What is Wrong with these Words….

Storm in a tea cup, overreaction or side-issue are rapports that some people could easily throw around about one incident that is over a week old: a small icicle in comparison with the murder of 49 people that sparked. The fiasco I'm talking about, now a few weeks old was the fiasco in which Owen Jones in a discussion on Sky News walked out because his fellow presenters Julia Hartley-Brewer and Mark Longhurst. Summed up briefly the walk-out point was when the two other panellists according to Jones would predominantly not concede that the attack that had just happened was an attack on LGBT people. For sake of context and people judging for themselves the full exchange is reproduced below:

• Owen Jones: “At the end of the day, this was a homophobic hate crime as well as terrorism, and it has to be called out… It is one of the worst atrocities committed against LGBT people in the western world for generations, and it has to be called out.”
• Presenter: “Well, it’s something that’s carried out against human beings, isn’t it, no matter what their…”
• Owen Jones: “No! No… This has to be called out for what it is; this was an intentional attack on LGBT people.”
• Presenter: “On the freedom of all people to try and enjoy themselves as Bataclan was.”
• Owen Jones: “Excuse me! Can we just explain? You don’t understand this because you’re not gay, ok? So just listen…”
• Presenter: “Whether I’m gay or not has no reflection on the fact this person killed…”
• Julia Hartley-Brewer: “No, I don’t think that you have ownership of horror of this crime because you’re gay.”
• Owen Jones: “Can I just say that I find this astonishing?”
• Julia Hartley-Brewer: “I’m not Jewish, and I’m not gay, and I’m not French, but I’m still equally horrified by these crimes.”
• Pointing at headline on the Telegraph (“Isil wages war on gays in West”) Presenter: “Now, you share that view that this was deliberately targeted on one part of the community rather than the freedom to enjoy yourself, no matter what your sexual orientation is.”
• Owen Jones: “What are you talking about? This is…I’m trying to understand the point you’re making. This was a deliberate attack on LGBT people in an LGBT venue. It was a homophobic terrorist attack. Do you not understand that? It’s not some abstract kind of, he picked a club out of nowhere – he picked a club because it was full of people he regarded as deviants. That’s why he attacked the club.”
• Julia Hartley-Brewer: “I think part of the issue is, ok, this is a hate crime, this is an act of terrorism, all accepted, it was an attack on gay people, absolutely, it was horrific, however my guess is this man will probably be as horrified by me as a gobby woman as he would… genuinely, genuinely, this is the thing, we don’t know right now. We can speculate, but we don’t know how much of this is motivated by just his homophobia, whether that in any way is related to his religion…
• Owen Jones: “We heard from his own father about his revulsion. Why are we trying to deflect?”
• Presenter: “…I’m now going to quote from the Telegraph is saying: ‘Mateen’s father said his son, a US citizen of Afghan descent, may have targeted the gay community…’”
• Owen Jones: “May have? He did! Why are you saying this?”
• Julia Hartley-Brewer: “‘After seeing two men kissing in Miami some months ago. He may have been angered by many other things since then.”
• Owen Jones: “I’m sorry, I just find this the most astonishing thing I’ve ever been involved in on television. If he’d walked into a synagogue and massacred dozens of Jewish people, you wouldn’t be saying what you’re saying now. You would be talking about it as an antisemitic attack. This was a deliberate attack on LGBT people, this was a deliberate attack on the LGBT community, this bizarre attempt to deflect…”
• Presenter: “It’s not bizarre. We are trying to draw parallels in terrorist attacks on people who are being attacked whether they are enjoying rock music in Paris, whether they are gay people in Florida enjoying a night out.”
• Owen Jones: “This was an attack on LGBT people. This was a homophobic attack.”  
• Owen Jones: “I’ve had enough of this; I’m not having it.” [Exits Centre Stage]   

On June 12, 2016 Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse nightclub in orlando Florida, a LGBTQA+ venue with predominantly Latin-American regulars.   On June 12, 2016 Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida, an LGBT nightclub with predominantly Latin-American or Latix as it is called, regulars.  He then proceeded to massacre forty-nine people. The conversation between Owen Jones and the other panelists above might seem frivolous in comparison, but it is worth analysing the above words and the context of the world in which they are uttered. Both Jones and Hartley-Brewer have since issued their own follow-up statements on what happened: Her is here, her article is here.    In her response Hartley-Brewer points out that she says "it was an attack on gay people, absolutely, it was horrific, however my guess is this man will probably be as horrified by me as a gobby woman as he would...genuinely, genuinely, this is the thing." In her article she also claims "so which part of those statements suggests I didn't think the crime was a homophobic crime? Anyone Anyone at all?" Going back a little, Owen Jones whether it was in this exchange or in his follow-up article has never specifically accused her or Mark Longhurst of homophobia: what he has written about which is not much better is that 'On Sky News last night, I realised how far some will go to ignore homophobia.' Some distinction here, not much but it doesn't bode well in someones favour if there response is fundamentally inaccurate.   Returning to the above script it is worthwhile going through the list of statements that prompted Owen to walk out. Without the responses: 

• “Well, it’s something that’s carried out against human beings, isn’t it, no matter what their…”
• “On the freedom of all people to try and enjoy themselves as Bataclan was.”“Whether I’m gay or not has no reflection on the fact this person killed…”
• “I think part of the issue is, ok, this is a hate crime, this is an act of terrorism, all accepted, it was an attack on gay people, absolutely, it was horrific, however my guess is this man will probably be as horrified by me as a gobby woman as he would… genuinely, genuinely, this is the thing, we don’t know right now. We can speculate, but we don’t know how much of this is motivated by just his homophobia, whether that in any way is related to his religion…
• “No, I don’t think that you have ownership of horror of this crime because you’re gay.”
• “I’m not Jewish, and I’m not gay, and I’m not French, but I’m still equally horrified by these crimes.”
• “…I’m now going to quote from the Telegraph is saying: ‘Mateen’s father said his son, a US citizen of Afghan descent, may have targeted the gay community…’”
• “‘After seeing two men kissing in Miami some months ago. He may have been angered by many other things since then.”
• “It’s not bizarre. We are trying to draw parallels in terrorist attacks on people who are being attacked whether they are enjoying rock music in Paris, whether they are gay people in Florida enjoying a night out.”

With the omission of Owen Jones' responses, I will now deal with each one of them. Most of which say something about the extent to which people will 'go to ignore homophobia' but they also say something about the nature of the media and it's own very narrow narratives: 

• Human beings: To my knowledge no one in the room had brought up the idea they were not human beings.  It was also not why they were murdered. 
• This is simply bizarre: the contention point was simply intention. Omar Mateen could have easily targeted another club in an imitation of what took place in the Bataclan club. If Omar Marteen had wanted to imitate that, he could have picked numerous heterosexual bars in Florida to carry out his killings: he did not he chose a specifically LGBT one.
• Mark appears here not to understand what Owen Jones has just said. This response came to the statement "you don't understand this because your not gay, ok? So just listen...." The point being that is easier to ignore the toile of homophobia if you happen to be heterosexual. Not that it renders you incapable of compassion for any human beings that don't your kind of sexuality. How Mark's heterosexuality has anything to do with why Omar Mateen did what he did, you'd have to ask Mark. More likely the statement was promptly by the need to get the conversation back to a discussion of one-dimensional terrrorism  not something specific, which is what it was. Again why not simply murder any other group of people somewhere else? 
• This Julia's sticking point, that she adamantly clings to in her article that she clings to in her article has many colours. It is correct she says it was a 'homophobic attack' it is the following words where the denial starts to creep in. Omar Mateen had been revealed to be a misogynist and a man who routinely was violent towards towards his wife. But that was not being refuted, and it was not int his instance a group of women who he had murdered. Drawing on a list of hypotheticals of people he might want to equally kill or that he equally hated was about distancing the reporting from the fact it was a homophobic hate crime. That it can be other things too wasn't being denied It also worth bearing in mind Owen Jones doesn't believe there can't be multiple reasons  to as he puts it was 'both a terrorist attack and a homophobic attack on LGBT people' or 'it is possible for an atrocity to be more than one thing at the same time.'      
• Ownership: Again a change of subject. He hadn't mentioned it. Or in the words of Owen Jones: 'This is not about lGBT people taking ownership of the pain and anguish. People of all sexual orientations have wept over the is massacre, and all communities should unite unite in grief. It is highly likely that straight people died in the atrocity. When the neo-Nazi terrorist David Copeland detonated a nail bomb in the Admiral Duncan gay pub in 1999, one of the fatalities was a straight pregnant woman, having a drink with her husband and her gay friends. LGBT people are part of the winner community, and LGBT people and their straight friends party in LGBT venues. But this was a deliberate attack on a LGBT venue and LGBT people. According to Omar Mateen's father, the reportedly Islamic State-supported terrorist had expressed revulsion at the sight of two men kissing. His co-workers have described his anti-gay comments. Omar Mateen could have chosen many clubs, full of people laughing and living, but he chose a LGBT venue. This was homophobia as well as terrorism. It is not enough to simply condemn violence: we have to understand what it is and why it happened.' 
• It wasn't Jewish or French people who were attacked. People having the capacity to be equally appalled by all  atrocities is a wonderful thing, what has this that got to do with the conversation? 
• "I'm now going to quote from the Telegraph.. is saying: 'Mateen's father said his son, a US citizen of Afghan descent may have targeted the gay community..." Unless Mark was to go onto to say something else how is that not homophobia-denial? May have? Was there still some ambiguity....... 
• Omar Mateen may have been angered by many things in his life but he had just killed forty-nine people in an LGBTQ bar because it was an LGBTQ bar. It was first and foremost that reason why he did what he did. It was that and only that Owen Jones was trying to get them to understand.
• The final caveat says other things that are not exclusively to with the denial of homophobia: “It’s not bizarre. We are trying to draw parallels in terrorist attacks on people who are being attacked whether they are enjoying rock music in Paris, whether they are gay people in Florida enjoying a night out.” In one respect some respect this is not bizarre at all. In the world of the media it is not bizarre to draw parallels but they must remain within tight margins. As well as the need to obfuscate homophobia another need had by this point emerged: In the media since 911 terrorism has become a one-dimensional story where it is Muslims and muslims in the monolithic sense Vs the West, or rather us, where neither side of the equation is allowed any nuance. The detail of homophobia was a nuisance to this storyline and got in the way of the mythology that everyone is equal; the this is war against us all argument is not some token humanistic or equalitarian gesture, it is about feeling the need to avoid to seeing any inequalities that exist in our society, in this case the reality that LGBTQ still have less rights than straight people. Looking in the mirror and seeing if you have something that someone else doesn't is always a lot harder than whether you hate someone or not.   

So what is it that can be taken from something that is so tiny for so many people and is fast fading from the memory? The liberal and politer means of cancelling out the central reality of a tragedy after it has nearly happened can arguably be more insidious than words that people now deep horrific like 'faggot' or 'queer' or 'pervert', they settle more gently in peoples minds but do the damage of denying the reality of a communities grief, the community who is more likely likely to be the victim of similar attacks. Julie Hartley-Brewer jokes in her article about people checking their privilege but it was precisely this that for her and Mark Longhurst was on predominantly on display on the television:  Well-meaning or otherwise. The liberal universality of 'human beings' being equal wasn't brought up to clarify what people already knew it was brought up to push away the biggest motivators of why Omar Marteen had done what he did. Inverting reality and making her the victim she then has this to say: 

It's proof that there are now thousands - if not millions - of people in Britain who regard the taking of offence as not just their hobby but their full time job. They seek out offence and hidden insults wherever they may be, and even where (as in this case) there are none and then they shout long and hard until their designated target gives in and agrees to be shut down. 

Well, sorry to disappoint you but no one is shutting me down or silencing my voice. I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself so I get to choose the words I want to use, not Owen Jones or random people on Twitter or anyone else. That's how this whole "free speech" thing works. 

If you don't like what I have to say then either don't listen or debate with me using the facts rather resorting to abuse and lies. And don't ever presume to tell me what I can and cannot say. This is, last time I looked, a free country where I am entitled as anyone else to give my opinion. 

If Owen Jones wants to live in a world where people can only say what is on the officially approved list of platitudes, then perhaps he has more in common with Islamic State than he thinks. 

   

Despite the two-day barrage of of insults on twitter Julia has not had her voice shut down and still continues to be published in the mainstream media, that does not seem to qualify as censorship or even bordering on censorship. Whereby people are forcibly stopped from communicating, if the word has any meaning at al. The regrettable barrage is over and her entitled opinion has been completely left untarnished. Owen Jones also and only walked out of a discussion, not something I know of him ever doing before and not yet a pattern in his behavior. A walk-off whatever one thinks of it does not stop anyone expressing does not stop anyone expressing anything. 

   The in-complete ability to recognize the major reason why these people were murdered and injured was repeated and so he left, and maybe he shouldn't have, but it is hardly surprising. Something so tiny, but not disavowing homophobia was not in her or Mark Longhurst's canon. Instead making sure the usual news-propaganda was continued was, the one of monochrome-Muslims vs the rest of us. That simple acknowledgement apparently is too much to ask?     

   49 people were killed: they were foremost murdered to put it bluntly because they were queer. Just recognizing that and saying it does not take even a paragraph, Julia's brief disclaimer aside. The attacks were other things but they were this. A frivolous point for some, an added insult to many others. In particular, if they happen to be the people who have to live with the consequences, and now as well have to put up with the reasons for these people being murdered rubbed out of the reporting. 

Media memorials

The man was shot in the middle of the night and came back to the life. At 9 AM he was reported alive and well on the front cover of a magazine. The life:

What was your name? What was your name? Where did you come from? Would we have liked each other? No relevance now, just the memorials.

Until Tuesday when you will die again.

Human Delusion

His beliefs were like a fireworks display of the mind. All fizzle and cackle in the moonlight dreams of what never was.  Delusions that circumnavigating facts would get you reality, which was not enough. Having achieved the goal, she’d feel finished.

There was here and there was over there: The picnic in the singing time. Dreams of a place you could so casually remember as if it was perfect when it wasn’t. Why couldn’t the sunshine just be sunshine? Sometimes I feel I have to put pen to paper to feel as though I can write at all.  To breathe and

Trade in my toys and Rapunzel’s and live amongst the branches where people already abide and try to swallow up what they have to say without spitting it out.  Love is a promise nobody ever made. I catch images and now just taste them for them-selves before they evaporate forever, I can’t hang onto what I value the most anymore, it has to go for a walk and never come back. It’s disappearance a gesture that something meant something at all.

Night and Day

Hiding in your dreams, buried in the avalanche of collapsed stress rose up your half-self without its other part, which had always been like amber wrapped around an ant. Time slowed down and said hello and took away your clothes. Hideout and seek, they make memories out of daylight

The under-lit world was a place to see things clearly: Asleep in your undisturbed room emotions just rise to the surface. Fastened and bound into the syntax of your own sleep; little pieces of there and here and nowhere came gliding through. Your personality always felt sandwiched in, pressed between the walls of memory closing in around the present tense. Now under your dreams you at least feel free. Is your bed an incubator of madness? Old people and a conversation with a Bus Driver where you actually felt connected. Words pour through your mind as if they weren’t pushed. As if you were growing time between your ears like an antiquated hobby, it followed smoking. Shame had no place so things moved smoothly: A tidy honesty, not the stupid drunk explosions to be exposed elsewhere 48 hours later. Violins and Dreams, sadness curdled up to be a potion that only your head could up with and swallow; this is the speedway to ecstasy   

  

I leave no fingerprints here. They wont find me. I’m on the bedrock, the backbone, the memory gland or whatever the real thing is called. At the bottom of my consciousness I can finally breathe, the oxygen of my uninterrupted head, but enough fishing, it's time to wake up   

The Thwarted Maelstrom

The balloon out of the magic of time, a sideways glance at them and they are us and we’re staring at ourselves.  Tiredness enthrals and time stands still but everything is moving. Lengthways he knew what he was doing; lengthways she ran out of the house in her mind. The balloon sidesteps the other wise clarity in the air, interrupting the day with the blue that out-blues the sky which went grey an hour ago.  Whirl in the mystique of time is this blue balloon; the mystique something we don’t understand but can explore, the balloon upsets the balance and sticks to the moment like a bad stain.  The kid here has a face that says ‘don’t give away where I got this from’, fun is a secret now and she’s not blabbing where she got this little piece of blue fun now and not next week either. ‘Run along adults, this is all mine and it can go about its day with me along by its side and I don’t give a damn if even the Earth complains.' Shards of sky fell into this kids eyes and she spat them out as a gift for the entire world to see. Rudeness in this place was a gift, something genuine out of the mist of contrivance and false-talk; you can’t wrap up spit so she let it fly from her mouth, an act of love not contempt that burst merry on the stage-scene of this frustrated landscape that needed to be disturbed by laughter.

Avalanche

The tears of 27 years throw down your hands and make love to me. Be my companion in the setting sun. Lonely and adrift out here amongst the deaths of intimacy with your melting ice cream. I'm all yours and set me on fire before going. Crying out and running out of time from somewhere deep down from the place that no place in polite conversation. Horrible things do not seem the problem; it is the absence of good things that is the problem.

The Colour of Love

She made marbles in the sunshine all day. Mixed up with the colours of the sand and the tears ran across the sand to meet the blood of a stranger and made love. The language of all the strange was incommunicado to everyone say making marbles across the beach.  The beach stank of other peoples tears all dried up the sun. Everybody thought if they kept crying someone would come and save them. The colour of love was unmade in the sands of time. Time carried nothing to them; there were no magic bottles with little messages pleading for help and to give them a purpose. The purpose lay on the beach in the hands of the marble makers. She took out her eyes and cleaned them and put them back in and saw what was happening and took out a pen. 

Imaginary Woman

And I wanted your words and I wanted the mouth that went with them and I wrap your words and my desire up into a bundle and hand them back as a gift. I like my emotions like I like my coffee, virulent as the taste in my mouth of the memory of you and a shudder like your words that shout through my stomach. Your face rang out through me calling me back to the amber nectar of a dream and wherever you may be, a daylight robbery brought into the midst’s of my mind by a death filled loneliness and we are back together in the attic of my emotions which crawled away with you into the sanitary cave and make up rumours about a myth.  Desire seems to bleed inside out blending in with your day-to-day life.

I caught the last bus to a dream and found my way back home aboard the vestibule of a donkey that cried beneath me wanting to walk side by side with me. That cat in the lonely land no longer smiled and was no longer pleased to be mad and bid me adeu across the lonely night sky continually inferring me on that ‘holidays have been cancelled here’. Now the night-time has come to an end but I can’t switch off my craving dreaming’s which terrorise helpful strangers at the edge of this morass of dark sand at this crossroads to I know not where. The cat bites of lust are all over me, but it’s ok you cannot see them. 

Mirage

Ghosts too can go on loving the living without them ever returning the favour. I have devoured my skeleton for a delusion. Come and find me when my silliness has devoured itself and I have started again. Who would have thought silliness could be so serious eating its way up through me with its games. Roll marbles over my emotions. Sparkling stars fuse out the quickest. Now I have only to grow flowers in the wilderness. I’m swimming to the bottom of the ocean so I can breathe again. Time tiptoes around every minute squealing what wasn’t. Daftness slapped in the face and seeing what I want is always somewhere else and not a place I can move too. Say hello to who I was yesterday if you ever see him again. The landscape out here is cold but the screams of my stomach keep me singing under the facade of my smiling face. Coming home to who I really am and the finally death knells of wishful thinking, well maybe.

The Graveyard in the Sun

26-06-11


I went on that day to find someone like you amongst all the other so-called sleeping prisoners. Cast in the sunshine I went wandering as some kind of exile in the horizon of the dead, this is the only place where the land is laid out to stretch, where there is some pretence of. Why are care and the community more thorough once you’re under ground? Headless angels and forgotten names are landscaping my day out for you if they are still there, you are not here you are somewhere else but I feel like visiting your compatriots is the best I can do today. This is the only part of the city where life and death are allowed to meet up in plain view.


Frank, Hannah and William go by and a cider bottle or a bottle of some fermented juice to drink away loss, and there I was I found me. It is somewhat odd to come across a gravestone with your own name on it. A married dead version of me it would seem. Frank and Hannah and William are odd company but not as odd as the headstone that has nothing on it, imagine being dead and anonymous. Is that a failure of a death? I count the ages walking by and play the sick game of finding the youngest death; I think I found an infant of several weeks. I then wander all the away across the graveyard looking for the opposite, it doesn’t ring out in your eyes as much to see ordinary sized deaths, the later the graves the later they die and later and later. What time is it?

The uneven graves hide under the wonderful day. So untidy up close, like the flawed contours and cracks are hidden by a conspiratorial sky and ‘our loved ones’ can keep up not having their flaws noticed. Going by me are a middle-aged couple, or a couple of people, a husband and wife, a brother and sister, two friends? Dead people have a habit of bringing people together, even if it’s the ritualistic and necessary cleaning people come here to do.

The Children of Grief

To go by your side and walk hand in hand, it’s how the love I have for you arose so strongly the moment you were no longer around. For you to take me away again in your car and spoil me on Sunday: We go on grieving and my grief plays games with the image of your face comes out of the abyss and says ‘hello’ and parts and leaves again. You make these strange little visits; hushed, quiet and brief, playing your love across my face and making me cry out in the wilderness where we used to go for coffee.

Upon your shoulders I used to ride high amidst our holiday destination, piggyback me back to anywhere so I am back here with you again. Temporality switched off with your death, my body shrank in the wash and I was five again. Then came being eighty-five and feeling the wars on my body and then back to age five with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I pang with each piggyback ride through my memory but I see them more clearly now and with them you: the grief didn’t go away it went away and came back better, I no longer mind swallowing the meal of your memory everyday and every week and with it the twinge.

Their not you, they: But I’ve found a few now whom I can call home and who know me like you. I spent two years out of orbit, insane on the bliss of grief; that blue opaque sky is now the mapping ground of my life with you or your life with me. I think I can just about fit everything about you up there; spinning cobwebs of images and thoughts and snatches of voice your still quite alive up there, in the sky and in my head. The café did a dance without you and asked why you were missing, I had no answer but my stares at the empty chair where you used to me, the table and the coffee doing a negation through the air, pleading for clemency against reality. I know this is going to hurt but don’t hurt to bad; bring the crying after the coffee somewhere else where jurisdiction of pain in public does not reside. We bleed far more easily than we cry; no one ever felt the impulse to inhibit a cut. I sometimes feel like I pull blood back up into me for the sake of someone else’s embarrassment. After somewhere else is how I deal with you; lodged in the calendar like an exploding piece of time. They, them and it all surround me pointing the finger to suggest you’re not here but I no longer fall into the invisible trap where you are, I have what you were and the why and how to get me dancing around your absence and the game of hide and seek with your alluring shock to the system go on but I know they are all part of the exploding bliss of life.

Hoatzin

Hoatzin /hwaet'sin: n. a tropical American bird, Opisthocomus hoatzin, whose young climb by means of hooked claws on their wings. [native name, Imit] /








Sumptuous animosity gathered around the table; will I ever see you again? The prayers sent out never got any further than the jam and toast. I am a stuffed toy set beside the fire place for your pleasure.

Sat down on the hill with our lives and the world ahead of us; where's all the perspective lead, to one central point or just shapes we crisscross with our eyes and our lives and our hardwork.

Spartacus sat upright and gave up on himself. In the knitted armchair of your morality a chill went up your spine; was what you were doing goodness or good for you? A soldier camped out in their own home can't call for backup. Self righteousness piped out of your vocal chords as you kept yourself warm. But that chill makes you pace at night.

Floorboards

The delusion crawled across your mind leaving a snail trail in time. They'd all rather put the world on a flat tone and reduce the fires of the world; one stringed up silver bullet of dogma that they can roll across the floor.

The dynamic flowed out of me and I found I could always see the stars if I focused my eyes the right way. A world without memory sees no stars and the bitchin to find a bastard hasn't much to acrue. Constant fishing for an enemy brought nothing up from the bottom of the sea. So singular in their interests they bled the fruits of their own love and left the world dry.

The dual shoes fit perfectly on both feet as you walked the grounds; gravel littered your world like gravy beneath your thumbling toes like a fish out of water. The forest where people played were like the margins. Acres of inefficient beauty that you day today circumnavigated. Going around constantly what mattered the most.

Going for a walk was no destination nor no beginning; a timeless hug against your own arrogance. Playing tennis with the people you despise the most. But that bullet kept rolling over between your fingers and your comrades and colleagues, cleverly sidestepping anything that really matters. So long, I am going somewhere to find something else, something that really matters and something that is really really.

The walls between us

Who ever knew where we really were? There were no signposts amidst this land of bricks, you were right I used as I thought you were the potential scaffolding to the stars. The rations of desire or piece meal pain relief. I feel as though I am exploiting the Gods I don’t believe in. I never knew you were only human.

The Hour Glass

The me and I fell in together as they fell into the centre of you. The and the the came rolling into one another and made a complete sentence. Time was filling itself backwards harvesting its own self awareness. You vied for my attention within my own body and wouldn't let trivial obsessions get into the way. A glass cup of warmth that constantly refilled itself and gave of TLC without ever burning. I roll over and kick you out of my imaginary bed and it's an accident. I leave you waiting somewhere due to forgetting I was meant to meet you at some certain time in my sleep but I was dreaming but i only upset you in my fantasy. I made my way to please you in the middle of the day when it was dark in the real world and found sunshine and you in my dreams before i had to say goodbye and brush my teeth and let the day go by. I and me and you went for walk once upon a time with a made up picnic and I said everything there was that I wanted to say to you and could and you undressed your mind and allowed me to see what it was you were really thinking and if those emotions I caught gleams of like sequins in time were my good guesswork or the delusions of my own self hoping into your imaginary lap to curl up like a cat that needed you.

That picnic in time that never realy happened seems to have left as big a mark as anything that reality could throw my way. Like a bruise from the inside out forcing my blood to the surface. The moon keeps making faces when my back is turned as though it somehow had no idea that i knew what it was doing. The distinction turned on a head that somehow my dreams were squealing that these dreams should be out in the world. Like Pandora had leapt out of the box with something good to say. But seldomly Pandora got let out the hole with something to say as she'd ceased to speak years ago and was only a spoilt child. I had no nightmares to share with the world but only my nighttime singsong celebrating what hadn't been and my diary of delusions spun together as a potential bluepint of the future.

The Shared picnic ran out and the dream said yes but you had to go and i was left in the forests of my imagination with the hanging tree's of my creation lost without you the human cup of wamrth at the centre of it. But I light another cigarette and your gone. Can it really be true that it was actually it all coming true that i was so scared of all along? But picnics don't make themselves do they? I made and make patterns in the minds as a nice derailed train journey to actually geting on the right path. Roads feel so small and even with their goodtimes I can't sing walking down them. There's no jazz in the tarmac and maybe all along I should have just given up and gone back to bed. But can I bring my Aztec love out for you? I can't even from my scewed balance see things to argue about and I'd give anything for anything for that one argument over nothing for me would be the vestibule of nothing holding out against my own time but second servings of peace are nothing compared to having a mistaken ruckus with you. The stills of you go in and out of focus like a memory in the dark poorly lit. The photographs in my mind aren't good enough so i skip breakfast and leap over the table to find you. Before the cups of tea and the squeezed first breathe of hearing you I stay here amongst my toys in my imagination workshop where kisses against recalled images in the air will do.

Vertebra

It rides through your flesh like a snake in search of something in the middle of the night. Like a winding stairs that holds your head from your heart. I climb all those blocks of bone with my fingers as if my hand were a spider making its way to some safe haven over rocky steps of flesh.

That thing would kill you in the night. As if it were some problematic motorway through your body that you hadn’t designed. No one had given you the road map. In fact I was the only one who had journeyed down that path with my fingers saddled next to my thumb. It kept you together yet it caused you pain. It created hell for you but allowed you to keep moving. It was a physiological bridge that no one but me could walk down. My fingers and my eyes were jealous over whoever may have walked that route before. I’ve tried furtively to own your back with kisses but tenderness wont get me a passport into the feelings that crawl amongst the sea under that bridge. I’m in the same room as this house of ligaments but I still don’t know what it is that animates them into moving every day. I’m wondering all the time what goes through your mind and through your bones when you’re excited, what feelings are propelling you? What is that motivates you to get your spine moving and go running? The more pain that snake causes the more you seem intent on wanting to move its nest.

I sometimes wonder if in a thousand years if archaeologists were to find your body trapped and frozen in ice that had survived some second ice age what they would make of you? What would they do once they had dug you out of that hulk of ice? What would the twisted vertebra tell them about you? Would it say something about your own personal neurosis you tried to run off every morning or would they take it as a sign of the twisted qualities of mankind in general? Would they make a killing and display you for children to come and gawk at some ancient human prize. What will the children of the future make our little human ways? Will we horrify them like some are frightened of the ways of the medieval, will we appear medieval to them, or will our back aches be a source of nostalgia for something they never experienced? Will they still have love or will that be too costly for them to afford? I can see those future archaeologists seeing your tattoo glowing black through the ice as the frozen box melts in the future sunlight.

Love Sickness ii

And we wished we could keep our loved ones in draws, ever close but just out of sight as we play pray in the wilderness of so-called maturity and ourselves we don’t need other people. They called for us from out from the old backyard and we came running in and found nothing waiting for us but nothing was our playground.

Love Sickness

One word flew out of the morning and in one second everything they had was broken in two. Who noticed?

Janus

Draw a line down the middle of my face and then I can tell you where ending is the beginning and the beginning is a start and then I can have a start.

I skip childishly between a thug and being a butterfly. But the butterfly can cut you too if you get too near. I’m the cat that sits on your lap, I’m the cat that turns and bites your head off. Don’t think I can’t scratch you and love you at the same time.

Drawing a life out of inks of black has an ecstasy that only we can see; In my dreams and in my bed where life does not exist. Things existing somehow were not good enough. I watch myself from the outside. I’ve put away my life neatly into compartmental draws stuffed safely away where no one can see them. I made a coat out of my own skin this morning, someone else can wear it now.

Epiphany

And she came out of nowhere and kissed me in the darkness. It was strange how nowhere always felt like somewhere. The ties of meaning wrapped up neatly in one second seconded themselves into one sweet little bow.

Those ties came undone and spread themselves like an imagined angel of darkness spreading itself out to go to sleep as though in its rest it was the most alive. Pain was normal, it spread itself out and went to sleep taking your dreams and your nightmares with you.

She’s still there in the darkness, my lips see lips but i can’t see and the sea of darkness surrounds us like we were two twins sharing the same amniotic space.

There was something that went click and all of who I was fell out of my homeland. Time is on no ones side and if God that isn't there was a she it wouldn’t be on hers are either. Firing bullets out of my own mind that were imaginary. I’d want to be wrong so people could shoot me down out of the sky. Taking your marching orders from time the clocks have eviscerated millions. Governments are factories and factories are governments and they have a different design now but imagination can’t dream up a delusion good enough to unmake them and we have now only the making to spin something, perhaps better if only infinitesimally small and only to be blown away by the confiding hands of the clock that we are all running away from. Always remember to ask the victim what it’s like to be beaten and what it’s like for the vigilante to get away with a kiss when no one was looking. The best I can do is to remember my Amnesia.

She made honey where my lips were, the acres of space in my head shot apart by an electric spark. The darkness past a gaping doors; is this a dream, a fantasy, a memory. All we ever had was the gaping door and the acres in our heads and what is in our hands now, an electric honey that makes me cry and bite. The cut and the bliss drove by me and through me like a bus sauntering off to crash somewhere else but even if it was only ever crash that was delayed in our own predictions where else are we to go? Love and Liberty can never be evicted from each other’s bed or minimised or made remote from responsibility or kissed out of sight. In the end we all do it to ourselves and maybe we never deserved it anyway and we have yet to come to terms with life not coming out of the darkness to find us, we have to go into the darkness and find it, where ever it is.

The tongue sat in the fishbowl of the mouth and what the hell is this, a kiss? Someone your senior kisses you, this is no more than a handshake but somehow so much more. The hands on my face or on me anywhere in time are bigger than any fuck and twice the mark.

Stately the stars sit there doing nothing as though they were waiting to be pinched out, they’ve done enough already. Stars and angels mean nothing to being kissed in the dark. Doors opening up and the darkness comes at you quicker than the light. When did darkness get to be something bad by the way? Several million years of passion spill out in the mouth. It is not my desire, it is your desire filling me and making my desire. My darkness has a full stomach now, its safe now to look.