Sandra Bullock (ASMR)

We all love a bit of Sandra.

ASMR

Hello.

Do you know what’s happening?

They’re making walls,

in cities

in places

in towns

in forests

in groves

in lemon trees

in brazil.

Do you know what’s going on?

They’re building Mother Nature’s dams

in chinese cities so big

they’ll eat the smoke of chicago

and spit it out like a whisper.

Or a cough

Or a stutter.

But probably a whisper

(most likely a whisper).

Let’s face it:

a whisper is the most probable scenario.

Did you hear the news?

In Syria

on the plains

next to Hebraities

they’re building hard whored

explosive

dandelions

and everyone is smiling.

Do you know what’s happening?

The witches

And the warlocks

They’re eating poppies

in Afghanistan

and those poppies are rich and wild

and fill the tummies of the poor.

Everyone has had dinner

and most will stay for supper.

Did you hear the news?

Raving Russian

Homo-

Sapiens

are flaunting their flawed

and fuck-full fabulosity

at the Petersburg gates!

And their old man

putin slops his chops

with jealousy.

Did you hear the news?

The babushki of tyumen’

are crying in the markets

haggling for coins

dancing 80s spectacles

and eating raw fish.

Did you hear the news? The poets are experimenting with long line formations

and scratching their heads, because long lines are much too long,

and they threaten the very existence of the short lines of babylon.

ah, the short lines of babylon! we are sorry for your loss.

please accept our condolences. we will buy you wart cream and nytol

and little crocs for your children. Is that okay?

I do hope the dwarven deities of oxford academia doth not object!

Didde vous entendez?

They’re making pqsta

In the forts

Of Florence

qnd the French fqrmers

They complqin

Becquse  they do not receive

Economic subsidies

For their wheqt.

And bqbies, they cry!

Bqbies they cry for the wheqt!

pleurez-pleurez!

vite, vite, donne-moi du wheqt!

dé sé tou derre pqrons.  

Did you catch wind?

(I hope you didn’t)

they’re draining diamonds

from your bank account

and filling it with pigeons instead.

They will nest in the vaults

and survive the winter with outmost efficiency.

Would you begrudge a mere pigeon your diamonds?

Oh, but you are a cruel man.

I will phone your mother!

Did you hear?

It’s time to sleep.

You little, darling

beautimous shit.

I’ll tell Sandra Bullock to get her hooks ready

If you don’t close those eyes.

Ah, yes.

That’s better.

Close those eyes.

Close your lips too.

Close the books of stress and

Work.

You have done enough.

Your body is getting heavy.

Oh, very, very heavy.

Oh very, very, very heavy.

Oh, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very heavy.

And all your limbs are getting heavy

heavy, heavy

And your stomach

Heavy, heavy

And even your nose,

Heavy, heavy

and your mind

heavy, heavy

& they’re all dancing together

& drifting softly

senselessly

to sleep

and peace

and the kind curves

of a warm, welcoming bed.

Is he asleep?

Sandra, bare forth your hooks!

Tonight we dine!

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.

On Gay Marriage in the United Kingdom

This article was originally published on the following link on 15 Feb 2013.
http://www.varsity.co.uk/lifestyle/5622

I recently had a debate with a Christian. A respectful, intelligent, questioning Christian, who, luckily, didn’t seem to just take biblical text at its most obvious face value and had given her beliefs a good deal of thought. She did, however, believe that homosexuality was a sin. Not a major sin. Not a ‘you must be immediately stoned and then thrown to the salty brimstone’ sin. But in her eyes, an imperfect circumstance in a world full of many varying shades of sin (and, to be fair to her, probably full of varying degrees of goodness, charity, honesty etc.).

We weren’t in agreement and although it was a calm and reasoned interaction, I must admit that afterwards I felt slightly angry – not at her, but at myself, because I had forgotten to mention one of my most compelling arguments against her belief, which is not empirical or easily-proven, but it is true and most importantly of all, it is built upon pure human experience. And, like me, it’s hopelessly sentimental. So gather together a copious amount of spare tissues and read. Or, alternatively, buckle yourself into your beliefs and powder your eyes in cynicism. C’est à vous.

Gay sex cannot be a sin because gay sex is an expression of love. The feeling of complete closeness to a partner is not exclusive to heterosexual couples. The feeling of warmth as someone lies against your chest and lets you stroke their hair is not confined to heterosexuals. Nor is the feeling of nervousness and excitement when you know you are going to see a person again, after a long period of separation, or, maybe after only a few hours, when you will then indulge in that stereotypical couple’s bliss: cuddling, eating humus from the jar and listening to David Attenborough’s orgasmic tones explaining the beauty of Africa. Or the feeling of satisfaction when you spend all day traipsing around the supermarket trying to find wasabi or party hats or Tesco pet insurance, bickering intermittently along the way due to sheer frustration, and then realize that somehow this seemingly trivial experience is proof that you are building something together, co-operating and sharing moments that will never be repeated. Or the feeling when illness, deadlines or general crankiness bring you close to screaming and a loved-one comes to calm you down, to provide you with some sort of food-based comfort and to speak softly no matter how many irrational or bitchy things your flu-infected mind feels tempted to say. Or the feeling when you are so in love that you think you have gone mad and somehow, despite your better logic, you become connected to a greater sense of meaning and becoming: the feeling that with this person you are not just becoming a better you, but also a better cell in the system, a better dot in the universe, a better sheep in a flock, a better mushroom in a mushroom field, a better Cambridge student in the academic sea, or, whatever analogy fits best to your psyche. You feel so elevated, so connected, and so true. You capture that feeling, you press it against yourself and preserve it to memory, knowing that even if you are confronted with people every day who disagree with your ‘lifestyle choice’, that it was never a trivial choice, but an overwhelming acknowledgement that you are doing the right thing and an affirmation of being human. This is my definition of ‘holy´: being yourself, being in love, being happy and creating meaning. Gay love is, in my eyes, sacred, not a sin.

Now, if you think I am basing my beliefs purely on emotion, no matter how ecstatic it may be, you are wrong. There are countless reasons why we should not only tolerate gay love, but embrace it and treat it with the same dignity and respect that we treat heterosexual expressions of love. There is ever-increasing evidence (both scientific and testimonial) that people do not actively choose to become part of a sexual minority, which automatically increases the prevalence of hatred and discrimination against their person. This is not some pernicious plot to annoy people who care about others’ bedroom habits or to convert your children to the temple of Elton John. Even if your upbringing or religious text makes you view gay love with disapproval, I believe it is important to take a ´live and let live´ approach: give me my rights, and I will let you have yours. After all, are you endangered by my love? No. Is it contagious? Clearly not, although a willingness to come out and live a happier and more accepting life is contagious.  Is it consensual? Oh course, we love it. We could do it all day. It’s great fun! And love – whether the sexual act or simply the implications of truly being in love (i.e. writing love letters, buying Ikea plastic roses or filling out tax returns together) – is an excellent, endorphin-packed way to keep healthy and busy.

But, in order to be fully respected and accepted in society, we need the same rights as everyone else: no special exceptions and no differences in terminology. And so, in this vein, I whole-heartedly welcomed the recent approval by Westminster of Equal Marriage. Civil partnerships and adoption laws gave us certain practical rights: to hold our loved one’s hand on a hospital bed or to raise a family with all same determination and love as heterosexuals do. But our partnerships were still not equal in name ('marriage' -- and the respect, rightly or wrongly deserved, which that word conjures up in most British people's minds) or law. Moreover, any religious organizations, which accepted homosexuality as love, not sin, were banned from recognizing this through marriage. Now this is different. Now we have greater freedom. Now we have moved closer to a goal of acceptance, and, with every step closer to equality, people recognize that our love is in no way less dignified or real than anyone else's.

And now, in this new context or hope and progression, I, as a gay man, can look back with even more joy and satisfaction at the best decision I ever made in my life: the day, back in year 10, when I decided not to take my own life. When, having being bullied for being gay, ‘outed’ to the whole school and having lost some friends, I embraced that I was not a sinful or dirty person who deserved to die, but someone who could participate in love like everyone else. I hope that one day in the future there will be no more contemptuous attitudes, no more teen suicides and no more treatment of love as sin. An idealistic view, but something to work towards, at least.

It is time to acknowledge that the value of truth does not lie in how convenient it is to your beliefs. My love is just as beautiful, intense, committed and vibrant as yours. 

  Maybe it is time for acceptance.