Sudden premature deadline (s)
and promptly
I wake up too soon
To the pandemonium of drills
No wait, just dread.
Clanging and booming
In my head.
The sweaty worker bees
Silently mock my disarranged
Lazy pyjamas.
It is the gongs of doom
And life is starting too soon.
Tag: poetry
The sponge
I am soft and full of holes,
Preserved by smiles
That host soirees in my belly,
Every once in a while.
Forest fires snuffed out
By the swampy stretch of shallow summers;
By the mountainous intimacy,
And the cold blood pumper.
I am the overzealous draught
Puffing up the wrong trail,
Where Circe’s shrubs grow dull
And Rosemary’s spell tickles your snout.
Their nymph dance clouds the air
And you stare, as the same shade of ash
Stains the ocean and sky.
I smile at your glassy eyed eagle eye –
You are at sea with my oddly set genes.
My two-minute love, I am
The train of thought you couldn’t follow,
The prospect turned to vapour,
Floating up to be a cloud
And raining down to wet your dreams.
Don’t expect me to bloom
Just because it is spring.
You amaze at the flowery insights
Budding off my frivolous tongue,
At the bleeding emotion
Ejaculating from my ripe fat fruits.
There is a pureness and ease
To this elephant happiness.
But the sickness, you see,
Has been breeding for months
And the worms inside are waiting
To rush down your throat and smother you.
As you press your feverish mouth to mine,
It is your weakness that will rot you.
I lie before you, truthful and bare.
Trust me darling, all I really am
Is a few padded memories of childhood,
Waiting like dew to dry up in the sun.
I have soaked up more than any barnacle could bear
So just give me a squeeze, and I’m done.
Photograph of view from Punta di Circe, San Felice al Circeo, Italy
No Life During Wartime
Back to bite, back to bite, don’t breath, thump thump.
Lights, gone. Food, gone. Drugs, gone, Hope.
Desperate sex and wobbly legs.
Get me drunk, look after me, stop the thinking, stop the world.
Back to bite, back to bite, bite me harder, fuck me harder
Than this silence, than this screaming, are they screaming, is it me?
The terror is like popping candy abusing my skull,
Like angry clots of blood trying to burst out of fingernails
Pulsing, screeching, moaning, and then silence.
The constant ringing and now your face has gone all blurry.
The thought of all the itches we will never get to scratch.
It’s all rotting, it’s all gone and you just keep being so fucking kind.
The bile in my stomach, my hands in your pants, is there even a point?
Splashing about in mud, looking for familiar faces, for a trace of something human.
Slaves demanding justice, then wanting the crown.
Grey days, skipped days, were you slowly drift away.
I don’t want to be pretty, I don’t want to write pretty
To hide behind niceties and disgusting adoration.
In the darkness I’ve stopped tripping, I walk steady now.
I’m not longer funny but I’m lonely, as you roll me the millionth cigarette,
As I gulp the millionth gulp of bitterness, my bitterness.
We lost a long while ago and we’ve wasted all our time.
Toxic waste and suspicion, is that mask because of me?
They’ve turned us against each other and there’s no going back.
There’s no life during wartime, only slow self-destruction.
Before the bombs, before the lights went out,
Before the mould and the stench and the disease and the hunger,
The mind numbing stupidness had already knocked us out.
Featured image: Jobkill by Pushwagner, Hariton (1987) can be found in the Norwegian National Museum, or online at: http://www.pushwagner.no/galleri/kunst/JOBKILL
SHOCK
Sudden, sudden loss of control.
Your invisible blood sticks to my fingers,
The air that left you,
To my chest like alien tentacles.
Grey metal to join the blue and black,
Already nuzzled in the fields.
Who was here before me?
My pill-induced nightmare is shattered by your silent scream.
Sudden, sudden loss of control.
My biggest fear just rolled all over me:
From a distance I observed,
The war of paranoia and sedation –
The human-made virus
Spreading through the world.
Whose side am I on?
Grey streaked kind woman, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.
Sudden, sudden loss of control.
I cling desperately to the only scrapes you left me:
It works, but only just.
And only just always fills you
With horrors and questions and blame.
Only just pulls me out of Switzerland,
and right back into the rubble.
I’m at war.
Featured Image: ‘The Art of Paranoia’ by Peter Schwartz. Check him out here:
Choke.
I can smell the lethargy in the air as the rain comes down.
Who told you you could write all over my skin?
Territorial disputes.
Casually manhandling death and the rain
don’t stop, the rain don’t stop.
Biting breasts under neon colours.
Stuffing your face and drowning in the barrel-
Drowning in the rain of your pain.
Contempt for conformity. Body builders of human agony.
The vivid dreams stopped months ago.
Flashes of blood running down my neck.
This winding road is damned and this skin is too tight.
Grinning mouths with men hanging at the corners.
Unsteady flooring and gums aching.
I’m heady from the drinks, the want and the sweat.
This tube smells of metal, blood and piss.
There’s a nightmare pulsing in between my legs.
Laughing hyenas pull at my clothes. I give in.
Vaccinate me for control.
Chapped lips in the cold. Stomach acid scratches at my soul.
Flashing streetlights, cars, dancing on my window.
Magnetic network of obligations and purpose.
Buzzing in the world and screeching in my ears.
Monotone high pitched frequencies and I’m going mad, I’m going mad.
The itch, the itch the pulse in the eye,
the everlasting night, the bite,
the blood.
I’m a mess of filaments,
my nerves are barbwire.
Your fingers feel like bombs.
Psychosis, migraines, want. A hollowed out gut.
Out of body,
overlooking this city.
You stand next to me, naked and shivering.
My cigarette shakes at the lips.
It falls and I let myself fall.
National Poetry Day and Collaboration with Mental Spaghetti
It’s National Poetry Day and Mental Spaghetti have published and illustrated (thank you Marie) one of my poems and accepted my offer to collaborate with them on their project!
They are a no-profit organisation that promotes art development and creativity as means to combat mental illness. Check the post and their blog out here.
Why the “Mercury” Thing.
I’ve now been writing on this blog for more than a month, so I suppose it’s about time I explain the meaning behind it’s name. It’s really quite random: it comes from a dream I had a few months ago, that I came to interpret as a metaphor for the duality of my existence (yay to over analysing everything).
So, I was slightly manic, I guess, or at least excessively high spirited, and I had this kind of weird dream (as happens often) that I was this beautiful, goddess-like, amber curled creature dressed in silver, floating above pools of mercury right next to the blazing hot sun, bubbling with purpose and a secret. Pretty cool huh?
Except that all of a sudden, I was sinking into that same surface, watching the godlike me floating away and contemplating me with a mixture of pity and disgust. I was immobilised and uncomfortably warm: I wasn’t burning (as you would kind of expect, seen as I was pretty much chilling in a pool of corrosive substance right next to the goddamn sun). No, I was just uncomfortably warm. And I knew I was stuck there: never to drown and never to be free.
While the other me floated away towards bliss and immensity, towards a world of hope and possibility, I was signed up for eternal apathy and discomfort, and completely incapable of helping myself.
In the morning confusion that followed I also wrote this poem about my ‘mercurial’ (and grandiose) persona, so I might as well put it in as well!
I dropped the thermometer:
What a thrill to chase
Little bubbles everywhere.
Acrid shiny silvers –
They are drops of mirrors.
Look there: it is me!
It is my reflection I see,
Blazing sunlight and glee:
My volatile moods,
Etched with smiles and deadly fumes,
On my ever-changing moons.
An eternal river,
I gurgle with promise
In the soil, the air, the water –
Breathtaking and flawless.
My shiny surface
Draws you in closer.
I’m your road to gold,
the gods’ messenger.
But my scalding skin
You cannot touch
You greedy treasure scavenger.
You’re too avid and bitter
With your truths and reason –
Your reality addiction!
In the gaping darkness
I will eat you whole
Like a death trap –
A black hole.
I’m liquid metal,
Quicksilver.
I will melt your brain,
Destroy your swollen liver.
Only the mad can dip their toes
In these pools of chaos and clatter.
I’ll be the gloss on your top hat
If you’ll be my mad hatter.
Post #9 Goodbye Lancaster
Orange and gold
Through the stain glass window
Brighten the churchly silence
And the unyielding heart.
Foxgloves and orchids
float in the air –
I could hatch my eggs right here;
Behind her undeserving shrine,
Casting darkness on your lonely burial.
Lord Ashton, you fool.
I’m high in the dungeon,
The statue is headless.
Are we talking about the walls
Or drenching ourselves in useless sadness?
On the tree stump I forgot
If you mattered to me yet.
You were shrieks, nettles and streams,
Red leaves and silly dreams;
The laughs and the pints,
The sly glares and all my fears:
All my hazy window seats.
I’ve forgotten why I care
But I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
And I forgot to walk the promenade,
I forgot to warm the bench
And I didn’t drown my thoughts
In the marshy quick sand.
I forgot to match the pretty face, ask –
Did the chemo go okay?
Yet they loved me anyway,
I who could never afford their pain.
I forgot how to be grateful
With my flesh my flesh my flesh.
I forgot the date, the present and the letter
And I can’t recall why it ought to matter.
This is the bubble, the cell block,
The lithium drenched infirmary.
Here we don’t feel like going to bed
Or to die a slow death in the library.
Here the sky is white and clinical
And the crystals didn’t catch my breath
And I didn’t smell the fresh wet leafs,
All I saw was corpses and death.
Now I’m sober, I’m cold, I’m clever.
I disgust myself more than ever
And I leave you with a humid heart,
My lower second class grave, Lancaster.
And the people in those houses
Oh, they laugh and dance dance dance
And they grab my hand and twirl me round
I entertain, and I am bland.
Post # 7 Nighttime Frenzy
The outside air is sharp and crazed:
The breeze, the fever, my head in a haze;
How did you resist the deep dare of the dark?
From your window, the sky suggests safety and light,
My guts din and dance in a chaos of sparks
And I run as a child, with no aim, in delight!
Joy, frost, ducklings and breeze
In our hair, with seduction and laughter
I tease you away from this bleak pallid world,
Towards cosmic, magic, rhapsodic symmetry;
Souls and bodies embraced in deranged symphony
All those secrets and certainties fiercely unfurled!
Forever unsleeping we’ll live, you and I,
We’ve no need for the slumber and the idleness, you and I;
Don’t they see, don’t they feel, the bustling euphoria?
Oh, my fingers could dance this dance forever, my mind
So many worlds and ways and wills could wander.
Thick brows, dark eyes, framed in curls of amber
Unruly as my soul, ostensibly beam at me
And this beauty I now grasp, won’t relinquish or enrich me.
I shiver in the cold, at the promise of spring…
Up the tree all the stars, share our frantic delight
Of the books and the feels that still keep me up at night;
And I’m sheltered from the morals and manners they sing:
‘Now stop it Mercury, you’re insanity is gushing
From the core of your reckless wickedness, and burning;
We’ve no heart for this blame, we’ve no time for your pain.
You’re talking too fast, you’re delirious, you’re rabid
you consider yourself clever but you’re merely big mouthed!’
And the squeamishness and guilt and the fear creep back in:
I am meat, dust, and disgust, yet again.
Post # 5 Ghost in Raval
It was scabby
Ugly and terrified
With skin like red velvet.
It crawled, hung, stuck to the floor
the paws red and abused.
The phantom walked past quietly
calm, distant, confused…
It was too heavy
And he held it
He grabbed it
By the paws, the scabby paws
By it’s weakness.
Not a sound did it utter,
Not a wimper:
A silent submission.
And I don’t know what won,
Which remote song of humanity sung
Of emptiness more ghastly than fear,
Hanging limply and calmly,
Like a shrivelled christmas turkey.
lifeonmercury 