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There are too many rules that make writing this close to impossible. I was told I had to have a reason for it. Though not just any reason – it had to be solid, impervious to solutions that they now develop in the form of pills or a television series or alcohol. It had to withstand the harshest attacks any human can throw at an emotion. I couldn’t just Feel with no particular aforementioned solid, impervious reason. To claim destruction and tragedy I had to have gone through destruction or tragedy. Both would be ideal. Throw in a dead pet in there. Then we’ll talk.

But I can’t say that I have met all the unspoken criterion. I do know, however, that this feels like an unwelcome guest whenever it sits inside me, and that’s about as close to the truth as I can muster. There’s something massively unnerving about constantly having something or someone else live inside you that you don’t know whether they’re an extension of yourself or they were never a part of your matter, that somewhere along the way, you picked it up inadvertently and cooed and coddled it so much and so often that it thought it belonged. When it didn’t. Parasites don’t often belong inside your head.

Let me tell you about my creature though, because it’s the sort of thing that begs to be described. Literally – it’s begging me – I have not heard more whining and pleading more than when I try to talk about it. This waters it. It digs its roots deeper, but in some way, I am satiated in the knowledge that I can still use simple enough words to express its existence – that way I know I didn’t make it up. Something so well-descriped had to be deliberate.

Alright. It’s small. It’s not a big thing, not really. But it fills space with the skill of liquid molecules. Or gas. It smells like pillows. Old, well-loved ones, not the freshly-purchased kinds that doesn’t have the musty sting of the past tied to its end strings. It likes the idea of me leaving, or turning off, or starting over, or ending. It likes me to do the sort of thing that will demand attention that I will not receive. Like going off to a different continent for 6 months. Or refusing to speak. Or finding myself constantly unable to speak. I don’t think I control any of that. If I had my way, I would be far more well-adjusted with my self-expression. But it, this thing, doesn’t allow me to do that – not verbally anyway. Not in the physical presence of another human being whom I might desperately want to reveal all to. The thing scampers off somewhere inside me and hides. When it hides, even if it’s scurries into some crevice inside me still, I tend to forget all lack of sense and I find myself feeling quite silly. Quite silly, and quite logical.

I’m starting to think it’s a bottle, or at least moulded to look and act like one, and every drip of memory is restrained in its imagined confines. It doesn’t grow in size, but it does its job with keeping everything inside. Sometimes it’s a serpent though. Serpent-like. These times it makes a bit more sense, and I can feel it raise its head like a python out of a basket whenever I blow the flute.

Lately, over the course of six or seven (or eight or nine or fifteen, I’ve lost count) months, I find myself entertaining the idea of shedding. Just to see what would stick, what would refuse to budge from my existence. I don’t hope for much but I mostly hope it would be people. I mostly want to prove myself wrong on the noxious thoughts I have that if I were to do this, nobody would put up that much of a resistance. The thing with me is that I want resistance. I want to be able to declutter and find things sneaking back into my life. It makes me feel necessary. I very hardly feel necessary.

When I coddle these thoughts, the creature, it tends to be when I’m left quite alone with my head that I don’t know what else to do in particular. It hurts doing this, but it feels better to hurt tangibly than to feel it slinking around inside me like a dark vapour rising from sleep whenever I cast a thought about its presence. Rising from sleep is the worst, you know. When you remember what your default setting is, that’s the worst.

It sounds like I’ve managed to make this as romantic as possible, but there is little romance in this. I have no compulsion to keep feeling these things other than my own psychological compulsion and that has proven to be slightly out of my control. I want to feel better. I feel like I haven’t been better for a solid amount of time for about ten years, and it makes me wonder if I’m a master at making things up or if I’m a master of drawing things out. The thought that I don’t entertain much is that everyone feels this way all the time. I know everyone feels this way at some point in their lives. But I would very much like to find out if this is common headspace and I just haven’t caught on to this yet. Missed the memo. Now I’m harping on cyclical pseudo-depression like it’s something new and undiscovered.

I’m afraid to stop writing because once I do the heaviness will return and I can’t afford another moment with that thing right now.

I’m also afraid that one day I’ll wake up and realise that the only way I can get rid of this is to get rid of myself. That purging the parasite means purging the host entirely. That maybe I’m already diseased by the toxins and I’m too far gone to feel like an average, healthy person again.

I’m afraid of waking up one day and learning that this is my addiction to pain and attention and sensitivity. That there was nothing to begin with. Nothing in itself really scares me. Frankly, I’m tired of being scared.

Philosophy 101.

Philosophy 101
Write your essay in poetic format based on the following questions:

If a poet slams in a forest,
and no one is around to hear her speak,
does she make a sound?

Are we all made redundant
when our breaths don’t circulate around
a room, of a bar, every last thursday of the month
embracing the claws of
a point system that is at best democratic,
at worst, superbly flawed?

If a poet slams in a forest,
does every word recited disperse into
unsung molecules that sink?

Do words have mass?

In anti-gravity, can you hear your own
swallowed sentences?   

If a poet slams in a forest,
does the poem erupt from her mouth in a floral burst of
metaphoric ulcers that settle in the soil like seeds waiting
to burst into a poe…tree…?

Does it find solace in the nature of leaves and live amongst
the browns and greens, the veins in symbiotic lifestyle?

Is it still a poem?

Is she still a poet?

What makes a poet, a real poet,
is it the ‘p’, the pop, in the poetry,
the popular pandering of personification
that plan to perpetually pacify the people?

Is it alliteration?

If a poet slams in a forest,
if she grows her own woodland of poetry,
and the next poet traipses into land
what will be found?

Baby poems wailing for a chance to be spoken?

Will she find that that muse is a parasite
merely existing in another life’s home?

Is there a fruit of labour that
sprouts from the creation of a poem?

Do words have saplings?

Or is it just talk?

If a poem dances naked in front of you,
will you laugh or get turned on?

Is the nature of poetry
entertainment or affection?

Is our poetry only validated when stripped
naked in front of a room full of judges?

When we keep them in between our pages
do they suffocate and shrivel within themselves,
is attention their oxygen,
or   

Are we the definition of poetry
Are we poetry redefined?

Do poets have souls?

If all poems are trees,
does that mean that all poets are virgins?

If all we are are clambering for growth,
If someone tells you you’re a force of nature
would you believe them?

End section A.

Keep your margins empty.
Leave a space in between your lines.

Sunday Storms.

Sometimes the feeling itself is something simple.
It’s like plucking.
In a desperate attempt to separate skin from skin,
you hold the suspect between two fingers,
half-tight grip, twist your wrist ever so slightly -
and then pull.
Do this again – twist and pull – over and over, every four or five minutes,
until the interval between each pluck narrows in on itself,
let the two move closer and closer, until they kiss
Where their breaths collide is where you stand, in the middle of
a Sunday storm. Sometimes it feels like this.
Except that instead of plucking a dead flower or weeds,
you pluck memory.

It is scientifically-flawed, but my idea of a single memory
is that it is a graft of skin etched onto the film roll of my head,
as if my brain was oozing something cancerous, and had to be
patched up. So, the story is: the doctors took parts of my body,
my forearm, my thighs, my belly, and used the flesh
to form a haphazard quilt around my mind.

Sometimes the memories feel so well-sewn and tight
that they begin to burn.
Sometimes they rise awake, trying to pull at their seams,
to pull apart from each other and make sense of themselves
without company.

Both times hurt.

Sometimes it would be Sunday.
and I would be midway through my third cup of coffee,
The wave i would be riding would sink into itself
like the bow section of the Titanic
This is where it starts.

You could chart my regression with a graph,
recognise it by the colour sucked out from fabric
like some unspeakable bleach monster rising from the icy oceans
to remind me that sometimes, drowning isn’t going to solve anything.
We are made to breathe through vicissitudes
Through the plucking. It’s why meditation exists,
It’s survival instincts. So I stare into
the murky eyes of half-drunk caffeine,
watching it lose its flavour,

Sometimes they don’t tell us that
we are less rubber, more floral foam,
When someone presses into us, we never bounce back to our original dimensions,
Our dents sit deep and empty, while life trickles puddles inside them.
It’s up to us to feel filled or just heavy.

Sometimes it will be a Sunday
when old biology lessons trickle
back into brainspace and I find connections between
emotions and enzymes, potential and kinetic; the higher the heat,
the higher the kinetic energy of enzymes, until it hits its optimum temperature
in which it starts to denature – we all have optimum temperatures,
that’s why they call it breaking points,
that’s why when you try to reach for sky and find out that it’s just a ceiling,
you start to fall back down,
sometimes the fall causes you to curl inwards, and each graft of skin
vibrates like molecules in orbit, the higher the kinetic energy, the higher the heat given off,
that’s why you burn;
Sometimes you keep the fall inside yourself like it’s a possibility
of resistance, waiting to hit ground to find your pieces have broken apart
from the impact,
So you can start picking, pluck each wound,
this time on your own terms,
this time because you have to,
not because there isn’t a choice.

Sometimes it feels like that.

Smoke Signals.

Old poem about a twat I don’t care about now.

————

You never saw me in my hot-off-Boxing-day-sales yellow stockings.
I admit it seemed like a good idea at the time, looking like I met
with an accident with a gargantuan walking bottle of mustard,
but at some point, I pulled it off. Vaguely.

And you didn’t see me dressed as a modern-day over-accessorized hippie either,
sat behind an Oxfam counter, working the till like the till was my bitch,
and a landyard around my neck, like I was tied to the ideals of social work,
all stoic and altruistically hip.

I had black nails and boots with heels that are at least two and a half inches.
At least.
You never saw me that tall.

You never saw me on my best hair day,
and thankfully you missed me on my worst;
and there are days in between when you weren’t there either,
when I was flitting past windows and doors, which became houses, and banks,
drifting through seconds that amounted to stretches of life, only ever almost there,
but not quite fully.

You never saw me handle fivers and tenners, all the pence and pennies
with the skilled precision of a naturalised citizen or someone who has long-handled
these bits of metal. Now all it requires is a bit of touching, bit of grazing, bit of barely-looking,
and then the rest is up to mental sums (which take ages).

In fact, you weren’t around long enough
to know that mental sums take ages for me.

You weren’t at all there to see me dance at that one club
in that one place that one night with that one guy who was quite certainly
very much cooler than you’ll ever be.

You weren’t looking when my eyes were looking
for a sign of you looking for me
hopefully not looking as though I am looking for you
(though I am
and I seem to always be).

And those chain-bars that hang about the city?
The Ship or some loosely uncreative name of the same vein,
that one those two tourists were asking us to point them to near Monument last year?
Yeah, I run into those every other day now,
and I have half a mind to ring you up and say
‘I found the ship. I found it’. But I don’t.
You weren’t there to see me have this slight dilemma.

And I remember there was a brief moment in time
when you used to say ‘mate’ around me
- or maybe it was just the one time -
but now if ‘mate’ is uttered it will be puffed out of your mouth
in smoke signals that evaporate like the rest of you did.

And you weren’t there when I figured that the word ‘burnt’
is two more letters away from your name,
so believe me when I say that the irony
hit with plenty of dramatics
and you are apt, yes sir, I am quite sadly jammed
in between two eras of movement
and I find myself wondering if I’ll ever
see you see me see life
the way I do now
and if I’ll ever
get to taste your kiss on someone
else’s mouth.

I hope I never do.
You were a shite kisser anyway.

The Floorboards of Ryder House.

Here are the instructions.

1. Proceed with caution on these slabs of cheap floorboard; this dust-and-hair-and-lint fest, this carpet of human shedding, can easily be likened to hot coals underfoot.
2. Toes only.
3. Watch out particularly for the patches that creak – next to the work desk, three size-38 steps from the wardrobe and the second plank from the door, the one with the cracked edges. They are quicksand in a wooden swamp – think that attic scene in the film Jumanji – so adopt the precision of a tightrope walker if you decide to rise at stupid o’clock for a morning coffee.

I dip the tips of my toes onto the floor and concentrate on the act of wishing my body mass into the air surrounding me, hoping that the more I think it, the easier it is for every cell to squeeze into an inch of air space as gaseous matter. But all I seem to have done is direct it southwards, into all ten toes, into the heels, and then suddenly I am walking not with feet but flesh-coloured dumbbells.

Every swish of my nightdress is like a firearm gone off. Not a silencer either, it sounds like one of those M-82 semi-auto .50 calibre rifle types. Until now, I never figured that 100% cotton could produce such a sonic explosion and had I known this nifty fact, I would have left the item at the rack in Oxfam. These things should be in the washing instructions.

My roommate shifts in her bed.

I freeze, arms out in a defensive stance, hobbling on one foot, ready to drop and play dead at any given moment. I am the non-confrontational sort; if she prods me awake, I think, panicky, or says something like ‘I know it’s you who made that ear-splitting rustle’, I’ll just snore pointedly. It works for animals, doesn’t it? Foolproof.

But she doesn’t wake. I exhale.

I pull drawers an inch at a time, pull my clothes on in slow motion, brush my hair with the caution that accompanies dismantling an explosive. Each time the metal hooks of the hangers click against the rung in the wardrobe, I cringe dramatically. I pull my socks on to cushion the blow of my steps against the floor, twist open concealer and lipstick caps as un-violently as I can manage, pull my coat on with barely a ripple in the soundwaves, and then, throat tight and breath hitched, I slowly twist the knob of the door and creep out with the stealth usually adopted by a highly-trained agent.

Finally. Relief.

Then –

There was half a beat between the slow-dawning realization that I had forgotten something and the first ring of my phone on the desk in the room, vibrating madly against the surface, rattling the bedroom walls with its shriek and buzz and leaving me with the red wrath of a hung-over Brazilian.

The Second God.

I wrote a sequel to my God poem. (Backstory: I am God.)

—

Three thousand years into the future, I inform the human race that the world is about to end.

Really. For real this time.

I admit I’ve been harping on this for literal ages but before, something would always go wrong. There would always be a glitch in the divine system. I use a PC.

It was usually a case of not having the right technology to annihilate the entire universe without the mess of bodies and guts all over the place. I needed something clean. I sat on the zombie thing for a long while, trust me, I was pretty obsessed with that too, just like you guys; but the dry run I held didn’t go so well, there were always cockroach survivor types. Let’s just say it’s a lot grosser than The Walking Dead.

But I still thought it was a pretty sweet idea so I sold it to AMC and FOX.

Anyway, I was running out of time on the whole apocalypse deal – I mean, I know, I’m God, I can just make more Time if I run out. But you all don’t know how much hard work goes into making something infinite. It’s not something you can rush out at the last minute. Because there isn’t a last minute. Because it’s infinity. Right? It blows my mind too.

Besides, if I kept hanging the threat over your heads, you wouldn’t believe that the world would end after a while. The trouble is, I always figured we’d need just one more human invention – a chip, a speckle – just a megabyte too much to tip the scales against your favour, so I could blame you for your own arrogance, lack of discretion and godlessness, all those things I warned you about in those holy books I never actually wrote but got royalties for – but there was always something that held me back. Here’s a secret: I was supposed to press some button or pull some wires in a North Korean nuclear power site when the Mayan calendar ended, and you guys were supposed to blame it on Kim Jong Whatshisface and dictatorship regimes, but to be honest, I had spent the entire night at a craaazy end of the world rave party I threw, and was too hungover the next day to finish the job. By the time I picked myself out of my own divine vomit, it was too late, and you were already making Facebook memes about how silly end of the world predictions were. I’m looking at you, Atheists. You lot ruin everything.

Plus I always got very into human technology myself to use it against you. When the iPad came out, me and the angels got ourselves one each and when Satan pissed all over the protective covering, cackling madly as he ran off to egg two teenagers into having pre-marital sex or something, I didn’t even bother smiting him, I just dropped by the Apple store and got a new one. I know, I know, consumerism is bad, capitalism helps only the uber rich, bla bla bla, I’m left-winged like anyone else, but hey, I never said I was good at the whole “practice what you preach” thing. Come to think of it, pretty sure you guys came up with that shit. I had nothing to do with it.

So full disclosure: I announce the end of the world in three-thousand years. Tell your grandkids. I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve been doing this for way too long and I’ve been made redundant over and over; I’m not sure what’s next for me. Lucifer suggested a solo career. But I’m tired of the single life. I’d write a book but I haven’t actually got a great reputation in the publishing industry.

I’m thinking reality TV.

Maybe Big Brother, part two.

Bigger Brother.