The tiny hip coffee shop where they know your name
Sit by waist-height shell-pink windows for the open half of the day
Until at once, you’re outside and you’ve never been in
And you’re living vicariously through pretty women
Flick your eyes, pocket hands, feel the wind blow through you
Unwelcome airs glare to pass bricks under shoes
The word isn’t envy, more mixed and unclear
Knowing this ain’t you and wondering why you’re here
Pressed against unknown humans kneaded into their dough
Inadequate in context stretched vast and shallow
Recognise no features, all mushed into one face
It’s grandiose gaze bore on me is both of our waste
Taught To Shuffle
Camp bed on the bruised skin of the floor
A wound cleaned out for the first time
The undercurrent drafts
Of an invisible mattress
Muscles worn like an ill-fit
Suit from the time-capsule back of the closet
Ready to spill like the dog-eared deck of cards
Taught yourself to shuffle with
Every single one bent in its own way
Banquet Hall
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.
Mourning This Too
I remember mourning this too. Somewhere I was, that was me. It gets left back there, someplace behind you. The scratched surface of your discarded homes. It’s harder to always see into the clutching winds that carried them away. I’m here on the acre. I dipped my intimidated toe in here at 18, left behind my innocence for it at 19. At 22 I left it behind too. So here I return to find… something. Because now, a few steps beyond this, I mourn something fresh. A wound that tears back even further than any of this. A cut much deeper.
The last Sunday of the summer is this afternoon. I’ve spent the whole of this bright season stressed out of my mind. Pumped full of either urgent adrenaline for things moving too fast, or slow swirling omnipresent conflict and despair. April we decided, May we tried to forget, June we braced, July we broke. August we let go, between flying anxious distractions and demands. And now it’s nearly done. The last month has exhausted me more than any other, maybe because of the accumulation, or maybe because of its own brutal carouselling pains. Whichever it was, it constricted my soul like a snake. I felt crushed, unable to move, to tidy, bandage, heal, cleanse, finish off the basics of bearable life after freshly moving into a house of loose ends. No time to rewind, no time to reflect after the mind warping complexity of emotional broken bones, identity trauma, a haemorrhaging way of life. No time to be alone in space with myself. The only thing I dove into this broken glass pit to retrieve.
At the most hurt point in my life, something came up to carry on my shoulders that I couldn’t refuse. Because it embodied the kind of life I felt I should be living, even if I wasn’t ready to yet. And I wasn’t. And I guess all of that pain I had to shelve… Well it’s been waiting there for me on the other side of all this. It happened so fast and so saturated to the margins that I can’t face them without going back, if only just to figure out where I am. So that’s why I left the awful, busy loneliness of my new apartment, to catch up on mourning the life I just moved from, and to itemise the overwhelming receipts of my emotional debts to myself ever since.
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.
Boxes And Boxes And Boxes
Boxes and boxes and boxes.
Every June forever.
The longest day blown apart.
No reflection in a bustling river.
Blotted sky takes its longest to die.
From a seat on the long green bank.
Or a teleporting train threading nowheres.
You have to become so utterly still to make room for the colossal motion.
The quiet pause at the very arc of a year-long swing.
The moment momentum runs out.
And it realises the implications of everything it tore through.
Now that the velocity is abandoned.
The clarity unblurs in every halted direction.
You stop being it.
And suddenly there is room for it.
Good god.
What have I done?
Bad Dream
Simon found the news unbearable.
His expectations began all to simultaneously rise and pop like the bubbles in his fresh beer.
“Wow, that’s fantastic!”
The words were sincere, but after they’d left him he had to shut his mouth again fast. He couldn’t let escape the sounds of his insides creaking under their own weight.
“I’m really happy for you!”
The words were made of staccato wind sliced in his chest. He felt his woven ego flutter and strain like a bedsheet hung out against the April wind.
“Congratulations!”
Something sleeping in a depth of him was tossing and rolling through a bad dream. He wondered in a ripple of this grinding turbulence.
Drop In From A High Ramp
They always come together, the opposite sides of the same thing. Maybe not in the same week, but soon enough you’ll feel one side and then the other comes later. Drinking coffee for the rush or the lull. I want it no less, but I have become sick of the word FREEDOM. I want what it means, but its shape becomes caught in my mouth and needs a few tries to fully spit up, like toothpaste froth in the morning. The word COMFORT fragments as it spins away from me, no longer cast as a cohesive structure that glows warm, blunt, dull, numb. A ready-made life stretched out across a lounger chair. The shards of shattered comfort suddenly become sharply defined. The harsh edges and gaps and stops shoot me afraid as the particles behind them shiver and swim. The static was not as blank as it seemed from within. The edge shows you that you were somewhere. And you have just embarked on a journey through nowhere. The fear is crucial, but it’s worse than it seemed through the windows. Waking up alone. Waking up panicked by the gamble. But as the sleep falls from your eyes, wide and yet still shut, you see this world and this life for real. There is no balance and there is no tonic. What’s out there is scary, but staying here with no future is chilling too. To face one is to miss the other, and my god is it exhausting to miss everything all at once. You miss the control every road-mapped day of your life, but the highway is underneath your treads and the underlying parts of life are supported, so progression is easy but its direction is rigid. It isn’t your direction, but an approximation you accepted from a distance. And with every mile approaching, the acute angle between its course and yours widens and opens like a jaw off into the unknown. The decision to stray was a hard-won battle, and now as you idle at the mouth of a rough, bumpy lane off into the obscure and unseen, the word CONTROL isn’t in the front seat of your mind anymore. Now instead it’s this word COMFORT again. And you look back over your shoulder towards the highway junction exit and begin to flood the engine with nostalgia for the lanes you could see clear where you were… But not where you were going. And as it becomes too much to bear, breathe, and stare back down the entrance of this new coarse trail, where there’s nothing to help you across the loose surface and no detailed maps to show you the turns or the way. This is your direction, and you’ll feel where you’re going, but you won’t know where you are. And you know it’s right. You know that even as you look back and long for the easy route, the moment you rejoined it you’d be looking straight back off into the wilderness directions. You know it’s right, but your heart will not land, and so you are frozen at the mouth of a new life. The breeze on your face is the only reminder that time has not stopped still as you perch back foot on the lip of a high ramp. It will feel impossible to drop in until you’re already halfway down.
Coloured Airs
The leaves are changing now. I’ve seen them turn so many rounds, but I’m still pulled apart by them. It reminds me of feeling discarded into the gust that picks up to a wind, blowing harshly through all armour. To some people I have burnt orange and crisped and brittled so far that only the limp sweep of a current very slight is enough to pluck me pathetically from their branching life. I was about to say that this is something we all must go through, but I’m feeling less and less equipped to speak on any behalf larger than my own. When I label an experience as something universal, I tend to think I’m doing it out of humility, trying to tell the void that I don’t think I’m special. But I do feel I’m special. Even though intellectually I disapprove, this feeling drifts like incense into a lot of places it has no business. Colouring the air. So who is it for when I say everyone goes through a certain tough thing I’m living in? Well it’s for me, I guess. To make me feel better when I’m feeling hurt by truths and facts, becoming emotionally churned up by their emotionless lack of leeway. It’s an adult trying to ease a child’s pain at a lost toy by explaining that loss is part of life. The kid continues to cry.
The churning river in October rose high from swallowed downpour. Short banks of tall, framing tree lines. The sun breaks the sky open and the gradients of leaves glow between green and red spectrums, alive and dead spectrums. Grey water rushes teal at the edges, a petrol coloured surface crust draped onto wriggling depthless murk. It looks cold but feels warm. This is the tension of autumn. I want to save this feeling, but I know I can’t. October becomes more and more unreliable as the days flicker past, but I can’t help but figure that that’s what deepens the beauty of these picturesque minutes. The tired sun thrown sideways over scenes and settings, growing more weathered and trodden each afternoon. The summer signals now stretched and broken up to reach us as we drift closer to the edge of their range. Our sky picks them up in shorter and shorter windows of reception. And with interference mounting in titanic banks of swirling clouds that loom in the distance, it is hard not to remain aware that this comforting texture might, by its very nature, be making its last appearance until the spring. Every time the landscape observes this subtle harmony between overtones and undertones, red and green, warm and cool, light and dark, ease and difficulty, long and short, sweet and bitter, fresh and expiring, free and held, it fills the air with a sense of quiet motion to set our lives against. Life doesn’t seem right when it stands still, and so the currents created by nature can feel so immensely reassuring to follow in the wake of. But the duality of following a transition is that it can’t last, and my brain stalls in paradoxical betrayal. I want the sense of things changing to stay the same, the feeling of velocity to pause still. I want to preserve for myself the sense of perfect balance, accidentally created, exactly halfway through the steady shifting of enormous, season sized weights across the threshold of a scale. But it is only temporary, and I can never suck enough of it up into the canister of a memory to really take it with me anywhere else. That feeling exists only while my gaze can rest here. I love it. It is disappointing. It is beautiful. It is over.
Spending all day cruising in tight circuits around the same five rooms of an end terrace is easy to fall into. If the whole day is off, then why can’t you open a window in your schedule? Nothing is decided yet, except that there isn’t room because of all the things we’re gonna decide on. I know it’s nonsense and that the fresh air will help me with whatever. Every day to work and back, stretching springy legs. Your body is built to walk across continents chasing seasons. Your ancestors would want you to get out and stride the curbed clearings, even if they could never understand life in a place like this. Such a detailed place, made of uncountable angles and materials. Stepping over dry leaves fallen from still trees in neat front gardens left in wills to children on their way to primary schools on creaking scooters that scare cats vaulting behind recycling bins that are picked up on Saturday mornings but won’t take glass so in dehydrated daylight the headaches have to haul bitter bottles in sixes and twelves down to bottle banks near river banks joined by painted iron bridges crossed by drab logo’d vans driven by vests and hard hats resting clipboards on the warmed seats as they punch in codes and swipe keys to step on rubber boots into science fiction graveyards surrounded by three types of deterrent fencing that power the entire city’s shop windows left wastefully lit all through the imposing nights that hundreds of thousands of neatly compartmentalised unconscious bodies lay limp through before six alarms and two cups of coffee spill them out flooding the skinny pavements where we weave in relaxed chaos to avoid each other and the the puddles and the piling leaves.
Sick melody spins me out of the nothing. My arm throws a feeble arcing bat at the slippy screen to shut the plans of my hopeful former self. He thought I would be refreshed and ready, but he never remembered the feeling under warm covers skimming out of deep rest. The urge is to sink back under the surface tension, but a block stacks in my booting brain and a basic thought outputs that awake me does mostly make better decisions, and he can usually be trusted. So I tense my leg muscles and curl my toes, warming up the easier synapses before trying anything as complex as opening my locked eyelids. Once I’m ready, I have to lift and pull on them with more force than it will take to manoeuvre the whole rest of my heavy body from prone to standing. They roll open stiffly like shutter doors in winter, and the blurred murk blows in from the dark shapeless room.
You never notice how great your resting stomach always feels until it begins to ache. It’s easy to take good things for granted when for long unbroken stretches they are just literally granted to you without any real effort. Life is constant motion and we are always breaking a path through a jungle of decision trees and branching outcomes. At the start line we’re too young to understand, but after a short crawl we pick ourselves up to our feet and then we start to get it, the satisfaction of moving swiftly and easily. It feels good to propel ourselves through life’s motions with precision and efficiency. I wanna go fast and fluid, swim and carve elegantly across this existence as I eat as deeply as I can stomach into the sheerly terrifying amount of stuff there is to do. And there is a lot. Much more than the structural beams of your mind can support before they snap like twigs under your rushing feet. And so you have to keep it up, the speed, so that the G force keeps the door sealed. The draughty door to the untrustworthy regions of your brain that might be reckless enough to invite in the creeping figures. Paradoxes, voids, infinites. Villains and vampires that will infest and drain you with their undeniability. So you get good at moving fast, from places of fear and of hope, to see everything you deserve of being born. You get so good, and you go for so long that you gradually cease to notice. You are doing something as normal and mundane as hurtling through an obscene amount of life every day, and it feels kinda average. And just as the earth’s careful arc around the sun won’t feel so amazing until a moon-sized asteroid dislodges it and shoots us like a pool ball out into the frozen depths of deep space, you’ll never appreciate the astounding efficiency of your life’s velocity until it is broken. What I’m trying to say is that the pavements aren’t clear anymore. I never noticed how clean they were all through the summer. How free I could be to vary my path or to look around in any direction, soaking up the suburban details. Now my eyes are trained on the ground, scanning for urban rock pools of rain water and layered leaves that could conceal things I don’t want to rest my weight on. It costs me seconds to dodge these tiny avenues, leading to nothing worse than a damp sock or the fleeting horror of a slipped step. Denominations deep into the decimals of the day’s length, delays so small that they appear to bounce off me. And yet as they hit, it feels like my backpack has, from a secret compartment, deployed a parachute that catches their light push, dragging me as I attempt to navigate at a speed I didn’t know I was even going at until the resistance pulled me back from it.
As the world gets darker and the bright portraits of each flickering day are hung in thicker and more imposingly dark frames, we slip into October. Maybe the most truly autumnal month, fighting off the dual fronts of both summer and winter equally, without the warm bias of September, or November’s cold pessimism. October holds my Grandfather’s birthday, only eleven days before my own. These dates are much closer than our relationship ever has been, and as I pull together a card to mail vastly north to his remote edge of Scotland, I wish I had more to write.
Some people don’t sleep so long. They can almost count the hours they spend under each night on one hand, maybe casually inspecting their nails at the same time, subtly multi-tasking so simply, with an almost brutal ease. How did they become so wise? How much more life have they been allowed to live? Maybe the air is more pure out on the beaches of a sleeping sea. Is there only a finite dimension of consciousness that we all draw from through the crowded days, that if you wait into the dispersing night gradually opens up? Or are we all issued a specific number of hours we can be alive for, and it is up to us to ration and space them out using sleep, or to binge being awake and burn through them rapidly? And if this is the case then are those that blast through them any less wise, or perhaps even more so? I don’t know, probably none at all. What I do know is that I am not one of them. As alluring as cashing in some extra life bucks on the side sounds, like the engine of my parent’s old Zafira, my brain becomes pretty unreliable when you let the fuel run down. It will coast on ok, but when it’s time to hit the gas on a slip road, or make a complex considered judgement in a brief opportunity, it’s gonna spit at you and die if you were stingy at the last rest stop.
And at last the dusk is combed gently into the sky’s crown. The evening that has been stalking behind the months progress, tonight ambushes to kill the soft sinking gradient. To extinguish our last dying comforts and put the light out of its misery. It is as mechanical and unmalicious as the natural laws it is designed to offset. I cannot hate it and I cannot blame it, there is only acceptance and dread. Tonight, the sorry neck of our kneeling day rests extended over the guillotine’s mantle. We tried so adamantly to stretch it out on the dungeon’s rack, but it wouldn’t surrender an inch, and so today it is the hard way. The blade will fall and the crowd will turn away and the crack-thump will echo from the walls, like the sound of an axe splitting firewood. Later, in the basement levels, the severed, shrunken head is pulled up by the hair, out of the tinged basket and sewn onto the reverse side of its limp owner. A gruesome perversion. It’s nice to wake up in the light for a couple more weeks, but at what cost? Back then, sunset was ducking a little deeper each day, but now we have kicked it in the back and it is crippled on the floor, dropping suddenly below the horizon of our duties in a painful jerking fall.
Quit Vision 