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.
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.
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?
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.
Treading
Just enjoy the sun on your skin, not close to home and not clinging to the rung of any wider jungle gym plan. Somewhere plain becomes pretty with a drop of summer light like cordial in a glass. Subtle and uncomplicated, you are just here, fallen from any strangling context. The things you care about make life worth living, the causes you shred yourself for, but sometimes you feel most alive in the spaces between things that don’t really matter. When you are left alone with the world, by chance allowed to stop in one of its corners. You can tread your personal void for a while and observe the hiding museums of this world’s patches and details. Tracing the curves of structures and boundaries that fall outside the brackets of your own life. You feel gravity holding you against the pavement, and are reminded that despite your time spent working up to lofty goals, and sailing behind flying ambitions, everything that means anything in this life happens pressed to the surface of a planet.
Quit Vision 