Today I woke up somewhere new. It was the first time in a decade… And then my brain whispered me a correction. No buddy, you’ve been so wrapped up in yourself (and not that side of yourself, the other, laser-focused side) that you’re getting me seasick. If it’s been a decade on the futon, then look closely at the lack of nibbling button-dents in your cocooned caterpillar of a spine? And also, why do you get a sick feeling of timeline’s splitting in your peripheral perception like pulled apart grilled-cheese? Because, newsflash butterbean, it’s been two weeks. That feeling in your stomach isn’t slapping with you, it’s lurching against your impulse on its own organic memory. It was only two sprinkled pinches of sleepy eye crust since you slept back and forth so fast each night between pre and post horizon housing that you felt like you were running a bleep test along to your morning alarms. Bed, bed, futon, bed, futon, futon, parent’s spare room, friends couch, futon, bed, bed, futon, we’re moving out so the bed isn’t here any more so I guess floor, futon, futon, futon, floor, futon, floor, floor, friend’s floor, futon, etc. How did you so completely wash that feeling out of your saturated brain? And now you’ve remembered this, buddy, there’s a whole trashed banquet hall that you said you’d clean, only to vanish after just sweeping the floor. The red wine has only soaked deeper into the carpets, and you’ve only noticed it now after you started, but those champagne flutes you caved in as furious projectiles against the wall have turned into a fine sharp mist of broken glass frosting over everything. Pleased to have you back.
Butter Chaos
Slipping like butter off of angled toast. Rested on a crumb sparkled plate, rested on the plateaus of tectonic cushions. A dented sofa in the morning before the end of the world. Oily and bad for you and delicious. Your nervous system needs fats and your nervous ticks need a distraction. We make plain things more fun and fun things more slippery. They get more slippery anyway, it all does. Slip now off the crust and climb down the plate. The curve, the halo, the rim. How quickly something nourishing turns into stained upholstery. Entropy is the law of the universe. The emulsion of brusque mess is forever magnetised to the hardest places to wash. I watched the whole thing happen incredibly slowly, wondering whether it was really the right thing to do to simply reach out and readjust its gravity, or if that would only be putting off the inevitable… Or, I could argue that putting off the inevitable is not inherently futile… And it’s fallen off. Seeped into the fabric. Now just to decide how to and exactly how much effort is worth putting into cleaning it up. Soapy water like my grandma taught me, or suck it out with my mouth like snake venom?
Delicate Chords
Is this good?
What a hard question to answer. For yourself and for others. And worst of all, by others.
Is what you made right?
Well, no. That’s not possible, but is it right enough for you?
Maybe, but is it right enough for them?
Well, that’s what strums the delicate chords of your ringing anxiety. Is it good that they get this power over you?
It… well it really probably is. It feels awful to be scrutinised and backseat driven by someone without their licence. But it is ultimately good to get ugly holes of criticism blasted all through the delicate harmonies and collages you built for someone. And there it is, the reminder. It is for someone, not just for you.
After hours of sautéing your brain on a hot screen, it sometimes goes blank without warning. You could have sworn that you were frantically stirring at the proteins of an idea, but the black crust of power saving mode burning over the screen says you were scorching completely still in inactivity. It cools and dims into a dark dusty painting of your room, with a face at the helm, a face you see as that of an artist, an auteur. Someone who gives their whole self to their creations. Someone with complex attachments to conflicting aspirations and needs. My work must be totally and entirely mine. My work must be the very best it can be. And really, what you see in that mirror is someone who is hurt by feedback. Pained by the meddling hands reaching into their chest. Someone who has a head bigger than they like to let on, a head that bashes against others, hard and easily. What does this guy know? Maybe nothing. Maybe how to elevate every single thing you ever poured your soul into. It hurts every time, letting them in. Because what if they take it? What if they carve their opinions out of something they don’t understand? It’s scary to feel the depths of you invaded. But maybe they do understand? Maybe if you get it as well as you say, you’ll see the truth behind their demands. Maybe you could give trusting their vision a try. And it’s hard, because you don’t know if you respect them enough for that. They see themselves as fellow artists, but do you? You can’t see their soul.
Is this good? Well, it’s yours and it’s theirs, so you’ll have to share opinions on that. You’re always your own boss with your art. But it’ll make you stronger to get managed a little. To work within the funnel. You might have to let go a little. This never was completely yours, and this attachment comes from fear that you only know how to do this on your own terms. And you can get back to that soon enough. But remember, this is what you wanted. To fall off your comfortable rock, and into the sea. Stress is part of it, but so is relief, and pain and growth. Take the feedback and do your best, but don’t kill yourself over it like you would for your own work, that’s the price they pay for it not being entirely yours. You can only give a limited amount of yourself. And that’s good, and that’s ok. This is the ringer you felt inspired to push through, and if you’re honest it could be a lot worse. You’re still doing your thing, but as a contractor. This would all be easier to swallow washed down with a paycheck, but hey, your first steps can’t ever be your most comfortable.
A Full Length Mirror Folded Into A Suitcase
Cutting it down between repetitions is amputation. You’re going to lose functionality. It depends where and how we make the incision, but we’re either going to bleed out the gaps and thin the pacing, or sever the cadence and infect the tonal complexities, scabbing over emotional resonances. You will be asking me to change the size of a formed organ, grown under gravity and cell structure to perform for your internal mechanics. You can ask me to carve out more space in your ribcage. You can ask me to clot your loose ends and sew together the joints. But it will be messy, bloody work against the seamless logic of nature. My hands will quiver, while yours lay limp with lost feeling. Maybe you’ll fit someone else’s vision of the world, but you’ll shatter your offering with your redundant shape, like a full length mirror folded into a suitcase.
Fertile Minutes Of Intermission
I’d be there alone, the stub of man-made hill swept to the very back of a park field. Wide and flat, stubbled with short comfy grass cut to the same barber’s setting as the unfussy aluminium heads of parish council bungalow-owners. Soft grey and subdued, loose air hangs limp between the occasional empty threats from the lazy wind. A single jumper-ed figure has been dripping gradually along the grass’ edge like condensation down the upstairs windows beyond the border hedges. The price of good insulation. When his speck reaches the park’s breathing mouth, his surface tension holds him there for a handful more shallow lungs of summer-autumn incense, sifting down under the apple trees. And then he falls out. And I wash with the familiar relief of finding myself alone. Unwatched, I spill out and fill the entire space, unpacking as to move in for the fertile minutes of intermission between the dogwalker’s sparse dayshifts.
Four Pillows
They’re the same covers, pretzeled up on my futon in a shard of translucent morning. The same ones I folded into the hatchback’s hatch, like I fold the bed into a sofa, or my spine into the driver’s side. The same bedsheets I haven’t found the strength to change since we left for good, stacked with four neat pillows like a cubist snowman, riding in the back for a low-eyelid, 7:30 ride under the traffic’s tide to our old place. Four pillows is too many for me. It’s kind of a joke for one person, a softened parody of the bottomless consuming choices that wait for you in the morning. Or, just a block reminder that the way you learnt to sleep alone as a child has long expired. Sir, are you aware that your current sleeping licence does not allow you to operate a bed this large? Sometimes resting my head on even just two gives me vertigo, like the wind flicking my shirt on a high exposed balcony. Sometimes I feel I don’t deserve any. We still wanted to sleep there, even when it was completely empty. Nothing but spray bottles and echoes, catching our soupy sentences in the corners like spiderwebs. The bed had left, one of the last pieces of furniture. We felt we needed it still, but then one day it needed more so to leave. And so instead of a sensible retreat to our own new solitary rentals, it became a relaxing sleep on the carpet that concluded our weekly discussions. Sharp elbowed practicalities, severely wounded feelings and joking portraits of normality that seemed to wander in from nowhere when the front door was left open. You couldn’t tell if they were truly organic or just remnant chemistry shaking out. Bubbles topping this pool we’re wading in, or just circles still etched on the bottom.
Flowing Indigo Grass
It felt more like home than it ever had last night. My shoebox apartment, tiny and neat spatial divisions like the architecture of a micro-machine toy. But then the artists are invited and the plastic is poured in with gruesome spilling details. Just like my place.
My old home was inaccessible, I had handed in the keys. Keys that jangled against my new set and reminded me for weeks before of the old cellar door left open to swing on its hinges in the wind. Creaking scenes and demands from old times I can feel as they reach my ears, like the photons of millennia-dead suns only just reaching your night sky to rain romantic starlight seasoning across a colossal mouthed valley above the moors, impaled on the cold draft from space that gently combs and caresses the endless texture of flowing indigo grass at the borders of this cratered moonrock lot in every direction, encasing entire colliding galaxies that float in the reflections of liquid silver puddles of molten mirror, like wormholes bore out of the heavy purple dust, slipping right through to horizons of space past the underside of this dark planet. Feet on its ground and you feel some way. Take it all in, they’ll say, as if that’s a fair request. As if that’s possible at all. As if that’s a choice you’re making to discard more than you’ll ever have room to take with you.
Empty House Era
An empty house is very calming, but in a way that you can look into and appreciate, but not participate in, because its lack of life to participate in is precisely the source of its still serenity. And it only gets cleaner, and gleams more perfect the harder you work to get it back as you found it. Able to touch, but not breath in the rare atmosphere your very inability is filling the empty, sun painted rooms with, bigger and more abundant now than ever they were when you could truly be in them. Your life here has become silent, and the quiet space exhales. It could never be like this for you. It only reveals its beauty as you look back. You didn’t clean it like this, you didn’t clear it like this. Would you have ever seen it like this if you had? Would you have needed to leave, and set it free?
Then hits the moment you realise there’s nothing else left to do.
I am finally here in the emptiness. Nothing left to scrub. Nothing left to pack. And it’s time to go as the sun leaves first. I’m trying to absorb it, the feeling of being here in an important double-year moment of a fleeting life. But this moment isn’t that. I can’t see my life here anymore. The place is the same, but dismantling this setting has taken so much time and pure essence that it feels as though the phase it represents hasn’t even lasted until this bittersweet end. Dismantling it has become its own phase. I haven’t been, for a while, in the place I’m only just leaving. And so how do you leave? How long is it ok to stare into it longing for a reflection? Door ajar, peering in after pacing through over and over. I am dry immersed, I’m here where the memories live but they can’t absorb me into them anymore. I am a ghost of myself that lived here, stalking the hallways long after my life here ended. And yet here I still am and here I still live. And that’s torn me apart, and it’s been fine. But this is the last night I will be here as myself, in a place that I happened. How can I say goodbye over this distance? All that looks back is finality, and I realise I don’t know what I’m looking for here. Old sights and sounds, but the lighting has all changed. This isn’t my place, but I’m still here looking for visions in empty rooms. I wanted to leave but by now it hurts to go. I am alone here for the last time. It is cleaned and sanitised of my existence. It has let me go, but as I cross the precipice and look back inside, unable to close the door or break my gaze from drinking it’s final sight of somewhere so familiar and dear, in ways I didn’t know it was until my last moments with it, it still wants something. I can’t look away. It has let me go, but there is something stopping it from releasing me. It has let me go, but I am still holding onto a part of it. A part that I give back to it the second I break my gaze and shut the door on the last sights of the backdrop to an era. Saying goodbye to a silent old friend. It needs that part of it I’m keeping, the part I’m trying to drink in as much of as I can right now, and for entire weeks before, the part that I surrender as soon as I go. And it hurts to give it that. But after all it’s done for me, I owe it to this old place.
I Have A Lot Of Staring To Do Today
I have little to say today.
My thoughts sink off from their posts to dream of napping on the firm brick of sofa upstairs.
Sailing on a large airy carpet, stretched under big windows and high beams.
The traffic noise laps at our commercial shore in waves of loud ugly whispers.
High tide in a noxious machinery sea.
Wrestle my slippery self all day in cancelled out strength.
The boring tasks aren’t as demanding as hopping the mental fences around them.
I’m a corporate slug.
A loaf of slow mucusy administrative muscle.
Today’s paperwork is delivered inside individual halos of table salt.
Inaccessible, but visible for a quick dull taunt.
Can’t tell if it bothers me.
Of course, enough to try and tell.
But clearly not enough to actually tell.
So whatever, another unseasoned leaf please…
...And maybe some more functionless coffee too,
I have a lot of staring to do today.
Delicious Assertive Brainwaves
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.
Quit Vision 