cavities
I’ve loved each nameless stranger
In some missing life
In some foreign time
And goddamn I miss them
Acutely re-align
In their wake
As if we shared the same path
And as theirs branches make goodbyes
Through followed eyes like dripping glass
Enamoured with a sketch
Enamoured with a void
A negative space portrait
Of this imploded and destroyed
In love with a shadow
In love with a picture made of the absence
The unrequited ache of the devoid
Calm Coded Messages
Stood up too fast again
An aeroplane jutting out of fuel
His figure bows like corrugated card
Against the grain, trying to fold in half
Blood pressure dropped the dial
Tuned half out from the brainwave station
To crackle and emulsify with phantoms in the static
Calm coded messages speak under panic
All he could think
As his volumes haemorrhaged ink
Was how it felt so good
To buckle over where he stood
He realised he’d been in so much pain
Anaesthesia pumped quietly by his now scrambling brain
Neutralising in him
Finally fine to feel weak as the room spins
Catharsis in submissive pose
There isn’t anymore strength that he owes
A Letter From Your Reflection
Dear [REDACTED],
This is the version of you in reflection, we haven’t seen you here in a while.
I’m addressing you like this because this is a strange time, maybe the most turbulent of your life. And, because of both situational and psychological barriers, you haven’t connected with your inner self in a while. The world is forcing you to look outwards. Things are changing and you must be there for them. It’s natural to feel like you need to escape, but you are escaping in all the wrong ways.
When did you find this thirst? For attention, for gratification? For confusing emulsions of both in dissonant mixtures. I grant that after a decade of singular female attention, it’s natural to find excitement in the prospect that you are no longer excluded from possible advances, but even if it were that simple it would be a newly appropriate thought at the most extremely inappropriate time. You know this dude. Your excitement at it is attempting to take over you, spilling into the positive impulse vacuum that you’re finding left inside yourself. This isn’t the way out of it. The way you begin to recklessly pursue when your rationality pops like a flat tire impaled on a nail of emotional pain, is only going to rip you open wider.
You aren’t a bad person for getting sucked in by it all. But how easily you back out, retch, and find yourself repulsed after you’re done should really tell you all you need to know about why this is a bad idea right now. You will be free to explore, but just because there won’t be anything standing outside of you to halt for (except for the money, time and potential risk), there will always be your emotional physics creaking inside you. Cheap attention and cheap gratification will not fill the hole they promise to, and honestly I think you know that the odds of actually finding any are so low that you are almost certainly aimed squarely at solid rejections, further tearing you up. And even if you did, argue with me that you’d be able to go through with it? Without something invisible holding you back? I wonder what that is? You’ll use your money, your time and your energy to get something that only makes you more drainingly nervous, sad and alone. This is the road to loneliness, not the solitude you promised yourself. This is the path to the darker side of the dangerous place you are already going. Lonely single males don’t last long here. You aren’t even anywhere yet and you’ve already begun racing towards it.
Casual parts might be ok once you’re in a position to be casual, but you aren’t even. You aren’t even free and you’re nearly burnt out on this freedom because you are using the idea of it as a vice, and for that it will never make you happy. You are simply ruining the promise of a new dawn. Risk is ok, but you are so cut up right now that you just can’t measure it precisely enough to know what you’re doing. In time you might be ok to experiment, but right now you’re about to explode. Right now you need your wits, your vigour, your spare money, your energy to pursue, your spirit, your confidence, your self-respect, your dignity. All the things you’re throwing blindly into a grinding dopamine machine for a quick boost. I’m sorry it’s hard, I’m sorry you’re struggling. But you can’t let it warp your view like this. You need your vision, and as soon as you step back out into the world and remember your place in it, you remember too that that desperate person alone with wide eyes in that lonely room, chasing empty, degrading connections, that isn’t you. That isn’t you.
Sincerely… you.
And now this…
And now this… An alarm I can’t ignore I smother but remain alarmed It breaks back to before in a another foaming wave The break in our break away from breaking Washing back across shifting rocks to turbulent home I had started my own sea
About The Author
[REDACTED] is an East Anglian head-rush with a translucent blonde moustache. Unlike most writers, his facial hair actually makes him look much younger, and usually leads to an embarrassing smirk on the face of the cashier as his ID tells them he isn’t in fact just a dark-eyed fifteen year-old who’s had a hard life. The paracetamol and coffee make more sense now, as they wash up in the conveyor belt’s tide. Fifteen year-olds don’t buy coffee and painkillers with a fake ID, they buy vodka and fireworks. And they certainly don’t have trouble finding a dentist when their final wisdom tooth wakes up every six months to try and lift itself agonisingly out of their skull, impotently like the last skeletal grandpa out of the pool after 10am water aerobics, every other Thursday at community leisure, which so happens to be on the same street as three separate dentists that all have waiting lists so long that you’ll be yourself signing up for the senior’s water aerobics (and the Monday afternoon seated jazzercize if you can handle it) before you’re ever going to get seen. And, if you still somehow have any teeth left after fifty years since your last appointment, then you and your bridge buddies might as well blow if off for wheelchair yoga on Tuesdays and Fridays. And that’s a big commitment, because if you miss even one session they’ve been known to assume you’ve dipped into corpse pose and give your place away on the spot to someone with even less teeth.
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Hey, to break format for a moment here and address the theme above, I just wanted to say thank you to anyone that at all cares about this blog enough to read it on occasion. You may or may not have noticed that new writing has stalled a little lately, this is because I recently quit my job to begin studying as a school music teacher and as such have been pretty slammed these last couple months. I’m not giving up on this though, and aim to still try to upload once a week – hopefully this can be the start of that. Again, thanks for reading any of this at all if anyone ever did. I do this for me, but I’ve had a lot of fun sharing.
– W
Long Climb
You’ve seen the view from the peak But never felt the ache deep in your bones until you reached The final steps back down Jolts like a machine gun Poles magnetising to old feelings Reintroduced to strides from the way up Feel their fresh pain again as you can’t forget what you’ve seen Got used to altitude at the top Of battered decisions you’re back wading through the details of To the exit It’s a long climb Towards a final night Towards a final slice of your old life And though you know it’s right It could never be Fit in it one last time And then leave There’ll be a final night There’ll be a drawn out tearing goodbye There’ll be an edge defined As you fall from it As you exit the eyes You inhabited Fit in one last time And then that’s it
Quit Vision 