Lovers and ivory towers

Lovers and ivory towers: some spontaneous thoughts, and some lines, on an image

Two instances of the same image in verse:

‘Hyr throte, as I have now memorye,
Semed a round tour of yvorye,
Of good gretnesse, and noght to gret.’

~Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Book of the Duchess

Your neck is like a tower of David,
Built to perfection,
A thousand shields hang upon it,
All the armour of heroes.
…
Your neck is like a tower of ivory.

~Song of Songs
Chapters 4 and 7


I suppose that the metaphor works best with a woman or a boy, as opposed to with a man. With a man, I would feel inclined to write to the effect of

Your neck, an ivory tower, cracked
Along its foundations by the commas
And dashes that creep up from your
Chest. Little outward and upward lines,
Like exclamation points, – breathing space –
And the balcony from which you survey
Untold orchards… &c

And as a metaphor, it is one that makes me consider its contradictions – the contradictions abounding a kissable fortress, the tower with fault lines at its base and too many arrow slits at its peak. When the Man in Black remembers the above item of White’s physical description in The Book of the Duchess, it comes to him in the moment of speech – ‘as I have now memorye’ – as if he were remembering a detail from a dream. Yet what the river Lethe has surrendered is not a photographic likeness of a neck, but a symbolic one of a person, which happens to describe a neck – it is a likeness smoothed over by the river’s currents. More pearl than ivory. An ivory tower, as it happens, is the best descriptor in such a case – the one that tells us most about White herself beyond just her neck.

And White’s tower is not just a symbol picked because of where it stands on the Petrarchan plain of martial romantic conceits – this is before Chaucer discovered Petrarch, in Italy – it has been specifically chosen because it offers the poet particularly descriptive spatial and aesthetic properties. As towers go, hers is

Of good gretnesse, and noght to gret

It is a modest tower. Its modesty, amid descriptions of its ‘round… yvorye’ structure, paints a slender, swan-like structure. It is dainty, and feint, and characteristically feminine. That it is a tower connotes only its stature, its nobility, its impenetrability. The Man in Black cannot hope to recover fair White from death’s kingdom, and nor can John of Gaunt his fair Blanch, though the former occasionally manages to conjure the odd memory every now and then.

Yet in the instance given from the Song of Songs, there emphatically is a martial character to the addressee’s neck: it is hung with a “thousand shields”, and it memorialises “heroes”. It is itself decorated, and implicitly also armoured, with heroes’ armour. It is an epic poem among monuments. Whatever the gender of the addressee, it is characterised in explicitly masculine terms. (Even if it were not the neck of a man, it still remains that it is being described as if it was one.) The very fact that it is ‘Built to perfection’ implies a laboured act of ‘construction’, and the fact that it has been built or constructed gives a strong sense of its tangibility, a solid presence and a solid core. One is aware of a sense of “man-made” as much as one is of a faint sense of it being “manly”. And the Song of Songs, too, is ‘constructed’ as much as it is composed – both have been built along a poetic ideal, ‘to perfection’. And so too, a male pronoun is used in Chapter 4:

Let my lover come into his garden
And taste its luscious fruits.

As with White’s neck, we have an instance where the tower encloses the beloved, the ‘fruit’ (cf. the Pauline maxim as delivered in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale) and resists the lover’s acquisition of it. The beloved is a captive however, and not a tormentor as in Petrarch’s Canzoniere or the first half of Spenser’s Amoretti. The very fact that it is a tower which both encloses a fruit garden and specifically the taste of a fruit – an ‘Adam’s apple’ – makes its ‘gendered’ identification even more confusing. In my spontaneous lines on the subject, I wrote

…the balcony from which you survey
Untold orchards

Casting apples out into the world – a garden of men – but also locating the beloved, once again, as enclosed within the tower. If not as a captive, then as himself a reticent lover.

This dual image in the Song and elsewhere, or tower as a garden – by virtue of it being a tower which encloses fruit – makes a lot of sense to my mind. This is because, conflictingly, what lies within the tower is, in Langland’s terms,

… þe londe of longynge and love

(In Piers Plowman Passus XI, the knowledge in Will’s “metels” or dream, into which he was “fette” (fetched) by Fortune, is compared with the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden from which the Adam’s apple takes its name.) It is, much the same, the locus amoenus, a setting of beloveds and languishing lovers, as in Guillaume de Lorris’ Le Roman de la Rose. It is a garden where love and languishing both grow, but yet one which a lover like a Dreamer can at times struggle to rightly perceive. And yet it is a Dreamer, and a dozy lover, in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, which do the best job of it.

A dream, strangely, is so very much like a tower in Chaucer’s dream visions. The Chaucerian homophobe is tour; it is both a provocative symbol, like a tower, which we struggle to imagine in waking life, but which we ‘tour’ or a journey into when we sleep, or when we read the poems in our own Ivory Towers. In the Somnum Scipionis, Cicero writes of Scipio’s dream as a ‘Somnum complexus’. What’s more, it is ‘artior’ (from ‘artus’). It is a sleep characterised by encircling, enwrapping, clasping and grasping. It is a sleep experience of a narrow and confined space at the same time as liberation from one’s bodily enclosure; it is a towering off of oneself into “so inly swete a sweven” (Chaucer’s House of Fame).

Is having memory of necks-as-towers better seen as a reflection, then, of the memory of a sort-of ‘dreamer’ who has not made invocation to Morpheus, as Geffrey later does in House of Fame? In the Song of Songs, there is no sense among its serial metaphors – breasts are fauns, lips are honey, and necks are towers – of forming a cohesive picture. That, as in Langland’s descriptions of the “fair feeld ful of folk”, is an English tendency; rather, the Song’s images swim in solution. They ‘deck’ its garden. This relates to my main problem, and my main aversion to, this metaphor. It ‘beheads’ its object; it decapitates the beloved. And it is those instances of encoded masculinity – pronouns and elsewhere – which compound this disturbing effect. A man’s neck in many cases is checked by the characteristics of his face and his chest. The image of hair ‘creeps’ in, and a severed neck with stubble and a chest hairs necessitates a severed head resting someplace else.

Chapter 7 of the Song of Songs scans up the body of the beloved: feet, thighs, navel, belly, breasts, neck, eyes. Reaching the top presumably, it moves down again, to the nose, and then surveys the whole head. Our speaker has stepped back, and their eye traces the beloved’s hair and reflects first on love and then the beloved’s whole form. It then turns to breasts, breasts again, breath and mouth and lips: it simulates lovemaking. And is a human body that is made love to, not the collection of scattered metaphors. It is this very human beloved, the composite of body parts – a stature like a palm tree, a mouth tasting like wine – which after all, ventures out into the garden.

Come, my beloved,
Let us go out into the field,
And lie all night among the flowering henna

Let us go early to the vineyards
To see if the vine has budded
If the blossoms have opened
And the pomegranates are in bloom

Yet the ‘construction’ or ‘blueprint’ for the well-built chapter 7 has been a ‘vine’ itself – roped together images which form a metanarrative of a lover’s gaze and erotic feelings. It is the same technique which Hopkins uses to stow away phalluses in “Harry Ploughman”. So the beloved must venture ‘out’ to the garden if indeed the lover is to venture ‘in’ to theirs. A process of becoming mutually enclosed, complexus, characterises the experience of requited spiritual love. It is similar sort of love to that which is patronised by Aphrodite Urania in Plato’s Symposium – the heavenly Venus whose love inspires art. And yet the Song of Songs marries this concept to that of Aphrodite Pandemos, the common Venus.

In my lines, I have imagined the “fault lines” which a man’s form puts into the metaphor of an ivory tower as dashes and commas – disjunctive and interruptive moments. They are instances of non-utterance: a silence which threatens to derail a poem. Yet in the Song of Silence, the only “speech” of this breathing mouth at the end of the tower-like neck is the escaping “fragrance” of the orchard within, the locus amoenus. In chapter 4, even,

Your lips, my bride, drip honey,
Honey and milk are under your tongue.

And it is this outpour of fructifying, ‘sweet’ words which water the fields and form

…an orchard of
pomegranate trees
…
With every tree of frankincense
myrrh and aloes.

That is, the lover’s lips spring those gifts given at Christ’s nativity. Where in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, numerous sonnets beginning and ending in combinations of “Sweete lip” and “Sweete kisse” positioned the kiss in Sidney’s Second Song as the begetter of yet more lines of verse, the Biblical Song of Songs imagines the poetic expression of a physical love in pursuit of a spiritual ideal as a realisation of a nativity scene. Making physical love to a him with womanlike breasts – Spenserian milky paps – reconciles the spiritual and the physical loves, as long as the male-male lovemaking is configured as making love to a womanly Jesus.

Which is why the tone of my spontaneous lines had to be different, and tried to be more matter-of-fact and modern (reflective of a more contemporary and egalitarian kind of male-male romantic relationship). Here, “breathing space” of course puns on couples’ needing “space to breathe” as much as the age-old conflation of poetry and breath, seen exemplarily in Sidney and Shakespeare. In Richard II, the line is delivered

Words, life and all, old Lancaster hath spent

And much the same, one ‘spends’ (exhausts) oneself and one’s energies trying to break the fortress of a lover or former lover’s tower-like resolve to be silent. These same spaces are always cracks – they indicate a conspicuously effortful resolve to resist entry, and at the same time offer a glimpse inside as to the reason why. And that’s why this image is ultimately so powerful, and powerful insofar as it is difficult to reconcile. We get knocked back to its outermost layer every so often – we see objects again as things and not as profound significations. And then we realise that whatever a hair rising from an ex’s shirt collar excites in us, it is a problem which no amount of love poems or playful eisegesis (!) can resolve. That problem, too, is towered off from us.

Replete

Next in my series of many month-old poems I never bothered to do anything with:

Replete with you, incapable of more

before the war which robbed all saws

of pressures past from mind whole-cloth,

the pressure on my back, the love, the wrath

of complete repletion, a maximum in effect –

flipping every defect, hedging every bet

with a rhyme or two about the cut of your hair,

its receding rhythms, the coloured underwear

from Next or Topman unintentionally collected

year on year, which somehow nicely fit

(yet are not fit to wear). Because scent,

like taste, I can almost soon forget

until I finger the aroma that lingers where we met

White you out

The names we award to the colour of one's collar,

mean less here in Oxford, where the collars will be white,

because daddy's collar is already quite white

(though to say "Daz-white" will seem awfully blue),

where even black skin indicates whiter collars,

or white mothers, who'll white you out,

scraping black from the canvas, leaving it white

and bare, and boring, a space to be filled in,

ignoring the proscriptions of a white collar,

demands of taste behind your pound or dollar,

seeing distinctions like 'high', forgoing the 'low',

consigning baser forms to the blue abyss below,

where I've missed the simple pleasures of

Yates on a Thursday, or sambucca before eleven,

where EastEnders is not just watched, but waited on,

but I'm dipping my collar in bleach, whiting myself out...

(with such a dingy-looking shirt, I'd best not go out).

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

The beach

Happiness in my hand,
That elusive substance
Runs swift like sand
Gently blowing out
To sea. Under my feet
- I try to reach,
But the waves deplete
My strength and I am
Sunk in the substance:
Temporaryism, old friend.
Mutability, munificent
In its caress, its press
Against my skin,
Its insistence on
Sinking in
And drowning out
The hollows of sound.
But I can rise,
With strength abound,
Found on some coast
With happiness stuck
Between my toes
And the water drying
While I roast.

I

In life I had feared what it meant, when that last electric pulse strained out, to cease to be and to never be again. Not like being unconscious, or asleep, in that faint dimness of cognition... but utterly gone, absent, and unable to comprehend or be an "I" ever again. But here I am, still an I. I had not feared that in death I would be an I: that is far worse than becoming mud, than being absorbed, than surrendering to the womb of the Earth. Scattered Is, all looking up and into themselves and into everything. I am woodwo, I am seeing, I am blind; there is no scent, no taste. My blood: a river runs through it, and it runs through the river, and the blood of other boys' bodies scattered. Their own isolated Is. We have no mouths anymore. A branch took my arm, on its way down. Despite fear, I did it. Fear was less than the other thing. Now I've got the other thing in spades: a crippling sense of self, the self in chunks, all a self all the same.

Just a doodle

Split the atom, cracked half-shells
Split the infinite, "To dutifully love";
Love the yolk pouring out, dutifully
Tear down the walls, strip matter
Away.

Open the box, cracked china ballerina
Opening her dance, around-around;
Symmetrical-circular-here-we-go
Stop-start music, starts going
Again.

Lift the carriage, roll on tarmack
Lifting and falling, Wheel of Fate;
Progress to the highest, predict
Falling when the same joules shunt
Around.

Close the door, Chevy saltseaview
Closed beats ajar, indecisive hinges;
Swing closed hard, your red finger
-tips catch, this time I sound the
Alarm.

Smash the egg, more yolk to love
Smash the heart, more bloodyolk;
Blood-oak trees and bone white
Eggshell, shattered and scattered
About.

Choose the first, survey wreckage
Choose a second, begin restoration;
Buildings in Tokyo with wheels on
foundations, earthquakes happen
Alot.

Etcetera

Ani's Worlds (2)

Ani had to reach over to her phone. The girl in the bed had been there a week. Returning from work, there she'd be, in some new lingerie, in eager await. She was less appealing sleeping face down like this, however, with a spot of drool on the pillow the size of a sweat patch. Her hair, the dark, reddish and wiry sort, curled about itself in the air like arthritic hands. She mumbled to the vibrations on the wood surface by her head, but the girl could sleep through anything.

'Who is it?'

'Ani,' said the voice on the other end. There was an affectation of casual about the voice. 'It's just me, Marti. Had a day off. Here at home with Jeremy Kyle and thought I'd give you a ring. I can't remember if I was supposed to call you or if you were supposed to call me. Sorry.'

Gulp. 'Hey, I've been meaning to call you.' In truth, she really had been meaning to. Her voice went up an octave, a signal to drop pretences. We can let ourselves be excited, can't we? "I'm so sorry, I've just been' - her eyes fixed on the back of the girl's head, the wiry hair reaching onto infinity - 'a bit preoccupied.'

She slipped out of the bed, wedging the phone between her shoulder and her right ear, sweeping her legs out from under the white sheets and letting the bed slowly adjust. The weight shifted ever so slowly; she watched the girl's face twitch, her nose fidgeting about, near lips which look so much more beautiful in moonlight. A strip of sun broke through the blinds, straight across the mouth, down the middle as if teasing. Crapola. In a cosmic sense.

While they talked about the date, the quays, how the new jeans fit, she flitted her legs gently down the stairs in fluffy slippers. Every step was a performed move, to herself, revelling in the femininity she could assert when no one was looking. The private woman just the same as the outer one; whether this was true worried Ani somewhat from time to time, the careful dance of girliness was a never-ending waltz, afraid to stop and change the nature of her mannerisms forever by forgetting the moves. Being is seeing, or seeing is believing, or believing is seeing what you're being. It isn't important.

'Ani,'

'Marti,'

'Is it weird to say I've missed you?'

Of course not. Of course not. Of course it's weird. Of course it isn't. 'No, I've missed you too.' That she had. She tried to perceive the pretty, ginger-haired lady on the other side, straining her eyes through the cables and across the charcoal barrier and conjure up a woman in mens' pyjamas, with an empty bowl of cereal balanced on her lap. Without lipstick, they looked just the same, just as red; this was imagination, she was sure. The same little waltz, in a sort.

'Thank god,' (exasperated with relief, it seemed), 'You don't have work either today, do you?'

The bedroom was just above her now, looking into the TV, into Jeremy Kyle's soulless face. Craggy like the moon. In the movies, lovers looked into the moon at the same time, as if their longing could reach up to the satellite and back. Stellar love networks mapped through the heavens in ribbons and bows and knots of invisible cables reaching out from earth and back. Such a time may have never existed; now, whether in emulation of tradition or fiction, we simulate this with televisions and text messages. The bedroom, directly above her. There was the girl. The other beautiful girl. The betrothed, lying, unawares. One must be good about these things.

'I'm busy today, actually,' she said, at once hating and congratulating herself. Swallowing down a fingernail.

'Oh!' The insufferable 'oh', the one word, the one sound, a letter O, a single letter which reaches up to Heaven 'O Lord' and into Ani to stab at her with guilt, with pangs of longing, the desire to reward herself. To bite the apple.

'But I'm free Saturday.' The fireworks wanted to go off, but they just scorched the ground and burnt out slowly.

'It's a date.'

Ani's Worlds (1)

Ani kissed goodbye to Marti just once on the lips. The fireworks she imagined over the bay were made up of potential energy. The sea and the sky were both mirrors to this magical happening, catching the light and sharing it with the birds and the fish. Their lips parted slowly, regretfully. This was, at once, a beginning and an end. It was a door, ajar. The lights glimmered on the water for a second after they'd dissipated in the air. Trains tore them apart. The concrete floors in the station still pattered with feet, as they had before, but now Ani could only hear the roaring of the train as it cut through the air and tore a line across the South coast. The journey was to her, leaving a charcoal line in its wake, a separating of A from B.

The phone jumped, and lit up, as she had hoped. The small table on the train buzzed against its back.

'I really like you', is all it said.

Ani arrived back to the Hove apartment, dropped her keys into a shoe by the front door and slid off her heels and put them under the desk in the foyer. As she hung up her bag on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, she noticed the light. The kitchen was lit up, as was the living room; the whole house was bright enough to see, apart from the creeping darkness at the top of the stairs. She walked through the house unafraid - it couldn't be burgulars - and found Lorrie on the couch, watching a DVD on her DVD player.

'Still have my key', she said, in monotone but with a smile reaching out. Her body was rigid, facing the TV, only the neck poised to Ani. They both sat on the couch, watching the twentysomethings playing teenagers in love, and slowly their bodies gave way and relaxed and conversation became more fluent. Laughs and wine later, it had been like nothing was ever the matter between them. The red-head princess and the guy from the wrong side of the tracks got it on, and that barrier broke all theirs too. Kissing seemed natural. Like they had kissed yesterday, or the day before.

The charcoal line widened.

Diagram of Love

It's best to try imagining things in shapes;
Lets you see the whole world on a page
(Inside your head) and look carefully
At the rougher edges, the obtuse bends...
Where the heart has warped. Emotion sends
Its tiresome delays across wilfully
Mis-managed roofs and a cracking stage
Man, within the shape, is reduced to ape.

But shapes are more complex than at first we imagine
So we delve in deeper, forced to re-examine.
And its lines are far longer than first we thought
And its contours less level, but mismatched:
Declines and dips, and sharper relief was attached
And the battle to connect called "love" was fought
With one of us uphill. And your war brought famine,
To an already pestilent heart, now starved compassion.

So outside the shape the ape makes an Apollo,
But also wise, he would like to think of himself.
And he's never truly out of it, always linked by thread:
If only to perceive from greater distance, detachment.
If only to escape the heart's foul entrapment.
Which would dissolve the dying love, make dying dead...
And poor the adornments once revered for their wealth...
Just an empty shape then, a box. Merely hollow.

Symmetry is preferred when the love is anew,
But calculating love is wont to stew,
And boil over into the unpredictable,
As exciting then as it was delectable,
But again we're in some familiar pattern.
Guided by old verses; love's familiar lantern.
This couple will not do for couplets, alas
Their coupling was illusion, now since passed.

Regain symmetry. Regain control,
I beg of the air, the ground, the sea...
I am asking: make fresh and make whole
What is faint and illusory.
I don't fancy going A-B-A-B,
When I know our love I'm told,
Is beyond the letter C,
Forget what you're told, ma chérie,
Let's just repeat. Let's stay with B.

Break free, break free, disregard this echo
Of acoustics from times past, where memory was allowed
To run free and recall some past day, some nearby stanza...
When love isn't confined so easily, when it is best told in blank.
Except when it's perfect. But love is so much greater than the sonnet
That captures one of its facets: an obsession, a bemusement,
A bewilderment at nature, some new sensation...
All these belong to the power of the rhyme but disregard this a moment
If you want to seek the truth. Seek the truth.
Let's escape this construction. Let's shatter the diagram. Break free.

Set me free. Let me go of this! Fine, fine: let's rhyme.
If that's what you require, cruel muse, whose SMS
Shakes with a rumble and a light, when I haven't the time
To fuck with your metre, to put away bad words, to bless
You all over again with some kind new description.
I'm only a man and this is my prescription:
Take one set of perfect diction and throw it to the wind.
Take every thing you've heard about poetry, and love,
And give it to the air, let it all rescind...
And if we have faith in rhyme and poetry, then above
May come at last its return, its repetition, its relevance
To the world that cannot deny its power or its elegance.
So just write something dear, it's called "catharsis",
Get it out of your system, make a point of two,
Drop a reference to the Bible, name-drop Saul of Tarsus,
That's how a poem's made, isn't that true?

So let's clear our heads a second. Let's cool it down.
Regain the rhyme. Regain the structure. Regain the symmetry.
Step outside the Diagram of Love, and your frown
Might recede if it can perceive the divinity...
Of something not in me or in you (but sometimes in our contrivance)
Some other goddamn web rocking with our connivance...
To pretend there ever was a romance at all.
And from the reliefs to the dips, what a fall might befall
The falling lover... trapped again in ABAB...
Trapped again in those sounds, the conformity.
Text me later, get back to me.