i don't want any more of you than your skin
i won't let your information in
it's not about those things
i hold you like Harlow's monkeys cling
you're a prosthetic for my stump darling
don't worry darling
i know you don't want me to care
you want so much and no more of me there
no darkness no salt no underwear
nothing it takes work to share
just turn me on i'm a mod con don't bother with repair
don't worry darling
i admire the way you know how i feel
no need to talk to me that's not the deal
choose what we do because you're scared of we
baby your doublethink's much more tricky than me
just concentrate on keeping it nasty
maybe it's your view of ladies
maybe my face has different ideas to me
i don't know why you think you're more than medication to me
an injection, a correction, not a surgical connection
(though you can wear the facemask if you want)
don't worry darling,
i know i wouldn't fit with you.
i just take the benefits of you
and I have real friends for real ends.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Monday, 31 January 2011
I need a punch to the face
Something that I have been thinking about a lot recently is how it is impossible to know what it feels like to be anyone else, and how fundamental it is to know that.
SO i'm gonna try and share here how I feel sometimes. Not always; nothing is always, not even suffering, no matter how much it feels like it.
There is a weight battering round in my chest. There is power and springs and random collisions and it is fighting, fighting to get out of me. In my forehead and in my chest it presses.
At times like this I feel a good clean punch to the face would be the best thing for me. That it would drain my fucking stinking lymph filled pus throbbing infection of an existence. That it would be honest, and I would be real, and I would be able to do something that wasn't tarred by the past and by my badness.
Not my sins; i don't sin, noone sins. but still i deserve that sweet crack to the jaw and the brave clean pain to spread across my face like forgiveness.
SO i'm gonna try and share here how I feel sometimes. Not always; nothing is always, not even suffering, no matter how much it feels like it.
There is a weight battering round in my chest. There is power and springs and random collisions and it is fighting, fighting to get out of me. In my forehead and in my chest it presses.
At times like this I feel a good clean punch to the face would be the best thing for me. That it would drain my fucking stinking lymph filled pus throbbing infection of an existence. That it would be honest, and I would be real, and I would be able to do something that wasn't tarred by the past and by my badness.
Not my sins; i don't sin, noone sins. but still i deserve that sweet crack to the jaw and the brave clean pain to spread across my face like forgiveness.
Monday, 10 January 2011
On Tuesday, I watched a woman die
On Tuesday I watched a woman die.
Then I watched her die again. And again.
She died once for a repressive government.
Once for the power of the media in the people's hands.
Once to show the world these things.
And a thousand times on grainy film her eyes stared out and her nose and throat filled with blood to show me and others like me what we shouldn't let others see.
I didn't know, when I first watched it. Injury I can take. Injury I can see. The warm seas inside us don't scare me.
But they told me while I watched she had evacuated her body. The last process had been completed. I had seen her soul fly, and I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't paying to save everyone else from it either.
Again and again I watched the red flower, the sticky drowning from inside, the stare, the despair, the too-long raw footage and the closing of eyes that didn't close the story.
Again and again I made her die for me. And I didn't learn.
Then I watched her die again. And again.
She died once for a repressive government.
Once for the power of the media in the people's hands.
Once to show the world these things.
And a thousand times on grainy film her eyes stared out and her nose and throat filled with blood to show me and others like me what we shouldn't let others see.
I didn't know, when I first watched it. Injury I can take. Injury I can see. The warm seas inside us don't scare me.
But they told me while I watched she had evacuated her body. The last process had been completed. I had seen her soul fly, and I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't paying to save everyone else from it either.
Again and again I watched the red flower, the sticky drowning from inside, the stare, the despair, the too-long raw footage and the closing of eyes that didn't close the story.
Again and again I made her die for me. And I didn't learn.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
wasted breaks
there is a certain moment
between one day finished
and anything else starting
where there is a blank, a break and anything i do is off the record
and what do i do?
wait, mainly.
between one day finished
and anything else starting
where there is a blank, a break and anything i do is off the record
and what do i do?
wait, mainly.
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
Low-rent Body Disposal
We found bones in our garden. If you’ve lived in the sort of houses I’ve lived in, you’ll understand why this didn’t surprise me. Decades worth of tenants, each staying there just a year - not knowing anyone there before, not talking to the neighbours. Strangers connected only by the old tea stains we leave for each other on the wall and the half truths estate agents tell us about each other and the house.
You could have told that from the house itself, actually. Holes in the floor that admit the slugs who come in and squat with us. Cloth-eating maggoty things in the sofas. A roof that only stands up to rain that doesn’t try; because every call to the estate agents is greeted with sympathy and empty words rather than action. After all, we’re renting a cheap house; we’re not important to them. It has to suck, so there’s some inducement to work harder and get a mortgage.
And on to the garden. Enmeshed and matted patches of grass that ate all attempts at gardening tools, just as they’d eaten the bones that we excavated from the vegetative cement.
Large bones. Really quite large bones. Of a size and shape that make the finder hold them up to herself and compare. And shudder. Pristine bones - grey from time outside, but uncut, ungnawed, untouched. Bones, in short, that raise questions.
I lived with artists. Not installation artists, but the sort that find the existence of fuse boxes a revelation. I showed them the bones I found.
‘Oh yeah,’ they said ‘we found those a while back.’
‘And you didn’t wonder what they were doing there?’
‘Yeah, but we didn’t know how to find out, so we didn’t think about it.
... if it’s human remains, can we name it?’
So, for all your serial killers out there reading - and I want you to know, I value your demographic - may I suggest disposing of bodies in low-rent household gardens. They’re private, so no walkers or inconvenient dogs - us tenants aren’t allowed to luxury of animal companions. Noone stays here long enough to tackle the Triffids in the garden and install plant beds, or even nooks. And when the bits rise to the surface, you can rely on lassitude and sheer incredulity to prevent anyone doing more than making an exhibit out of them or setting up an ‘identify that bone’ competition in the corner at parties.
Archeologists and doctors consulted at the latter thought probably sheep humerii, and possible a rib. Or a human scapula. The case is still open.
You could have told that from the house itself, actually. Holes in the floor that admit the slugs who come in and squat with us. Cloth-eating maggoty things in the sofas. A roof that only stands up to rain that doesn’t try; because every call to the estate agents is greeted with sympathy and empty words rather than action. After all, we’re renting a cheap house; we’re not important to them. It has to suck, so there’s some inducement to work harder and get a mortgage.
And on to the garden. Enmeshed and matted patches of grass that ate all attempts at gardening tools, just as they’d eaten the bones that we excavated from the vegetative cement.
Large bones. Really quite large bones. Of a size and shape that make the finder hold them up to herself and compare. And shudder. Pristine bones - grey from time outside, but uncut, ungnawed, untouched. Bones, in short, that raise questions.
I lived with artists. Not installation artists, but the sort that find the existence of fuse boxes a revelation. I showed them the bones I found.
‘Oh yeah,’ they said ‘we found those a while back.’
‘And you didn’t wonder what they were doing there?’
‘Yeah, but we didn’t know how to find out, so we didn’t think about it.
... if it’s human remains, can we name it?’
So, for all your serial killers out there reading - and I want you to know, I value your demographic - may I suggest disposing of bodies in low-rent household gardens. They’re private, so no walkers or inconvenient dogs - us tenants aren’t allowed to luxury of animal companions. Noone stays here long enough to tackle the Triffids in the garden and install plant beds, or even nooks. And when the bits rise to the surface, you can rely on lassitude and sheer incredulity to prevent anyone doing more than making an exhibit out of them or setting up an ‘identify that bone’ competition in the corner at parties.
Archeologists and doctors consulted at the latter thought probably sheep humerii, and possible a rib. Or a human scapula. The case is still open.
Thursday, 15 July 2010
McPornos
i'm lovin it
drive up in a cap so noone sees your face
order a synthetic aesthetic then supersize
it's just like the real thing (only slightly more rubbery)
but who cares when it's so lovingly texturised!
blank eyes blank skin blank lips to suck you in
wham bam thankyou ma'am satifaction on demand
assembled in the backroom from reconstitued meat
product placement apes desires fake desires sate real needs
buns with just a bead of sweat to hint at organicity
plastic featureless perfection can only arouse sick in me
if you think you'll find happiness in a box
just don't eat your soul to fill your stomach.
try living like this it's fast and cheap and sleazy
money can't buy you everything but you can try
be warned you'll end up fat and dead of malnutrition
and your wonderful relationship will end in rsi.
drive up in a cap so noone sees your face
order a synthetic aesthetic then supersize
it's just like the real thing (only slightly more rubbery)
but who cares when it's so lovingly texturised!
blank eyes blank skin blank lips to suck you in
wham bam thankyou ma'am satifaction on demand
assembled in the backroom from reconstitued meat
product placement apes desires fake desires sate real needs
buns with just a bead of sweat to hint at organicity
plastic featureless perfection can only arouse sick in me
if you think you'll find happiness in a box
just don't eat your soul to fill your stomach.
try living like this it's fast and cheap and sleazy
money can't buy you everything but you can try
be warned you'll end up fat and dead of malnutrition
and your wonderful relationship will end in rsi.
Monday, 5 July 2010
The Ugliest Thing I've Seen
I was sixteen, and I lived in a one horse town where the horse would kick you in the head if you looked at it funny. And then its owners would come and piss on you for causing the horse distress.
Or so it seemed to me, as a fat buck-toothed young lady with no instinct for camouflage and a knack for getting on chavs’ nerves.
I had just started to enjoy myself, for the first time in my teenage years, as I had met some people who hadn’t gone to my school and so didn’t treat me as the butt of every joke. In fact, they almost treated me as an equal. And with these guys, I’d started to think it was worth coming out of my shell. I cut my hair, got some big boots, and drank illicitly in alleyways. My god, it was fun. Some of the best fun I’ve had actually.
One of the good things about my new friends was that they liked punk and rock. There was a small punk rock venue in my hometown (pop: 200,000, thinking pop: approx 200) which was our destination on Saturday nights after going to the classy establishment of the Bargain Boozer for the obvious. We’d down much of our drinks in the privacy of Back Walk, the street behind it, then take with us as much as we could disguise so as not to have the police or doormen or other killjoys take them off us. On our way to the venue there would be much jumping, playfighting, meeting other people (sometimes the bands, gods know what they made of these 15-16yo drunkards) and eventually queuing up around the block to wait to get in.
Hundreds of people waiting to pack into this room on top of a pub. Their sweat collected on the ceiling and ate away at the plaster, which in accordance with the circle of life fell in fat flakes back down onto the sticky crowds. The floor was an un-rock highly patterned carpet, with occasional black sticky patches like the devil’s loogies that made it noticeably more difficult to get up when you went down. Which you did, often, cos you’d glugged your share of the vodka. Straight from the bottle, in my case, before my system learnt to recognise it and gag. The bands playing I’d hardly heard of beforehand, but some of them I see in HMV now. If that’s not an insulting thing to say about anyone.
Pretty much anyone ‘alternative’ in that city, it seemed, was there. Rows of teenage boys in baggy jeans and black band tshirts (it was the early 00s), girls in stripy tops with tonnes of bead bracelets and baggy jeans. Some of the older ones had dreads or coloured hair: they had special cool points.
And because of the sort of town it was, and Newton’s third law of motion, where there were loads of alt kids – generically called skaters at that point, somewhat inaccurately – there were packs of chav/townie types. Some of them had cars and would drive past slowly yelling stuff out of the windows. Some would throw stuff. And some of them would get hands on.
They got one of the guys I was with. I don’t remember the details; it was a long time ago. I remember:
A group of teenage townies (that’s what we called them: sportswear, hoop earrings, fake tan, expensive trainers, inadequate womb nutrition, difficulty conjugating verbs, anger issues - you know the type) around him. Some guys, some girls. One of the guys punching him.
‘I’m a pacifist.’ He said.
Smack.
‘So you won’t hit him back?’ said one of the girls. Maybe this was impressing her.
Him: ‘No, I don’t believe in it; I’m a pacifist.’
Smack.
Hundreds of people in the queue stood together and pretended they couldn’t see it, glad it wasn’t them.
‘So you’re just going to stand there and let him hit you?’
Smack.
I wanted to go and intervene, but there was only one of me.
‘Come on, hit him.’
Smack.
‘You’re just going to stand there and let him put you in hospital?’
Smack.
I went to go over, but my boyfriend pulled me back.
“It’s not worth it", he said; "they’ll just get you too.”
Smack.
He pulled me with some force, but I could have broken free. I’m not the world’s best fighter but I was angry and at least I’d have done something.
Unlike everyone else who stood there in the queue, like they always did, glad it wasn’t them. United by a dress code and a music style and a lack of spine. Waiting to getting out their anger in the mosh pit on their friends, boasting about their bruises, shutting out the outside world.
I don’t know what happened then. I let him walk me away.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
We came back later and the pacifist was drinking like a fish through his beat up face. Like always.
He’s usually homeless when I see him now, cadging drinks and being the one with the sad mad staring eyes of whichever group he’s in. He’s not a pacifist anymore, I don’t think.
Or so it seemed to me, as a fat buck-toothed young lady with no instinct for camouflage and a knack for getting on chavs’ nerves.
I had just started to enjoy myself, for the first time in my teenage years, as I had met some people who hadn’t gone to my school and so didn’t treat me as the butt of every joke. In fact, they almost treated me as an equal. And with these guys, I’d started to think it was worth coming out of my shell. I cut my hair, got some big boots, and drank illicitly in alleyways. My god, it was fun. Some of the best fun I’ve had actually.
One of the good things about my new friends was that they liked punk and rock. There was a small punk rock venue in my hometown (pop: 200,000, thinking pop: approx 200) which was our destination on Saturday nights after going to the classy establishment of the Bargain Boozer for the obvious. We’d down much of our drinks in the privacy of Back Walk, the street behind it, then take with us as much as we could disguise so as not to have the police or doormen or other killjoys take them off us. On our way to the venue there would be much jumping, playfighting, meeting other people (sometimes the bands, gods know what they made of these 15-16yo drunkards) and eventually queuing up around the block to wait to get in.
Hundreds of people waiting to pack into this room on top of a pub. Their sweat collected on the ceiling and ate away at the plaster, which in accordance with the circle of life fell in fat flakes back down onto the sticky crowds. The floor was an un-rock highly patterned carpet, with occasional black sticky patches like the devil’s loogies that made it noticeably more difficult to get up when you went down. Which you did, often, cos you’d glugged your share of the vodka. Straight from the bottle, in my case, before my system learnt to recognise it and gag. The bands playing I’d hardly heard of beforehand, but some of them I see in HMV now. If that’s not an insulting thing to say about anyone.
Pretty much anyone ‘alternative’ in that city, it seemed, was there. Rows of teenage boys in baggy jeans and black band tshirts (it was the early 00s), girls in stripy tops with tonnes of bead bracelets and baggy jeans. Some of the older ones had dreads or coloured hair: they had special cool points.
And because of the sort of town it was, and Newton’s third law of motion, where there were loads of alt kids – generically called skaters at that point, somewhat inaccurately – there were packs of chav/townie types. Some of them had cars and would drive past slowly yelling stuff out of the windows. Some would throw stuff. And some of them would get hands on.
They got one of the guys I was with. I don’t remember the details; it was a long time ago. I remember:
A group of teenage townies (that’s what we called them: sportswear, hoop earrings, fake tan, expensive trainers, inadequate womb nutrition, difficulty conjugating verbs, anger issues - you know the type) around him. Some guys, some girls. One of the guys punching him.
‘I’m a pacifist.’ He said.
Smack.
‘So you won’t hit him back?’ said one of the girls. Maybe this was impressing her.
Him: ‘No, I don’t believe in it; I’m a pacifist.’
Smack.
Hundreds of people in the queue stood together and pretended they couldn’t see it, glad it wasn’t them.
‘So you’re just going to stand there and let him hit you?’
Smack.
I wanted to go and intervene, but there was only one of me.
‘Come on, hit him.’
Smack.
‘You’re just going to stand there and let him put you in hospital?’
Smack.
I went to go over, but my boyfriend pulled me back.
“It’s not worth it", he said; "they’ll just get you too.”
Smack.
He pulled me with some force, but I could have broken free. I’m not the world’s best fighter but I was angry and at least I’d have done something.
Unlike everyone else who stood there in the queue, like they always did, glad it wasn’t them. United by a dress code and a music style and a lack of spine. Waiting to getting out their anger in the mosh pit on their friends, boasting about their bruises, shutting out the outside world.
I don’t know what happened then. I let him walk me away.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
We came back later and the pacifist was drinking like a fish through his beat up face. Like always.
He’s usually homeless when I see him now, cadging drinks and being the one with the sad mad staring eyes of whichever group he’s in. He’s not a pacifist anymore, I don’t think.
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