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.

The midnight tides wafted between cityblocks
and shops, rolling the wheels of each bus,
and we stood as if in an orchard
with the moon's light gently rippling on us
filtered through leaves of apple treetops.
We couldn't unstick from our heads
(or one another's) words of
the same song on repeat.
First we both caught it, then caught
ourselves out kissing. Repeat.
There is a symphony rumbling beneath my feet.

In everything, there is some orchestrating
taking place in a place we've not been before,
we never thought to. Everything is little more
than what dangles on the pieces
that the invisible orchestra will play
- an underground score,
day rising and falling away,
open window, closing door, and
I am listening, waiting.

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.

They shall fight
(them)
on the beaches and with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air,
(we shall)
never surrender,

and they fought and never gave in because we will never stop
because finding peace is like locating Nirvana,
as Kerouac said,

then we set our alarms to the atomic clock
and on the radio they tell of a President,
some well-spoken man with a halo effect, I'm sure friendly as any,
ordering for the bomb to be dropped
because he was always meant to

Millions disappear, living people there and then not,
because it was always going to happen
and people can point fingers
How could they? How could it be?
Because it's you and me.

We are ripples in a series that create city-wrecking waves.
We drown each other.
We are not destructive because we are evil.
We are you and me.

Our parents, our stranger fellow commuters, our heroes, our enemies,
our fiction, all conspiring, and it all adds to this.

Our wars- we are all soldiers and all politicians and all victims
of a lot of all our shared bad decisions
and all the consolations
like the great loves and great distances.

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.

There is more to be said
in the wordless breaths of sleep
than one supposes

when the breaths are sharing space
between two dreamers
touching noses.

We'll stay at home, together but alone
but for the mornings that crumple on the floor,
like waste paper printing headlines on the ceiling.
We'll stay behind the door, afraid to wander
in uncertainty, parallel to busy roads,
the voiceless excursions,
the plans for long soporific days in expensive homes
and fresh-aired kitchens filled with frying pans.
Without direction, the answers all lie behind.
Ask me the question; I'll try and make up my mind.

Elsewhere the city men all crowd together,
either not talking or talking about the weather.

The clarity in eyes that bless the walls,
The understanding in a dull gaze on the walls,
sprawling time packed up into a box or a fist,
hurrying on tiptoes everywhere the sunlight falls,
tripped up in the garden, an inevitable descent,
and oblivious to the clock-face, the crimson crepuscule,
disappeared again into the rushes. No one knows where it went.

But it doesn't matter what's been done.
The eyes, still and still clear, don't recognise time passed,
don't realise what they may have missed.
It will end in the same place that it had begun,
nerves tight around the second try as tight as the last,
no space for thoughts of new starts or possible debris,
not one thought for broken hearts, for the people we cannot be.
We'll share this absent-mindedness, between
the clutter of conviction and certainty,
and practicality and potentiality,
and other matters on which we can agree

Elsewhere the city men, all crowded together,
are not talking, or talking about the weather.

And if we are going to fall apart, then we will do.
Our facades will fracture, our fallen faces,
our lost grip on graces, our black and our blue, our lost places
in the queue. We create words for the fears we cannot name.
And although our landscape erodes with the years,
the cage is the same. The scenery is new,
but what we call history will happen again,
so how can there be anyone but ourselves to blame?
Break and build, create and burn,
the pride follows the fall when pride has taken its turn.

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.

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.

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.

I broke every mirror trying to climb backwards
in time and into a world where I attacked him.

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.

Love like a butcher knife. carved out, and blindly awake
as the star alive in the sky. pointing north.
A cadillac with a massacred paint job, bad orchestras,
hollow at the heart. Good riddance. you hear that?
We can cultivate careful flowers and preserve hands
like clay or lake water; delineate what I know -
all the missed calls, together trying to suspend grief.
I liked that version best. On the day before the war I woke
to forget safe, forget someday, to forget all I have done or can do.

Take memory of us as children, pale backs to the open air,
unhinged and split down to the unsolved sum of their parts.
Language is out of whispers, out of dental floss, out of spines
and I want it gone. the gossip of eyes. Your face healing,
becoming wider, slicker, something peculiar, mystifying.
Chipped paint, my broken toes- here, eeriness is terrifying
and irresistible. We’re made into animals, into streets
then shadows, our ghosts finally unravelling in gilded seams.
The sun creeps down haunting myself from within,
heart yawning open, wider with each passing moment,
your empty promises of bones or something like that.
and your hands open, larger each time twisting away.
shuddering yellow as butter, as wheat field sadness,
right there in a parallel universe where this isn’t quite natural.

We were sheltered in spiderwebs, rundown by motels
with blasted neon. My brain has become a fuzzy blank.
I am sick of cries from the mouths of birds being poached,
colossal grief in the sky, grey slabs of meat, banality, lawyers,
a gesture, a mouth bruised for air, the thing you feel
teasing at the sutures, the faraway planet. We never get it,
maybe something close, but always something else:
a variable, some otherworldly energy blast from a hero’s eyes
and the high sinister jagged moon looking down on night
demanding that it hides different versions of itself.

We recited stories of dragons everyone knows and pretends not to.
The only thing I know is to be gentle, to be flaky, and too quiet.
There's floral wallpaper in a steamed up bathroom
and this sadness - the kind of fear of seclusion, window
on a ruinous heart, carrion catcher, sleep in the pits of reddened 
eyes.
contaminating poetry about love and bicycles, that 1920’s echo
in your empric mouth. I remember the laughter of people long gone,
an old whisper to an old friend, “Shhh, don’t ***** them."

Fear is not one to reason with. Time zones in clumsy prayer.
How the mondays folded in on  birds, my willingness to spill blood
at every opportunity. Don't think about faraway fragile nests
and the whole dizzying unfair gentleness of it all.
It's 5 AM and what’s left is the delirium to pry dawn open.
An evanescence of being. Short-lived, sweaty. a shadow to carry
though it's smitten loud and an endless maw of your affection.
Suddenly, it’s summer. Suddenly, I’m unremarkable.
My heart getting weighty with the demolition of stars.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Words of warning for the future:
if you see it coming, when you see it coming
usually only when he tells you it is coming
(so keep watchful, open your eyes, your mind)
set yourself on fire and choke air
and set ablaze your surroundings should he come closer,
throw flames farther, burn reasons for him to be brave-
As you choke and he runs
from your signals of smoke
keep in mind that you are really keeping him in mind,
nevermind the cinders burning
hollows in, ash promises of love that you crave
and you know you do, in the trail he left behind
- all the trouble for him that it will save.

Sometimes,
sometimes I scream instead of breathing

and it takes my breath

and it makes me stop

wondering what could be so frightening
that I am confusing breath with screaming.

Perhaps it's just some times.

It steals lungfuls from me
sometimes,
but doesn't everybody get scared
sometimes?

Ophelia enters, playing the lute
to share a song that she wrote
about being sick to death of being good
but keeps hitting the wrong note.

The Lady of Shallot is mute.
She has been since she failed to float
but she etched her song into the wood
that made up her grave and her boat.

I.
Why do you always speak in twos
in twos?

II.
I speak to myself in the third person,
listen from the
first time I
heard
the first time.

III.
Spoke = I'm stupid = shut up = out of breath.

IV.
I've been holding my tongue for years
everything aches unspeakable aches
that I- and I- and
you-

V.
Mistakes.

VI.
"I wish you were somebody else."
Words can't be unsaid.
"It's all inside your head."
I wish it was, someone else instead,
her instead, her instead,
someone else, someone else said.

VIII.
Always skip the stanza seven.
Couplet in elegy of cousin, in heaven.

IX.
Speak now, or, forever hold your peace.
I chose to hold forever, not knowing
it was all I spoke for.

X.
"Keep quiet, until then."
Hold my breath until when?
Out of breath by stanza ten.

XI.
You must have me mistaken,

XII.
No words.

The night knows all my secrets.
Sometime plucked out from in-between
illusory stars where there were no dreams
during that night just past,
I misplaced myself-
again.
This morning I find fragments
scattered about-
don't remember
anything breaking-
kitchen counter, bathroom tiles,
stairs, crumples on the carpet.
Never in one piece.
All I would want is to find tiny bits,
tiny pieces, in characters
and in phrases imprinted
upon the pages upon pages
of a thousand books
until I'm whole-
again?
Just keep reading.
One day all the nights will have my story to tell.

Suddenly I don't need mirrors to tell me
(my hands aren't my own anymore, anyway,
not since I looked down and saw stolen gloves)
I know without reflections just how
I'm worn out, chewed out, drowned out,
called out, strung out, caught out,
spun out without a shadow of a doubt (but for self).
I'd rather be invisible than a body that I don't know
or afraid of what nobody else can see,
so I become as close to a whisper as I can be,
turn up other volumes to abrasive, stay discreet,
but it's then I hear them- their voices, hear her speak
amid the clatter, scratching out of the radio.
So even if the world did fall out from under my feet,,
I'm still here, not tired out yet- I can just listen
to anything I believe I hear in this moment- that's all I know.

A stumble first, one of many, but then the thin-thin-
thinking-ridiculous-manic-hideous-and-forgot-
ten times as bad as it used to be, as it was be-
four times as loud as your in-
tension headaches, and those other pain-
fulfilling nothing so you really can't com-
plain and simple, nothing all that spec-
shall we try again, once over? Try a sec­ond t-
I'm not enough, I don't think, to  be some-
one stumble, this one time, another time, and it's one of many.

There are frozen birds in the garden,
trains stranded in the downpour,
flowers missing from the bouquet,
boots left standing by the door.

There are papers soaked on the front step,
well wishes clinging to the trees,
a sort of pleading in every word 'no'
and consent absent in every 'please'.

I don't like this time of year-
summer's breath down my neck,
chased up sleepless from shorter nights,
tired and dry,
hands that were shaken by day,
the one before
still aching and sore-

day breaks to brittle hours-

sunlight strips, sandpaper scratches,
at the corner of an eye
and all the clutter catches
at the throat's back, dust kicked up
from summer's track-

day breaks the thirsty flowers.

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.

I.
Let me walk you home. Come on, the way you came
is not the only way back, and aren’t you just a little boring
if all you’re doing is going back and forth?
We could all drown tomorrow. We could all die.
Why don’t you just let your shoulders drop
lie down, lie, lie, and so will I. Wow,
you have no idea  just what you are worth.
Now smile. I am falling. In love? Falling for sure.
Lie here, you look vulnerable, I can’t leave
so I’ll stay with you, oh love love, for a while.

II.
Drink this. Look at my eyes and how the grow wide
at just the sight of your smile. To be honest, it’s not there-
what I care about. You know what that is?
I bet you don’t, don’t you think? Have a drink.
Stop talking, please. Your smile and your mind
are just so mesmerising, but I don’t want you to think.
I don’t want what’s on your face or in your head.
I’m hungry. I’d like to eat you. No?
Well, until you change that brain of yours
I’ll keep you all wrapped up and treat you
so well, you’ll be so safe and confined instead.

III.
Why the crying? What are you crying about?
Hurt? Do you really think people hurt other people?
That brain of yours. You’re just a sea made of tears
and a lot of little locked doors. Getting hurt,
that’s a choice. You’re weak, that’s why
you should listen to me sing louder than you speak
and you can follow my voice. Follow it
and I’ll follow you to your home. Silly, little,
silly, fiddle, little fears. I’ll kick all the doors down
and confiscate you. Odd vulnerable little thing
shouldn’t be alone. I’ll make sure you don’t drown.

IV.
I’m not saying it’s the end of the road
or the beginning of one. I was just a big smile, really.
A big curved way around from one eye to the other.
Did you see the rest of me? You saw what you wanted
to believe. I rescued you. You trapped me
and so now we’re both out stranded, very far.
I know you thought you knew the way back home
but odd, little, vulnerable thing- ready for confiscation
in exchange for what, confirmation?
Do you even know where you are?

(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)

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.

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

Boating on the canal made me notice summer's return for the first time
and immediately I missed winter. The way my head  tilted forward,
spine protruded. I spat fire and ash, a small dragon;
my skin sagged like a coat on a cold blue hanger.

One morning after I'd spent the night with a boy,
while he showered I saw a skeleton in his wardrobe mirror
so ugly in loose underwear, the darkened hair lank,
skin grey and sunk to bone and it all disappeared
when turned to one side.
How could he share a bed with that? I thought then,
seeing clear how I existed for the reality of others,
as a shell, offensive to the eye, a skull-head.
-
The voices came not long after,
and in clinic bathrooms
a coyote hungry stare,
the silence of September.
For thousands of days I had not felt my body.
In my mouth grew ulcers and teeth died.
,
I really did stare at the sun and started drinking water again,
Slowly started eating again until I managed pasta and pie.
My body now- I think I'm touching my arm but instead feel thigh.
There are the bones of an elephant
gravely buried inside me.
There  are phantom limbs attached,
they belong to soldiers who shared beers
in Vietnamese hideouts,
they belong to the widows who lose their wedding rings
down the garbage disposals.

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.
"

Sometimes it's black marble, igneous rockets into endless dark and space.
and then sometimes it's an echo, resonating shades of black,
the frown on a clock's face, or the absent moon,
the illusory balloon, the ball that you chip away, also black,
while following the garden paths,
which don't meet but collide,
and the dice that are rolled ricochet,
echoing back the old days-

what could have been, what might have been?
the answers stand either side of the street,
face to face, but neither seen.

The clouds circle round you, windows blink in sunlight,
glaring, the obvious that hits you loud and with spite
and then the ground beneath you shakes,
the crowd are all staring when everything breaks,
you're a pile of glass, the same way everyone else is debris
of earthquakes: a fist of lost teeth, the split in twine after the fray,
the twist in time, and mistakes made by the billion everyday
on each lifetime's path, and every path at some point meets.
They may, for a time, treat you like hot sheets,
like what makes up their headaches. Be brave-
you may, for a time, forget all reasons to laugh.

Love knows no boundaries, they say. All of which I'm sure is
that it doesn't know how to say please, or any painless ways to go,
to find the exit sign, yet on the contrary, it enters with ease.
When you walk alongside it you cross every line.
It’s not the task that’s small as they tell us it will be.
You feel little and funny until you find yourself
more than twice on edge of a line that drew
the rainbows you saw above the war,
you want to go elsewhere for more,
see light-shows in the sky, explosions, and
the roar of the Earth applauding, a deep
rumbling sound, like bones and rocks and the
walls of Pompeii crumbling down all around.
But go back home, go back home to before
you forgot what love poems were about or for,
before the cats all got out, no need to lock the door.

Remembering him for a while today,
remembering just how much of me he had loved
when I didn't. The things he had seen
when I didn't see the distances he went.
To the moon and back,
it could have been.

To the moon and back.
Just how much of an effort
he'd gone to just to meet my hand
across the expanse is hard to believe.
Imagine the distance between
the moon and my side of his bed.
How difficult it must have been to breathe
how arid and how vacant
it must have felt. He never said.

I'd like to ask him what it was like,
trying to get to me-
ask about the journey
but we don't speak anymore, and anyway
I know how tiring it was, loving me.

Last year, Neil Armstrong died.
They scattered his ashes over the sea.
Somewhere between the moon and tide
there is something legendary

It was 1972, the last time a man on the moon
set his human footprint in.
Since then, no one has dared go back,
and instead send lunar rovers
to explore its cratered skin
and send in the satellites that send us answers
to the questions that we have about space
and do the learning for us.
Do the loving in our place.

I suppose it is safer that way.
To stay on earth and look at the moon
and admire it, from far away.
In the arms of whoever you can love,
with the expense of something like intimacy
surely it's better to be able to love
right up close, across smaller gaps
than the span of a galaxy.

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).

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.

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.

Didn't I give the warning? The Danger-Lies-Ahead
and the Do Not Cross and the Turn Back Now
(if you know what's good for you)
but as I warn, I watch, and I prove myself right,
ignoring every warning, running
straight into coming traffic- and there was a  red light,
I remember there was, in retrospect
and looking at the wake of catastrophe,
I can at least say that I was correct.

Still, flat hands
tick time away,
filling up boxes,
making empty space.

I don't know this form
and who it is for,
only to still, and to stay,
and to wait and to count-

the passing clouds
each passing hope-  

hope for time, hope none is waste,
hope whatever it is was worth the wait-

but then there is more time
and there is more space.

It's a long time to wait
and still to see
only one still, flat clock face.

she smells like honeyed storms –
meaning: we are all a mess of light,
we are bitter and raw; a drunk train,
a daring locomotive, a dream ship;
we are also summers and bedsheets
and nectarines and rain, old maps,
deep with creases, but also brittle,
paper like moth wings, easily torn;
we are fast like wax, lazy like roses,
full of madness and malice, of motion
like clockwork; we keep those faces
and hands because we are not in time;
we are in-understandable –
meaning: we are all in a mess of infinite,
we are limitless; an acceleration,
an unwinding expansion, a runaway,
a struggle; we are all in a mess;
we are the holy that you will not find
in a temple or church or stained glass
or ancient passage; you will not see us
in any book, or on walls or at windows
or along skylines or across seascapes;
no, we will not be findable at all –
meaning: perhaps, just this; perhaps,
that is the way of the metaphor.

Going to and from somewhere not far,
I pass a couple of children on scooters
shouting, Ice Cream!
from across the street.

When I dare to raise my eyes to look out
instead of down at my shoes as I walk
I instantly see faces of strangers,
crying- Eyesore. I know they are right.

But nobody is selling what I want.
It does not seem producible.

It is not a house on a corner, the size and charm
of a dormitory, with window treatments.
It is not those shoes my sister likes with the red soles
or sunglasses my mother likes with the diamonds
or the endorphins or the caffeine or the career ladder.
I do not covet Ice Cream, the biggest or best thing,
and I don’t have romance for pipe dreams either.

That is someone's else’s dream,
unexceptional, formless, but probably fulfilling.
I hope I am never fulfilled.

In my hand there’s a digital map that orients me
in a roundabout. I am a breathing oscillating blue dot.
I can’t get anywhere from here.

Why do I not want Ice Cream or summer dresses?
Why do I not want to be out on the town, meeting new people?
Why do I not participate?

I watch people on television, traveling.
I am so scared.

I listen to Neil Armstrong radioing from the moon.

I scan the transcripts over and over of
Earhart circling Howland Island:
We are unable to hear you
to take a bearing.

Intermittent despair- what can you make from that?

I look up to see the sun caught in the tail end trail
of a jet. I wave:
Do you hear my signals.
Please acknowledge.

And then all my thoughts are frostwork and blue
with parachutes and windows on walls
and I am filled with clouds and I can’t see.

We cannot see you.

Now I know I begin and end with images,
how far across this field can my voice spread out,
extend and reach in singing, in screaming?

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.

When she understood her first game of chess.
When she was runner up.
When she swam in the sea fearlessly.
When she heard the words I Love You struggle from his mouth.
When she landed on the ice and didn’t fall.
When she shut the door and was brave.
When she was sad because someone else was sad.
When she was happy because someone else was happy.
When she fell asleep on the train and travelled far beyond what she knew.
When she went elsewhere and came back.
When she learnt to identify fox gloves and two distinct birds.
When she read about what Katy Did because she’d been told to, and what Katy Did Next because she wanted to.
When she felt beautiful and invisible and good at his birthday party.
When she got an upgrade on an aeroplane and fell asleep with all the leg room.
When she broke a bone in a playground in Egypt at night.
When she protested for peace.
When she photographed them smiling.
When she walked calmly across a stage.
When she made a statement about double standards.
When she was eloquent at the dinner table.
When she decided to let it go.
When she said goodbye and looked back.
When she said no and meant no.

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.

They never spoke about it but it happened, and thoughts
of what happened pushed into the soil only grew heavier and dirtier
when they pretended to strip the past of its indelible importance
and pretended that their early nights were the product
of productive days and not prescriptions, but they never had dreams
and they never took flight and they never felt the rush of wind
on their faces and their faces did not even feel theirs.
They stilled in their silence until silence sounded like a soundtrack.
If they had thought about it, they might have seen the faintest promise
of closure, enough to try for, enough to cry for. Cold and concrete
and the cure perhaps as painful as the poison itself but to come to a close
nonetheless. Instead they chose to tell themselves no closure was needed
for no wounds had been left open for nothing had wounded them,
and saw this as stoicism, as strength but it was strength mistaken,
in actuality it was slavery, and the bad guys got away,
and the robbers got rich, and what went around never would come back around
with some comeuppance. Their paths redirected, their plans and aspirations
and passions scribbled beneath a blanket of white noise they thought
was safety. They never again would take off their shoes to dance
or light candles in the summer or make someone's day by offering a smile
or offer anything much at all. Why would they, when they got nothing back?
A tombstone in every doorway, a bitterness in every bite,
a listlessness in every kiss and in that listless life, one big lie-
I am whole, I can be what I want to be because this never happened to me.
They throw their heads back and then they laugh. They watch Forrest Gump
with dry faces. They sometimes have nightmares like those of children,
of crocodiles and claws under the bed. When they wake, that means it's a new day
and that means nothing now. Tell me you know I exist, says the smallest voice,
a whisper, an echo, from somewhere buried so immeasurably deep under stones,
a voice that had been ****** to death. Tell me you'll save me, that
you'll pull me out of here, that you will give me a chance to survive,
I'm all bloodied up and broken but because of that I'm stronger now.
I know the meaning of strong, and I know that it all means something.
If they ever catch a breath of that small voice, they turn up the radio,
take another pill and swallow, change the channel to a game show,
check their phones and when the curtains are drawn, throw more stones.