little snips of nagging guilt

and maybe if I keep saying ‘tomorrow will be better’, tomorrow will be better.

 

I met someone recently who said ‘first world problems’ at me. and when I told him that actually, I hated that phrase and felt it belittled pain in general, ‘yes, but for example, sometimes depressed people are full of self-pity’. Paraphrase mine, but that was the gist. And I agreed that yes, yes they are. We are. It’s called learned helplessness. But also, sometimes we are full of self-pity because we believe no-one else gives a damn and someone has to. We have to believe we matter somehow, even if only we care, because sometimes we’re that close to the fucking ledge. But thank you, thank you for invalidating us. Thank you for making me feel guilty for being like this, like I just don’t have enough willpower to stop feeling like shit and that if I pulled my socks up high enough everything would be sunshine.

fuck. you.

 

this is not a good day. tomorrow will be better.

.

.

No.

incoherent old words

looking for the person i used to be, the things i used to know about myself or writing or living in the old words. i have documentsupondocumentsupondust, and i used to be able to write without- so much fear.

loss and how we live with it. i did it blind, then.

 

.

 

all the way up the hill
I watched the cars down
past the trees, the small buildings
the steep curve

distant traffic at the foot
speeding through the intersections,
hairpin bends below
there

where I saw a boy sprawled across the road
skateboard in the gutter, all limbs
wrapped in a grey t-shirt

the shouting passers-by, the women with blankets
Josh from the café on his phone, running out
to meet
the oncoming cars, the coming police
the man and his murderous car
pulled up in the drive, child on his hip

traffic stopping, veering

all the way up the hill, bag pulling
down on my shoulders, dragging me down
weighed by coat and cumbersome heels and ugly jeans heavy
awkward weary furious body

I wondered how it would feel
stepping out into the road before the snapping cars,
too late to stop

letting it all drop, once-
for all- flying backwards

crumpled on the tarmac, limbs crushed,
only pain, only a black coat, only a body
letting it all go in the smack of a car
books flying everywhere, bag burst, split zips
screeching tyre marks all over the pages of Worthen’s
Anthology and Merwin’s Rain in the Trees, damp with ripped sheets
and torn hair and who knows what, blood, wet, the dark things inside, not sure
as I’ve never died before but

that satisfying impact
ploughing bones apart like dominoes, the wet slap
of a sack of raw meat, swung back
oh my body’s babel
I’d do it

I’d do it for that second

that terrifying release from the stranglehold of the mind
saying live live live

 

.

 

that was 2008. I don’t write like that anymore. I didn’t write like that often, back then- this has a little more grey clarity, functionality, in it than most of the things I was writing. but I still like the last few stanzas. the wet slap of a sack of raw meat, swung back. my body’s babel.

 

.

 

from what I’m reading, i’ve  been splintering and mending and splintering long before this. it’s good to remember that; I may feel like I’ve reached another smashed plate, another spiderweb of splinters and hairline cracks that stretch forever into the distance, breaking and cracks in the head- so damn difficult to mend-  but I’ve been doing it forever, and I’ll be doing it forever. it’s not new. one day I’ll look back and see what I’ve written now and remember. I suppose this is why I write. reminders that I am not just Now. I’ve survived, grown on. I can keep doing it.

I was so much more vivid then, in university. colours and bloody dripping words and I wrote without thinking about it at all, words just out the way one breathes, words pulled like a string out of my head and dropped onto the page, and I remember that, I do. I don’t have that colour anymore I don’t know where it’s all gone. I don’t know how to write without being afraid of all the things I’m not writing because of it, all the things I’m losing because I’ve found one thing and am following it. I don’t know how to destroy boldly. I need to learn.

destruction and creation are Janus-faced. to create is to destroy everything that could have been created, all the possibilities. that paralyses me. am I doing the best thing. is this Right. as if there is the Best Way to do something, the sheer perfection that I keep missing and by putting another word down- it will be the wrong word, and I will have destroyed it, and lost it, and perfection will be gone. Rightness will be gone.

that is wrong I know but I don’t know how to not believe it-

 

.

 

paralysed with silence
and the swallowing absence of words that always sink
through the inside of my throat when I think of it

I corpse here,
faced with unmoving fear, still
and huddled in my head, unable to step further down
these corridors,
these spaces opening blank
and vacant as a building locked in darkness,
echoing with the gaps of something missing.

this is the absence of something more than breath.
there is nothing I fear more than failure.

it is the death where the dead is the inside of myself
scraped into my hand

trembling like dust in the corners of elevator shafts,
forever rising up and down, in silence
inside the shaft of my unspeaking voice

 

.

 

that’s 2007. First year of university, before my voice picked up the edge of panic and became frantic and frenetic and brittle as glass and as manic as I guess I was, so sharp I hurt myself on the edges of my thinking and bled colours.

working through the pages of 2010 now; apparently I got even more incoherent for a while. clever, and meaningless, and lengthily incoherent. it gets to be hard work reading here because there are too many scrambled images packed into one sentence, like I picked up a whole box of pictures and shook really hard and then pasted what came out onto paper. noise without substance. see.

 

.

 

speak, little monster, speak.
winter comes near and your soul groans.
speak, and do not be afraid
even if the things come tumbling out like bones in a storage locker
like the cold house weaving in winter in the shakes of wind
in the whistlefrost and the permadew
and the reasons that make him stay behind.

you have no hips now, and they do not bear children
up and underneath them, ridden on white horses
given no ponies, I think no yankee
will doodle on this page. what a lark.
your voice
makes me vaguely nauseous
and it is only the impending doom of a sinking ship, a dipped croissant
that makes me want to see the back
of your turned, fair head.

 

.

 

what the hell is this about, Valerie. and there’s more of it, pages and pages more of this particular- headspill. apparently I just needed to make noises. a lot of it was about or to God, as well, but most of it is more or less violently cluttered, whether or not I was saying anything in particular. my head was scattered and unfocused and everywhere and it shows.

apart from- some things. one or two pieces from 2010 are still so full of darkness and silence it makes me sad to read them.

aha, early 2011. apparently I was aware of the noise I was making.

 

.

 

i am learning to be innocent and kind
no I am not. i am learning
to be more focused.

I will probably not be too focused here.
I am learning the difference between being focused
and not, between writing like I have somewhere to be
or something to say, and not
because I am simply taking out the small packing-case of my head
and pulling many-coloured umbrellas and portcullises out
and stringing words gently along until they tug behind my boats
hang off my legs like angry children, demanding solace
or demanding games. I have met too many angry children in my life
and their solaces are easily procured
their angers easily calmed. Small children are like trees
no, they are easier to understand than trees.
today is a day to throw all words out into the air like rice
cooked and landing lumpy on the face as they rain back down again.
today is not a day for sweeping sentences, the long brushstrokes
of words and intent, words and intent.

 

.

 

2011 is much the same, although I become even more prosaical as I go, and all the poetry I write becomes prose with vague line structure. Becomes conversation, more than anything. and- we’re in 2012 now, and the separation between Writing Deliberately And Thoughtfully and Writing Because I Have To Get Things Out is a bit bigger. I have two versions of myself saying the same thing about words, written two months ago, and one of them is full of wild imagery and repetition and has its roots in fear, and the other one is prosaical and deliberate and pushed. Have the pushed one.

 

.

 

i defy
you, cold and ordinary fears
you, custard
of sword-swallowing words, the fall-apart and the not-know
the quiver of will this work this time will the magic hold
each arrow can I still write
each target a faint and far-off thing, a word, a hope
write me

this time there will be words there will be ink
making the page dirty even if it costs me to put them down
even if when I speak my throat dries up and the horror
takes over my hands what am i doing what have i said what is this
who are you and the words must out, and sometimes
you hammer things flat with the flat of your head
against the stubborn backs (they are your own)
and sometimes from your hand life falls like snow
and words become true, and real, and right
and altogether more real than you could have hoped

and like now you batter them flat with the heel of your shoe
and tell them behave, I am master here
even if you will mutiny, you will stand in ranks
I will have mastery, I will subdue
there will be a poem, even if it is
not very good

even if it tastes like prose
and if I have to hammer my soul flat I will
and if I have to make myself submit I will
there will be words, even if I dislike them
and there will be truth, even if in the saying
I lose an eye and an arm and a leg

wordswordswordswordswords
a resolution and determination a disagreement
a loss of things that could be, every time I lose
the wild horse every lost advantage can I still write  no
words
today it says no

but write me out until I give in

 

.

 

I don’t know. apparently I don’t- write as automatically and fluently as I did before, or as brightly as I did before. and writing now is habit more than anything in a brain more vague and less focused than it used to be. I may have done myself a disservice by going to university; it seems to have killed my brightness.

I think I’m too tired to think anymore.

take up your own apparatus of torture and death, and walk.

feels a little like I’m sitting in a carpark. idling. stalling. waiting for something Godot to happen leavestreesleavesGodot and push me out of the gates and down the street. now I can’t drive at all so my car metaphors can end here.

maybe that explains why my metaphorical car is stalled. I can’t drive. why don’t I just get out and metaphorically walk? I have legs in my metaphor, right?

 

I wonder if I could push the brake and accelerator pedals with stumps.

 

ankles. four- five- five?- years ago I wrote a poem with ankles in it. first year student, then. it wasn’t that I thought I could do anything, although I’m sure that was a possibility. it was that I wasn’t aware of how limited I was. I was completely ignorant and blindly bold- rash- uncautious- in that ignorance. I wasn’t aware that I have very few choices. wasn’t aware of how little the world becomes, when really what you’re trying to find, or trying to escape, stays the same no matter where you go or what you decide to do with your spare time or the rest of your life.

how meaningless most anything one does is. most things don’t matter. whether I sew something now or decide to read something doesn’t matter. whether I put more time into singing or writing doesn’t matter. does it make much difference in the end? I’m still not paying attention to the thing that matters most. and I am still reluctant to pay attention to it because it is life-consuming and exhausting and unhappy-making. God is life-consuming and exhausting and unhappy-making. and so the words fritter and trivialities appear in the same sentence as time because real life is fucking hard.

being God’s is fucking hard. I’m now reading all the possibilities into what I’ve just said and am amused at the incongruence of some of the readings. and the hindbrain’s just kicked in with things everyone else is going to say. but I have a baseball bat inside my head and I will beat those voices into bruised and bloodied stupor because really, they’re not saying anything I don’t already know. They’re not saying anything I haven’t already chosen to defy. It’s not like I choose what I say without knowledge of  why I’m saying it. and I’m saying it. deal or leave.

 

Self-conscious minute over. Baseball bat out.

 

To be honest, it’s probably a segment of tibia or something.

 

I’m quite sure that for some months I was being dragged by the hair through the days and weeks, down the dusty road of adventures I didn’t want to be part of. The Great Adventure. Bah. Following Jesus in the company of friends, Mark Grace says, and clearly he should know because his name is almost as bad as Levi Marychurch’s. But when one says ‘Christianity is following Jesus in the company of friends’, one is leaving out the rest of the sentence. The full, unabridged version of it goes something like this: “Christianity is following Jesus in the company of friends through stark and barren desert roads in unrelenting heat and bitter sunlight and up tiny green hills before you plunge down again into the next endless, infinite valley of swamps and darkness where strange things flame in the night and you’re exhausted and hollow with hunger and frozen deep to the bones of you and each breath sobs out or is choked from your lungs as you half-wade, half-drag, mostly-drown yourself in a terrible, futile misery through the sticky dark with unseen underwaterswimminglurking things wrapping slow and sinuous extra limbs around your body and those limbs bite and burn like fire or glowing needles lodged underneath your skin while people disappear howling and thrashing and gurgling inches from your fingertips and you find yourself constantly bruised and slashed all over, slowly losing consciousness, hands, hope, friends, pieces of sanity, certainty about anybody and most of your faith in anything at all while you drown several times, get set on fire several times more and are resuscitated repeatedly to the same endless soul-destroying horror of it and there’s nothing you can do about any of this, any of this at all except keep dragging your maggot-laden, leech-infested, oozing-with-open-sores body up and down the hillsides and through the dark and the light and the dark again in pursuit of this elliptical, barely visible, beckoning, elusive, vastly difficult- person. Because there is no other choice.”

that is the Christianity I understand. that is the Christianity I am trying very very hard to avoid. this is all the Christianity I have ever known and I would not give up what I have learnt for the world and for all my lost hands and flayed skin and agony, but I really don’t want to have to do it again. and again. and again. and againandagainandagain because following Jesus is like a neverending curse. Following the man who chose to die in the most awful manner possible is just askingfor terrible pain and suffering. I hate pain and suffering. But everyone who follows Jesus is pushed out onto the endless road and into the swamps and the dark and through the flail and the fire and fastened upside down blazing merrily to a cross in the Circus Maximus between lions and Nero having a dinner party to the sound of your screaming. if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his [own freaking instrument of agonising torture] and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the good news will save it.

This is all we have to look forward to no, alright, this is not all we have to look forward to.

 

I am more than aware that my vision is lacking. I am short-sighted. I am very short-sighted. And I am aware that the word restoration resounds in me sometimes the same way the word heaven resounds in some people but it is very hard to look at and see restoration when all one can see is terrible and devastating ouchery, everywhere, always. I know one of the things that pushes people full-tilt through all this terror is the good news- is the hope of restoration- of everything, everything becoming right and true and truly whole, heart-whole and glorious and enormously, vastly right- and then there’s faith in the God who promised this, that he is good and that he loves us- whatever that means. And we hold on because we believe his promises, because we believe him. Because we trust him. Even when this trust is desperate as words and only words.

But I am so bad at seeing this. And I am so bad at looking ahead for the lights of home. And I so dislike the road ahead. And yet, and yet.

Where else can we go? you have the words of eternal life.

fuck.

procrastination (- hide)

I’m discovering how to procrastinate productively.

it’s curiously predictable. if I want to avoid recording songs, I record readings for librivox.org. if I want to avoid recording readings, I look for more things to read for librivox.org. Or I read. reading’s a bit of a dead end in this game; I don’t avoid reading at all. but if I don’t have anything I want to read at present, I write. And if I want to avoid writing fiction, I organise my room. My attempts at stories are becoming very visible in the state of my shelves.

If I want to avoid sorting my wardrobe, which is mostly my floor, I sew. If I want to avoid sewing, I read, write, sing, take things apart with screwdrivers or draw costumes. Or I look for more patterns and styles on the internet.

unfortunately the internet is still, as ever, a default dead-end of procrastination. but it falls under the category of ‘research’. Knowing things is good. Input is as necessary as output.

 

if I want to avoid reading the bible, I write. to or about God. if I want to avoid writing to or about God, which is to say if I want to avoid thinking about God, I read, sing, clean, record, shower, cook, write stories, write songs, take apart things with screwdrivers, visit friends, do laundry, paint boxes, paint faces, eat biscuits, go opshopping, roleplay, hang out with my flatmates, drink tea, organise my bookshelf, organise my music, write poetry, blog, sleep. go on the internet. sleep.

… I hadn’t actually considered why I do things in light of what I’m avoiding.

premonitions:

this ain’t gonna end well.

 

lock it up and flee for the box in the woods.

sweetheart.

fou.

I could recycle the things I say and never hear the difference.

sleep. you’re tired and running up against deadlines and a little bit scared and always, as always when you’re tired, insecure. you’re starting to think yourself into a small embankment, arms tight around your knees, back against the grass and the dirt and the hole you’re worrying into the skin of the earth. the skin of things.

the door is open. you can see the stairways, stretching down into the dark like a hand reaching for a child. a friend. another person. like the word yearning, like a voice that says

sleep.

it’s a word that fou, floats to the surface of things like a face breaking water, jerks up from the dark harbourwash with the ungainly yank of lightness, a box, a piece of junk popping up into the clear. water spilling off it into the dark, the grey foam, the unseen beneath and the dark-grey piers indistinct in the mist. there is mist. there is always mist.

fou. you are afraid and scared and lonely and all the synonyms for fear that are and are not the same thing, for lonely is not quite fear and fear is not quite -

sometimes you are always alwaysalways that, foolish-faithless-hopeless-reckless. condemnation and a title all in one line, a breath, a bible verse to remember above and over and over everything else. sometimes that is all you are and childofGod means nothing, nothing at all. it is so hard to see-

Paranoid and faithless? I wrote. Bedtime.

Insecure and beginning to think people are secretly talking behind your back? Bedtime.

Suspecting the worst of silences? Bedtime. Rationality has climbed out the window and flown off on giant wings, bedsheets to the wind, a white cotton flapping in the night. People are much kinder than you think, usually. Particularly if they’re your friends. And you’re being as paranoid as when you were sixteen and didn’t have the ability to slow things down and look at everything clearly and objectively. That ability seems to have fallen asleep.

Bedtime. Join it for a few hours. Vasilissa’s doll is right- “The morning is wiser than the evening.” Things are always better when you wake.

(the easiest answers come first.)

ten minutes before bed.

Quick notes before bed; a post in ten minutes, say, headstart for morning. Sunshine. Sleep in between like a dead man lying with his legs tucked up beneath his chin, returning to- the mother he never knew, perhaps. Maybe she’s claimed him now.

What can you say in ten minutes?

Nonsense. Always nonsense. But also this: it is difficult, it is incredibly difficult to question the existence and the solidity and the rightness of the thing you stand on while you are standing on it. It’s like digging a hole right underneath your feet to try and see if the earth is solid right through, if you’re standing on it, if what you’re standing on is indeed earth and if earth is good for you in any case. Studies have shown. No.

But how else? Stand outside? There is no standing outside; there is no way to be sure that what you’re standing on is indeed stable and safe and true. You have no way to measure. We have been standing on islands of bamboo and rickety flotillas of junkyard scraps all our lives; our world is based on the kingdoms that shake. Our worlds shake, constantly, constantly. Rearrange and drown and fou up again, all at once, salvaged like a dead man’s face in the water. That is all we have ever known. How can we tell whether something is stable to stand on when we’re not standing on something stable in order to measure something else’s stability? It might just be levels of comparative less-ricketishness, but we have no perspective because we are on these islands, we are these islands. How do we find a position of objective perspective when we are always and consistently and always and completely subjective? We are unstable creatures ourselves.

 

not quite the right way to say it. haven’t got the right words for it yet. later. next time. ten minutes is up.

but up drift the foolish, brightly-coloured bubbles like a snark

I am telling everyone within readingspace, earsworth, locationdistancebodycorporealswimshiporbitradius how full I am. I am stuffed. If I had gills I would be stuffed to them but I am so much more stuffed than that. I feel as bloated as- as- the most bloated thing you can think of, plus extra, except only in the region of my belly. I am regretting it already. Noodles are evil.

Apparently this also extends to blogging about it. I’m serious, though; I am to the extent of full where all my concentration has devolved to digesting or thinking about digesting or thinking about the solemnity of the weight of my rotund (quick check: yes, I’ve rotunded, it’s definitely comparable to rotundas and rutabagas- what on earth is a rutabaga?-) belly and the heaviness of the feeling of it and waugh there are moments, definitely moments, when I remember my friend who has an on-again-off-again relationship with bulimia and think rather wistfully of sticking two fingers down my throat and bringing it all up again.

I don’t do it because that would be a waste of good bacon. Also because it would hurt. But let this be a lesson to me to not eat things that expand in your stomach.

 

I have decided I like trivialities. I like waffling, sometimes. oh god don’t mention waffles. today is a day of very bad choices in the eating department. I don’t know what those sales-clerks are doing in there; their fiscal totals are plummeting! They’re padding out their mannequins with silk ties and blowsy scarves and winter parkas! Oh my belly. Embrace me, belly, like a bride. Stefano. A moment in today, I had another section of that in my head, one that sticks, always, like a finger jammed in the door:

inform my hot heart straightaway
its treasure loves another
but turn to neutral topics, then
religion or the Weather 

and I need to find my Auden to see how much of that I’ve gotten right. I’m missing a line between the third and the fourth and probably some of the phrasing is wrong and certainly the enjambement; that is the problem with memorising poems. Sometimes you don’t memorise line breaks correctly. Or punctuation.

 

I’m

in a fey mood today. No, not fey. Full. Fattened. Calflike, moonbeams, billows, what was that story again with the- the Moon-Calf and his mother the moon? It makes me think of Chesterton, or MacDonald, only MacDonald wouldn’t have- it’s more twisted than- it makes me think a little of El-ahrairah in Watership Down- was that i-t-?

 

WHERE HAS MY AUDEN GONE

 

a significant amount of today has been spent in overweening capitals. I think also my belly has drawn most of my thinking processes down into it, like some kind of hibernation cave, a skin igloo, warm and round for tucked-in winter, and all that’s left is the frivolous bit, making merry in the top of my head…

I like ellipses. they have a good feeling at the end of sentences, sometimes, when used properly. they remind me of quotes, a leftover trailing feeling, an into-the-aether waving of vague hands or no, not that at all…

 

I CAN’T FIND MY AUDEN. well. doesn’t part of being Honest With Everyone also include Honest With How Much Poetry I Actually Remember? Take that, studio audience; take that, friends and strangers and the relative merits of progenity. Alright, I’m actually babbling now it’s the best way to write that is all I remember of poor Prospero’s speech and I’m not going to edit it.

 

I’ll probably read back when I’m less full and slap palm to forehead in a mimicry of everything the internet has ever offered to humble man, ever.

small, dreamy interstices.

Family hurts. Family always hurts. Even when I’m happy with my family it hurts, just in a good way. In an oh god I love my parents so much it aches kind of way. I find it impossible to be grateful and to not ache with gratefulness at the same time.

ache. it’s a good word.

it’s a good emotion. almost enjoyable, for all that it is a species of hurt. it reminds you that you have insides.

 

 

chicken soup and leftover bread. this is good bread, even stale and popped into the microwave for warmth and softness.

popped. it’s an odd word, popped. saying it is a small explosion, a soft implosion, a foreign noise like the fluff of corn suddenly appearing, miraculous as a birth. three syllables. Plosives. Soft on the lips.

it makes me think of poppenhuis. dollhouse, in Dutch.

 

I did a poetry course in my first year of university. there was a woman there with thick-framed glasses and short hair, dyed. Middle-aged. I recall her being kind, friendly the way you’re friendly to a strange and thorny person who is just so young it- hurts.

she wrote a poem about Petronella’s poppenhuis. and about a Rembrandt painting.

 

I rarely ache about friends. mostly I hurt for them or am hurt by them.

 

 

 

it’s funny how love aches.

 

 

 

 

chicken soup is gone. flatmates are home, noise and friendship and the cold outside and conversation, everyday and friendly, mundane and muddled and- lovely. I’ve had enough of wine. I’m done with Stevie Smith for the evening. I’m sleepy. Wine makes me sleepy.

 

I wouldn’t stop the ache for a whole world. Hurting from deep affection is intense and flavourful and complex as a good wine.