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.

"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!

Point, counterpoint. Incomprehensible, I should hope.

So, I'm working on this structure. At first, quite unintentionally.

Lala. Red. lal la. ----------------- Blue. //

Lala. Girls. lal la. ---------------- Boys. //

Lala. Fathers. lal la. ---------------- Mothers. //

Di-di-dum lala. Blue. ------------------ Red. //

...but later, I'm starting to think it's one of my key styles... it's obtuse and quite well-hidden but definitely identifiable.

Rubbish description, but vague enough, for my purposes.

But perhaps life decided this pattern for me. It happens, it always happens.

The standard format is:

La-la. Happiness. happyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappy. SAD.

but variations include:

La-la. Love. lovelovelovelovelove. HEARTBREAK.
Di-dum. Girlfriend. girlgirlgirlgirlgirlgirlgirl. SINGLE. (or, perhaps boyboyboySINGLE)
&
Ta-rah. Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes. NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

But then I start to wonder if it's actually a symmetrical event?

Sadnesssssssssssssssssss.------------ > Happiness. ---------> Sadnesssssssssssssssssss.

With the good thing in the middle, obscuring my sight of the bad. Is happiness a tangible emotion, something which can be affected with permanence?

Or need it only ever be the eye of the storm?

Makemeloveyou, makemeloveyou, makemeloveyou, forcemeto... oh there you go?

I'll try this as a poem. Perhaps comprehensible but wilfully obscure is preferable.

Thankful for everything

It's weird. It's not even ironic that I'm saying this. I discussed this with my spiritual counselor (Tom Phipps, ironically) and I think my conclusions were backed up. Essentially, when you're in the throes of an emotional high or meltdown, two things occur to you.

One: creative overload. I have to thank you for all the things you've done to my writing. I haven't felt the need to post any of the good stuff I've written onto my blog, but I am submitting one long poem for the Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize and I think my Scrawl contributions this term will be superb. I am fairly happy with Darker Angels (Scrawl, HT09) and The Tyrant (Newdigate Prize Entry 09). I have been relatively successful this term on the 'scene' and in terms of boys, if you're counting them. But of course, I attempt conversation with you and am consumed with some sort of resentment. Which is fine. It's not nearly as bad as it was. It will pass. Very soon, I predict, I will be entirely indifferent to you. But thank you, thank you, you've done wonders to my writing in both your roles as a positive and later a negative force in my life.

Two: critical faculty dissolution. Here we see where Hilary Term and Michaelmas are opposites. My Michaelmas nightlife was depressing, but academically I felt I was doing well. Now I churn out terrible essays about Crow in Ted Hughes, or half-formed theories about aestheticism in James Joyce or literary techniques in the Old Englies elegies and I get bizarre looks from my tutors. My entire reading of Crow became informed by the Emily Bronte connection supposed in a later poem ("The Wind on Crow Hill was her darling," Emily Bronte by Ted Hughes). While I enjoyed that part of my essay, a comparison of Bronte and Hughes, it fell outside any usable function in Oxford terms (Victorians and Modernists don't mix!) and distracted me from the actual set question. But Emily Bronte is a poet I can deal with. My blogs come from that same voice as hers, that address of a nameless you who is not solely one person. If you're reading this, don't flatter yourself thinking you're the only "you" contained in "you". Point being, it's hard to focus on essays when you've completely rewired your mind and are sitting in your own little autistic Palace of Art half the time.

I've started drawing again. Haven't done it in years. I used to be good. I'm not anymore. I sat down, one lonely Sunday Balliol morning when everyone in college was in bed with a hangover or trapped in that neverending Sainsburys queue buying hummus and I decided I would draw the college. I stopped for my own embrassment because the world I was drawing was slightly less real, slightly idealised, slightly distorted like a vision of land seen across desert sand and swaying in the sweltering heat. I tried drawing a person, a beautiful vision of a face I imagined, but it came out a sinister gypsy stereotype staring back out of the pad at me and making me uncomfortable. I later, in the throes of my the emotional epiphany the otehr night, where I stayed up till six in the morning writing my Newdigate poem, I discovered my aptitude for drawing caricatures. There's something suitably childish about my style and the unironic annotations placed around the drawing.

I've started sticking things to the tack board in my room. Besides my unfollowed Routine (wake up, stretches, 30 crunches, etc.); there is the Homage to Assholes (a reminder to stay away from heartbreakers); there is the drawing I found in my pad that I did when I was 14 (it is in blue, pink and purple pencil and it indicates I should "Taste the Rainbow" like I am some Skittles salesman); there are two Toni & Guy business cards (the cutter, the dyer); Vacation Residence form with useful dates; post-it note listing books I'm meant to have read; two poems I wrote ("Candles" and "Church Siren") and a poster for our bop of my friend Ronan dressed as the Heath Ledger Joker with the declaration "Ronan Is Not The Only Fruit". Bizarre literary references are just one wing of my Bop campaign (Georgina and I are in charge of the Week 8 LGBT Bop, and promote accordingly. There's also a poster of Me as Uncle Sam declaring "Liam Wants YOU To Come Out (nearest recruiting station, Bop Friday 8th week)" and one of Georgina comically with cigarette-in-mouth beckoning "Treat yourself, have a fag."

I've got endless ammounts of work to do. Tomorrow I have a commentary due for the Old English poem "The Wanderer" (subject of my last dreadful essay) which I will have to do today if I want to go out tonight. I don't know if I can face PopTarts at Babylove tonight though, I still feel tired from Rainbow! at Thirst Lodge last night. I have set myself the topic of Graham Greene for my Friday 8th Week (familiar date...) essay, although I haven't really thought of a question and I still have 2 and a half books to read in the next week and a half if I am to accomplish this. Which reminds me, I'd best be finishing Brighton Rock.

The Speculative Wildnerness

This is a poem I wrote several weeks ago and was extremely disappointed in because it did not convey what I wanted it to. I deleted it in a rage. I later discovered that Blogspot autosaves everything you enter into it, and I found it incomplete. I haven't bothered to edit it or even finish it, because I realise it has no conclusion and that was part of what I was struggling to find with it. I think it stands now as much about the futility of unexpressable emotion and about the feigned attempt at looking for love where you never really felt it. It's also something about my attempts at trying to work certain sets of imagery into my writing and accidentally imbuing some contrary images, which I think itself encapsulates the dyad between expectation and reality.

So here it is, under the original title I gave it which now I think could mean anything (perhaps not entirely related to the poem's content, but more to the feeling to which the lyrics sprung from). The poem's title is "The Speculative Wilderness."

The tide is splashed upon the shore
Which saw the closing of my heart,
Wherein the thought remained no more
of love which could inspire art.

Each frothy bubble, born anew
Bursts or breaks at fresh horizon,
And to air and touches true
Union of unrivalled poison.

And I sit fiercely, perched atop
These rocks which have seen many pairs,
Who felt in themselves no strength to stop
Nor care to count the whys and wheres.

This beach, along the coast it stretches,
For many ones to contemplate
How men and women alike make wretches
Of the loves they cared to half-create

Against the sea I see and saw,
The eyes within the water's blue.
Against the rocks I hoped to paw,
The cracky lips and heart of you.

No nature remains at all consistent,
The beach to forest, and then to desert
They're all but nought within this instant;
Manifest of just desserts.

And wild woods, I look upon
Just as I might have done the shore,
And cannot find alas the one
Who I have been looking for.

He sits acrowd, as one rock,
The one I have misplaced.
And time the fiend, the ticking clock
Makes worry that I've lost a race

For other men on other beaches
Are looking for one not dissimilar to you
And falling away and out of my reaches
Is everything I claimed was true.

So I reach into this endless ocean,
And find myself aloss,
With hope that swimming through emotion
Will return me what I want.

I cry to sirens, "Let the this ship sail!
That mistakes might not repeat",
Your siren song steals away all,
That ever docked before beside this seat.

My voice carries some seven seas:
"Oh cruellest creatures of saltwater,
Release this man! I beg on knees,
As you would a widow's only daughter.
I beg, condede. I bleed, I plead."

And

Brand New Day

I'm not going to mention Babylove last night too much. I had fun dancing for the first part of the night, but there weren't enough hot people there so I weighed the odds and just decided to leave.

I'm over my daytime drinking/spiritual crisis/Death-Cab-for-Cutie-on-iPod-on-repeat fetishes now and am feeling pretty darn fine. A conversation with the Devil Himself sorted me out (figuratively).

Party coming up, so that should be good. Tonight is LGBT Film Night so I think I'ma show 'Transamerica', which promises to be a hit; I might buy popcorn. I realised that I looked really good last night which is good, because it was really important that I did. I bought some new clothes and wearing them also picks up my mood. I met this really attractive girl yesterday, and I plan to find her again and ask her if she's going out that night (Kukui, Bridge, Lava/Ignite?). I realise that all the dead weights I have clung to in the past are just that: lifeless, soulless, not quite monstrous or detestable but certainly not worthy of any profound affection. I have a massive Virginia Woolf essay approaching, but I love her so it should be vaguely enjoyable. OH, and I got an email from Spilt Ink this morning and my poem "Silent Love Song" (which debuted on this very blog) got accepted for the anthology of the best poetry at Oxford University, which I'm happy about.

Life will be good. I make it so.

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