‘And so a secret kiss, brings madness with the bliss…’

I am a man of obsessions. Of subtle sly passions that grip me for longer than I ever believe they could, passions I do not realise are there still until many years later they quietly leave me. You’d think I’d have learnt by now. You’d have thought.

There is a fragile memory in me that if anything is than this is the only example of sudden and instantaneous love. A love, not a lust, for it endured and would not die or wither or fade and only quietly, in its own unforgiving time would it leave me. And because everything of any worth to me empties itself into words I wrote that moment down. Two poems. The second penned is the only one of mine that I remember people calling my best work, something different and light and beautiful. I called it ‘Intermezzo’ because that was what it was. I still don’t know what I meant by that. And lying there in black and white are words that state a recognition that this could never be. ‘…the feeling of a hand/before it all/before it…’ Crisp snow, a giving, an opening, gentle teethmarks, a bloom in darkness. ‘What was that?’ ‘It was what it was.’ It took until perhaps only a month or two ago before I stopped loving ‘The flutter of your eyelash/silverscreendreamer’. That memory is from September 2008.

If you figure this out silverscreendreamer then I don’t mind. I don’t fear you asking me about it, I don’t worry it will frighten you because something tells me you’ll understand if be perhaps a little bit surprised. I no longer love you. I still respect you and treasure you existence as a pearl of this universe but I do not love you as I did.

And now it comes again. That same sly kind of love. Another night. Another memory.

‘Intermezzo’ is adored elsewhere but the other poem, the first, has always captured that memory of her better. It never gained a title, but then perhaps it didn’t need one. And so I ask again –

…are you?
the warmth returning
giving life
in from the cold
are you?
only
the darkness of closed eyes
writhing in the
two heart beats
in from the cold

echolight

I type this in the white pale glow of my screen in an otherwise dark room at the ungodly hour of 00:39. I feel more focused and fresh than I have almost all day. I want to write something because I don’t want to waste the energy, the clarity, the mindset.

I want to talk about what it will be like not seeing The Devil, my lover, until December. Perhaps I should say my current lover, or one of my lovers. Perhaps not. But I know what it will be like. It will be strange and haunting moments like this in the middle of the night when I think of her. There is no way to capture the other kind of intensity that I’ve found so often being around her can be like unless it happens. I can talk about it, but unless it’s there, in me, in you dear reader, in this moment now, it’s empty. Perhaps that’s why I can feel so detached, this other strange intensity. I know one thing though – I will seek out that feeling wherever I can. We both will. It’s what we do. Seek out the best that we chemical scum have to offer in the electric light. Run screaming, howling, under stars, over slick, wet sand. Feel the water of the docks wash against naked skin. Reach out to others who live inside the madness of atoms and strip them back to apes with mouth and fingers, “because we know and we can say it now, we can say it now, because the sun is never ever coming up.”

Goodnight.

Brewery of Beggars

An eight minute jazz number by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Chaos from order and wonderous, beautiful madness. This is what I am waiting for.

I leave for university in just over a fortnight. Whenever I’m not in direct contact with someone restlessness takes hold of me by the throat. I feel as if the house is empty and I am inside that emptiness. Books lie half read, I add sporadic lines to my writing, I desperately seek human contact. It’s only been a few days since I felt more manicaly alive than ever. But I know this restlessness, I’ve been here before, and every time is worse. Perhaps I’m realising at last that my life will change. Or perhaps, and this I think more likely, I’m very aware of that, that in fact my life has been changing, I’ve been changing, and now this lull leaves me wanting it again.

What is more frightening? The thought that the world is chaos, background noise and fundermental madness? Or that there is a huge vast mathematical order to everything utterly beyond your control?
It doesn’t matter. Just let me get out there, I beg of you, and drink myself to death on all this life.