Writing
A small selection of old and new poems, exploring my experience of: relating, othering, noticing, grief, word conjuring and interloping arrivals and staying with what is.
Mendieta
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Mountains are my Heterotopias
Through some form of attention tension
there is an invitation
Mountains of space between,
you give me yours to read
Mendieta
My own hesitation evokes a somnolence in me, and I see it too in the passers-by as they pass by
No flickering but a muted aliveness
What exists in me in the after energy of reading you, I would describe as the pleasure principle if it were cookie cutters and placed to lay across the back of my neck
Mendieta
It’s coming up to that time
A re-enactment, unless I turn around and invite us both to face ourselves this time,
another is close by
when you tell me something that has happened between you now and the ‘you’, you once were
for some such ‘energetic dis-attunement to it’ reason,
it gets taken in and held in my body in a foreshadowing of my need to dissect it, I swallowed it up and hold it softly inside, neither chewed nor digested.
A misplaced abatjour? Protected by a meniscus of bile
I’ve learned to climb you again and again each day
Mostly in mornings, afternoons and sometimes evenings
And if this discursive space
And it’s consequences
would speak to me next time I climb
All the others, your others, would recognise all of this as a unifying sensation,
Sung…
I notice the girth of your nadir and
I think of Ana falling from the Mendieta of 33 storeys and I wonder what Andre did with his mountains of pain- I bet he’d saw off his arm to not feel it- I want to think of Ana not Andre, so I try and place myself as her while falling.
And in my imaging, me as her,
My feet are bare
Mendieta
So that…
your dirt pushes itself between the skin and nails of my toes
And in relation to this subjection as I climb you, my sole souls’ souls sole on your dirty earthiness
you bear the weight of my body with its questions unquestioned
As I walk on top of you
And as you push into me
as I walk around you, reading the mediated circumference of your Mendieta through my feet
Prints of geomancy onto you
as you breathe out, plumes of dirt smoke
as I imagine you
as you breathe out
I imagine you (see you)
expanding
into new territory,
and not on fire, no!
I won’t be scorched, but rather just a glow from your mountainous archaeology
Shaped by the haptic gestures of my steps
being there and larger than the sea to me
And geographically
further away
Mendieta tells me that
uniformity of water, without knowing- is,
boundaries of sedimentation offered.
Formed of attention tension
Stephi
Everything that can be given can be taken away
Except for the independent nameless words and feelings that press upon us making opportunists of themselves in moments such as these
yes, the ineffable...
no treatise can demand use of these words and yet they are the most
eloquent
the most articulate of the inexplicable…
Perhaps these feelings and words are meant to be ungraspable
The feelings here, right now, un-bearable
Perhaps we are fools to depend upon words anyway
If I rest here with the presence of ordinary things surrounding me
such as
the table legs upright and predictable
unquestioning of their role to hold up the slab above
Will it help?
What If I notice how the dirt at the bottom of the curtain is not in the way of anyone
in its gathering more of itself
each time it makes contact with the floor, swoosh
Or, how about that the door to the outside continues to open for me whether or not
I am wearing salted tears…
I am really not sure if I need to put something down or pick something up
I like it here- hesitancy is underrated!
When I am ready
I will take up my place in the family of all of this
until then,
think of me as Schrödinger’s cat for now
in an entanglement
of
Shapes out of shapes
into shapes
A bit like your dancing yesterday when somehow in the dancing there was an acknowledgement
That Stephi had all the rights to her life that she took
Jon
Jon hasn’t quite committed to the space he takes up in the world this can be seen in the way he rushes through his words
hoping that no one realises that he is uncertain about what he is saying.
He tells Samantha.
Jon
perhaps like most of us
is focused too much on what he doesn’t know rather than what he does...
Of course, this act of rushing through, points at the very thing he is attempting to avoid.
Jon just needs to own his uncertainty with certainty...
Sam wonders why Jon doesn’t yet know how beautiful his voice is, and that he could just speak for the pleasure it
Jon likes to use
the words ‘kinda’ and ‘like’ a lot. This may reference his time spent living in Alabama.
He uses them as a space fillers
it helps him think
kinda like...
Jon likes succulents. He enjoys how they demonstrate
How
to
just
be.
He values the non verbal relationships he can have with them
The silent reciprocity moves him
In
a contemplative way...
Jon loves 2C1. He knows that his consciousness is there to be developed and explored.
He loves the unknown potential space that the psychedelic/stimulation interfacing offers him.
This leads us to his love of setting coordinates using his modulator
oscillator...
He sits and waits for time-stretching and pitch-shifting algorithms to take him by surprise or
can he predict where the sound might take him to.. Too?
Jon is utterly keen to see/ hear where combination of sounds might go…
He is interested in the evolving propagator
he knows this is a life guide.
Everything is happening but nothing has been decided
Stalking myself around corners
crevices.
Showing myself to myself
Flasher.
Nope, it’s actually not like that
Where can I be found?
Right here
right ear
right hear
alright dear?
Closed clenched.
What is my personal identity?
Mars directly conjunct with Gemini
14o north node...
Placing my awareness between us
Oooh, that’s interesting and
Or around my vagina
Grand air trine
My shadow knew she needed to lay off me this week
Well done!
Like Jupiter,
she had me rotating fast around her
as I orbit this/you/us,
slowly.
As opposed to going at your
10 hour days
Speed
I’d like 10 years to one Earth Year. Yeah you’re playing yourself like a Jupiter synth
Perhaps, I am really like Neptune
Unseeable as me when I am naked
with your eyes
I’ll need to make my calculations to get clear with myself
using the maths skills you are teaching me
I am
Elliptical
stop start
pause go!
16 hours to rotate and 165 days of orbiting the sun.
You are rotating slowly now the equivalent of 59 Earth days while your orbiting of me as
I, as the sun, happens with speed.
88 earth days.
I’d like to experience a non-verbal space with you,
Benefit.
I could gather the impressions weeks later, induced by a
Polygala senega plant
yeah, guidance from the
snake pit
of
plenty.
Wet Questions
What does the heart say now?
It says your angst is betrayed in your connection to you and your connection to knowing this knowing.
In your wanting of absolution and in your desire to seed grow
with the intention of becoming
What are the next steps now?
They are on the terrains of your choosing
tempered by inculpable expectation
expanded by your gentle insouciant exploration
Arms open wide
Or folded formally
across
Closed.
Who is the magician in your life?
He is the court jester, gesturing and
the fool tomfoolering
and the clown bowing down before you,
those tears
that clown.
He is here
just a ‘hovering
wanting to kiss your feet with the backs of his cobalt blue eyes
Who is the me who is knowing this?
She is the constellation of stars
and you as a starship
an air balloon,
and a cartoon bunny’s thighs
traversing the intergalactic plane
Ha, your structural integrity swaying and swayed
morphing, beatifically
Influenced by the gravitational pull of Jupiter’s moon’s and its guaranteed perpetual red dot a’ storming
with rage’
Where are you from
and where are you now?
I was there being a quark to your nucleus.
Yep, staged in a formation which an excited audience member in befuddlement observes.
Now I am here, bound to samsara.
I am stimming
on
pulling a pushed door
and
opening a
shut case
What, if anything, have you found?
In my left trouser pocket caught around a mythical tissue,
over used and
undervalued
rests a binary compass
spin twitching in its seeking of the strongest directional pull
How do you understand this?
I see that it translates its resonance as an Instructional constraint.
It tells me that linear stories dampen creativity and I understand this
not with my intellectual faculties
but with my disguised Geiger counter style knowing
that exists as the cashews nut nail
on my left foots
little toe
What is beyond your horizon?
It is the telling that stories are not always meant to facilitate sense making
But are
and can be made with the intention for them to act as a mirror to the extraordinariness for what the gravitational-wave implications see & imply
which
is
that
my
singularity
wants
now to experience yours as if we were a boiling pot of potatoes
for the telling about how we orbit each and everything else leant on an axis within this horizon.
And with those polite polarities,
rightfully bringing, especially shame accepting blame. I would smile
So now I’ve arrived to be with you here and there
I’ve brought my beautiful arms
And my sighs sighing
Love’s articulations and souls undulating aligning to times signature timings.
It is all there
and Rapunzel knows
she helped me figure it out and acknowledge it.
She said that It was never about the suitor prince algorithm.
But simply about her letting down her hair.
So simplistic Rapunzel
There are steps inside my tower.
Yes Alexis!
killing off what you cannot hold located, respected, honoured as the truth of your self expression.
killing is always about self hatred- that’s a territory to explore, disallowing feminine expressions in the masculine, begets the dichotomy,
splintered off,
kill off-
kill the other off.
The other who represent those aspects of me- The dualistic articulations that trans identities interrupt
push back in violence.
Yes, the internalised- society says there is no place for me, so let me make do with the edge- easy to fall from the edge...
I’m interested in embodied vocalising- the this is what the********says, in this situation.
Could write some dialogue from the point of view of the one who hurts to curb the self-hatred.
This would be an act of experiencing contrition from the perpetrator on my part.
And of course the voice of the victims
And the societal voice.
Mmm, if the societal voice were an insect, which one would it be?
Or a flower, a seemingly benevolent, transgressive flower which one, ha! A chrysanthemum!
The word is animistDid you really say
Yes and then no and then yes
Did I really say errr and the ahhh
And then I guess
Did I really say now you are were can you stay
Did you really say, changing your mind for me, is not ok
Did they really cook
pears
with goats cheese
and lemon thyme
And place them like the four elements
fire, wind, earth and wine
And did I really glance at them as I drank the air
And why is it that I can’t stop thinking about you when your there
Did I really say, “they made a film about that, Don’t you know?”
And then show you the ugly corn on my shy small toe
Did you really often say that you thought that I am brave,
but that you found me somewhat of a haze
Did you really say non attachment and attachment at the end
Do I really want
you
to be you
to be you
Do you really want
me to be
me
to be
me
Am I really just you
being you
being you
being you
And are you really
just me being me
being me.