Rob me Blind

Today I tried to work for my exams. Of course, I failed. And so, instead, I decided to try to write a poem that rhymes. I've never written a poem that rhymes before. I often dislike rhymes. They can destroy the emotion, tie up the poet, destroy the honesty and turn the exercise of poetry from one which seeks to overwhelm the reader with the beauty of shared emotions, to a mathematical formula, something created purely for the purpose of showing one's prowess. Look at me, I can write a sonnet! Look at my iambic pentameter! Feel the wrath of my ruthless enjambment! 

But, yesterday, a friend of mine told me that poetry conforming to certain norms, certain verse lengths, certain rhyme patterns, can be good, because it can increase the reader/listener's ability to comprehend. I didn't fully agree with this, but in any case, I attempted to add some rhymes where I could, and, actually, it was really fun to write. It is a poem about trying to forget memories, and, given that I was going to be cliched anyway by trying to make it a little bit closer to typical poetry, I decided to take a picture from the place where I grew up, to let it grow in my mind and see what formed.

Rob me Blind

 Half-men, half-art

Half-dancers in half-dark,

Half-lost, half-gone,

Our half-beauty half-dead, half-newly born.

And, hark, all this I have sworn:

There are mysteries brewed between our eyes,

Deep and deepening,

Held in empty-wing-stretched arms

Incomprehensible, incomprehended, incapable, unmoveable love-struck charms,

But beautiful.

This

is true,

because I want it to be so.

Remember:

On a bench we parted,

And our hardened hands hard shook

And I,

Your crooked innocence,

Half-took.

Hidden,

Held,

Hidden.

Remember:

You said your father died,

And I almost laughed,

Because I never know how to behave,

I’m half-cursed

To half-here, half-there,

Half-British wit,

Half-Irish care.

In either case, I’m island bound.

And now:

Dreaming of a victory,

A heart-head victory,

A brew of love and wisdom,

Wolf and man and cat and fox combined

And in harmed-healing harmony.

I try to ship these memories long,

Long-longing-listlessly away,

Like souls to scattered bodies go,

I try to ship them.

Out.

Remember:

Of course,

After you left,

It would only be logical,

That I mourned a while,

On a window seat,

Lit a few candles,

Stared in the mirror.

Cliched, but valid.

Necessary.

And then:

Did you hear?

To break my brittle back,

To free frozen fear,

I borrowed the hangman’s rack,

And here,

suspended,

I shivered

Crippled and

Cracked.

But,

mentally-ailed,

feebly I failed:

Stepped down,

Slipped away,

Slew myself away.

Ran back to a pitied useless craving day.

Regretted,

And on life went.

Half-academic bliss,

Half-bourgeois Kent.

And as down I stepped,

Hidden half-bled hope,

Fell from the suspended rope,

Half-Hidden

Half-hoarse

Half-whored

Half-glorious

And dropped on the ground

Bead by Bead.

And in those beads I found little pathetic mirrors of the world, each reflecting something, each showing a different stage of life, each with more wrinkles on your face.

But now, disgraced,

I ship them onwards

And I wait.

I take your words,

And I push them

Off the shore.

A lantern

On a coffin ship.

But it is daylight

And it is a cold, wind-rained beach

And I am barefoot

And the beach bugs crawl

Between toes.

And the soft ice cream stench

Twists past the currents.

The raw cliffs tower above,

And the tower, it almost falls,

mourning Napoleon’s dying day,

but it composes itself,

and fulfils its role.

The air shakes its undulating crowns,

Humidity builds,

And refuses to be cleared,

And as I feel my empty turning stomach die,

The sand grows grief-grey under the grief-grey sky.

I take your words,

And in the day,

I push them to the sea.

They flew-flowed-faded-fucked away,

This memory gone onwards,

To rest,

To rest,

To rest with the wronged and righteous

The sacred and sexless

The forgotten and to be forgotten

The saints and deities

Dictators and prostitutes

Monks and mistletoe,

And everything which is dead, and shouldn’t be remembered.

My heart and hope heavily you mined,

Stole a kiss,

Robbed me blind.

It was great,

Glorious,

Holy.

It rose upwards,

Dance and tangled,

It scraped the angel’s clavicles.

But now, I forget and, burned,

 to normality

return. 

Inspirations: this picture, Jay Brannan, der Steppenwolf, Ginsberg. 

Back to Stoffski

Today I rediscovered an old school friend, soul-mate and frenemy for the first time in three years. 

My collection of language books when I was 18: it has since doubled or tripled. 

We met when I was 16. We went to the same secondary school: a co-ed Catholic-Protestant religious sports and academic focused grammar school in the North West of Northern Ireland. We were on the winning team of the Northern Irish French Debating competition (oh, the prestige!) and we both watched ridiculous Spanish cinema. It was beautiful. 

 Like me, he loves languages, with a passion that is hard to control. He loves words. He loves the feeling of forming a past perfect tense of a clunky Dutch verb ('Ja, ik heb het opgegeten!)  full of endearing phlegm (or, voiceless velar fricatives, if we are to be technical). He loves the rush of Slavic constructions twisting his tongue in ways he never could have imagined. He loves that exhilarating feeling when finally - finally!- you can COMMUNICATE. He loves to move to a different country and just feel that tingle when the people around him actually seem to understand and speak the weird code of vocal vibrations that constitutes a foreign tongue. He loves to talk about Ukrainians. Lots of Ukrainians. And Armenians, apparently. 

But I digress. 

We used to talk on the internet until 3am as teenagers, night, after night, after night. Under the now obsolete green charm of MSN. We dreamt, in typed phrases on early morning keyboards, about what we would do when we left school, what boys we would grow to love, what experiences we could have. And complaining naturally, complaining about being born in a corner of the world (North-West Northern Ireland), that is just... bizarre. It can be the most beautiful place. When the sky is setting over Mussenden Temple; when your mother smiles at you in a way you don't quite understand, but you feel all the love rushing out of a heart that can still be pure; and vulnerable (vulnerability and openness never age); when you say something in your home speak ("Awk, she was fer goin' 90 down yon motorway, Gave me a wee heart attack tay be honest, hi.") or when you tell your friend to meet you at the 'Polish' section (assuming all supermarkets must be stocked in pickled gherkins and highly-processed orange juice) and he spends ages looking around the shoe polish aisle.  (These are just a few random thoughts). 

I grew up here, I actually grew up here! 

But it can also be one of the strangest, most suffocating corners of the earth: I don't know whether that is just because it is 'home', or whether it's because it rains every day, or because the people still have some scars of a conflict, puritanism, IRA bombings under their skin, and good oul Ulster Presbyterianism shoved up their behind. Most likely both. 

He moved to London when I was in my last year of school, and, like I told him to his face, he became a bit of a dickhead. A bit of a lot of a dickhead. He used to write me e-mails just to tell me he was SO, SO, SO, SO busy, that he really ought to be living his hopelessly bohemian life. Which, I appreciate as the complete truth (I've gone to uni now and like, all in-denial hipsters I love blogs, hummus and weird Middle Eastern Music), but at the time, I would have appreciated waiting a longer time for one of his messages and then receiving a deep intellectual 3am rant, like we used to have. My insecure, but growing 18 year old self found him quite patronizing about how, like, yeah, London, will just, like, yeah, like totally, like, open up your mind, because like you, can like, meet Colombian-Germans and like, have sex in Soho, and like, wear tweed, and like, yeah. Thus, in the back of my mind, I started to think he was a frenemy. I didn't like his online persona, but I was weirdly, weirdly, weirdly (I still am) attracted to his mind, what he is and what he could (and should!) become: something beautiful. 

Link: Being a dickhead's cool!

Haven't you heard? Being a dickhead's cool! 

"We're having new-aged fun with a vintage feel"

"Say I work in media, I'm really on the dole"

"I organize a vegan crack night!

 In any case, today he returned. The dickishness had evaporated and been replaced by a more tolerant, world open, forgiving and loving view. (Although, probably, if we had spent more time together, we would have got into a heated argument. But, I guess, now, we would have been able to appreciate it, move it aside and look at the sunset.  I would have liked him to stay until the sunset, but he had to rush.)

A hopelessly beautiful sunset at Churchill College, Cambridge

But, the point of this blog, at this point, was to share the main emotion he raised in me: a memory of who I was when I was 18. Confused, ready to leave for university, not sure of who I could be, always self-critical and always, always, always writing. I miss that person. The naïvety (oh, you wouldn't like me calling you naïve, dear 18 year old alter-ego, would you?). The simple open heart.

And those moments, when I first felt that extreme euphoric intellectual-spiritual-new-age HOLY-SACRED-GLORIOUS feeling of being connected to everything around you, of being so heavily in love for the first time (not with my friend, but with a poet. Oh, my stereotypical youth!)  that you are part of everything around you on a tiny improbable planet in the middle of a very odd universe, loving your part in the incomprehensible system of all the linked-connected things around you, wanting everything to just fall into your mouth, and your body to just melt away and become everything around you.

A moment of extreme, beautiful mindfulness.

And, I started to read some of my old work. And I decided to share a description that my 18 year old, madly in love with a poet, self, wrote about this feeling. 

HOLINESS, an extract from a text from when I was 18: 

He threw a lopsided smile which made him look ridiculous; and I laughed until his fingers shook and my stomach felt as if it would eat itself from within.

He was a man so clumsy and so true to himself that he thought he could begin his romanticising of his thoroughly homosexual lover whilst simultaneously making references to female genitalia. It was bizarrely endearing, and, three hours later as I travelled home after the conference, suspended in time and rushing down a roadwork-infested motorway in that ginger revolutionary socialist activist’s thick black car, I could not prevent myself from temporarily forgetting the implications of my lies, and instead laughing under my breath at the memory of Adam’s words.

The next morning after the conference, as dawn streamed into my room, I remembered those words once more and I felt overwhelmed by my admiration for Adam’s glorious frame, his sharp wit and his political agility which stretched past Stonewall and St. Petersburg all the way to the conference halls of Ireland.

Then; it came....

The transitory feeling which he gave me of supernatural brilliance and dizzy falling.

I remember rushing-running past bliss blue candlelit gravestones. I didn’t know what I was doing, but the edge of the horizon was falling below me, the dawn was suspending all in a beautiful blue and the wind was shaking into my ears. Virginities were crashing, men were losing control of their disobedient wives, bankers were speculating with metallic fictional number streams, and I was running, with no cause or reason, sucking in the delicious smells of midnight toast and Adam which were still present on my fingers and across my neck.

It was just a Thursday morning, and that was just a sun rising.

But it was special, and I was falling, insanity-bliss into a single moment and a single desire.

I had awoken alone from a mad sweating stream of consciousness, body still not engaged and practical, but somehow free to movements and dizzied of thought. Hands rising to my white bedroom roof, I had felt free and whored and delicious and possible against those sheets. Mad in the spontaneity of a random morning awakening and a warm desire to move and change the world in a single second.

I had taken my body, unwashed and unwatched from the cold dawning bed and spontaneously walked bare-chested wearing only sandals and long-johns across the early morning town towards the only meadow and grass I could find. It was a silent rabbit-filled cemetery where I had taught myself to cycle years before. It was peaceful and beautiful and full. Full of life, full of madness, full of circumstances and mountain facades: bliss blue sky, bliss blue mountains, bliss blue silk of a paper horizon.

The sun stretched and warmed my neck from behind.

I was falling beautifully, and a ticklish charm rose in my stomach, upwards and beyond.

Just a moment, just a thought, just a euphoria touch on my bare chest.

But it was human in that moment. It was desire. It was nature. It was simple and pure and chemical and free. It was life without deadlines and obligations. Life with no system of governance. Life with no sexuality and restraint. Life undetermined by time and place. Life with no predilections and compasses pointing to Jerusalem.  Life with natural edges. Life licking itself free of wounds and chains and adult-slavery.

Life: just there, just then, just perfect-imperfect, existing, becoming-life! 

I felt connected in that moment.

I felt that I was becoming the rabbits, becoming the trees, becoming the blue, becoming the gravestones, becoming the mountains, becoming my own hands, becoming my own body, becoming love, becoming death, becoming happiness and melancholy and tears, becoming Trotsky, becoming Marx, becoming Slovenia, becoming an anus, becoming a flower, becoming grass-stalks below my feet, becoming it, becoming then, becoming a chain of being, and a soup of being, and a soup of life’s deity, and a soup of moving glittered streams.

I was made of dust, and I would return to dust. Once, then, I would return, after this brief interval of human life. But before, I was lifted through imagination and left dreaming of the amazing possibilities of this wonderful thing we breed between our eyes: drifting magical fantasy past borders, past mountains, past seas, past hopes, past fears, past taxes, past communist rainbows, past contented sleep, past sweated tropics, past the blind cafe in Old Berlin, past Marlene Dietrich and Böll and Brecht, past Katharina’s lost honour, past womanism and purple, past Russia, past the Nile, past Egyptian revolts, past Homebase spanners, past fez-toting lovers, past striking French train drivers, past Irish conference rooms, past discontented Libyans, past cacophony, past distance, past time, past it, past over.... past gone, just present.

Just that cemetery I needed.

A holy moment served to my eyes and my ears, once more kept, now a shining surface in my memory.

A holy moment where I saw all that was beyond my understanding but not beyond my loving.

Holy moments of now-feeling; sometimes Adam gave me those.

They depended on him.

They came from him. 

But those moments would always sink, and realism would always return. I couldn’t feel connected forever. Life couldn’t be beautiful forever.

That was my last day of complete and utter admiration for Adam and the last day before the cracks began.

            That was a holy moment that could not be repeated; which you cannot repeat.

            Before my consciousness could comprehend the change, my chest was already cold and my neck itchy, stones were between my toes, and I was walking home to fall asleep once more in my bed as if that moment, as if that falling, that becoming and that recognition of self had been just another banal circumstance in the chain of normal life.

It had been one month since I had first kissed Adam.

One month when we met almost daily and spoke until four o’clock in the morning over internet interfaces, until my eyes were heavy and my days in school were senseless.

There would be one month more before the end.

One month more to build on my obsession which had been born almost immediately on the day I first saw Adam and Egypt together, synthesised and in unison.

Love or obsession.

I still don’t know.

But they were born of the same womb.

Born of childhood desperation for love and yearning to be kissed for the first time in three years. 

Born of family fears which left me desperate for another strand of life.

Born of self-hate and exterior fears at once.