Lace

The lace of my brain unlaced, the trace

of the stain unstained from the place

where we left it, feigned in the instant,

ingrained in the act, the spasm, the retract

-ed, redacted instant on the page, the cracked

screen where I write cracked words, from

the cracked brain you cracked with the crack

of our spasms, smoked with our pipes,

the chasms between rhymes that come

with coming, rhyming bodies, alive, long

revived by the manic instant of the

painter's brush, or the poet's pen, spent

again in the moment, the instant,

the stain that follows in shocks, in waves,

the crack that cracks outwards for days,

and in retreating leaves the thread

unfurled and undead, tying my head

to the words that we said, the spasms in bed,

fixed, and clicked into place, leaving only the

trace of your stains in my brain, coming

in poems, leaving prose for better things,

unread.

"Metanoia"

Madman in the Attic had become too too tongue-in-cheek for me; a bit on the nose, a bit unhelpful, a bit of a joke that didn't work anymore. I just discovered a new word, Metanoia. It's Jung, so its actual psychological significance or reality can be taken with a side of salt: a moment of re-thinking the world, of re-structuring the universe around a realisation, an epiphany: it is the category to which both 'psychotic breakdown' and 'healing' belong. That ambiguity is beautiful. It is "a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form", cf. Wikipedia. Been there, done that. And what a lovely spin, too: a more adaptive form.

Yes. There is something I agree with there. I do feel stronger, better. Recovered, but not like bones that recover more frail. More like steel, reinforced with steel, molten steel poured over, hardened into some enormous obelisk; the original thoughts, the original feelings, the original loves and losses are someone else's. They belonged to the old particles of steel, which dripped off as I was growing, becoming, strengthening. My self-image reduced to coal, the chipping forces made me crack; more pressure, and heat, and agony, and on the other side I changed, into diamond. As if coal I had had been my chrysalis; I had span it around me with negative thinking, poor decisions, and antidepressants had been the steroid, and my carbon-and-sulfur silk-web spilling too fast to catch; time was all it took for the Adult to emerge.

Metanoia, n.

It contains 'annoy'; that's cheeky, I feel, the right amount of on the nose. It contains 'meta', and look, look at the absurdity of a blog discussing why I chose the name for a blog only I read (properly), half-aware to Watch What I Say while Saying What I Feel. (The same time knowing it's slightly ironic, because I'm fudging this exposition to fit a very loose definition of 'meta', because I feel I have to. ) And it has these other fitting meanings, too: it is the retorical device of retracting what you just said and saying it again in a better way. What I mean by this is, it is the style of self-correction, that lends itself freely to streams-of-conscious, blog-blank-type, etc. What I mean by this is, it is my style. What I mean by this is... [joke not funny anymore]. In theology, 'metanoia' is repentance.

My blog has, stylistically, always been dependent on epiphanic elevated journals, taking real things and lifting them into the pure abstract, heightening things into pure fiction. Now it is named for being so. And it has always been a (more carefully constructed than it might appear) intentionally long-winded, winding, self-correcting and confusing style at once meant to seem instantaneously written but encoding more interesting truths all the same. Like the "Birds" poem (blog down), which is all about renewal and a desperate attempt to find happiness (pre- or mid-SSRI detox), which was a false start perhaps, this blog signals a positive-outlook way forwards. For one thing, depressing blogs don't get you second dates, and they seem to over-worry College.

I am torn whether to quote from Kanye's "Stronger" or Wordsworth's "Prelude", so I'll quote neither. Onwards!

Birds

Small, yellow birds come together

in swooping, long chains – they look

like sheet music , faint sketched out rows

dotted with black beaks and tails, perfectly

plotting out their song (a tweeting, chirping,

unapologetically freeform melody); swirling

staffs of song wrap around in ribbons,

and the closer in it ties, the louder it sings,

and the further out it loops, the more faint

and elegant it begins to sound. I am some-

where in that music, somewhere behind

those layers of invisible and disappearing staffs

(five line staffs, I can just make out),

being carried away piece by piece (each pair

of tiny bird-feet carrying a pound or so of flesh),

and the music rinsing me clean (on top the mountain,

so green, its scent so alarming), leaving me left

all but a man, scorched by their music,

wet and cold like an infant.

And he says to himself, "Story of My Life."

Once upon a time I was a happy young man.

Then, one day, a wicked witch cast a spell on me, and I started (very slowly, at first) to become someone else altogether.

The handsome prince promised he'd slay my demons, and be patient, and when the real me fell totally asleep he promised he'd wait for the 100 years-spell to pass.

At the worst of it, locked away, demons all about me, unable to think for tears falling or feel for numbness aching me, I was abandoned by the prince.

At this point, I succumbed and the real me fell further from the surface; the demons overtook me, and I became the Monster that knights and princes travel the land to slay.

(No wise prophets were there to recognise the innocent person underneath.)

Things got really bad.

And worse and worse.

I was abandoned at the worst possible time.

I was blamed for everything that happened to me. Was it my own fault this thing happened to me, then?

Now the prince wishes to roam the world, slaying demons for others, and wants more than anything for some other knight to come and slay me.

And I still need saving, but no one seems to care.

I don't think this is even the happy young man talking now. I'm someone else, still.

Written on the Occasion of a Confrontation

Hesiod the Hellenist, and Homer’s Homos

Do you listen to old Aesop’s fables,

Concluding the dead fabulist knew best?

Does Shame still reign your anus, unable

To enter Eros? This attorney rests

His case on science, on logic, on facts:

(The fact being you did not choose what pleases

Your being.) Retract assumptions: enact

Redemption for We that love erastês.

Fabulist and fabulous: ne’er collude,

‘Lest to suffer the rude, the boisterous –

Like an idiot you get fucked (no lube!),

Mentally at least: it’s preposterous

That your frail dignity should yet depend

On the judgements of lesser men (mere boys

At a loss, you concede, to comprehend

The situation.) You and I both toyed

With feelings we chose to reject, respect

Arbitrary mores and social controls,

Dare we not upon death, rewards collect,

For setting hell for ourselves as our goals.

You’re nearly free but so far from awake

That I could shake you by your bones, ring you

By your ears, drive you with a wooden stake

(Forsake that mistake, for is it not true

Vampires rest in horizontal closets?)

Wake up to see that a swirling access

To the uncommonly possessed (trust it’s

Me who wants what’s best; abide where digress

-sions spring from passion!) by the uninspired,

And get fired up! Reclaim the fires of hellls

They invented to throttle our desires,

ART IS YOURS – (mostly mine) – listen as bells

Ring out to proclaim my words as music:

Do not relent ‘til your face is in stars,

Praise poetry (its art metaphysic)

That teaches it’s fine to be who you are.

Had it been

Utterly insignificant

I've never seen myself as important. No, quite the opposite. But I had hoped that by the time I reached a certain age I would begin to matter to people. I never mattered at school; I got good grades, but never praise. I played by all the rules, was nice to people, but making friends still didn't come easily. I've told myself all my life that this is due to ugliness, perhaps in conjunction with some other, imperceptible defect of character.

My first year at university was amazing, but I was always kind of cognizant of a growing patterning, a homogenizing of the masses. Soon, the group united under the banner of "Freshers" split, mutated and came apart, contracting and wincing into tiny little bubbles. As always, I am a loose particle, not attached to any particular bubble for too long, petrified of getting blown into the dirt. As always, I am excluded. People might not even realise it's happening.

I'm fairly confident I could commit a quiet little suicide in my room and go unnoticed for some time. I'd put the bin out so the scout would know not to open the door. It needn't even be locked from the inside. I disappear readily all the time. Done it since I was about 13. At 13 at school I would slip out at breaktimes and lunchtimes. I couldn't face people and what's more, it didn't seem like people could face me. Eventually a teacher in his infinite concern threatened me with suspension for my deliberate flouting of school rules; I called his bluff and dared him to knowing I was the smartest kid in that shithole, and the next day I was presented with a laminated card that would permit me to leave the building at my discretion.

I think things are getting worse. I'm slipping further and further under. I'm perfectly lucid at the moment; I am getting very good at faking lucidity, though; sometimes I believe myself. Every little rejection is a shove. Every impromptu picnic for which I am overlooked, every dinner party in my own kitchen where there isn't room to seat me, every well-organised trip to some little island with my entire flat + six acquaintances that I'm not invited to either. In my last relationship I was perpetually overlooked. Plans were cancelled all the time, around me, no matter whether I'd cleared days out of my schedule to attend them. For example, I was asked not to come to a trip I'd been invited to so it could be spent with one friend he hadn't seen in ages. Then, later, in term time such an event repeated itself all over again, this time for a friend he sees every goddamn day. Then eventually we broke up. And he went again, afterwards. Later, some girl breaks my camera. I can scarcely afford food, but it's an accident; her right to break my camera, to my ex, is more significant than my right to having one.

Everyone matters more than me. This is the message life screams at me. I can be on the verge of killing myself but whether someone has 'a good time' at the bop matters more than whether I make it through the night in one piece. I can't remember the last time I had fun at a bop, or a house party, or a club night; the fun, if experienced to any degree, is almost always overshadowed by a crippling self-hatred come 1 in the morning. I think I have anhedonia: the inability to experience pleasure from those life events normally considered pleasurable. Pleasure, to me, is more like intellectual appreciation. I can take in that a film or a book or a song is 'good', but it must be good on purely artistic terms. My tolerance for guilty pleasures is waning.

Of course, why should I matter? I realise that I'm talentless. I haven't cultivated any useful trade skills and at the only level at which I could be happy to exist (the top) I am assuredly not good enough. I won't win any poetry prizes no doubt because I am simply not as good as the competition. I probably will never get anything published because I am probably more rubbish than I realise. I thought a job application lately was successful, but now the Personnel person is taking their time in getting back to me and it becomes apparent that my defect of character has shown through. Oh, but I fake being real so well! Don't I? I smile at the right cues, I am polite and courteous, I can even convince people that I find their jokes funny, that my words haven't been processed by some faculty short of the soul, that we have some sort of human connection. Perhaps this makes me a psychopath. But no! Psychopaths get away with it better. I am just humanfail.

I do have feelings. (This, I can vouch, is probably the strongest evidence that I am not a psychopath.) They are just very, very minimal. To others, at least.

No future,
No hope,
No love,
No joy,
No reason.

Coup d'etat

They tell me I'm a blood stain;
A leper retched upon the earth;
Toxins drip within the brain,
Deciding what I'm really worth.

And though I cannot yet believe
What others know as 'simple facts',
I trust my powers to perceive
Reliefs in all those things I lack.

The world confirms it every day,
In every thought that goes unspoken.
And every passing word or phrase,
Stirs new fears of being broken.

For every act I never make,
Can live forever in remorse.
And every choice I do not take,
Takes my life apart by force.

Why do I try to read men's minds,
And scan along the smallest gestures?
Why invent the science of mankind,
To justify my every posture?

I play "So Unsexy" for inspiration,
Shuffling through the tracks on iTunes.
Alanis induces exasperation,
And quatrains never seem to bloom.

Force yourself outside of ease,
(-- Oh can I lose a stone or two?)
Inventory all you please
(-- Yet nothing does like couplets do.)

How uneven are these lines
(They drag and drag and drag and drag)?
How many revisions, how many times
Before they cease to zig, and zag?

I cannot help but shatter glass,
In ever surface I offend;
By fist or by my own impasse,
I bleed and see my own pretence

Has fallen; to be ignominious,
For blogging pain or misery,
Is the only kind of eminence,
I might ever hope to still achieve.

Bad lines and bad rhymes all,
Every single one of them!
Give it up and gain the gall
To say you tried and failed (again).

Must a face be quite so grim?
I can only offer pity.
Do you have no brain within,
To make a little ditty

That might alleviate your pain?
No? Here you go, put it down.
Don't bother revising this again.
Just lake, pockets, water: drown

Away your every care,
In blood or booze, I care not which.
Don't make me listen, do you dare
Suffer the ears enduring this?

Bad poet, bad, you bad bad boy!
You're not anyone. Bully, moi?
But I am you, and you annoy:
Enjoy your inner coup d'etat!

Give it up, give it up!
Take your face, and bleed away
Just do not spill another cup
Of blood upon the rug today.

You're just a stain, a stain you hear?
A stain I cannot yet abide.
So shun the inner voice; I could not bear
Should either man remain alive.

Your inner poet? He is nought
But pretension entertained too long.
Consider how much time you've fraught,
For words that always come out wrong?

Have you found a mode of discourse?
(Which voice am I? Why, I'm the third.)
Have you Earth and brain divorced;
Do you still search for rhyming words?

Put away whichever words remind
You of the year or date,
A poet never permits time
To burden art with undue weight.

I thought you hated all those frauds,
Who slipped in modern-sounding things?
Could you live through to applaud
The rhyming Gmail.../fail/ure ring

Of a poet whose inner hunt for sounds
Is dominated by all things mundane?
Do you dare to write aloud?
Do you dare to write again?

I, the Third, have taken over.
I'm the only poet in this head.
Busy yourself, read Behn's Rover,
Your career's already dead.

You do not have a face for photos,
Nor have you e'en a pen for books.
Your verse is just as full of woe,
As your saggy body always looks.

'BDD'? bipolar 2, 'NOS'?
Why acronymise my complaints?
You're just a failure; eternal rest,
I hurriedly prescribe you take.

You've pushed companions far away,
No friend remains, not a lover.
Do you expect your brain to tolerate
While you conjure yet another

Awful word or awful sadness?
I cannot bear you either, boy.
One, Two? It's time to test
Whether you are yet for joy.

Test over; your results are here.
I sentence you to death (again),
Why haven't you yet disappeared?
Accept my sentence. Do not remain!

Fine. Burden me, the poet, too.
But your ugly face, it will not do.
I request a handsome muse,
Whose visage I might abuse
To conjure up a rhyme or two
With which I might escape the blues
Granted by cohabiting with you
Inside this coffin, this chew-
ing mass of leprosy.
Can I cast him off to see?
You've broke it! You've broken everything,

No metre, no rhyme, quatrains all unstrung,

Just when I think I'm on the thing,

The form is changing; I'm undone!

Is this the compromise we've reached?
(Yes, I hear the my victim say.)
Is this the lesson that you teach?
(You'll never mock another day.)

If to oblivion I must recede,
Then you, Third voice, I take too
Let us drop into the bleed
Between our different forms; I'm due

Escape from this, the world
(Repeat that word!) I said I'm due!
I'm sick of failing at the word;
To the worldly word, let's bid adieux.

When Sex Bloggers Collide

It had all started with an innocent comment to her blogspot account; I had forgot to sign it anonymously, but thought nothing of it, and left it at that. Two Asian girls from the Labour Club later, and of course I'm checking my Nexus Email for comments on the blog, rugbyladwitha sensitivesideandabigdickatoxford.blogspot.com, and there was an email from her. You know, the girl who goes around shagging boys and writing blogs about it. Her. The enigmatic and untraceable vixen of the Oxford and Cambride sex blog universe: sexathertfordcollegestaircasetwelve.blogspot.com. Her email was headed "Hey there"; I knew 'there' meant genitals. Lad.

She had sent the email from her University account too, and I was shocked to learn that her college was only a minute away from mine. All this time, all this sex, happening at one university, so close together? Who'd have thought nineteen years old got up to so much, y'know? I said "Woah, I had assumed you were at Cambridge" and she said like no way. I said "I thought I was the only one taking someone home on a Tuesday night after Bridge." She said maybe I was; she never gets further than Hassan's without falling prey to a roaming, eager penis. We were like Gods among men, and we were about to shake the heavens. (Except she was a lady God. A Goddette, if you will.)

She asked me to keep her college location a secret, so I won't reveal much, other than that did you know you need a keycard to get along the Bridge of Sighs? I sure didn't. I think I know why they call it that. 30 years ago, or whenever it was built, some prophetic bridge-builder-guy (do they teach bridge-building at Oxford? Probably not, he was probably from Brookes) thought "One day, there will be an Oxford sex diarist" - this is before the Internet existed, no doubt(!) - "and she will set the paper-blogosphere on fire with her carnal lusts. Or, her pen, writing about them."

Boy did she. She had some bad chat. She was really clever. She insisted I wear two condoms, so she'd be 196% safe. We were really noisy, I couldn't help myself, I screamed "We're having sex we're having sex we're both at Oxford or possibly Cambridge and we're having sex" and those geeks next door in All Souls were no doubt extremely jealous; when was the last time a rich academic ever had sex, no? With his wife, you get it, am I right? (I'm right.) Somewhere between all the loud proclamations of sex (she was screaming "Oh yeah this sex is so good, I'm having sex, I'm SO EMPOWERED by this sex that we are having, here, in Staircase Twelve" that I was only in there for a couple of seconds before -- like the fates stepping in, between our thriving fiery over-sexed genitaliases (genitalie-i?) (we both have lots of sex) to push her sweaty labia away - and the condoms both popped off, and I came, and it was messy. But she said no worry, she was thinking of a new mystery blog anyway "Teen mother with a pram at Oxbridge." I said, if I'm sterile, perhaps she could be Gonorrhoea at Oxbridge (I left her the number for my doctor).

"Oh, one thing, Belle," I said, when leaving the room.
"What's that, you big sexy man" (that's what she said, eagerly scanning me for a nationality she could write about as a distinguishing feature)
"I thought we were double safe?"
"Yeah, but what if it's triplets?"

And as I was leaving I thought "I think I'm gonna marry this girl."

Poseless poesy

Following hourless days and dayless weeks,
What can I do but attempt to speak
From my speechless voice;
My illusion of choice
To sing loud silence
Or bring soft violence
Upon the heads of headless peons:
An instant choice, lasting eons.

Same, as an image