I now write from a small room in Devon. The walls are whitewashed brick and I have a basin in one corner, which means I can brush my teeth and wash my underwear and fill my water-glass in a gloss of solitude.
My window overlooks a medieval building called the Old Postern and a sunny orchard which is also a herb garden. It’s growing thick with plants that have seeded and rooted their way in from the woods, hedgerows and river banks. It looks like it really needs to be weeded and cut back. But the fact that all the herbs and trees are growing happily, the fact that the birds give me mad exaltation from dawn til dusk, the fact that shrews rummage around in the brush, and insects pepper the air, gives me pause. The clumps of stinging nettles look so wrong, I want them gone, but interspersed in-between them, and matted throughout them, are other wild spaces and species.
I guess tidying places up (whether its my bedroom, a kitchen, or a garden) can become a bit of an (entwined) aesthetic and emotional obsession for me. Like sometimes it’s more the streamlining and editing of my spaces that produces a sense of calm than the specific content alteration. & Sometimes the space just gets thinner rather than nicer with my engagement. I’m trying to loosen myself from the mechanism of pure tidying and think more about the decisions I’m making as I work, edit and cultivate. What do I think belongs around me and why?
What really concerns me is that I think the same thing could be said for my mind. I have a (similar) tendency to spend a lot of energy making sure I’ve tidied up my thoughts, edited my personal narrative, matched up my emotions to reasons and my actions to emotions, without always learning a whole lot in the process. I’m not saying that I think being reflective (or being tidy) is bad, but that when I rely too heavily on habit, I risk cutting out a lot of uncatagorisable mushy stuff in the process. Good mushy stuff. Thoughts that initially look wrong but end up having much more going on in them than I realise, at first lick.
Something about the green mesh of mixed spring growth outside my window feels abundant… in secrets, in unpredictable life forms, in stuff I have not yet seen, or said. By ‘mixed’, I think I mean part chosen (herb and apple tree) and part unselected, undefined, myriad.
I’m sitting here eating a biscuit and I’m deciding to share with you the collection of poems that I’ve spent this past winter working on. Poems are like mixed weeds in my brain, they are my internal unsolicited biodiversity, they resist a purely mechanistic way of gardening, the ‘tidying techniques’ of my mind, they require me to think about what I’m saying and make new decisions about why I want to intervene, streamline, edit.
(If you are reading this on your phone plz turn it sideways… like landscape… to get the format of the poems as I have intended)
I Smell Work Love
Saxifraga when conditions are tipped in favour of the flowering shrubs on the mountainside they start to reach further up the slope they start to break rocks and foil past austerity something about the angle of the sun something about a shadow from the wind roots burst into roots which push into stems and flowers flower into flower when in this kind of material dream Crop After Lily Clarke The spot of blood I saw on the field won’t forget itself Lily it was a poppy and now it is a word & I am aware of it even in the night when we couldn’t quite see that the moon was electric its dusty eyelid had slipped so low its flint its gold thumbnail it’s become so dark on the page & dark in the meadow & I’ve started to relate to the thunder I’ve started to remember the crop of blood on my leg (inner thigh) & I’ve started to relate to what I put on the counter what I have to dismember vegetables for meals like the word of a lover lost the poppy asserts itself be fruit to me flower do not add eat outside the moon starts to shake the clouds from the sky trying to separate language from live flesh so I try instead so I pick up the knife and roll the melon back onto the board again yes it is an undertaking to prepare this to be prepared to forcibly discard the idea of melon or the distant idea of a flower becoming only in blood which reminds itself only of senses that slip by surrendering a field of things it cannot be until all the longing left is harvestability Summer I’ve got so tired my skin is snapping at one cent a cell flowers are freight for language sentences spill off like petals and sense sticks to air like pollen and at least I know that water brings me comfort and how to bundle up an hour by tying down its corners yeah I can shove an extra twenty minutes in at the last punch the bottom of my back is a numb firestorm and I know how many hours I can weed before I bleed my brain out I know how to work the season till the die back and best how to stuff summer into money December & now out of the morning a bucket scrapes the gravel or is it a shovel or actually hands is it hands making that terrible noise against the concrete and the stones? reminding us that we must tear at something in order to survive a signal that most of us must rise and tear at something or scrape our bodies against the earth/or worse the world’s hardest surfaces for a chance to ask, really, gasp really will I be imprinted with a sleeve of software into one of those swivel chairs I feel like I’m moulding slowly dry spoiling in my own flesh as I sit here and slide out death longhand with the sweat of our industry it pure suffocates me, it’s disgustingly crisp clean and perfect so bland and satisfying when it clicks into place A discursive meditation on being disinterested After Anthony Anaxagorou of when it slips, attention ate the pillars of me remembering to listen to you man with your blue keep cup, I remember when I wondered who in the world would walk through that door when hello held such a mysterious edge of the counter always feels hard on the morning shift the skin on my hands is pulp and my bones so close to the vibrating steel of the espresso machine cleanness is the only thing I can concentrate on today it is sunny, today it is rainy, today the plates dig into my joints, and wrench at my youth full body of referendum, and election and virus and I’ve got bits now I repeat myself a lot keeps me calm or blank makes me feel sick and I’m unreceptive to bits blasted at me, food scraps or milk spit, everything smells half-way like froth and coffee and there’s no end to social anxiety except, I think I left mine somewhere, I think it got scraped into the bin by accident with somebody’s bus pass and they were indignant we hadn’t care enough to notice. I tried to explain with customer service that the care was lost too very unfortunately with the bus pass and we were doing everything we could to find it. Pockets After Emma Jones Decorate your placard of mourning I’m eight ghosts behind you now and if I performed? what was the difference I’ve duplicated now I’ve become a part of that which aligns with a more digestible vision. It was a silent rendering. Morning never arrived, there was just the burial of tomorrow, I see it now, the day is all there is: stolid and rank with everything I know about it. Careful little shrew, you just bit a hole in the corner pocket of my bedroom. It’s good to feel the air in there, my god. The way a cool finger touches my side belly. I am stilled. I want this change, the opening up of it, to last forever. Girl, I have taken you in a thousand times and my body has ripped in bearing how you separate me from myself. Dimmer the dream. Pull it right down from definition into the loose lesson of sight and let it melt there in a place you have to be reminded of because the days will avoid these pockets these pockets will keep you alive. When will I move out my parents’ house? Cold duct tape holding down the carpet dog in the crate small brown stain beneath the oven Mum balled up at the table and adult siblings make meals no splashboard food-stained paint dad comes in at ten and takes two clasped plates one overturned one containing over to the microwave then eats in the night and falls asleep with his kindle and the telly turned up bedroom equals haven garden equals dirt (and dog shit) the summer is too hot, the winter is a routine campaign for couch space and it’s the house of all houses which traps me in almost thirty types of unsuccessfulness here is the plastic boat in the garage, I used to take it down to the coast and sail it around, a fucking relic of my life, how beautiful, how absolutely beautiful that is Veranda Leopard print sun spots under eyelids trucks and birds and dogs bark in equal pendulum and further in is a family geology a thousand beat story a tank tide of loving the done wind wanting more so I swim through mind drenched falls & lift the thin orange lids up which means letting everything in go out and I can hear the creak of her sit opposite ready for the fight face sun if only there was more done by the heat of it let’s have a chemical alteration I no longer want to be soft meat face sun done with the heat done face under the weak warm ready A poem from memory with a line from Ilya Kaminsky I see her window open in the rain letting the animalness of the garden come in no through breeze just an invisible push where the window should be which is wetter? the hot sweat of the kitchen or the breath of mud and trees which is nicer? my small body or the spring onions in the steam I can smell both I can smell it all I can smell the curled mouse gone over there I can smell another child running down the stairs I can smell laundry I can see her window open in the rain I can see her window opening the rain Active Solace with another line from Ilya Kaminsky I draw an axis through the afternoon and slip into the wind where the buildings give way, it’s a hard flood, it scrubs me out I see watery clouds I see tiny massive swans, I see runners, I see the corner where I kissed girls in the dark and I see the bus stop, the dogs, I know none of it will feel nice, I don’t want to be in the wind no see I want to be reminded of how I understand discomfort because hearsay I might work out relief untitled as if all the junk around us got aerified and squeezed through eighty tubes eighty tubes in grids all about us angled every which way I would describe the wind Dog with a stress disposition They used to say they wanted to train her to make it easier for the whole family, but I think they changed their minds, I think it became more about wanting to make her feel good, work the stress out of her small heart. Because when she didn’t know what to do she would sit, and sit, and then start to tremble and eventually she'd throw up. It was in these moments that they all saw a piece of themself in her and wanted to do the dog training, and the discipline, so that she would be ok Boyfriends Don’t you just love the way it sounds my boyfriend oh, my boyfriend? he’s an investigative journalist uh! my boyfriend had a pasta salad for lunch I think my boyfriend would prefer it if we came later on in the evening, say 8? My boyfriend literally doesn’t give a shit My boyfriend stuck his fingers into my body and now I can feel them there every day hurts like hell Bottleneck She melted her body today and tried to form it into the shape of nine more hours in controlled task force of nature she is, we are impressed she’s almost possessed by fear she is almost dead at the desk of achievement or murdered enthusiasm doesn’t care any more to try I picked her up asked her what she wanted she just wanted rest can you believe that there was no specific illness or desire or loss to speak of well, I could be that wasted too if I gave in and that’s the difference between us that’s why I’ll make it to the mother fucking top someday just watch me die up there. having I wish I’d never had you I take it all back I take back that [ ] I take back [ ] [ ] because now I’m hourless I’m a belly of water forming into a drip drip drip I drop onto the hot back of my dreams in a calamitous panic thinking that I still have time to get back but I never do have enough of myself to drink time or enough of time to drink myself in Day 7 You should have seen me I was perfect I saw the sunrise I swam in the lido with a friend as the day turned yellow and I was back just in time for a perfect banana and my morning meeting with the heads. I was reeling from the cold I guess the exhilaration and my ideas were gorgeous ecological even I would say and then I took a spontaneous break just because I could because there was this perfect gap between tasks and I lay on the floor and just happened to develop my ideas perfectly thank god for my spontaneity and my sense of balance and then I got this call from a friend of a friend of an uncle of a banana and they bought my idea for thousands it might even be millions if I go rock climbing in the evening and stop by the quirky bar to drink a half pint with the bartender who (by the way she) has tattoos which categorise suffering into five perfect symbols: a dripping ham, an explosion, a skeletal rabbit, a tiny flower in a glass sphere, and a nasty eye you think you recognise. Wilful Amnesia Girl: A Study of Her After Parul Seghal’s ‘Case Against the Trauma Plot’ She’s sitting on the plastic seat like it’s the edge of a motel bed and a paper bag with mottled aubergines in vibrates on the carriage floor between her feet old brogues I want to say fallen over purse– wide eyes– she gives me all of that and a small amount more: how she likes to wash the corners of the kitchen floor on her hands and knees how she lives alone and has on her mantelpiece a single flat sand dollar that she takes and looks at while she masturbates how she likes to eat refrigerated pears for breakfast and now you’d expect her to pull back the curtain on childhood but she resists she won’t backflash for you she finds your therapeutic scripts wanting undoubtably she is the “person to whom things happened” but not a crank for your live stream pain plot we don’t know she exists because we see her wounds we know she exists because of the aubergines, the brogues, the saucy sand dollar and the refrigerated pears you may watch what she does next (takes out her phone to text) but she won’t let you make her misery visible freeze force stasis repeat yes she finds your therapeutic scripts wanting in fact lets get to it there’s no bloody chamber any longer, you already consumed it there’s just the motel room to house her backstory and if you flick on the lights in there all you’ll find is a young hungry writer who needs to monetise some part of her pain & tidy it up for you so she says eat it untitled what do you mean by debris do you mean carcasses like rotting red strips of flesh on bone or do you mean the split branches that lie in trees and swaddle trunks until the storm Eunice blows I just wanted to know what you mean when you say wastage to me Sabbatical: the testimony of an afternoon Blessings, they are about me now, flying out their insect lives in quickly spun knots. Confidences, they are talking to me urgent and rattling out their breath for as long as it will last sweet when you expected stale. Elderly, it’s taken me this long to realise how perfectly/ energetically/ seamlessly/ precisely/ systematically/ wryly/ rampantly thoughts prune themselves, when you’re looking another way.
Thank you for reading & send me return e-letters if you’d like ! I love them like I love summer parties
x
View from my window featuring a spoon made by @studio.tamsk https://www.studiotamsk.com/