my words don’t travel far, they tangle in my hair and tend to go nowhere

Ignoring writers group tasks and other little things (definitely not including poetry), this is what I’ve achieved this year and is what I should be working on to better 1) myself and 2) my writing. I have been mostly neglectful.

Today Has Never Happened: 20,623 words, finished but not redrafted and barely reread. Incest needs heavily rewritten.
Endings Start with Questions (working title): 17,915 words, not including several added pages of diary extracts and flyers, finished and partially redrafted. Masturbation needs rewritten, may be entirely ridiculous. Blow job needs heavily rewritten.
Missing Shade of Blue: 11,863 words, abandoned but planned. Death needs heavily rewritten.
Suicide Society: 4,747 words, stopped in the middle of a sentence. May be too much like Brick.
Swimming with Dolphins (alt title My Brain Hurts A Lot): 3,950 words, finished and planned redraft. Bulk up nurses.
The Manifesto: 881 words, abandoned and half planned. Too purple.
Peanut Butter and Strawberry Chapstick Sandwiches: 3,604 words, finished and half-redrafted. Purple.
Love, Your Third Daughter: 39 words, abandoned but in a pretty font
Eschatological Verification and You: 1,695 words, finished, vague redraft plan. Purple.
Anarchy: 305 words, on hold
Samson: 104 words, stuck
Straight, no chaser: 1,048 words, finished, might redraft, may be too disgusting.
The Revolution is not a party: 968 words, finished, should redraft
People on the other side of the phone are not real. Discuss: 1,704 words, abandoned
How the war began: 1,464 words, a reason why I shouldn’t push myself to write when I feel shit
Hold Your Applause: 1,300 words, I can’t remember if I wanted to expand this

And we’re losing all touch, losing all touch

Message read on the bathroom wall

I take pictures of graffiti in toilets. If you read something good in a toilet and you have some form of camera you should do the same and send me it. I collect them with the vaguest notion that one day I’ll make a coffee table book of toilet scribblings. This will never happen because my pictures aren’t good enough but be quiet with your dream shattering dose of reality. Bah, logic.
And the last one isn’t mine but I found it and I giggled.

Abandoned 3

I was thinking about the differences in thinking about sex. The very very physical and the romantic emotional. The cloud of lust that disguises odd faces, strange noises and leaves everything in this beautiful glow. And the same lust that makes it all so bright. Heightens senses. Memorises moans and groans and oh just certain things fingers were doing. I was comparing the two in my head as I walked home the other day and I thought there’s two sides of one girl. But it took me so long to write this shit I gave up and can’t remember exactly what I wanted to prove.

Lou fell in love with an anarchist, which is a difficult thing to be these days. A cause, a real cause mind you, not a flimsy environmental issue; save the whales, nuke the whales, slice, dice and serve the whales. Hug a tree, love a tree, stick your penis right up that tree. A real cause is hard to find. Lou fell in love with a revolutionary. A girl with passion behind her delicately smoke-filled eyes and a riotous sneer in her smile and he would never have seen her had his lab partner not called in sick that day. She stretched past his waiting form in the union cafe to liberate a sandwich and grinned as he tried not to stare at her protruding chest. She stamped in thick boots past careful lines of hungry students and swung her arms out above her head in a laconic yawn. Her oversized coat rode up her back and revealed her jeans, slashed across each cheek of her ass. With a wink she had taken an overzealous bite of her stolen lunch and disappeared out the door. Lou fell in love with this anarchist.
At the time, he was a dating a librarian. A problem he didn’t seem to acknowledge until he was stammering in front of her critical fingers. Such noises were ignored as her nails tugged on his pubic hair and hooked into the elastic of his boxers. She pulled him this way through the bar and kicked open the door of the toilets in the back. Anarchy did not seem to extend to her Snoopy bra or the curling flower tattoo secreted behind her knee. In fact, the little rebel positively blushed as he entered her, before her nails tore lines in his back and she bent his head back by the roots of his hair.

It’s not block, I’m calling it writer’s funk

Louis XIV or a note to my Little Prince

I’ll send a dozen roses to you on the moon
to orbit around your most beautiful ego.
I’ll love you forever until the last sunset.
Then I’ll pull you by your roots
destroy every thorny petal
and discard with comet disdain
never to bother me again
with baobab insecurities.

I loved you first

Sam didn’t say anything. Dee watched her twist the scissors around her fingers in the flashing sunlight streaming from the kitchen window. He tugged at the edges of the towel around his shoulders, coughed down his sleeve, and slurped an unwanted mouthful of sugary tea. Sam didn’t say anything. She licked her lips twice, audibly unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth but changed her mind halfway through her first breath. She placed her cool fingers on his temples and tilted his head down towards his knees. Then the only sound was the steady snip as his curls spiralled to the floor.

and now I don’t know what to do. I can write it all up to this point but as soon as she cuts his hair I’m done, spent, empty. I don’t want to follow the Biblical story since I’m barely following it at all but for the hair.

I am making the effort to rewrite the things I think have most potential. Which at the moment is my backwards end of the world thing. Possibly my hospital piece but I dunno. My mum, who never has a strong opinion on these things really, believes adamantly that I can stretch that one to a fullsize novel. I am not so sure.

I have a very strong urge to write a philosophical novel. I keep trying to make my french one work but I don’t know. It’s a drag. A drag I wish was already done, if you get me.

I am mostly posting because I liked that first silly poem and to let you guys know I am still alive on the internet in case you didn’t know. I want to write a short story about otters.

For a lack of anything better to say

I am trying to read too many books. Or really I am not reading Plato because I can’t afford it just now and I’m reading Orwell and Burroughs and thinking about reading Hemingway. Everyone is kinda melting together. It doesn’t help that there are all the contemporaries to keep track of. The Beat Generation, really. Throw in influence and you can stretch to Salinger (who is in the to-read pile) and Palahniuk (who I cannot afford) and Bukowski (whose poetry I dip into now and then but not too often). 

I’m reading so much because I’m not writing. I cannot write. I enjoy it in the moment but that disappears instantly upon completion. When I get back to it I’m left with utter indifference. I can see the good bits, bad bits but I don’t see if any of it is salvageable. I can’t see if there is any point in trying.

I don’t mean to sound quite so oh woeisme pointless emo whine. I certainly am not fishing for validation. I will be annoyed if anybody tries to do so. It’s just in the frustration of everything else I couldn’t cope with this too. 

I mean, dreams of publication are always great and I’ve always had them. But I don’t write thinking I ever will be. I don’t enter competitions or submit to magazines because I prefer the solitude. It’s not the rejection I fear. It’s getting it wrong. It’s hard to explain and sounds so fucking idiotic that I’m not going to try. 

It’s easy to stop. Let it all go and soak up other people’s work. My fingers are torn apart and I’m a wreck but I’d rather be silent than mediocre. There’s just the fear of inadequacy , the threat of losing something. 

I spend too long in bookstores reading first and last pages. I browse through Amazon reading as much as they put up for free. It’s all a long narrative I can’t keep track of. But Burroughs is a kind of mundane reality that I can’t stop reading. Not like the Fuck Up which was a mundane kind of mundane that while mildly entertaining and occasionally funny was rather disappointing (but cheap).

I am sure I had a better point. Ok, I watched a film based on a Hemingway story. In it Gregory Peck shot a rhino in the face. He’s so manly.

Lecture Notes

nirvana isn’t something you obtain but something that must be sustained

surrounded by drug takers and ne’erdowells

greek gods have birthdays every month

your mouth is a gun all curled up in my flimsy hopes of childhood crushes

16th C lot of cold weather, goddam witches. WHEN GOSSIPS MEET

that’s when we’ll explode

and it won’t be a pretty sight

You are right about Antigone-how sublime a picture of woman! and what think you of the choruses and of the godlike victim? And the menaces of Teiresias and their rapid fulfilment? Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full context in any mortal tie.

Shelley was totally hot for Antigone you see.

surely he meant survive, ‘if you manage to escape childbirth’ Good God the babies are massing

an arrogant man is safer than a narcissistic man. An ego is infinitely better than a flower

a stranger in a black car with candy-flavoured condoms snares the woman-child with her long legs and taunt skin stretched to brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreak

sexy, sexy Apollo

Christian IV was a total alcoholic

take me to your bed and show me some trees

she had blow job lips and sweet cunt smile and every line of her mouth was a kiss off to all the men that had never wronged her. Somewhere between her cubist breasts and her incubatory thighs was a tattoo of a vine winding along the contours of a waitress-toned stomach.

I have forgotten why she was leaning over the counter, spilling over onto my lap because the coffee she had poured me was sludge cold.

she sang in crackled gramophone tones, scratching the record throat, lifting the needle notes

she sang so soft as if she’d break

the beautiful dangerous kind of ordinary you just can’t leave alone

I almost married a guy once. he proposed to me because I wrote a story about a man with his name. He slept with me because of that story but I never wrote it for him. So don’t tell me your name.

she clamps a finger across his mouth, don’t tell me your name, I’ve been told too many names tonight and I don’t want to lose yours

whisper it in my ear sometime and I’ll echo it back in quiet gasps

but later later later

Like regular comics but on the web

And I’ve been reading a few. Like Minus for example, about a little girl with magical powers. Some of them are utterly charming. The ending is crazy.

There’s Letters to a Wild Boar which is more arty than comicy. I was going to post the last one I read but it had a naked Josephine Baker dancing in her banana skirt so I thought maybe nah.

I got really bored and read through the archives of Perfect Stars which I have linked over there I am sure. It is arty more than comicy but there are comics about Hemingway and Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, Sylvia Plath, Pokemon and Joe.

I will say anytime he acts particularly big-headed this comic has sprung into my head.

Mostly I’m just avoiding tutorial work. Half of the text I must read for tomorrow is in Greek. I have a helpful sheet of words to help me but they are in Romanised Greek. This text is full on crazy alphabet shit. No clue as to what is happening. I will wear a low-cut top and my tutor will be too scared to look at me because he is older than time and has probably never even seen his wife’s breasts. Oh I am so moral but it is the fastest way to dodge questions.

On Hold

Elyse lived in a flat with seven others though the eight of them were rarely all in the flat at once. There were, however, always miscellaneous others invited back that seemed to get lost amongst the clothing waiting in stacks for their turn in the machine and the piles of university literature that was systematically studied and swapped around and boxes that would never be unpacked, still warm from mothers’ helping hands. It was impossible to clear a space even in her own room which could hold a roommate at sudden last minute notice should the couch be otherwise occupied. Every day she fell in a tangle of limbs on this one couch in the designated common area with no guarantee she would stand back up again.

Not one of the eight was what you could call an organised person. Tidy girlfriends and boyfriends sometimes appeared exasperated and organised an intense military tidy but it only lasted as long as the relationship. There was a commune festivity that was easy to get lost in, easy to be swept along by. Arguments were as regular as the click of the boiled kettle with make-ups over mass used tea bags and empty bowls of sugar. Philosophies and religious views clashed with sleepy apathy in ad breaks of shared tv preferences. On the whole, life in the flat was chaotic but comfortable and it was in this atmosphere that Tim found Elyse for the first time.

The flat was never host to parties. At least not parties in the conventional sense. There was always somebody new hanging around, always some form of alcohol flowing free, always something worth celebrating. It wasn’t unusual for several friends of separate roommates to turn up at the same time and it was natural to gather on the couch and share intimacies. But there was a general aversion to parties in some sense of the word; an unspoken worry about past evictions on the grounds of rowdiness. But for the sake of argument the scene is set at a party and here enters the second character.

Tim knew a girl called Molly. He knew her a little more than he was sure he was happy with after all. Molly had been living in the flat for three months, the newest addition and so the baby despite being older than the majority. That night there might have been twenty or so bodies in one sitting room, drinking from few cups and taking collective sips whenever a rim came near a pair of lips. Sighing recycled air Tim thought he just might be able to shake her off in the dense chatter.

“What’s the party for anyway?” He bent down to his tiny doll companion and she shook her thick black curls at him.

“Not a party,” and she bent in towards him as a group pushed past to the fridge. Tim shrugged and darted away as soon as someone caught her arm in excitement. He pulled a can of cider from a passing armful and scanned the flat for somewhere to sit that wasn’t occupied. And that’s when he sees her and maybe everything should die down a little, go into slow motion, quieten and darken so all he can see is her long hair hiding half her face that seems to flow into long legs dangling down from the shelf on which she sits. Maybe we should roll out a range of clichéd lust-tinted signals that this pixie is his new target but we won’t because he merely admires those long legs and turns into a conversation with a different girl with a full mouth that he will fill with himself in a sudden rush of sublime enjoyment.

“What’s this party for anyway?” He asked her as she was wiping the edges of her mouth with her eyes turned to the floor.

“Oh, it’s not a party really.” She pursed her lips in a compact mirror and waved her hand for him to go. He opened the door into a beer run on its way out and thus removed himself from the narrative for a time. And much as he may like to believe otherwise, the party and life itself went on quite uninterrupted by his absence.

Abandoned 2

The Postman Always Rings Twice (everyone else just waits like normal people)

1

I am not a morning person. If anyone of you have been unfortunate enough to see my morning hair you would know this already. But I make a conscious effort to appear like a morning person. I drag my ass out of bed at a reasonable time most days and then I begin the daily routine of attending to my vices. I pick up discarded glasses with discarded dregs of whatever bottle was closest. I pile up discarded articles of clothing and push out discarded bedfellows. I check my eyes for clumps of eyeliner, the corners of my lips for traces of lipstick and access the damage to my skin: scratches, bruises, the dreaded spot that must be burst with a satisfactory, climatic explosion in miniature, ink splodges, that sort of thing. Minty freshness enhances the fuzzy tastes in my throat and a beaded facial scrub reportedly cleanses and purifies my pores. The hair I generally leave until the last moment, it being the most disastrous result of the Night Before and requires the most attention. Or a hat, perhaps.

Then I move to the real vices. I count cigarettes, I count coins, count emails and deadlines and chocolate chip cookies. I count pills and recount the bruises, the scratches, the clumps of eyeliner. I recount the Night Before in bitter detail, this is helped by the presence of the previously mentioned bedfellow but their input is not always welcome. I was half-way through a cup of my heavily sugared number three vice (after arrogant bastards and a book with a good cover), when the doorbell rang.

“Ohhh. Dear.” The two smiling figures in crisp black suits held back a sycophantic sneer.
“We usually come in and talk over a cup of tea but,” the male suit turned to the female who finished his sentence for him: “Obviously this is a bad time.”

I tugged the bottom of my t-shirt a little further down and ran a hand through my hair, my fingers ensnared for a moment. After a pause I crossed my arms across my chest.

“Can I help you?” I croaked and they noticed I croaked with a wincing smirk.

“You can help yourself, if you’re open-minded,” and a leaflet was pushed into my hand before they turned and walked synchronised elitism and murmured vague curses at their matching backs.