Raising the dead

The box isn't shiny for the luminescent glow which brings the screen to life. No, it shines instead for the dead of the night and for the mourning of the day that went before it. The day has died. Time took it upon itself to wrap its coil around the world and choke it, as a whole, just as yet each minute of its entirety conspired to bring misery before the earth. The combination, so drastic and effective, saw it give back its partner in space and above and below the saddest look of reflection and the deepest sigh of eternity stolen.

Oh for the evil that men do, I wonder. I stare out the window at you and wonder if you know that the window you pass now is my own. I suppose you don't, for you've never met me. It is the unconscious evil that men commit that brings me before you in this helm of dark and despair and depraved things that forms the living room at night. The cat sits so quietly, she is content and her purr soothes the air with its majestic whim. Oh, what time God must have spent in her creation. Time; my enemy. Time; His plaything. What is time, to God? To the man that makes none outside His whim. Why must He be bound by seven days, unless its evil is greater than He? Time or He? He or it? Time or him...

Such unconscious dark desire, behind those eyes that lull in belief of truth and beauty. But you have no idea, and I have come to learn all of what you will do. You, the stranger by the window, who passes out of my sight. I know now that there is no way you will ever fall before my sight again and I hold so rigidly the contempt for your soul, for I know what evil it possesses. It is not God within each of us, not He, not he; Time is the only thing within us. Potential. All synonyms, I reach, and discover the word on the tip of my mind's tongue. For the knowledge that you will undoubtedly beak her heart, or maybe his (I do not know you, boy by the window), I return only one word. The word, not Time, not God, but equal in its wrath: inevitability.


Currently listening to:
Raise the Dead by Phantom Planet

Currently reading:
The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Mistletoe; reflections of every sort

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

But do they know it's Christmas time at all? They starve, we eat. We throw it all away. 25, 000 people will starve. Twenty-five thousand.

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

How the boys search for love and pair up not a moment too soon. Because feigned Christmas cheer is better than none at all? I wish them happiness.

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

How I start to wonder how many hearts I've broken this Christmas. And the count is higher than last year, no doubt. But I chastise myself for doing this, and for feeling so happy about Christmas.

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

Because this Christmas, despite being alone, I am in a good place. I'm at Oxford, I'm more aware now than before what I am and what I am capable of, and I'm starting to come into my own a bit. To discover what power I may have over others that I never knew I had.

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

And because Christmas love is in another place, unformed and indelicate, like unformed clay or batter. Like cookie dough. Batter which can form in the new year, if I cook it at the right pace. But a watched pot never boils, so perhaps I should care less?

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

I wonder how many of my friends will cry this Christmas. Cry for lost loves, cry for joy, cry for disappointment, cry for tragedy or Eastenders. I wonder how many will find that first kiss with that person. I wonder how many will come to conclusions they had held at bay too long, under the auspices of the greatest moment of the year. "Do I really love him?", "Can I fight it another year?", "It could have been magical."

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

Ho, ho, whore. Could she afford presents this year? Does she sob at night, under the weight of expectation, under fear of her pimp, or for fear her oldest daughter must know what she does for money?

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

Smash, crash, bash. Deck her halls. Have a punch, dear. Merry Christmas. // Families reunited by the holiday, and friendships re-established.

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

One day, for one thing that never mattered, for so many people and places and years, can cause one to reflect on so much. Which is a shame, because I should be wrapping presents, or rushing out to buy last-minute gravy and Yorkshire puddings.

Oh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

Only I don't want to.

Alone at Christmas

I've never properly had Christmas with a boyfriend or a girlfriend in my life. I came close, one year. Some unyielding force within me yearns to know the closeness of listening to cheesy music, sat beneath mistletoe and slicing into Yule log. I would really like to have this, but I know it won't be this year. I've officially been single for about a year or so, barring the unnamed quantity of four-week distractions here and there, and it sucks so hard. Never does one's mind wander to contemplate loneliness, meaninglessness and the wonder of isolation so much as mine when it knows the sweet chill of rejection, the warm scars of unrequited temptation, or the indifferent numbness of maudlin despondency.

The good news, it won't be entirely in isolation. I will be spending Christmas with this sexy group:







Yeats was sexy in his youth, at least. In a sort of Serverus Snape way. And I know Virginia and I might have had a wonderful time together.

I hope I find someone under the tree this year.

Bleeding lamppost

I'm wandering down these little narrow streets. They're wider when they're busy. The sunlight illuminates the cobbled pavements and somehow, with its reflected glare, the pavements seem bigger - big enough to carry thousands of shoppers, each so very individual and kooky and bohemian and cool (not to mention, original). Each stone of the floor is a sponge, saturated with a morning's tranquil light and spilling it out everywhere in a flood of orgiastic colour which seeps from the neon green of the sign above the shoe shop saying Offspring over to the demure browns of Montezuma's Ice Cream. The sun retreats, the stones dry, and all the light begins to shy: the stones, hungry to soak up as much light as they can, rob the streets of space and colour and any feeling of home.

Cobbled, cobbled, Stonewall and Milk. I can see where I'm going, thankfully, as I can catch the streams of light flown east from the distant pavillion as it coalesces in the air, before slipping along the pavements, and draining away, to the unseen sewer of light beneath which floods the underground clubs you enter along the seafront. I know the route, but I don't know where I want to go. Nothing and everything is the same as I remember it. Everyone is still my friend or my enemy as left before but no one quite gets along with each other the same way, and the city changes superficially: there's an Esprit and a Bench now, somewhere. These lanes could be the windy streets of any city, except in any other city they'd be a red light district. I kind of squint my eyes, and press my fingers against the lids and then against my forehead, and the whole city shifts into a spectrum of reds like I thought it might, because that's appopriate in so many ways.

I am choking on dirty air. Hallowed halls and 'dreaming spires' produced such a brighter mind and happier countenance. I run fingers along a lamppost, who in squinting eyes has an arm of light pointing out of the lanes and to Hell Itself, and there is something black and moudly now against my hand. I stare closely at it, and I convince myself that it's blood: the lamp is bleeding? The city? My fingers to its touch? I wipe it away, but it just smears my palm, and I close my eyes and imagine it is running upwards along my arm only that it's no longer blood; it is cobbled pavement sucking the light from the lamppost that gives texture to my hair and my skin, and these vestiges of personage become drowned in darkness. My eyes stay closed, and I walk as the city pulls me under into its belly, into depersonalised hell. Do I enjoy these moments of escape, or are they everything I fear? I open sharply and am spat out, or something. As if my eyes shot out light, there are flecks of it in the air with the swaying city as it resumes shape, before they disappear like all the rest of it, pouring and bleeding; stolen.

I walk in an and around the maze of streets until I bump into myself. Not a mirror, but actually me, on the street, as if I were two lost people in the same city. I wonder if if time is stretched and wrapped upon itself in strings and streamers, or if my soul has wandered out of my body to explore the city alone and I have found it (or perhaps my body has found me), or perhaps this doppelganger is a careful double who arrived to replace me in my absence but was crushed under the languishing lows of the life of Liam. He's wearing a new shirt I bought last week, from one of the new shops that weren't here before, and is staring at me with a similar puzzled expression and a hand reaches over - I thought to fondle me, but actually to grap at my clothes - and he lifts a tassle from it into the air with a physiognomy that spells a road not taken, a wanderer in similar straits. I'm in subfusc, and he's out for a night out, and I am confused by my desire to kiss this better me who with every moment I wonder might instead just be some helpless person, with a face a bit like mine, and hair like mine. How else do we distinguish people - not by who they are, but by how they appear. I think he wants to kiss me as well, but I'm suddenly pained by the knowledge that were we to do so our realities would collide and fold so as if one never happened. I never know which roads to walk, or which taken were better or worse. So, we shake hands, and hug, and walk apart but I turn around and he's doing the same thing I did a minute ago: running his fingers along a lamppost, then looking at it, and closing his eyes with only his imagination to sweep him out of this city.

Silent Love Song

The beach beneath your feet, the sand betwixt your toes,
Soft-caressing air against your arm, its chill against your nose,
A hand beneath your chin, sunlight beam bent from sky
Across the dunes and to your face, to set your smile alight.
The tide longs to be near you, and trickles through the rocks.
Winter may change the trees, but ours knows not the clock.
The hand of time so cruel, and callous we not know
As with every moment near you, I feel sun and sand and grass and snow.

But for this moment do I wonder,
What became then of the past,
And so she asks if someone blundered
and I know not beyond the last.
That last time I did see your smile,
and a moment I claimed mine...
I disregard all these rules,
and send out unseen this untamed rhyme.

Currently listening to:

Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo by Rivers Cuomo

The Art of Isolation

Drunken stupor, directs the mind,
to bring to light all that it finds;
within its beat, a transient wave
which cannot yet this moment stave.
And so I hear you, as yet again
to tell to me so freely
how, and after all-- we're friends:
how you adore him so keenly.
Do you (I hope), feign? pretend?

Why do I in thought, cry alone?
Yet without tears, and at this throne:
with wine-stained lips which call to home.
Such little I knew of your hearts,
both so deceitful and so apart.
To exist this way, is it my art?

Shades

So I'm working on a potential Hopkins essay, and apart from dwelling on the fact that I can never write in that style (although, I think imitating Tennyson or Milton is quite achievable), I am annoyed, impressed by and startled by what he (cos he thinks he's SO great) calls 'inscape'. Inscape is apparently the thingyness that things have, but is also in other things (like 'God'), yet is particularly particular to each particular thing somehow too. That is probably the most specific but also the least accurate way one can describe it without being Gerard Manley Hopkins (who himself didn't put it in very comprehensible terms). I don't think it's entirely justified, the idea suggested in his poetry of a binding energy within all living things, connected by their innate uniqueness, but it does put my head in a certain state of contemplation.

As a consequence of staying up late and writing very little of relevence to anything - perhaps imagining some poetic verse in my head and then failing to write it down before I forget it - I am a very tired person. Pro Plus, tea, Relentless and Coca Cola together make an approximate subsitute for a decent sleep until about 10 in the evening, when I really ought to think about winding down anyway. I sit in the Balliol bar today totally spaced out. I look depressed, and it attracts bizarre (although appreciated) inquiry as to my mood. I'm just totally not thinking in a normal way. My eyes are scaling the painted walls and trying to discern where paint brushes fell in the original application, in what way, and how many times on a particular spot. How big is the brush? There is no way of actually telling, but I am fascinated with the power given to everything superficial in my life. Strip everything away, and I don't quite know what's left. There's just me, but not my clothes or my hair or skin or any part of my body. Just whatever atheist approximation of a soul I can render: my consciousness, my memories, my sentience, something else? Outside of me are other people but I am particularly odd in that I don't feel any warmth most of the time, at least, not in the way or people do.

I am shapeless and obtuse and abstract, but definitely warm. Like a burning glowing nicey thing. Warm at least after the first Double Soco+Coke, but by the second more of a sitting blue flame which is uncommonly icy. This is the fundamental me, sat amongst other people's warm glowy things. Embers scatter back and forth in the natural flow of conversation of those around me, and there is a general warmth. I don't see the flames with my eyes, because my eyes start to contemplate the jukebox and the CDs and the encoded music and I also contemplate how many other places in the world are playing this song right now, and how many to the same precise second. I'm noticeably colder than them, but I don't see why. When a small, inquisitive but kind flame is passed to me it just flickers out and try pass one back but it's basically like whenever my body tries to blow into a peakflow chart: my soul is like my lungs; athsmatic ,and can't expell anything necessary to life from it.

My eyes are layers of glass and each one holds a different print of the spectrum. The outermost sees and reflects forms, and shapes, and light and physicality and time and the universe. It is contemplating this one that lets me slip deeper, to the others, to the despondence of the innermost glass panels. Others see people in terms of flames with temperatures and colours and intensities known immediately to my innermost mind (the one not in my head, but one might say 'heart') but not necessarily to whichever part of me processes things rationally. But it never lies. Others see when I'm being lied to, or focus sharply on minor movements - hair being tucked behind ears, eyes darting to the left for a split second, a finger which taps on a belt with impatience - and reads from that not the image but the meaning. All this is immensely confounding, and I just sit dazed and like the movie, confused.

I came here to write a poem about something which I saw tonight with a different, more salmon or amber lens in my eye, but I can't. I feel I need only hoard these inoffensive words, whenever I write them, even if only to burn them. Jealous greens and self-pitying blues which illuminate my own flame; the desire for something nice to happen to me, and me especially. But I find even I can't relate to my emotions most of the time, and indefinitely nor will anyone else.

Currently listening to:
The Glass Passenger by Jack's Mannequin

Currently reading:
Who knows

Epiphany

I am stood in the middle of a room with its red sea parted years before man knew it. Monocrhome red: a shade of undecided passion, perceptible but altogether unrelatable. Stood in perfect rows are the tides of men and women at either wall in perfct, mathematic alternation of height and skin and weight and scent and mind and gender, and each is stood facomg their perfect opposite aligned by the other wall.

White shirts, no collars. White shoes adn socks unseen but undoubtedly pesent under white robes with obscure all human identity just as the opposite wall does in black. I stand between sledgehammers in dark and lightest shades of grey: still grey in light but always soon black in the night, when the candle of my effort to illuminate has exhausted.

I pass along this thin, empty channel and stare at those perfect rainbows of alternating eye colours: so precisely inhuman in some. The room dims, my eyes squint, and in laughter (stifled through robed and gloved concealment) many men and women dissolve and all that remain are the ones so peculiarly alike myself, only improved.

Of these, in physical likeness, I do not discover any similarity of soul, only sinister seductiveness in absent eyes, seeing mine not as it but as one wishes. I begin the dance of dances, and we all dance it: perfect mesmerising rotation. I spin along my widened channel: spacious but lonelier, and each cloaked patron spins in their spot. As time draws, they bein to listfully dance in the space made along their walls, but they do not step forward into the amiguity of the channel.

The dance dies with the hour nad hands reach - not from wall to wall or from any wall to the channel but only along those perfect parrallels of prized partnerships. The dissolution of souls into bodies and bodies into an explosive ether occurs and my hands frantically reach for one another in the absence of a mate. Ceiling to floor, and wall to wall, but no cloaked patron left as in these ruins I lie crushed; a place of worship deprived of salvation.

Currently reading: Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Currently listening to (shuffle):

• The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get by Morrissey
• Drive You Home by Garbage
• Dying by Hole
• The End is the Beginning is the End by The Smashing Pumpkins

Inferiority

I have realised that if I'm ever going to be happy in any social or romantic sense then there are physical changes I need to make. I regret how shallow it is to force oneself to conform to these requirements, but I can't help it really. It's just something I need to do.

1. Lose weight. I'm too ill for the gym at the moment, so I'm not sure how I'll achieve this exactly. I recently worked out lunch and dinner at halls to be far more expensive than I first estimated, so maybe I'll just substitute something insubstantial but filling. Or dust. I'm huge, and no guy likes a fat guy and the girls I do go for always seem to prefer skinny guys to ... bulky ones.

2. Buy expensive clothes with the money I'll save skipping meals.

3. Watch my skin dramatically improve without the oils from all the food I eat.

Dance, Dance (then stop)

You probably all know the situation where someone you're not too into starts dancing with you, and to be polite you dance back for a song or two. Then you discretely say you're going to get a drink or go to the toilet or for a cigarette than you'll Be Right Back, Honestly. For the rest of the night, you avoid that person and act as if you cannot see them on the dancefloor. What really sucks is when you're that other person.

"Make the first move more often" is what Liam is told by his Brighton friends in great numbers, "to be bold and more confident." Before being told this tonight by Dougie, by Ronan, by Beca and Georgina and Luke my LGBSoc dad and even the guy who runs the Pop Tarts night at BabyLove and some old geezer who looks like Truman Capote, I had this in mind. So, while Georgie is out getting a cigarette and Beca and Ronan and I are on the dancefloor, I notice a striking young man who at first I decide is far too attractive for me. This person will never notice me, but as he catches my eye I smile anyway and he smiles back and continues dancing with his hags.

Still finding this guy rather attractive, I smile at him again and he smiled back prolonged and we start dancing together. Unfortunately the song isn't too good but we both seem resolved to presevere and I think he fancies me which is just as well cos I think he's hot and I decide I probably wouldn't mind taking him home one bit. I consider for a moment that he's probably got some great body and guys with great bodies don't care much for guys with very average, boring bodies, but I don't let this insecurity show and a much better song comes on which is just as well. He's not a great dancer as far as I can tell but it's ok because in that is the encoded message that he's a fairly reserved, straight-acting guy who's not going to embarass me when he inadvertently meets my staircase buddies or want to overstay the morning lie-in time if he does inevitably (or so I thoguht) come home with me. And yeah, he's hot, and I'm chuffed that as far as I can tell someone I think is attractive seems to be into me for once and it's the only time that gay clubbing isn't an absolutely abysmal failure for me.

Except it is, because he grabs my shoulder and says in my ear in a sexy, manly voice that he'll be right back and those are the only words I have ever heard him utter. Later, he returns with his hags, and I dance nearby him again to get his attention but it seems as if his eyes are trying their best not to meet mine and he and his hags walk off after a song or two. I am instantly upset - not to the point where I want to cry, but only because he is symbolic not of one guy or one shag but every guy who I rightfully am otherwise too afraid to go over to because they will not fancy me and they will not want me and they will only reject me and leave me alone, on my own, while everyone vaguely attractive couples off. I rub my eyelids as if to soothe a coming headache and then I'm a bit better and dance with extra enthusiasm as if to say "Fuck him" but it really gets to me because I really did want to fuck him.

I spend about an hour telling Luke how hideous I feel I am because no one wants me at any club, not here nor in Brighton nor presumably any city in the world. All the uglies are macking and it's sickening and I'm not getting with ANYONE which means I'm uglier than them and I stop to despair at how many complete strangers I must sicken purely by existing in their vicinity. How much kinder they are than me because they never seem to tell me how they really feel about me. I contemplate going to Bridge and picking up some braindead Oxford Brookes girl because even though I'm not horny I feel lack of sex actually chilling my veins. I have ice blood from lack of sex. I have also been (officially) single since January and "more or less" single (not seeing anyone) since like June. I also contemplate becoming a Roman Catholic priest and letting my stifled eroticism come out in poetry about Jesus. Who woudn't like to infer the act of fellatio to the messiah? I wonder if I'd have been happy if I was intellectually starved back home with more willing, forward guys but then I remember I was just as despondent on the club scene there as I am here.

Doug and Costas mention going clubbing in London on Saturday and while it originally sounded like such a great idea, I'm no longer too sure because I realise how gay clubbing and I do not get along and by 2am I always feel like I want to die. My standards are too high - higher than me - and the guys I go for always go for guys even better looking than they are which means my only option is to go for guys uglier than me, which I'm not sure exist and if they do I'm not certain I am guaranteed action there. Nor do I want it. Sex is only really good when it's someone I really care about or someone I am attracted to on an extreme level. Half-measures suck. Sorry, imaginary Brookes person. Sorry, Jesus. In the end, I give a strong maybe and odds are I will go to Heaven or Soho or wherever with the intention of a good night but end up asleep on the streets of London till an early train, probably actually crying.

I get home at 3am and write a blog in which I can't be assed to change anybody's names. I'm not sure how to make Facebook recognise the publication of my blogs but I'll figure it out. I wonder if I should allude to the night's other subplot: the guy with the mixed signals. Well basically, I don't know what to think. Do I interpret certain words as flirting, or certain actions? I can't be more explicit in a blog... but I wish he'd more explicit with his words. Or, with his nudity. I'll settle.

Thanks for reading my extra-gay, extra-uncensored edition of Liam's depressed rantings. I don't normally write so unambiguously about my motives. It's kind of Brat Packy. The novelists, not the actors. Although, Molly Ringwald...

Only Ever Me

Whenever I'm... somewhat innebriated, as I may be in writing this, it is clear that I'm the only one. That is to say, I can never be part of a group drinking experience. I'm either the sober one - the designated driver, perse (more accurately, the guy who gets everyone back to the Brighton station before the last train departs), or in fact the roaring, embarassment of a drunk. When you're drunk, every look cast upon you is to some extent, a look of disdain. Gentle pity, or irreverent disregard? The underlying sentiment, in whichever case, is negative. I am a leper, a freak, a twat. I am, a drunk.

I'd rather be the drunk idiot than the sober guy, though. When I'm drunk, my sensitivity to the subtleties of human suggestion and interpersonal relations are heightened. My social autism is inhibited. I realise key points (as I will term them) about my place among large groups. The differences that make me (in polite terms) "unique" or in less forgiving but altother more precise ones, unwanted. The rugby guys sit there, with their physiques about them and the eyes of girls cast upon them, and embrace what is essentially working-class rowdiness under the auspices of middle-to-upper-class boisterousness. Or, snobbery. Get out of jail free. Pass go, do whatever you like.

I'm accutely aware of laughter. I mean to say, I know who is and who isn't laughing at me. Someone tells a joke. On the surface, it's about someone else entirely. However, my presence as the drunk guy has inspired them to think of this anecdote. They are, implicitly and unspokenly laughing at me. I cut a glare, but it is unseen. Except for when I, taking leave of my senses, commit an act which is horrifically (and always uniquely) embarassing, I am invisible. Invisibility. My super power. That, and supernatural gayness. I'll elaborate. Why is it that who I fuck (and not even exclusively, might this drunken me be so pedantic as to point out) is so important to defining my existence amongst peers? The faggot is the faggot is the faggot and must be treated as such. So say God, so say rugby, so say northerners, so say the French. Ooh, subtle.

Where was I? Oh, right. Drunken epiphany. Don't you love it? There's something so fantastic to be taken from the simple pleasure of knowing. Even when what you know, is that everyone, admit it or not, hates you.

My Old Blog

Just a link for reference: my other crap I've written.