dear interested party

surroundings are indicative of nothing but themselves. the plains of my desk remind me of my desk. i ate some cakes earlier to banish the graze of hunger upon my insides and i couldn’t move. i complained of feeling sick, i tidied up. it was mainly my clothes that formed a small drift against the legs of the chair.

i am hoping to sleep soon, my social side sits on a balcony opposite in the bitter night air reading a russian novel. close your mouths, here is something. you will get what you seek. and you think you are anxious! i have written only two pages while seated at this desk, and i am due to leave for sagada very soon. i promised myself a hundred pages in three days. this is pre-emptively halfway down one of them; the first one. two pathetic pages; hardly the foundations for publication or even a lasting relationship. i am tired, the boulevard curve of my spine aches from the base.

a gentle, anxious search for the journal that confirms my frugal creativity is underway as a slanting lightness inside my head is opening out into the room and i hold a yawn at bay. the height of the rooms was to be expected i suppose.

i saw a lot of tall buildings today though, and a lot of old ones, too.

newsprint covers my hands but that isn’t what i need. i need to know of the old dictionary worn at the corners and torn on page four two six. on that postcard is a horse-drawn tram. and down there or over there, people laugh, three people, three men. there is the camera i bought. i just didn’t think to carry it with on those expeditions to the city.

that is my coffee mug, i made it this morning (the coffee not the cup). i have forgotten yesterday already, and i write this quietly because my sister is sleeping. i am free to question my own stamina, and my literary impotence; it bears upon my day, lashing it down. i try to guess the time and think of how much is left before i have to move. i am unsure but it is okay because in the end we won’t go out anyway.

the very best for less

this weekend’s silence: the result of diligence. a statement of intent as poignant as a fight i saw outside a supermarket.

the piece

incredible clarity in the day’s temperament today. last night i exorcised anger whilst walking across carparks. i don’t remember walking across any carparks, but it fits.

woke up to one of those seamless visions of a novel: the relevance of the form’s necessity needs questioning, but it appears to strengthen only further within the confines of thought, the spinning concierge.

hung the ideas upon the inside of my eyelids as i drifted back to sleep. woke, and wrote. courted the idea of eating, and ate. portrayed all of this as actual and in no way harmful.

could see the structure of the piece (the novel) in graphs. tore out strips of paper from old jotter and laid them across one another, alongside one another, building a mountain range upon the flat table top.

this is the piece, i thought, the novel, i said.

i drew in rocks and crevices upon the mountains and foothills of paper.

this is the only way. take the lead of the verb and cement a foundation upon discourse and reason. accept and reject the ideas simultaneously through a redefinition of the core concepts. stories will come too easily. ignore them until there appear to be no more. then write, anonymously and without reference to place.

my time is without, it deals in the unsaid.

warning

i drove home that night with such vitriol that my car was filled with blood.

that, indeed, was how it was. that was the state of the evening.

i drifted from a parking ticket queue with hasty lies and reticent preference. i mumbled my excuses and left the people standing there in the bitter cold. they were happy, they had each other. they were talking and laughing and remembering things that did not include me. i had embroidered my presence into their childhoods all evening, but the thread had finished.

damn acquaintance, you tempt me from afar. you make me do it.

driving through the evening streets and picking my way through the drunk revellers, i anticipated the journey ahead. this was not the journey, this was the journey to the journey. i could see their faces ahead of me in the night air, in my mind. we would talk of our separate evenings and sleep in our separate beds.

they were not there.

i hated them for ten minutes. i hated myself for twenty. i drove home in thirty. i was asleep before i saw the clock.

this is how i have felt since the days of my learning, and i am still learning. apologies will not do in this instance.

career path

reprisal and the frustration of unrequited success ache within the soles of my feet, my ankles are swollen and my toes are blistered. there can be no ownership in such a world as this. nothing is mine.

a future will rise next week, a yearly fixture. it has been regularly promoted and invested upon, i have told of it before. i even left once. it sings its own name, it is an indicator of nothing other than a desire to indicate, a statement of statement of statement. it is an enabler, fecund and sure, a geographical fix that roots and ties. it’s everything i never wanted, but i feel better for the chance to neglect it. it is easier to make a decision negatively than positively. but what if you have nothing to negate, what if your question makes no sense?

rejection would leave me rejected.

i am drawing up the blueprints of purpose, fully aware of their false economy. the creation of living space in which success is an inevitability, is itself a necessity. the truly depressed man creates a house in which failure is enviable as the product, the house’s highest form, an expression of personality where personality is non-existent.

i build stories like houses, but rarely live in them. i was in there for ten minutes. they had already decided, but my knowledge is yet to be determined.

broken caps

STILL you find me writing POEMS
to and for and about you
under a FIRMAMENT
of GIVING UP and a SOLITUDE
of LEARNING and LOVING
(in that order)

you scarcely MOVE these days
ALONE on that side of the STREET
and although we share RECIPES and FRIENDS
the day when we can
SPEAK without THINKING
remains somewhere, circled in red
upon a LOST CALENDAR.

flight flight

been away, came back. i am expected to show my experiences, scars and souvenirs, all click and whirr and cheap flights.

for me, it has been an invisible culmination away from the glare of people: a movement towards purpose, focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass. i am merely learning though, the focus of my heat touches nothing and simply fades into the cool subjection of the city’s cool thoroughfares.

against this floor i am a decision, not simply a maker of decisions. decisions do not act upon me, nor murmur behind my back. i cannot call them my decisions. they call me as they wish and this is what i have learned. i have learned to allow and receive, whilst not being satisfied to admire the tessellation of the future tense as it awakens.

so perhaps i will live in the city i have just returned from. perhaps i will stand in its churched squares and be allowed a moment to think alone as the cold howls from foot to rooftop. perhaps i will raise my hand to the back of my neck, think of my profligacy and proficiency, think of the meanings of which i am lacking (not meaningless) and stare at people who are not drawn into a fearful denial of their heritage and education. through the conversation and smoke and open doors, i will sketch a taut proposal of direction and trajectory and achieve the necessary. i will search with eyes and fingers into the expressions of strangers and endure the hopeful, placating disease of contentment.

bound up in perhaps, i am immobile. so where am i left? what decision am i?

i am a return, a vain return full of broken cleverness and jarring warmth. people stare. i have surprised some and hated just as many, but their time is not for me. i need not worry. full of fear and appraisal and shivering timidity, but not worry. lying on a pavement in this city with the leaves and finished cigarettes, but not worry. wind-burnt cheeks and forehead, legs resting upon an old novel, but not worry.

i am trying to gain a sense of place, in order to impart a sense of place. too often i work in reverse and brazenly advertise the inevitable shortfall, the until that devastates every writer, lover and person. this time i shall give no warning of plan.

i’ll be lying down, arms by my side and face in the gutter, before you can say easyjet.

i think it was music

(originally uploaded by bullish1974.)

when the clock gagged on, red glowing petals that floated up. i thought of sudden epiphanies with no memory.