Why do I do what I do when I do the things I do

I can't now conceal my thoughts in verse. Which I can never do very well, anyway. It's exactly 2.30 as I begin writing this and I'm awake for no good reason. Well, the reason was good. But no, but yes, but let me continue. Ulysses is beside me, still lodged on page sixty-six. I have to reach page seven-one-eight by Tuesday. I was supposed to be reading it, but I let myself get distracted. I turned to face away, and the song I set to play, spun me down the stairs, and cast me unawares. I returned to this chair and sat and spoke.

The silent words we say in fingers against a keyboard. Why do I say them here when I wouldn't say them if I had to press them through my lips? Lips. I long for lips. That is part of the problem. I sit and am stirred ("for a bird,--the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!"), and should learn to quell the tell-tale beat. Because games are played by the few, but still there are rules to life which transcend toying. I define my life by trying to break its fourth wall. I was told this once, in my mock-Oxford-interview. And it has stuck with me. I'm pushing reality as if I were a fictional character and I am simply toying with its meanings and its words. I am the product of an internal struggle to get the things I want in 'reality', the safe way, and this other timeless desire to make everything mean nothing by pressing upon meaning.

I feel like I've come to some great cathartic epiphany and write without certainty that I will publish this. The things I never publish are always the best. Do I destroy the quality of the pouring of my soul if it's edited to suit an audience? Could some terrible disaster - worse than the one which awakens my existential crisis - be incited by its genesis? ("Poets are not so scrupulous as you. Nowadays, a broken heart can run to many editions.") I think, I think, I think. I sit and think and think too much but never enough about the things I should be doing but rather I think to analyse the words in ways they were never meant to be. And then, the attached issue, is that I hope the other person can read words as I write them and see in them what I want them to see. The double-meaning, the no-meaning, the differing meaning - and then further still do unlike me and answer with conviction; "Yes! And where these meanings contrast, dissolve and collide, I say yes to all."

What is man if not the product of his fears, his desires, his attempts at being something else and efforts to stifle the thing within. The love that dear/dare not speak it's name, Joyce tells of Wilde's; but none dare speak any name, Wildean or Shakespearian. Never for me, anyway. In the act of naming we do so wrong! Naming takes identity. Naming takes the truth. Naming bubbles the meaning to the surface and adds so much to what was there before. How often a poem is changed by its title to some other twisted meaning not in its text - the title is only to place this thing, this thing (THING! the best word in the English language, I DECLARE!) within a box of glass, at an arm's length, in particular lighting and with tinted spectacles. The distortion does not affect our comprehension of the reality if we focus! But focusing brings us in closer to the reality. REALITY. WHERE DO I STAND? (In reality.) I mean, am I here, toying with words and asking the unaskable and because I wish to change the course of the novel, to make Dharma & Greg of what could be Dickens?

Oh salty, vague, and deliberate. HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.
But here, with your company again, I remember why I was so glad you disappeared from my heart.
This is the blog of pain! Pain I cannot describe.
Pain owed to no particular, no man, no woman, not even myself but certainly mine. Its genesis, my own. GENESIS: said twice before now. Why does this word sit in my skull? WHY DO I ASK IF IT DOES? WHY AM I TAKING MY THOUGHTS AND TRYING TO FIND OUT "WHAT IS LIAM THINKING?" I am thinking my own thoughts but I wish were two people. One on the couch and one in the chair. One to listen and one to speak and then afterwards, make silent.

I am elated with a joy, or was, or can be. I am now not in the throes of time. But now I am, because I glance to the clock; how time has taken my mind to its corner for these constant numbers: 2.53. Where comes the four? Now. As if sensing my expectation of it. Do people think like clocks? So rhythmically yet circular, mechanical and unthinking yet with so much unintended profundity? Do we mean the things we say we mean? Life, brings life, brings life. What of death? What is death?

I need a drink. 2:55.

"Write about me instead"

A darkling thrush says not too much,
About the rhymes of life,
Nor whitish pages on loss, and love,
Of those who liked to write.

Woman much loved, you I wonder
How did he make you feel?
Could you see his eyes, and big cracked lips
And know they make him real?

Oh bugler boy at first communion, I say
The smartest boy in Wales,
If only you were sat beside me
My heart might seem impaled...

For what was the feast followed the night
Thou hadst glory of this boy?
Libido drained yet not asleep
I played, I touched, I toyed

It little profits that an idle king
Should sit upon a throne
When sat on princely poof beside him
Is not a poof to call his own?

Alas! for this grey shadow, once a man-
The unsightly son of souls
Could do a deed with you in hand
And do it till grown old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
Your voice will be the same
I will kiss each and every bit
Be you blind or deaf or lame

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
So let's not talk of age
Let's talk of bright and happy things
So we might set the stage

The night is darkening round me
But at least your lamp is on
Toucha-toucha-touch me
Before the night is gone

I know not how it falls on me
This feeling of transcendent grace
But when it falls away from me
I long to see your face

Fra Pandolf's hands would work busily a day
Should you they have to paint
I'm running out of quotes to bring
My manner losing quaint

I hunt the house through,
And here I find, this final, final rhyme
So let's not delay, let's just smile
I'm seeing you in nine days time

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