Weight

Another chapter I'm after you, again,
I drained the fluid from my ears and
I ache. My eyelids are bruised and
Chinese water burns my cheeks. It's
never been so hot, never so warm.
The summer creeps up like an insect
on the fleshy lips of a baby.

The flies don't disappear in winter,
you know. They lurk in back alleys
and sell enlightenment to young Americans
because, of course, they're the ones.
I need to remember what death is,
I forget so often these days and soon
you'll hate me for my nonchalance.

Breaking my word

I said I would never put up an old poem.. But I'm about to. I've been trying to sleep and these old lines keep echoing around my skull, keeping me awake. Therefore, it must be pertinent, mustn't it?
Still, it's not quite. It's too docile. I must have written it when I was feeling both calm, and like this. Probably when I was awake, and also supposed to be awake. I like that it's calm, though, it feels less linked to me. I have been thinking about whether I should try to be more asexual, or whether I should have assigned that job to my surroundings. They aren't helping. I feel like everything is making me more and more feminine these days! Never mind. It's late. I'm babbling.

Pasture

Foetal bones crack their surfaces back
twist baby faces baby bodies smiling like girls
into gaping shapes of misapprehension
which seat themselves beside clocks
their handles tangled in vein after vein
ticking to the awesome refrain of the awful game
and fingernails on a child form last
so there is no chance that they will free themselves
crowds gather and smother them
but black won't arrive
red strings sucked from sticky pink surfaces
keep coming and coming wrapping around hands
which shake and sputter jagged mutterings spread
like immune deficiency and they all drop down
before the babies
before the sunshine
before the rabbits rush back to warrens at dusk
to avoid saliva vultures loving their hind legs
countryside is pretty when you don't know the time.

Purge Gate

Spinning glances glance from lines of light on glass,
they stare into eyes of sheep, red and wrinkled, lines darting
like roots reaching, stretching to grab your own. Home grown,
it's weak to suggest, even, the swab of tissue, white and flaccid,
lolling beside fat metal hard metal and photographilia.
Fuck. You. Don't. Mention. Her. Name. In. Here.
Sent into frenzy spending many on the tips of tongues that
oh so soon wait and tremble in beside cheeks a-quiver and strings
strung along in guitars so unpredictable so touchable,
true ripped fabric just repeats the same dull monotonic autumn,
so sheets of paper flutter onto it and lick themselves, licking,
licking licking licking along to the clunking tune, the bulky beat
of no particular street that I conjur to calm and soothe my aching bones:
techno. Wooden slats contrast to scratched surfaces beneath
elbow. Teeny tiny cakes on teeny tiny pink pencilcases can be copied
and I will stare down at you and feel more alone because you and I are the same.
I I I the autonomous autoroute to automatic hypocrisy this,
this is our issue, and I hated you so much when I heard what you did.
Now it's all we cling to. I want to write about the queen,
in her purple orange green ticket machine, so serene, so clean,
Get off my screen.

Unfinished

I search higher and still all I am confronted with is garlic mayonnaise and a jumble of vowels that mean nothing to me other than a book I once bought as a gift during a festival that has no significance to my own personal wellbeing or, as far as I can tell, anyone else's.
Purple barriers jump up and down and still, do not, move, so many layers purple onions, purple beds purple... jackets, envelopes...
You should probably start there. Probably, because it's fixed somewhere but not here and not in my head. I am putting each broken nail in line according to size and weight and then if they are exactly the same, their serrated edge. Whether they cut to the quick and tongued the only white pain I've ever seen, just, lying there waiting to be ripped. Because they catch in door frames, you see. Door frames can be right little shits if you let them. I've seen all sorts of people, all times and places, they'll see one and run back to their mothers.
So once they're lined up I stand them up, lean them up against each other and it feels like one of those lucid dreams, one of those internal balloon itch feelings, everything expanding and suddenly shrinking so small it makes your skin crawl to imagine it. Torment, my friends, need not break a cell. Let me tell you that. It's the tiny things that upset me. Balloons blowing up and up, they're harmless. Now nails. You must build them into little houses.
I'm lonely, but I hated how your mouth looked in the dark. Gaping hole, raping even everything that wasn't there, sprang fangs and swallowed me whole.

Towards

The end. Of Autumn term, of the year. Towards Christmas. Towards presents towards money towards festivals. I am sick of having unnecessary fat. I am sick of me. I am sick of not being anyone else. Urrrrrrrgh.
Entering the Inferno, you would imagine I could at least write about it.
Changed the name of the blog, it's more fitting.
I wish I was gutsy enough to run away to Belgium.

Dream Inside, Rebecca

I am in your halls of residence, balls of execution,
lots of execution.
I am the chewing gum whose nails scrape along wood,
before thumping on blue jeans and red glitter eyelids.
You will come to me when you are isolated and shut,
lost out in, out on, breathe in these dated pages -
Is she Japanese?
All of my clothes are hanging out for you to paw, nuzzle,
and saliva falls onto silk, walls empty and curved, circles white circles
beautiful empathy and an empty tramp.
Awright darlin' :
he won't eat meat, he only sits there Tuesdays, night time, stroking the night
spreading the cooking oil because butter has run out.
I left the Japanese girl early. She's still there. I keep her. She shouts mute.
I watch her swirls as she stares at my laundry and
together we can while away hours just-
empty bubbles pushing hard against white, white, white is unclean,
so unclean I can feel my bones.
I am in your stadium, afraid of him,
you didn't know about the man, but he knew about you-
oh yes and the tattoo, and another girl with a gun shoots you down.
He's too old, his eyes display no record of an infant- his head is on my knees-
he can't understand washing machines, lip sync, apologies- his head is on the block.
he won't allow, permit, see, feel me or anyone else - his head is in a sports car-
he reaches into the void and nobody notices - his head is in a mausoleum.

Dank

Trail pulpy red digits down the pale plaits of that child
because all she will know is that you cannot possibly be internal-
the infernal racket spewed by my appliances is nothing in comparison
to the screams of the girls in the irony of light pollution, and the dullest of alleys.
They can't hear you, can they? They are buried in chemical,
black dust and pink powder clouding their already obscured pupils
which learn nothing, see nothing, are nothing, will be nothing and I
won't face it without bird beaks and soft tweaks of plump skin
which blushes at your static electricity, and then drowns in purple.
No queen ever wore it. It's a ruse- the regal shade- it's rude, illicit,
only to be found festering in a gutter, in many rings of oily fluid
from exhausted bodies, exhaust pipes, exhausted lives-
and what's more it will only scream uninmaginable, unholy noises
directly into you nostrils so that for a blissful and disgusting minute
you are the dirt. More guiltless than the baby which selfishly sucks at its mother,
rendering the remainder of womankind wild and hysterical in envy
and beyond the boundaries of dignity remains solidly naked for months
end to end, bending toes and at very last toenails which scrape and gag
the placid, lonely placenta. There are no mothers. There are simply wombs.
Submissive and pained, they must shed their load or burst open,
becoming, ultimately, fountains in national parks for passers-by to gaze at in awe:
embodiments of noises, septic tanks and daisy chains.
The moon wanes,
and strangely a pale world seems smaller.

Deskdesk

That last poem was the only one of the 'slightly inebriated' batch that I could bear to post.

These next couple have been written over the course of my first few weeks.. I'd hope in a sense I'm improving via exposure to lots of brilliant poets. The Floetics night was perfect, and I just got an email from a lady confirming that I've got a place on the bill for a different open mic night coming up on the 24th. Maybe.
Sussex is so much better now fresher's week is over! I love living by the woods, there are so many squirrels and bunnies everywhere ^.^

Wide

And once again I have not the slightest idea about what I should tell you
about where I am and who I am and how I've been going.
I have not been well, I've been ill with anger and vitriol
smoking out my intestines and leaving me with long black strings.
I have to tie them together and create beauty and calm
since you deserve nothing less.
Bizarrely I've become less preoccupied with your ever
presence in my poetry.
I am resigned, perhaps. But I don't feel that way.
It is precisely 2:24 and the night invades my nympho skull,
inducing panic and hunger, and your body is limp beside me.
I fed you wine. I fed myself liquor and I am now wide awake,
legs bent beneath my instrument, and I'm wondering,
at what point do I define this?
When it leaks into my soft life?
When it impedes my sleep, or you notice it?
You are certainly lost to the world now, gazing at blank stars
on my white wall.
I want to lean out of the window, walk down,
walk along the gravel path between black houses to the meadow
and lie down on the wet, awkward grass and look up, alone.
Partially because I've been told this is what I should be doing.
A little because I want to feel overwhelmed. I long,
I so wish to feel full and outside of life which is so compelling and so dull.
I know that I can blame nobody but myself for this cage,
and I have no clue why the bird within keeps screeching
that same old ugly song.
I wish it would hurry up and wear out its vocal chords,
and that they would hang down so that I could string them up
and make a violin to pass the time.

Sussex

I am officially a Sussex university student! It's quite brilliant, but quite busy. In all honesty, I've been disenchanted by the freshers events, I was hoping for a more artsy mainstream culture, but never mind. I think I was quite naive! But I'm slowly finding my niche.
Recent poems have been.. different. Written in the presence of others (though sleeping), written in the early hours, written drunk, written cold and uncomfortable.
That might sound romantic but in fact I think I like these far less than my previous style. God, reading through, I loathe 'Bed'. I may not even post it. Do I just descend into repetitive rhyme when I am inebriated? Surely my mind is supposed to be 'liberated'?
Does this justify the use of stronger substance or none at all?
I will have to try both.

I'm going to a poetry night in Brighton tonight called 'floetics' - I am quite excited! It should be good.

Stagnant Algae

I love that there is nobody home
and that every step dashes it further into predictability
with anglesey and marina,
our two lovers have seen a new beginning which will run out.
White round necks run around in the dark, drawing my eye,
sweet Jesus you're appealing,
I need something to drown out the white noise, white colours,
white cotton fabrics and white animal festering liquid that stands in refrigerators
self-righteously.
I hate dairy,
why can't it leave me alone? And vivisection will never be the answer
to the rage of a nation
and illimitable humanity that drips onto fruit
and snakes and who knows how many pieces of futile paper
or cardboard or tissue, crumpled,
sobbing from disuse and stinging a little in the side.
Like the toy doll on a stick that licks our mental wounds- our empty rooms,
in yellow sickly houses with blue and red rugs which lie
in the silence, deafening the old and driving them into inertia.
I remember. I remember when marshmallows were the only problem.
When car parks were the setting for intense joy
and now the ticket price strikes twice with glaring eyes
while I watch my quaking, ruptured thighs
that wish just for once to become ocean to bare pain for my own personal gain.
Labouring under the illusion, of course, that everything early was pure.
Not a battlefield but empty, and I know,
if I squeeze a little that I am wrong. I was still full of melodrama.
But water means nothing to a man who owns a tap,
plughole and bathtub full of dirt.
A worm pushes clods of mud to find a delicate wisp of opaque plastic,
clinging to a docile strand of glass, or grass, with ambivalence,
and suddenly mutating into an enormous god and devouring it.
Endlessly.

Spitriol

I am really angry at the moment. The poem I'm about to post is not a poem, it doesn't have an ending. A never ending poem. Did anybody have that board game, The Never Ending Story? That was a frightening game. The possibilities. I might dig it out and write with it.
I have been thinking about word association on top of word association on top of word association in poems. Dada, etc. I might try this out soon, but I'm about to go to Sussex University on Saturday, so my writing might be interrupted (not that it isn't already).

I think although hell is other women, it's mostly just myself. I was looking at the SCUM manifesto earlier and thinking it was a good idea, but then I think it's not really wide-ranging enough. SCUP? Bring on global warming, that's all I can say.

Sphere Weapon

Bait my breath and dangle your hook into my throat,
leaving the gag reflex unmoved, yet nerves screaming through synapses
as the metal fingernail opens a gash, overflowing fluids,
and as my cauldron lungs bubble and froth,
as my paper body convulses beyond control,
as my snake eyes strain out of their sockets,
as my pig cheeks turn pink, red, purple, blue,
I'll scribble futile newspaper articles, but they'll know it was you.

Aspurged

There is a butterfly lying in this puddle,
underwater flutters dulled by ripples of breeze
so that passers-by don't recognise
the fragile mystery inside a watery cage.

Mottled patterns pulse outwards in perfect mirror images
which do nothing but amuse the grass. And me.
A tea party breaks out nearby
but they are ambivalent towards suffering.

The butterfly must listen, but I,
I hide my ears amongst the simple bracken
as the clatter of cutlery, the screech of fine china;
the disturbing murmur of conversation penetrates the atmosphere.

Wings convulse, antennae twitch and stretch,
I ease open a paupiere to see faint bubbles annihilate themselves
atop the shimmering film of water.
Meanwhile the butterfly thrashes in millimetres.

The guests invade further and further,
Armed with teaspoons and tongues they tear up the air
and blur the outlines of plants and dewdrops,
which cling uselessly to their shapes, gasping and sighing.

I feel nausea and sleep rush into my intestines,
twisting at my liver and lungs and drowning my brain,
tempting the toxins to emerge and dance and play.
My chest flutters, my lips quiver, and I slump; hidden.

When the dizzy world shudders into view there are no guests,
no tables or chairs or teacups or sugar bowls or milk jugs,
no screeches, no groans, no hysterical laughter or murmurs-
the ground is stunned to silence, an elected mute.

I raise my aching body and turn my eyes towards the puddle.
It has become a tiny glacier, little sugar crystals and porcelain cracks
have flung themselves all over the surface.
Beneath; empty, numb, and completely still, lies an amputee.

Tweety

Emptied buckets lie waiting for a sharp impact
right on the curb, beside the sharp tarmac road-
each bird beak spike rips your plump sole a little,
revealing flesh a little whiter, a little dirtier.
She'll pull on the soft rubber mask and drag you by the hair
drag drag drag
what a drag it is, sitting up here
without hair,
she'd say, before then. Life is a cab,
a dirty, smoked out cab with a grizzled grey man leering
at you, his eyes forming a ray of light through your pretty pretty dress.

I'd better leap through the glass walls into the dank, open air.
She found you walking there on the pavement, without shoes,
your body had been carefully constructed out of bird's nests and gauze,
eyes drooping quietly, squinted even in the cushioning gloam.
Disease, decadence and desire had exploded nearby
and you bore the twitching debris,
even your eyelashes were weighed down by encrusted glitter fragments.
A wafer of life beneath the heavy world of the senses,
unable to escape predictability to everyone but yourself.

She felt your frame was delightful, and pounced,
and now your skin is being eroded by the spines that previously
had only teased your feet for a game of pain.
Now those wounds are shrieking to be touched once more-
anything but to avoid this war of attrition against the body,
corpse to be.
But she just left you in the nearest dustbin when she noticed your unbroken nose.
Way it goes.

Inburst

I stared into your eyes like their grip would never give up
and those seas of adventure and excitement
would never pour out onto the stained sofas and wizened nudity
surrounding us, impounding us.
What good are hind legs, mongrel; lady,
if you cannot scratch them? See through them?
Once more I would like to be unstained as I was at the start,
trailing in shyly with my petticoats licking my heels
and asking if I could be permitted to stand alone.
Oh how wrong I was to trust my singular judgements,
all of them stacked up, filed away in my intense cabinet mind
which ached, so ached, to be it's mother.

Cage

These next few poems have been inspired by little other than stockholm syndrome for my bed and my regression to a lonely little girl, mending clothes, baking cookies, throwing screaming tantrums when nobody's watching..
I wish I could be a real feminist. I have fallen wildly in love with Lydia Lunch at the moment. Sigh..

Hotel

The shadows teetering beneath your eyes have sparked up quivering glitter fragments in my peripheral vision.
I'm holding on tightly to the clammy ceramic sink
and staring down the hole in the centre,
watching water washing down beside coagulated structures and metro stations.
It's taken easily.
My acidic muscles refuse to stand up, the ground is moving too fast but the stuttering furniture is tempting.
I rise and fall, rise and fall, rise,
collapse, towards an atmosphere empty of oxygen-
oh god, get me off this soft, pale planet! It is too close to my own reflection and I am unable to see clearly, my vision is lopsided-
please, undeniable deity of desperation seize my splintering bones and break them cleanly,
stack them neatly and create a secret garden for mannequins to stand and creak in.
It can be homage to my pathetic existence.
I wish the wind would whistle through me like it does you.
Surely my body has simply become too tight, too secure a cage for such force;
anger and rage creating visions which pulse through my cavities and make me convulse, froth, writhe, expire,
at least for as long as it takes. As long as it takes for whichever fuck dragonness that brought me in to bring me back,
screaming and asking for goldilocks to save me, just to see if I'm the right size.
I know the answer before the breath is drawn.

Paris

I just spent a week in Paris. Slightly irritatingly, I have been far more inspired to paint than to write. I'm going to spend a while making marks on paper and reminding myself what a chore brushes can sometimes be- I think I've become too lazy and lethargic to devote myself to something big, but I might do a few small ones just to get this out of my system. I don't think I appreciated just how lucky I was to have time set aside for doing this at school!

Oh, and I kissed Oscar Wilde's grave!

I did write a few things while I was away, but I'm not very keen on them. I only wrote one poem, the others are essays and don't belong here. I think I will post the poem anyway, abuse it as you see fit.

Sucker's Sea

Reverse my verses back into the handle of your sunshine yellow oh-so-mellow tea cup mug of pretty baby terrapins.
Seraphs dance on the rim and ask questions pertaining to words that I never heard.
Some strange ritualistic jargon encircles my cuticles, pushing them into my fingers towards the joint and crunching the bones in my hand until they form a tent,
Cuticles acting as ropes,
Bones as poles,
My skin the stretched fabric over a circus of slight discomfort, of distorted notes and screeching post modern masterpieces lost in their own reflected reflections.
It's brittle but strong and each elephant and lonely bystander may not exit without a bow and a curtsey
Which has become impossible amongst the layers of molasses, of lubricants and of used bus tickets which swim on the floor with the sewage of generated earrings clinging to lobes that no longer care and wish they would get gangrene and drop off,
Join the sucker's sea.
Each pair of shoes is held in place by a tiny emotion, suffocating quietly in the dark, viscous lotion that the skin yields to with no reluctance,
it folds in on itself with little more than a squeak of friction and the snigger of an old tramp, and the cough of his empty dog, and it dissolves- but not fully-
sections of skin can be found in this oversized puddle,
and lifted and tried on as hats and belts in high street stores, with custard yellow velvet ladies who coo like wood pigeons fucking violently on a thin white fence,
they'll tell you just how intriguing you look to their pin prick eyes.
It's all because prostitution is wrongly accused.
I mean do you really think the world would be a better place when we banned pleasure and suffocated our already sweating genitalia, turning it deep brown in rotting inadequacy and disuse, leaking steaming pale fluid that just screams for a glance of attention, of excess, of bravery of which I have found none-
ride under any dark belly bridge and I imagine I'll find true paradise on the tip of a hair follicle attached to some godless crackwhore, not some overrated god-searching junkie but a freak,
they can be on the underside of the tent.
Not scratching madly at the seams but opening their gaping, loose mouths that flap like patriot flags outside lying buildings, and sucking hard on the skin of the big top,
They'll make huge red welts that scream to the outside and signify that something, somehow, is living above the sucker's sea.

Virgin Post

I always wonder exactly how to launch into these sorts of things. I am probably not brave enough to ramble on just about me and my life in the knowledge that absolutely everyone can see and comment on what I'm writing, so I expect I'll just use this for posting my poems, and maybe the occasional rant.

The only problem I can see happening with this is that I am not a very strict or respectful writer in that I often come back and adjust my poems. They are consistently inadequate little wretches and they always need pruning, so you may also find new versions of older poems popping up if I really think that a change I've made has been important.

I don't think I'll put up any of my older poetry. I have tried this already in a couple of my previous blogs which I've now deleted- I think they're just too distant now to be appropriate in something as immediate as a blog. (There are also hundreds of them, and it would take me a while!) Therefore I will only post poems from 2009 onwards.

Anyway I hope you enjoy my posts and poems. Please leave all sorts of comments, I will appreciate any sort of reaction, gut or otherwise.

Ellie