A synthetic kite adorns the branches, hidden from our eyes, but nonetheless still tucked in the trees under which we doze. I had left it there, and there it remains from when I was a girl. Tentative trust bestowed upon me by my father ended in ultimate disappointment when my grip was lost on plastic strings and the garish bird settled far away from us on a tree beyond both our reaches.
But now it watches us from afar and the afternoon heat melts my brain. I slowly drag two fingers down your clammy back (which I do because I can) and I enjoy the nervous pleasure you exhibit, and you shiver. We are sat on an old picnic blanket I believe belonged to my Grandmother. It smells of her old house, slightly fetid. I thought it would quiver and rumble with the stories it must keep of lovers, of children and beige foodstuffs. I let you finish what I have started, for though I may be precocious, I am afraid. Sinister grins protect the true repulsion, and it is true that I am younger than you. I mask paralysis-inducing panic with airs of the garish, and it is true that you love it.

I opened the airing cupboard, fingers groping for fresh towels, instead touching the familiar scratch of that old blanket. I remember these things and I lament that you cannot repeat the past.

  

Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing yourself. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time.

Jeanette Winterson

Literally obsessed with this quote, it's lurked in my head all day.

I have dyed my hair auburn, played in the sea (Iamnotinsane), seen The Babies in London, and had a sweet Thanksgiving this week. The above photo was taken on a beach in Seaford one early afternoon with Adam, where there was no wind or soul to speak of, but there were lots of starfish and crabs for me to hassle.

I had some bad news about my Grandfather's health last week too, and haven't really ever had to deal with ailing relatives or anything like that, so it feels weird and sad to see someone scared and panicked about their own mortality. 

Criss-crossed ankles and upright carriages though

NO MORE MORBIDITY my Christmas tree is up, and my Christmas list is as follows (I hope somebody loves me big time this year)

Thank you Jesus!

(Anita O’Day tenderly, sweetly, sings in waves in varying frequencies that come in pretty wisps of sound from your kitchen)

Bonfire Night at Lewes was scary/out of control, but cool and beautiful. 

My favourite oriental friend Wing-Yee has a blog, people should check it out, she's very good at drawing. She can literally draw anything. Although her page doesn't have very many posts yet i'm sure she's got loads to put up there in the near future, I think there's a link on my blog lists. (hypehypehype).
I am hopefully going to be doing some scriptwriting soon with my friend Craig, COMEDY, but who knows when I'll have time for that with all the other work I've been avoiding.
I also have been roped into doing a poetry Open Mic Night at The Blind Tiger, Grand Parade on December 6th which I will do once only, with sufficient gin in my gullet and wobbly knees. 

All the songs on this album still make me feel weird after three years of it on repeat. Perhaps a lot to do with old flames and hospital visits! WHY MUST ALL MUSIC BE RUINED BY ATTACHING IT TO EVENTS/PEOPLE/PLACES?
I will write something and update this soon.

This must be the place

My weekend has directly resulted in an aggressive cold and I think it is sensible for me to go outside more, on walks. My bedroom (favourite place) has become a disgusting germ-pit. This week I am going to London for music and to make a friend feel better, and myself.
I've been thinking a lot about specific days from when I was younger and last weekend has made me think about one winter; February in particular. This also stems from being scared that it is November already. I am very scared.



No, I wouldn’t have it any other way, it’s the sound of it I hear and not the words I read. For once they are unimportant. All I can hear is

Do do do do do do dodo do

Ba ba ba ba ba ba baba ba

When I remember nothing it is dangerous, you’d think it was a blessing but it is a horror. I am alone in this room and all about me there are shadows at 3 o’clock which my eyes know not what to make of. There is a crackling inside my skin and a fire between my eyes. Is it possible this crackling is both a sound and a texture and a feeling and a state of being? Tearing it out made little headway but it all subsides anyway, isn’t that right? Give me thirty to forty minutes of immobilisation.

No I wouldn’t have it any other way, I am positively sure. I am sorry I am sorry I am sorry I am sorry I think I am likely to be forgiven.

It’s always worth it because I need your sunny disposition, your filthy talk, I need your kindly ear, your mothering, your lack of, your pretty face, I need your tantrums, and I need your depression. Most of all I need you near me to the nearest centimetre with facts I don’t care much for and a dextrous hand that fits every contour with (unknowing) magnetic precision. You have four or five faces but there’s one in particular I fear to lose. You fear it too! You must, need is mutual, of this is I am sure. Baby I’ve got silver and I’ve got gold let me show you let me show you. But when push comes to shove, this is getting old. I have struck this sentence the moment it hits paper because it nauseates me.

And when you call I’ll be there as always, because soon it will be winter and I’m hanging on the telephone just in case you can replace old friends. We might replace her and go sledging, take stock together forgetting of all the songs neither of us can listen to any more because of each other and retire at four o’clock to tea and crackers. I can recall silent twenty-four hours in constant light behind snow clouds, wandering up hills of woodland as though looking for her somewhere. The snow never stopped and it never stopped being silent either. I had the odd sensation that I was thawing head to toe. Was it just us that day? We only held hands for photographs, and your hair was longer back then. You were more genuine but on the precipice of disintegration which you fully implement now. There was no part of you she would recognise and I still lived in slight fear I would pay at her hands for not doing more to help. You see you never recognised my trueness and constancy for the inherent selfishness it truly was. I loved you because I loved myself. You loved me because you needed me. It is hard to say who really deserved the ostracism.

Sunny sunny love

 You strike me upon a star and the sound is purer than that of musicians that drive me to the floor I am a tuning fork and I press my mouth to fur for comfort. Boastful photo collages make the beautiful symbols I want them to and cymbals make the perfect sound I ask them to. Warm warm I miss July and August but not for the sun.

There are 59 minutes of optimism until I must make my evening my own independent sphere of time

Webcam photos are good

I wrote a short story yesterday. It's just a first draft so probably mistake-ridden/not good and a bit weird I guess. 

I was early for work one morning. I am always early. Due to characteristic earliness I had almost planned in advance a trip to a café for some beans on toast. My God! I love beans on toast. I sat at a small, round table for one in the corner, by the window. I like to watch the people go by, you see. I’m a real people watcher. I barely even noticed anyone else at other tables; I was so absorbed in beautiful girls with legs like large-scale matchsticks, and myself.  The waitress brought over my tea, and distraction carried my gaze over to an elderly lady sat in the corner. She was nursing a teacake with slow, shaky, but measured precision. She had cream and butter, but no jam. It was all beige, and I imagined the mundane taste she would have in her mouth, all crumb and grease and fat in one undeterminable lump turned over and over, stealing all the moisture from her tongue. She wasn’t wearing any jewellery, and her clothes were made from textures of velvet, velour, and thick cotton. Watching her made my eyes droop and I wanted to let my head rest on the table, near to my steaming drink so that I would be warm when I slumbered. I kept watching her. When she felt preyed upon her eyes slowly rose to meet mine, and I half expected flies to creep out of her eyelids.

She and I became friends out of a necessity to lose ourselves in our own contexts. She was lonely and bored, I was a little frightened and alienated. These juxtaposing feelings worked against us, and a bond formed neither of us were prepared to break but that dragged us down daily. I was eager to be a part of the eras she had been kissed in, had danced in, I wanted to wear the dresses she laid on duvets lovingly to show me.  The records she would give me to play (for her hands were too knotted, twisted, and she couldn’t position the needle correctly herself). In the early days I longed for the time she might be close enough to me to unravel the plaited, regimented bun of hair positioned on the top of her head. I knew her hair would be long, untouched and silken in its silvery cascades, falling onto, and past, her shoulders.

I wanted to cry, hit, and kiss her. At the same time she repulsed me. That’s the worst thing about complicated emotions, they make no sense whatsoever and there’s nothing to stop the oddest urges strolling into your head like they always existed at the forefront of your thought processes. She had become so much more to me than I had imagined. Her recycled stories were beginning to bore me, and so I became more child-like in her presence, petulant. Any rebuffs aimed my way would dissolve me into tears and angry fist-balling.  This was because I knew I needed her to feel things vital to my ego. Youth, memory, and energy were things I knew she resented me for. Sometimes I would put on a record by someone like Ella Fitzgerald, or Wanda Jackson and dance slowly for her to watch how I could pull my arms, the shapes I could make. I would pretend I had somewhere to go after our meetings, and bring makeup and dresses to her house. She couldn’t take her eyes off me when I twisted my hair into chignons fixed at the nape of my neck.

‘YOU ROT MY PATIENCE’, she yelled at me, quite some time later. I think she meant it, but it’s so hard to be sure. I said nothing, and instead rooted through her larder for some Crackerbread I could dip into butter. I loved her food. It was simple and full of the things they never thought to remove for fear it would compromise the taste. I didn’t believe in such compromises either. I probably did rot her patience. I rotted lots of parts of her in those last years.  I never allowed her to be who she was in the 21^st century. She was always twenty-one, and we were always in competition.  I had a lover, but then so did she. He was just dead, and she hadn’t seen him since 1958. He wrote her sonnets. I hated that.

Relief flooded my veins as I felt the pressure of a finger in the small of my back. We were like a psychedelic mating of play dough pushed and moulded together until our colours merged and bled together in the dim light of morning, I was not convinced that I was not still sleeping. Amongst other things, I felt something warm run down the back of my throat. I touched my nose, and it was bleeding. I said nothing, it was dark and the blood made me feel something I know not how to conjugate. I let it run over my hands, and dragged my finger over my stomach, chest and thighs, I could smell it in the air, and perhaps he could too? Where the red fern grows, time flowed horizontally and we could have been there two minutes or five hours, I couldn’t tell you. It went on, and when it ended I wanted everything else to too. I knew she was in the next room spreading marmite on crumpets. I didn’t let him turn the lights on, I asked him to leave.

‘Don’t just stand there, DO something!’ she said to me as I stood in front of her, brows furrowed. First, a forceful sigh, then, she thrust one, two, three, five, fifteen, thirty books at me. There were lamps and old dusty bird cages neatly left in the hallway. I couldn’t understand why she thought I’d want half of this crap. I wasn’t grateful. It was anxiety-inducing. Where would I put any of it? I steeled my jaw and kept silent. Why was she so angry that she had only me to leave every one of her possessions to? She could have done worse. I knew it was more than the task at hand which was making her so goddamn angry. She wouldn’t cry, but instead her bottom lip shook with fury and her nostrils flared intermittently. I had not the energy or care to detract myself from this scene. I wouldn’t be gracious enough to accept blame yet.

‘Don’t just stand there, DO something!’ I said. I can’t be sure that it was on purpose or by accident that I didn’t mean it. They did a few token things. Of course it was no good. They let me look her square in the face before they took her, and I could have sworn she was beautiful. Her eyes were flat and milky; they had lost the sharp narrowing I was accustomed to seeing. I thought about the process of putrefaction. The abdomen would swell with bacterial waste. Organs would begin to pop. Eventually, her body would collapse, deflate, and decompose. This was life and death as we would not yet recognise. I went home to watch my hamster climb horizontally across her three-tiered cage. I guess it does not matter how intricately our cages are wrought; we can stress our own freedoms but they are mini-triumphs, caught up in the mundane nature of the conventions we craft ourselves. I loved her until the end and all it did was ensure my three year-long stagnation of denial could go on forever as long as I could find someone else to share it with.

I've been so down in the mouth lately that sometimes when I bend over to lace my shoes there are three tongues

'...a century back
a man could be driven mad
by a well-turned
ankle, and,
why not?
...
there is hardly anything as beautiful
as a woman in a long dress
not even the sunrise
not even the geese flying south
in the long V formation
in the bright freshness
of early morning.'

Today is a Charles Bukowski day for me. I have read the entirety of his book of poetry; You Get so Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense rather than doing anything remotely useful.

Marjorie Cameron and Anais Nin.

Both women I've been thinking a lot about today. Anais was an erotic writer coming to prominence around the 1940s, I am eager to get hold of Nin's journals. As well as House of Incest (not as bad as it sounds), and Delta of Venus. Bit of heavy-duty, post-grad, summer reading. Anyone who calls themselves, 'the madam of this snobbish literary house of prostitution' is definitely worth my attention. Apparently, her and Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn) were both commissioned to write naughty literature for an anonymous man who was known as 'The Collector' with as much smut as possible. Delta of Venus is supposed to be the most risqué of them all. 

Marjorie Cameron was an artist, actress,and occultist. Both her and Anais were involved in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, (1954), a short film by Kenneth Anger. Cameron was cast as the 'Scarlet Woman'. I don't even know where to begin with this film. It is absolutely insane. The music is heavenly (literally), and everything on-screen is sensuous, psychedelic, absurd, and alienating. I might watch it again soon. It is STRANGE.

Such incredible, beautiful, and powerful women. I am not a RAGING feminist I swear.

I Ruminate Best at Night

I am bored so

I grasp at options at

Night when I am alone

Not physically, but consciously

I reach out for comfort

Your tiny heart beats

In its puny cage 

Matchstick skeleton 

You are so foreign cupped

Gently in my hands

My brain might explode 

If I stay in this bed

Or worse

I might crush you for 

Something to do

You always said nothing was wrong

Canvas and tea leaves and 

Niceties and endless nights

Of other people's success stories

190 minutes or so

In darkness, behind my eyelids 

There are mad fireworks in red 

When I open them there is still

Some red blinking light, only, 

It is a mere pinprick, a message

Good night, it reads

I will see you in six months

So remember to make 

Arrangements before you sleep,

Good night and Good luck.

There is no one I believe in 

The people most real to me are those

Who have been dragged about by their

Own people covered in their own blood

Which has been dry for some time 

Just like their hearts have been static

Make a martyr of those I could love

They will never be as vibrant 

As when they have fallen

Perhaps then they might 

Stimulate me when sleep

fails to find the switch to 

Anaesthetise what it should.

This was not a short story, nor is it a good poem, I apologise. Lynch is sexy and I don't care who knows it, I am going to watch the Elephant man now.

First you are non-existent then you are invisible

Halloween is SOON.
I want an amalgamation of all the above in a costume. I am having a party, I want to dress my house!

I want to talk about maxi and midi skirts. I just think they were not appropriate for summer. I wear them NOW in AUTUMN, with long socks (possibly belonging to my brother but that's neither here nor there) and boots. Boom. My usual winter wardrobe, rife with clunky jeans, black tights, shapeless jumpers is just not becoming at all. At least now I look MODERATELY ladylike, plus, tell me if you wear maxi skirts you don't pretend to be a can-can girl on your own in front of the mirror? So sexy. Despite the dragging, demure hemline. I AM SO RIGHT ABOUT THIS.

So this happened today...

Awkward. I think I'm such a badman, going into Primark despite my ethical misgivings, (also that it is cheap and everyone buys the same stuff), then my favourite Urban Outfitters employee Natalie Horobin does the same and we look like dickheads sat next to each other in our Post-Colonial Literature lecture with tweed- panelled boots.

So sexy. My student loan has been completely dicked away on Barry M nail varnish and clothes I buy on e bay that never quite fit right like a fool.

My writing is irritating me, I apologise for this.

I’m so very tired,

I need to rest,

But I sleep all day and all night,

My head leant on a hand on a windowsill.

I imagine that in that room straight ahead,

There is a bathroom filled with steam,

Over there, a pink and dripping body,

Soft feet pad on the tiles,

Plump and gorged on piping hot liquid,

I can see twelve windowsills peering back at me.

I am a zoo attraction, am I not?

Maybe someone could jab me, swift in the side,

Wake me up for kicks,

Watch me weep and rub my head.

But as long as you can’t hear me,

Your conscience is so clear,

I could dance but I fear you would remain,

Unaffected, which would be so hurtful to endure,

(Though I do endure it daily).

So I will eat my morning grains,

Ignore any growing pains,

Watch for a while the Time of others,

Spent as though hamsters in cages.

Why is it you are always alone by your windows?

You are like me,

 Perhaps you all watch us when we are sleeping,

The people who watch through windows,

Who dream in their slumbers?

Of realities they foresee with desire,

On the hour of every hour,

Though we are forever weary, so,

We daren’t open our eyes.

However this could just be me,

And no one is watching.

Perhaps these figures I see crossing from window

To window, are mere spectres?

I check in a mirror to see if I am there,

I am, just as always, until

A figure passes in front of my reflection. 

I think I should put some short stories on here instead.

Also, I don't recall typing out the last entry. Humiliating turn of events when your drunk misgivings are merely writing a blog entry rather than having one night stands or breaking everything you own.