The giving of a gift

What's this?
- I couldn't let you leave without...
You shouldn't have.
- I couldn't...
You didn't have to.
- I can't.

A failed apology

Can we talk for a minute?
- I really don't have the time.
I want to say something.
- I know.
I'm sorry.
- I know. I'm not.

A love confession**

I'm in love with you.
- Don't say things like that.
I'm in love with you.
- In love with what?
I'm in love with you.
- There's nothing to love here.

Dear Daisy,, age 8, family fruitcake:
Keep at it, but don't feel proud about it.
Just keep going, because it's working.

Dear Daisy, age 11, addressed to boarding school:
You will learn something from this torture.
You will learn about forgiveness.

Dear Daisy, age 13, subject- your disappearing acts:
You are not ugly or undeserving or fat
or anything that she told you. I know you feel alone
but you could tell someone what's going and speak out
because you're not stupid if you open your mouth
and you ought to be more like what you want, not a clones.

Dear Daisy, age 15, congrats on the weight lost and gained!
You went through hell, and yes, you proved it
you can starve yourself, harm yourself, and tell lies very well
but you put the ones who love you through hell too
and you're lucky they love you anyways and for any whys
so just don't do it again.

Dear Daisy, age 17, subject: stop:
It is not your body that did this and  you did say no.

Dear Daisy, age 19, to UCL halls:
He deserves better and he's not right for you
and you're not the girl for him, you're pretending to be her
and you know it too-
You love him so much, so let him go.
That would be the kindest thing to do.

Dear Daisy, age 21, to Amber Ward, High Mental Health Institution:
You've been losing your mind for more than a year now
but you have looked and seen it's actually been far longer.
This is real now, and you haven't a clue who you really are.
With these new eyes, you can see you've made yourself up
since you were younger,
and you believed your act until it became true.
Don't look back and don't pretend you have't realised
what you can't un-see now, even though it was easier
back then when you didn't have to care.
And who knows? Maybe you will always feel this-
anxious and confused and scared,
but at least you're not fictional. You can become fact
so don't look back. That's the cowardly thing to do.
Just keep at it, like you did when you were 8
because it will work, and it will this time too
but then you were doing it for everybody else
and now, who the hell are you?

Dear Daisy, received yesterday:
don't stress and lose sleep for worrying
because you've got a Masters waiting and you don't want to get ill
and don't worry because tomorrow may be unthinkable
but it's coming. It always does,
so calm down and sit still.

If you are searching for some sort of formula to carry on fighting, or for a sequence of numbers or symbols to decode bravery, there is no purpose to look any further. It’s not that you are close to it, or getting there, or that the concept itself of a bravery code is the first step towards deciphering the code, but you’ll never get the chance. There is no code. When you are trying to pull your parts together and make them work in concordance even though you have been unhinged an inch too far from the here and now, the currents of reality. For example, where is one of your hands? One is banging on the tabletop for attention while the other presses down on your trachea to crush it closed. You need to calm down one hand so you can use it to loosen the other from your own throat. There are no pretty ways- or any ways- to suture the open wounds that have been left on you. It feels filthy and confusing to speak, and it hurts because you know only yesterday your talk was free.

It is disturbing to smile and to hold your face without anything to express. All you want to do is release that scream that begs for freedom, just as speech. But you can’t go on like this, all torn apart- this is a body fighting itself, a war against its own shadow; it’s a mind murdering the body from inside. Think about that, if you can just about bear it, and then you’ll catch onto why there’s not a instruction manual waiting for you after your experience to lay out in bullet points the right way to feel. How to’s on coping with grief, guilt, disgust, dissociation, nightmares, the memory becoming part of your autobiography. There’s no manual or guide because there is no way to make peace with that.

No one ever taught you that bravery can be something other than clawed in eyes, sharpened nails, feral smiles. It doesn’t appear as the torn up hands of a wrecked clock or the veins filled with venom under poisoned skin. You can decide what your bravery looks like. Maybe it looks like smashed plates, slashed tires, the silver gleam along the edge of a bread knife that flashes as you make yourself a sandwich. Maybe it’s letting the shadows give you some comfort when the windows are jammmed and refuse to open. It’s framing pictures of yourself and your mother because you have a need for nostalgia almost as much. It’s changing the colour of your hair, it’s gin and tonic before noon or else only juice you drink from cartons. It’s taking out the ******* bins whilst knowing they contain one or several things you ought to not throw away, but taking the words of Kerouac- Accept loss forever. It looks, perhaps, like trying to fix a clock but allowing for times ahead to weave in and out of an arbitrary linear path. No matter how many times you look at those hands on that face, you’ll never be able to turn back time or bypass a single moment on fast forward. It’s brave to try and invent a potential cure and to persist, but someday you’ll be thankful you couldn’t fix yourself by going back over time or denying the disappearing time.

It could be going to confession every Tuesday and Thursday, or visiting a shooting range, whether or not you end up firing a gun. It could be learning to bake your favourite cake, then baking dozens of small cakes and eating them alone. It could be a simple mouth to pillow scream. It could be the development of an entirely original and organic dream. It didn’t come from nowhere, nor from what you are trying to be brave for. A terrible event can be catastrophic and cataclysmic. The evidence in that is surely in all catastrophes and the associated ways in which the world shifts around it, accomodates is corners, and is changed even just by the wake left behind.

Most likely it is writing and it’s burning. It’s howling, visualising your head split in two against a wall. It’s bleeding to remember why you stopped drawing your own blood. It’s acting sinfully to forget. It’s undergoing an exorcism of your own by drawing a map of your body and marking out all the hiding places taken as territory by the spectres that haunt you. You’ll need your bravery to claim those spaces back, to conjure a monster frightening enough to scare the spectres themselves out.

If you try on lots of looks for bravery, be aware you’ll be black-night and blues and plum-colour bruised. Healing looks a lot like brutality, but it is the best home you’ve ever had. It is the first that you have built with your own hands and you owe no one for it.

Remember: Whatever has been done. Whatever you have done to survive.
Remember: the war is almost over.
Remember: you have always been home.

Hand
book
time
table
penalties
forms-
         submission
lecture
       mental construction
lecture
       speech
lecture
        tracing
            language
    c i r c u i t s

CORE            
      
     m o d u l e s  
understanding individuals and groups
affect, motivation & cognition
supervisor agreement
ethics application
examination
current issues in attitude (research)
social neuros(cienc)es
judgment & decision making


DEADLINES.

The average human has over 1,460 dreams per year.
2. The giraffe can go for longer without water than the camel.
3. There are 5 capital cities in Europe with names beginning with the letter V.
4. For all the continents, in their names, the first and final letter is the same.
5. The lifespan of a dragonfly is 24 hours.
6. The earth's atmosphere is approximately 150 kilometres thick.
7. The cigarette lighter was invented prior to the invention of matches/
8. Peanuts are not a a part of the nut family.
9. Your heart beats more than 100,000 times every day.
10. You are not alone.

Did you know? Cashew nuts grow on flowers,
   and they grow one at a time.

Think of the distance between railway tracks:
    this traces back to ancient Rome.

To know the true energy of the sun: imagine it
   covered all over with postage stamps,
      each square inch a bomb,
       each exploding with power only comparable
        to explosions in Hiroshima. Energy like that.

Think of this: how time once was unknowable
   for being different to everyone, until trains began
    and the post began arriving on time.

Did you know? Facts are enough to make a poem.
Where do poems grow? Do they come one at a time?
When did poems first set down their tracks?
What is the power of a poem? Does it explode?
Are poems different to everyone? Will we ever know?

A pile of human teeth,
that which does not belong to itself but to the night and the moon
     and the lock and the hook, that which once did belong to itself,
     or to me,
a murmur and little more,
   something you shake in the hope that answers to the questions
     you want or some reasons you've yet to find
     will come falling out,
an inhabitant in a house that becomes a crime scene during their absence and they cannot be an eyewitness,
she who wanders along the beach by the sea,
    in search of shells,
   to listen in for the sound of old echoes,
         the unreal, suspended, irrelevant,
         the night-time fragments leftover after
            daylight gets its teeth in,
       a rule-****** in asymmetrical glasses,
       one of a family of confused clowns, juggling dreams
         that were once in trees, struggling
         and underestimating distance,
a cracked window in November that seems out of place,
    a Tuesday afternoon, and specifically not a Friday sunse
    or Sunday dawning,
a wishful **** belonging in the boneyard,
housing an ocean of unspeakables in
    attic mind,
    greenhouse heart,
    cavern mouth full of sea,
the container of many unspeakables,
    a cup, profoundly sad for being always a touch too empty,
        contained inside a small glass bottle,
         a paperweight.

Telephone wires are tangled in the trees tonight
and the stars are copper colour,
as if scattered from a fountain
and Romeo is calling from beneath the balcony
of the Capulet family in Verona,
trying to get reception-

but the receiver is busy
moving on, and growing up-

Juliet, the girl he is calling, has a new phone
that she doesn't trust with unfamiliar numbers,
and his is listed 'unknown'

Unsent messages: "goodnight
"goodnight- parting is such sweet sorrow,
that I shall say good night till it be morrow."

The story of the star-cross'd lovers was no tragedy at is end.
Nobody died, nobody had to pretend
to die. They rarely think of one another now,
only from time to time do they wonder 'what if'
or regret the absence of a real goodbye.

Romeo never got the chance to defy the stars
Juliet never got the chance to contemplate him cut out in them
and neither of them got the chance to commit,
and neither of them took a chance with suicide.

Telephone wires in trees, copper stars-
-ghosts, wished on, shooting, burning far, far away-

Unspoken words: "some consequence
yet hanging in the stars,
auspicious stars"

(the fairest of them, he'd once found in her eyes)-
no reception, nothing received.
In this love story, nobody dies.

It is remembered as any other night before.
It was not long until where Romeo had come and gone
he'd left behind just a flicker of a frisson
in memory, growing distant,
gradual decay, and then
he was nothing more than threads to weave
the patchwork of a dream,-
hard to recall, a close call,
a near miss, a could-have been-
but it was harder, with time, to believe it was ever
the real love she yet knew nothing of
at the keen age of only thirteen.

It was Paris she fell for. The two were to marry
and for her bouquet that day, the flower she chose
to carry- for their romance and sweetness-
was the rose, and in her vows, she spoke of her love
being boundless and deep as the sea,
and infinite. All the wishes he'd made on stars
and coins in fountains had come to be.

Spoken words: "Have I thought long to see this morning's face..."

So many saved lives and one love lost and
a glooming sort of peace settled over
the star-cross'd streets of Verona.

Here's what I have learnt about the phonetics of loss.
They sound something like this:
(which is to say, silence)
it's a note I've never heard anyone sing
and it's note that someday I will find,
come morning, sleep has left behind.
This sound, like those in an old lullaby
until found, I can know only as goodbye,
as milkteeth underneath a cotton pillow,
as the sounds that I hear now:
(the black bedtime echo).

Wilting and whitening
abandoned in the sun.
I thought of dying but decided
wallowing would be more fun.

I thought to cut my palms
as if opening a letter
but then decided
cutting your throat would be better.

You aren’t the only one with secrets. Some secrets will be shared but I imagine most go unspoken, because the best kept secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves, those things we don’t know that we have hidden or forget we ever hid in one of those hiding places we don’t know we have.

She imagines the sound of a spine cracking when she crumples plastic bottles to recycle.
He hates his father and not because he’s an alcoholic with a vicious temper
           but because he gets more attention from the woman he’s married to,
           his mother, than she gives to him.
She doesn’t like his laugh.
He doesn’t like his laugh.
She won’t answer the telephone because she’s afraid of being mistaken for a child.
He won’t answer because he feels sick thinking about all the prints other people
         have left on the receiver.
She has recurring nightmares about her childhood teddy bear and
         she is reaching forty-five years old.
She resents her baby because she has to give up drinking for her pregnancy.
He resents her for being pregnant.
He has never had a dream he can remember so he makes them up.
She makes up anecdotes that bear little importance to make her life seem interesting.
He is planning on killing himself before he is at the age his hair begins to fall out.
He intentionally hold his jaw clenched to make it appear more chiselled.
        He read this in a magazine.
She refuses to take her socks off in bed. She said she read in a magazine
         that *** is better if the socks remain on. She actually hates her feet,  
         and his feet and all feet.
She makes herself ***** more than seven times every day. She has done this  
         for five consecutive years. She is clinically overweight.
His hair is not naturally the colour people think it is.
She has fantasies about her boyfriend’s sister.
He is afraid to go outside or near sharp objects or get in a car because
         of his conviction that he will **** somebody for a reason he can't explain.
He has no idea what he’s talking about.
She has no idea what he’s talking about.
He says he doesn’t believe in love. He believes it, and that he deserves it,
          but has never been shown it or felt it. He hasn’t given up
          but says that he has with a shrug.
She loves the way he shrugs her off. She loves to feel unimportant.
She says she doesn't believe in love and people assume she’s damaged
           after her divorce. She never loved him in the first place.
She spends her time alone splitting open tangerines and picking apart
           the slices one by one and then eats the rind.
He spends his time alone splitting open saturated teabags.
He has been stealing from his mother for five years.
She knows her son steals from her but doesn't want to confront him
          because she knows he has a drug problem and she hates him for it.
He thinks his daughter is weak.
She’s sad her daughter is ugly.
She’s comfortable being ugly because it means she’ll never be touched by a man again.
They tell people they were too busy to make that appointment.
They are alone all the time.

When the crowds started their own Kristallnact
in the big smoke, it seemed Smaller
when tracing danger zones on maps, more and more
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-
(Warning, X marks the spots that are burning)
It was a stampede of hooves money was lost on,
shattering windows and smashing streetlamps
and all the same, shrubs and roses were stormed on.
The horses don't have names anymore.
There are beings almost human
trapped in hospitals, trapped inside the women
not yet hampered by the world,
and those who created the women,
three decades before, sometimes
only a dozen years ago, somehow
still waiting and still wanting
another human being to be born.
If I could dream, I'd dance in my sleep,
but I am in the same stillness,
in the same uniform,
in search of footprints to follow,
for hunger, for scorn,
for dying flowers and an unknowable moon,
and the babies now laughing
and terrified and bored and the good ones
who fell in love with the wrong ones
or had too much, of the good or bad, too soon.
The only secret I've been let in on
is that it's the same when you die
as it was when you were born, but
all of a sudden, something small
in the churches and their clocktower clouds,
in the wires of a telephone,
in laughter in the sun,
is enough to allow sleep to come,
dreamlessly but peacefully,
inside knowing that even if we feel alone
we will always belong
to everything, everybody, everyone.

There was no antecedent, no trigger pulled,
but the wound I got when it shot
was also no accident
so there is no reason to rattle me
for the answers to be shaken loose
because nothing is going to come falling out-
there are no coins of unspoken truth.
It just happened and I can't say why
because I wasn't even there.
It wasn't nothingness, just an absence
in the place where my mind usually
takes up its space. The lights were out
and nobody was there- that's not mad,
and it seems sensible, although
what happened made no sense, I know,
but I can't be a witness because I wasn't in.
Questions of why are wearing thin.

i. How the weathermen can predict happiness. Especially my mother's. Especially Swiss weathermen.
ii. I am glad that winter' is here, for finding warmth in the itch of wool, hat around ears, socks over knees.
iii. I am trapped in between walls and other people's walls and my bookcases and their bookends that may not ever end but can look like ends and ends and no no ends to the layers built in brick, all boxed in beyond this building. And my words are trapped in my mouth. They escaped from my mind to my mouth and now I don't trust them on my tongue.
iv. The strangeness of Roman numerals and the study of such numerals.
v. Is there a word for the study of numerals, specifically those of the Romans? There must be, as there is one for the act of eating whilst lying down, a fear of having fears, and the delusion that one is a cat.
vi. My wrists. No watch.
vii. Watch out for what you must keep a hold on, but know there are some things you need to just L.E.T.G.O.
viii. Morse code, S.O.Ss', plurals on top of plurals, mnemonics, anagrams, one blink for yes, lasts longer for no.
ix. Photoraph of my cousin on the day I found out she was going to die and we are kissing at the camera.
x. X for the kiss I need from the right one, or for the answer, and something telling me I got it wrong.
xi. Thinking is counter-intuitive when I'm thinking too much of absences. Silences. My thoughts don't know where to go and neither do my eyes and I can't look up because the photograph will look back down.
xii. Look at yourself. Steps: reflection; dissection; cut. it. out.
xiii. I cried harder than I have ever cried since I can remember a while ago and it's wasn't even a Wednesday or a Tuesday then, and those are my crying days.
xiv. When I get touched, I go back in time, sometimes.
xv. Transformations.
xvi. Condensation. Where do clouds come from? There are things we see everyday and we say we know exist with not a clue about how they work. How does a ball find its bearings? Where did the train begin to lay down its tracks?
xvii. Questions. Questions. Quote: Indecisions and revisions. Unquote: the more you cut it up, the more divisions.
xviii. How many parts am I divided into now? How many incisions? I can't keep count.
xix. The sun sets early in winter and the comfort of darkness is something you can count on. It stays longer, and you can count on that too.
**. Kiss kiss, one for me and one for you.
xxi. This doesn't count.

Left Brain

I am not a scientific test or analysis, a mathematician
or an algorithm. I am not a linear graph or a statistician.
I am the reason that you can colour inside the lines,
why you don't fall off your bicycle anymore and never forgot
how to ride it. I am the force behind your smiles-
eighteen different smiles. The reason you can hold a book
or ball and learn what to do when it's in your hands.
I take credit when you remember the name of your childhood
babysitter. Thanks to me, you can play with jigsaw puzzles
or cards or checkers or dominoes. And thank me too
for your vocabulary. You don't necessarily remember
just how it is you came to remember sequences like getting dressed
or driving, decoding or analysing. I am the reason
you can probably look at someone and learn their name.
I suppose you could complain about how I dictate your days.
How you get up, go to sleep, lend you the seconds and minutes
and hours and months and years. I am the one who taught you
time. I'm also there for you to know that it runs out.

Right side**

I am no dancer or artist made for television. Instead,
I'm the vibration you feel in the tips of your fingers
when  you make a toast and ***** your wineglasses.
Those eighteen smiles you can smile? I gave you the gift
of being able to count your crayons while you are smiling.
But it's more than box sets of crayons and toasts.
I am the reason you want to be. Everything you yearn for-
every penny you ever tossed into a fountain, every star
you have wished on, and every eyelash. I am the reason
why you prefer wearing blue to green, and why you may
fill a blank page with words for what you want, how you feel.
I am the excitement that waits for you at Christmas
or reunions. When you saw the sky full of stars, felt snow
or went in the sea for the first time, I gave you that gasp.
I am your eyes on the world. Blame me for your wanderlust.
I am not time. I am how you know sometimes
that there is no way you'll ever have enough of it.

in the next ten seconds,
he opens his mouth to speak to an acquaintance in a room full of acquaintances
an ugly metal faucet that has been dripping for fifteen days drips again in an upstairs sink
he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear as she bites at her fingernails and
            looks at the magazines lined up in the supermarket
before she opens the postbox, she inhales
she throws her head back before laughing at his anecdote, her knees feeling the ache
            of being crossed for too long
with slightly tremulous fingers, she touches she sleeve of her coat without reason, feeling
            like everyone on the underground train may be looking at her
he takes a sip of water and screws the lid back on, checking his watch
a hiccup is heard from the back of a classrm
he kisses her for the first time on the mouth
he notices his hair has fallen out and sits in the shower drain
their elbows graze against one another's in the lecture hall but neither of them
             catch the other's eye, both staring straight ahead
she blots her lips over a folded tissue to remove pink residue and looks herself in the eye
             in the mirror
her father lets go f her shoulders as she wobbles on the bicycle without its stabilisers
             for a second attempt today
he notices a stain of yogurt on his tie and curses quietly
she burns her fingers whilst making toast
she argues with the cashier about the fact that selected juices were marked as being on offer
the rain rattles against the window and he is uneasy with the lack of rhythm in its sound
they put on her favourite song and remember her as she was when she was still alive
someone wipes salt from her cheeks with a tissue
he realises that the tooth fairy doesn't exist and doesn't mind because it means he's grown up
she asks her father if she is pretty and he say anything
she slips a packet of biscuits into the supermarket trolley, her mother sees
             and doesn't say anything
an elderly woman cradles his arm as they slowly cross the street
they look at one another and both know
he says I'm so sorry
she says I'm so sorry
he says I love you
she says you know I do.

I wear her disapproval
on the worn-out sleeves
of a warned-about dress
and look smaller in it than anything else.
It makes me more of a mess
than I was already, it's lack of fit
will always outdo how well
I can fit into anything else
I could ever possess.

Train, train, bus is late.
Boiled and delicate in sun,
someone sings. I wait.

Beside greenhouses,
a gold field twinkles, endless.
I think of Steinbeck.

Crowding, reaching out,
nettles have claws here, and eyes.
Is my mind slipping?

I cry, all messy,
happy tears. His words show me
I am not useless.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger again.
Forgive me, please, those who have had to wait
at railway stations or for hours outside my door
while I was flat to face, conscious but of somewhere else,
someone else, but never of dying or of war.
*Nothing to report from the bathroom floor.

So, this is the poem that I will end up writing
when no other poem is willing to do the work.

This is the poem I write when I'm past not
being able to sleep and I'm beyond
even trying. This is born of body burnout.

This unfolds as I unpack myself from
bags beneath by eyes.This is an ugly poem
unfolding from ugliness.

In this poem, I'll make an ambiguous allusion
to someone who is missing. The kitchen
feels suddenly too small.

This may be one of a few kinds of resentful:
parental, psychosocial, rebel-without-a-cause sentimental
but the poem blames something for what it is.

This poem is to say I am not a talented poet.
I'm a poet with a stammer, a non-poet, speech impaired,
a poet with neither the rage nor the riot.

So this poem may even plagiarise, for
not even poets have measured how much
the heart can hold. -Zelda Fitzgerald.
This poem throws itself down the stairs.
It burns down the asylum with stolen words inside.

How do I urge this poem to do better?
I can't, I can only keep writing it.
Writing out my resentment, my restlessness.
Wretchedness, Wanting. I can even break
linguistic, grammatical and syntactical
regulations By capitalising some arbitra-
ry Words and messing with enjambewhatnow.

This poem has found a neologism.

In this poem I CAN RAISE MY VOICE
for my wanting, and then in the same poem
shut my voice into a music box
to leave on your nightstand.

This poem has managed a neat trick. Illusion?
Some rhetoric magic. Some see a rabbit appear from
nowhere. Others see a girl being sawed in half.
.
The best (- though, at what?) could see both
but know it's not really about that.
They know it's about appearing as something
that are you not and that's a craft in itself.

As I or this poem already told you,
I am  not a talented poet. I am just a girl
masquerading as someone she's not,
because she doesn't know what she is yet
or wants to be or could be, yet.

She and this poem may seem to have more
to them, to be even interesting,
but both are waiting for you to grow bored.
"

I'm not here to write romantic (when I try it sounds sarcastic)
and I'm not here to talk about the world we look out on
through eye windows- it's only earthy, it's only dust
and too much rain from too much sky
or too much space or too much city,
too sooty, too dry.

I can't find the romance in a square of tarmac
or even the rolls of sloping hills.
Give me discourse on the stratosphere-
for that is something I can lust over-
on heaven and on hell and on all the demons between.

Talk to me about the universe, per aruda ad astra.
Write something for me and show me only when I can
learn from it that there's more than
the shimmering stretch of stone and soil
between me and my appointment tomorrow at half past ten.

It's not much to ask, when you think about it
in a waiting room where minds have been lost;
It's not much to ask to want a reminder
that our lives are more
than what listlessly lolls beneath our feet
and that their prints are more precious
than just stamps on sand or concrete.

I.
Last night I lost my voice, somewhere on the streets
of central London, sunk in winter, and I wonder where it was
my frostbitten words dropped right out of my throat.

II.
My vocal chords feel torn. My voice box is raw
and all worn out and when I speak it sounds as though
I was screaming all night.
My chest is tight.

III.
Everyday I realise she's not here and every day
I forget, so as far into the future as I can see
it will be repeatedly realised, like it's today's news,
that my cousin has died and that I'm not meant to be here
to even be hearing the news because it should have been me.

IV.
Fate played the cruellest trick, the most unjust card
in the pack and dealt it, when it took Ella
instead of the one who had tempted it.

V.
The End isn't anything like I could have imagined.
It's clean as a broken mirror.

VI.
Rest in peace.
Rest in pieces.
Reflection
in fractured glass
cut in half.
Splitting image.

VII.
Number seven for the years of bad luck.
Superstitions, suspicions of guilt, make for a curse.
Morning comes like hell with a garbage truck.
I miss my cousin, who left for heaven in a hearse.

Excuse my drifting-
I didn't mean to kiss you like that,
I was just trying to swallow the space between us somehow
because I think tonight the moon was stillborn.
All the tides seem broken.

The space is dragging with plaintive collectibles=
complacency in yellow-teeth cliffsides, and all the empty shells
in which we'd listened for the corners of our ocean
and heard it ebbing, relenting, reaching.
It rippled on our skins and made us twinkle then.

Now I'm missing you, the grating bottle-glass shards
are what my headaches are made of
and are what fill up my shoes.

When our spines unravelled, I heard rain-
letter-writing weather, bathtub weather,
knitwear-perhaps-on-the-beach weather-
but the puddles were coming from the sun.
I don't know quite when summer blew in.

We would have found canvas chairs in the park.
You would be taking pictures of yellow daffodils
in black and white with your big heavy camera,
and laughing at each sneeze because I'm allergic.

There's really no need now to listen in shells
for the clutter leftover in elegy-
platitudinous phrases, photographs, plenty more fish in the sea.
Words couldn't ever weigh the depths of it.
Only abrade and erode it.

Yours is a world that, for immeasurable gaps
and for whirlpools and whale sounds,
I am not a part of anymore.
But please excuse my drifting.
I will always love the echoes
and walk along the beach in search of shells.

Outside, golden hands make the light change colours.
Hypnos tells me it’s okay; I tell him I’m fightless.
Cold daylight chews me into nighttime pieces
and perhaps if I tell the sun what I’m reading it will stay a little longer.

Everything past the window is uneven and loud like the ocean,
melancholy and pointed, all knees and fists and teeth.
September falls into October and paper stays paper,
though it used to be trees somewhere in the sun,
but the real truth is that there is emptiness in everything, not just beds.

October is coming in like a train whose whistle echoes for days,
an old steam engine with one hundred thousand windows,
whole rooms for watching time but no space for little tides, big blinks,
or eating up a list of books I must read before I turn twenty-five.

Light retires with a soporific goodnight and all that is left is a dearth of sleep,
imaginary owls and other big-eyed birds contemplating stars.
Morning will sound like breathless trees stretching new leaves,
clouds whirling, tiny winds darting through my sheets until I am grey again.
Sleep is just dust and I hate feeling filthy.

(3 hours. 3 years. A lifetime.)

1. 'and the Doctor said, "are you saying you feel guilty unless you are hungry?"
Discuss, with reference to the roles of female c haracters in the American moderns, particularly  to Plath's representation of Esther in The Bell Jar , the relevance of this quote to your adolescent development.

(10 marks)


2. Should a poet's work invariably utilise enjambment or read in sequence, allowing the poet freedom to let the poetry find it's own form?
(Candidates are encouraged to explore the source to which the question above alludes, and to formulate an original argument with an effective use of rhetorical devices to communicate it,)

(8 marks)


3. Elucidate your role as a daughter, then compare and contrast it with your role as a student. Use quotes directly taken from personal experiences and your own examples to clairfy your explanation.

(5 marks)


4. They are all looking at you and laughing at you. You are a joke. You are hallucinating and haven't slept in days. How does this make you/the reader feel and do you think this was a part of your plotline intended to elicit a particular response?

(5 marks)


5. Love is not unconditional. Discuss.

(10 marks.)


6. "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."
This famous quote by Nietzsche presents him as a nihilistic and misanthropic individual. Do you see him in this light or can you find hope in his hopeless stance? Use examples of your own suffering to corroborate your viewpoint.

(8 marks)


7. Is morality a prerequisite for appreciation of art? Are you? Are you appreciating/appreciated? Discuss.

(10 marks)


8. Calculate the 369th digit of pi as the fractal proxy to represent the infinite worlds contained witin each human being, and in doing so determine the contribution that you and the offspring you will most probably never have cannot contribute to the world shared between the infinite number of individuals posessing their own words, continuing on to deduct your own value from that of the mean value of the population considered in this infinite data set and draw up a graph to visually demonstrate the extent to which the world doesn't need you.

(15 marks)


9. Using the individual calculations formulated in question 8, derive the meaning of Y.

(5 marks)


10. Draw the shape of your sadness

(20 marks)


11. Don't you think you should have learnt by now?

(25 marks)


12. Explain what you are hoping for, and substantiate your hopes with empirical support.

*(5 marks)

we lay horizon-angle along aisles of the city,
its veneers bore the clouds as they idle awhile
in copper-bordered cobweb bundles

and rain is language, language is rain,
loosened from the tips of wine-stain tongues,
knuckle being blown or kissed by lip
lines; we trip over them all the time
or shoe-laces of feillemort-freckled boys,
never an umbrella, washed-out old news.

listen to the not-words we aren't speaking in a
shake of salt, a game of conkers, or get out of the city
and to the woodlands where, in a haze of petrichor,
you'll hear it all around on bark and leaf and then
the tinnitus of every caravan or shed.
A tin home with an iron lid to live in,
corrugated skin,

city life is wilderness but I know there is more
and wilder such, but I only half-dream of trees
carrying curses, stolen idols or heirlooms arising in
the anatomy of snakes wearing war-hoods
purely for the purpose of poetry/.

the storms that come can rattle the trees
round the courtyard into an epilepsy unflagging
and then sometimes

in my mind, flowers spit out embers petal-tooth
and lava spills onto tarmac streets.
the night knocks on the closely matched
blocks of paving stones. fireflies are out
but it looks like they'll die, their translucent wings
bring to mind an undressed volcano.

the cathartic outbreak of spiders that
that spread into a multiplication of landmines.

I.
Written a couple of years ago

For a moment she was a beat of nostalgia
disappearing
on the end of his tongue,
then misplaced- like a receipt underneath an ashtray

- or was she replaced?
He gave up smoking
and he's growing orchids now.

II.*
written for my best friend, recently, in response to a poem of his called 'i used to be his man*

Do you remember what time was like
before all of this began,
when I wasn't afraid of sleeping
and you wouldn't want to be anyone's man?

In permanent ink, written on glass
he left two words
after death:
half full.

The street where I've lived for three years until tomorrow is peaceful
and twilit clouds, more grey every day than the one before, are spinning
like ghosts interwoven around the clock tower on the corner
and meanwhile, a couple share their last kiss at a station
and meanwhile, a guitarist sings underground
and meanwhile, someone asks for help but it begins to rain.
Rain sounds. Traffic. No one listens.
Meanwhile,
women's eyes disappear,
in towards the back of their minds,
into the sky.
Meanwhile,
men count the days,
tug at their ties, a knot, a noose,
and they cry.
Quietly, someone somewhere is cutting open an arm with nail scissors.
Someone is screaming into a pillow.
Someone needs to be heard. No one listens.
We are a quiet cough in the polite throat of Fate.
We are burning up the blueprints drawn up of our stars.
The news channel roars. The mute button is switched on.
We are quiet and quiet and quiet.

Words in my head grew into my throat,
violent and teeming as weeds
but the moment they disguised themselves with petals
you uprooted them,
pulled out each thought so it wouldn't deceive,
and then

a sigh, tender, as dandelions.
Blown away with a wish.
You left me blossom and
blooming with forget-me-not.

Y.

That perfect letter.
Wishbone.
Fork in the road.
Emptied glass awaiting a refill.
If you look close enough, tiny prints of sparrows in sand.
The half of the chromosome couple half of us don't have.
A question we ask, again and again.
Second to last- almost there- in the alphabet.

Coupled with a L, and you can describe
the way in which what is done is done.

Modest X. Kiss kiss. Legs closed.
Y or N? Yes, of course.

It's a peace sign,
upside down.

Y- a Greek letter- joined the Latin alphabet after
the Romans conquered Greece
in the first of all centuries we've counted by their numerals.

Y is a double agent- a vowel, a consonant,
or both?

Before Y was given to us, we couldn't talk of someone smiling happily
or know to help someone in need quite desperately.

Before Y we couldn't ask for the answers we wanted.
I don't think we could have been happy.

but it's not worth stealing anymore
because all that glittered was never even gold
in the first place, and if there ever was a shine
it was made lacklustre with lust
and covered with rust over times that
even history books don't touch
(history repeats itself, keep eyes down,
avoid the looks, try to keep yourself from thinking
all of the men are just crooks)
and soon what you stole you see
you didn't really want that much
and soon it's getting old and your bones ache
under eyes so cold, but it's probably fake
what you thought was snow, so go
and don't make the same mistake,
don't make it twice. Did someone forget
to mention that the roads aren't going anywhere
only roundabouts back to tension,
not paved with gold? They are made of ice.

We grew the earth, grew it around us and grew into it.
We grew into pairs of shoes after pairs of shoes
and we grew into our names.
We learnt to tie the laces of our shoes
and to tie our tongues around our names,
and the names of other things, other people,
and around other people's tongues.

We planted our cultures, cultivated them,
and they blossomed into traditions
and stereotypes and generalisations and rituals.

We broke in our shoes, broke the ice,
broke our voices, broke promises.
We broke glasses, hearts and bones.

We built hierarchies, looked up, looked down, bowed down.
We broke down into dictatorships and demonstration.
We found solutions like democracy
and diplomas and delegated.

We fixed fountains and freight trains
and falling trees in the forest and faucets that leaked.
We formed partnerships, made promises,
pledged to parties for both politics and both parents.
We made marriage and then we annulled, we divorced.
We fabricated the faiths that we fed on.

We invented stopwatches, reality television,
pedicures, lampshades, philosophy,
greenhouses, dictionaries, exclusivity,
feng shui, hand-holding, ****** medication,
street art, lawsuits, lingerie, car boot sales,
snow days, karaoke, comics, psychics,
boarding schools, toast, baseball, psychiatry,
bird-watching, plaid, research, stag nights,
slasher movies, salads, and interventions.

We wanted and we wished and we waited
and we wanted for more.
We were growing faster than we invented.

We were outgrowing ourselves
and our earth
and our shoes
and our names.

We forgot what we had found and fixed and formed.
We broke down and went broke.
We are waiting to invent a new way we can fix ourselves.

Here it is.

Here is the hole in the stitches of your warmest sleeve.
Here is the emptiness of ice.
Here is the sound that only the loneliest make.

There it goes.

There is the sun, drunk on days, whirling.
There is the delirium that comes sultry with fever.
There is the aching overwhelm of blood returning.

That was the anaesthesia.
Here is the morning after.

Not sure how this one will go down but I put together the most frequently used words of late on HP and saw a definite trend so devised this:*

Leaving behind another year, a tired taste
of floating mistakes, of public raging gates,
violence exposed, awful gifts to mend a liar,
backwards hugs to choke at the level of desire.

Radio decay, nuclear energy nightmares tick
and bloom into panic and the safe feel the mental sick
until pills pass from pocket to palm
and they won't cure the nation's ills
but they caress the curse until there is calm.

The cares of the chosen ones- a company
that sees the fruits of some labour and wears a grin.
In their shirt and their tie, chosen to witness
those who laboured suffer and die, but they teach
not to notice, just follow a look to your watch with a spin-

that watch, would they give it up for a real change?
Or would they keep choosing to stay blind
in a prison of pretending, and still exchange
for the price of innocent faces wearing a scar
a piece of art just for hanging, or perhaps a new car?

When I wake up, my skin will be golden,
the wolves wont be hungry,
the wind will be sleeping
my back will lie flat against the lace trim
of a dream and my pockets
will be full to the brim with pennies
and trinkets, catching light pretty.
In the premature summer sun
they will feel heavy, but I'd never dream
of mentioning any ache
now I feel happy to know sleep from wake.

little hours, 31st July '07

the clock ticks and you count your headaches.
crickets and kisses and the sounds the rain make
have become biting.
and you are weak and hollow and waiting
     perhaps, to feel like yesterday,
at the very least,
     when you were becoming something
but because you can't think about anything but how
to be existing right now.
     you don't realise that this has no ending,
it's only the beginning.

sooner rather than later, late October, '11

this was always going to have to happen
and it has been inevitable, perhaps from square one
which was an anonymous kiss
and then became occasional, and rare, and not special,
     and the first time you said it's too soon
but you can't say it again
     because then what is the point of it all
and aren't you just wasting time?
     you realise then that sometimes it's a duty,
and you have to get it over with.

summer '12

you don't think about it like perhaps you should
and you have therapists who tap their pens in concern
when you go silent should the topic arise
and you are over it, you say, and you feel their disbelief
     but what they don't understand
is that there is no choice in that either
     and you move on because you have to- and really,
is there any other option? you live with it.

late November, '13

perhaps you should have not gone silent and said something
and thought about it more, because you've had the time
but saying you were over it never meant that you were,
only a refusal to acknowledge that it's there
     and suddenly you are not a child anymore,
and suddenly you are coming up to twenty-four,
     and since those little hours at seventeen up until now,
looking in mirrors, thinking yourself back in time
wondering much of you is missing- all that time in between
then and today, where have you been?

future*

you didn't think about what you didn't have
because you were too young to know then, and never got to learn.
     whatever was lost has been lost too long to find again
take a look at your future-
keep on hoping you'll find something or someone
who will not just want it over with,
who will have other options but choose you,
who will do more than just live with it, but love it
who will be another beginning
  one day, perhaps, this beginning will make things new
       and you keep hoping because you're weak and hollow
       waiting and because you have to.
you'll live with that.

Dust breath, blind bones, and a voice that you forgot
is growing grey, a goodbye from a whisper.
Starving for words gone missing, dreams scattered
away on waves of paper-
scattered paper-
lost thought, and it's burning.

Tongues are weak, stories left untitled
but that paper is burning
with yesterdays
and suddenly

it happens-

lips are fighting, memories filled,
old hope in new skies.

What was fading is falling for tomorrow
because the light is golden
and the waves burn clear
words that were waiting to disappear
and become unknown deep in the smoke.
The inside window was not broken.

Suddenly, all pains and panes are breaking
by the beats of poet hearts not-yet-lost,
getting back voices, breaking their insides open
to free the words yet to be written.

Writers running alone on their stories
alive for the words someday to be spoken.
Breathing clear, no smoke and dust coming in
to cloud feelings, nothing hidden, nothing blind.

Feeling all reality, all the storm and the shine,
the beauty in burning, the shine in the storm.
A poet existence- writing words that find
from the poet's heart, each beat, its own form.

There are few things comparable
to how remarkable it is to see
and understand
the way in which a closed fist
can become a held hand.

You were high as the hill you climbed in the night
up to the dog that's a tree, all bark. The birds bite-
there's a ****** of crows- don't stop to stare
Take and make bows from those that billow in my hair.
Do you know the question marks that follow all you say
can be bent into arrows? You fire away.
You never meant to be kind but your eyes shot stars
out into the skies. We both are shooting blind,
The answers we find were never ours.
There's been a ****** of crows- feather as blade.
We put away the arrows for I was afraid
I can't say for sure whether birds died in the dark
but the pure Green Man's song was in the dog tree's bark.
As the trees protect you, Green Man folds in your arm
The birds respect you. They sing, 'do no harm'.

The future. Although
I can't imagine mine, still-
day breaks, night falls. Time.

Summer

Wind chimes and the clock ticks me away.
                     I am waiting for something,
                               losing other things,
                                   like my fingers
(when I pointed at stars to try and read them)
                            and my ribs, one by one,
             (trying to hold myself upright)
I don’t know what it is I am waiting for
but it has its foreshadow in the air
felt on the outskirts of my lungs.
                and now it’s inside my lungs  
                  and all the same:
I don’t belong to myself anymore.

I want to take the batteries out of every clock
because suddenly I can feel everything dying.
Running but running out of time-
but how do you even go about a tantrum
when you'll never get what you wanted in the first place.
        I must be a child or an idiot or losing marbles
        but can't help the crying, making a fool of my face.

Autumn

Hands pull me back into my sleeves
and blood runs back into my heart.
It was not something I waited for. It was someone.
                so I placed my bet on the smallest, sanest sun,
                      but still, I gathered frost
                       and shed my light
                     until refusal words were all swallowed.
They become enslaved stars
while I am realising that those I once read
had always belonged to someone else.

Winter

Gravity rolls its eyes and asks,
‘Why do I even bother?’
The universe came in and hungry
               when it expanded
                 and everything got eaten up
              until I was left with only these parts
        that belong to him
             and belong to the night-time
                and the lock.
My mind is in ashes.#
They have already been scattered.

But there was the bet I didn’t lose.
As it turned out, somehow,
in that lost state, I didn’t wage a war
that I couldn't win. .

Spring*

Love is portioned out and put in containers
and in the freezer on the bottom shelf,
next to something I made to eat later
before I can remember.
I won’t let anything melt.
I’m saving it for summer.

You told me to look the universe right in the eye
but I don't think I'm brave enough,
not quite yet, because all I am thinking
is about what you found when you looked
and saw the nucleus, everything-
all the feral electons- around it, and
the things you once thought you could hold
slipping away from you, from the spaces
hollowed out of you, until you finally felt it:
the emptiness of space.

I have stopped retracing my steps backwards
and given up on chasing the echoes
in search of sweet nothings, epiphanies or guitar chords.
I only found everything was back to front
and the wrong way round and found hollows
where I once was, in lecture halls and hospital wards.

A list of images stuck in my mind:

- a well-made metaphor balancing precariously on the rooftop above a cortex
- asymmetry; namely, a piece of abstract art in a rectangular gilded frame, depicting three oranges in a disarray on a crumpled hectic tablecloth
- angry black stars twinkling ferociously in the periphery
- faces, sleeping or watching quietly from every direction, eyes following from the bookcase, the desk, even the blank walls
- the one clam that was not as happy as a clam is supposed to be
- a philosophy problem demanding to know if anyone saw you fall, with its broad chest, and nobody hears

Apathetic, acataleptic, anthropomorphic abstractions aided an anorectic.
Biology and botany, both broad, but bellicose blossoms bring banality.
Considered communication can conceal certain capabilities- cruelty without causality.
Delirious dreams of divination dwindle during daytime's discontinuation.
Echoing and eerie, ecclesiastical ecstasy eclipses eccentric ebullience in extroverts.
Face-to-face farewells facilitate friendships & fatigue families, familiar in fantasies.
Grace goes gardening, garnishing and ghostwriting, good god, glistening a glittery glaze over.
High, hovering, hallucinating helps habits' hardening and hiding in hazy harmony.
Introduced ideologies, indeed, illustrate ingenuity in idiosyncratic individuals I impersonate.
Jumbled and juiced juxtaposition of jitterbug and jazz justifies jovial jumpiness- jeez.
Karaoke on ketamine, a kettleful of kerosene, kindling kisses, knocking knees.
Last but not least, the lawless laying low are liberated, later learning large life lessons.
Mainly markedly meticulous, maids manage the meagerness of mess, mollifying mothers.
Namely narcotics, not either naivety nor narrow-mindedness, necessitates a nosedive.
Obligations to obtain n occupation only obfuscates obvious obstacles, and oftentimes objectivity.
Pervasive paradoxes parody people's past perceptions, predominantly persistent patterns.
Quick-witted quarrelers query quantifiable qualities, quotations never quivering or quiet
Rickety, raggedly radios ring with ragtime, rainbows remain a rarity.
Sick, staggering students suddenly spill, saucer-eyed, onto streets and scatter.
Thrown together, the tank top, the trousers, tempted and tongue-tied them, totally.
Underestimation ultimately undid the understanding of ubiquitous underachieving underdogs.
Variability in validity and value variance violates the valuer's viewpoint very vividly.
Wandering war-torn wastelands, wayfarers weaken, wait for water, wearily wonder at weather
Xenophobic xylophonist's x-ray wouldn't show his xanthopsia, xeroxed in the xanthic Xs of his eyes.
Your yawning and yelling is yellowing your youthful yearnings for yesterdays.
Zigzagging, zany zookeepers zestfully zone out with zoom lenses, to see from A-Z.

Trying to make meaning out of everyday matters
and these moments seems to mean so much to me.

Firstly, I wonder if dust matters to the dark
or city lights to stars
when they compete for its space,
and take up enough to make stars invisible,
unseen from the windows and streets
of London's nights.

And those streets, do they matter to the shoes treading them?
Does is matter to the street, being beneath them?
And I wonder whether our shoes ever matter to our feet.

What does it matter? Any of this?
Does it matter if it does?
What do I matter?
Do I matter much to anything?
Maybe I do, even to to matters I address in writing.

What makes matter out of anything?
Is our matter even real at all?
The matter of reality and wondering about it
can make matters worse
because if we are ideas instead of matter
some might conclude that this idea-life has no meaning
while others might will shrug and say it doesn't matter.

When I make make matter out of moments
by making books to fill with memories
and to document time
is there anything the matter with time I spend doing that?
Really, does it matter, either way?
We talk of it so often
but how much does time matter anyway?

What is the matter of me- what am I made of,
and is there any meaning to that?

What is the matter with me?
Everything mattering so much to me I suppose-
perhaps it's that.

I really really love it when you look at someone
and happen to have a smile on your face and suddenly
they smile back at you, not because they know why
or because they want to communicate anything more
but because you are happy and that is enough
to make them happy too.