Spiral: A Collection

Introduction

Take four

and make mistakes,

wake in the morning

to check

that your fingers are attached

to the undeniable spot

where your hands end.

Watch the clock

in case it stops;

Dislodge the plaque

behind your gums

and scream in silence

at reflection-you.

Tick tock.

Script the helix

and watch it spiral,

dipped in mothers’ milk,

everyone, gather round

for the epiphany

T-minus twelve days.

Creation calls.

Victor Frankenstein here?

Making something other than history,

constriction in the surgical instruments.

The fate you are going to meet

is going to be so beautiful

for everyone else.

You are going to scream.

You know,

a lot of this is about birth.

Through these broken walls

I hope you realise

that everything here

is supposed to create life.

Even the mistakes.

Someday I’ll write a love letter

to Rosalind Elsie Franklin, like the ones

strewn about my bedroom,

where I tell her about my day

and ask if she would like to stir sugar

into tea with me

and call it a case study into romantics.

Now, pick your metaphor

and run with it, show me

how exactly you’re supposed

to be reading this.

And when you find the answer,

let me know.

Welcome to the beginning.

Elegies in Turn: Vertumnus, Hora, Somnus

Play.

I do not know which iteration of myself

I am pleading with this time,

but let me ask on my knees if I will still be you

when I get to wherever I’m supposed to end up.

When you say ‘try again’ I reset,

slam myself into doors and windows until

the milk of my bones seeps back

into amniotic fluid, and then I am here again.

I am here again, and now

I have new mistakes to make.

Pause. Confusion. Breathe. Play.

There’s a body in the glass,

fragments plucking themselves

through parallelities;

there’s something beautiful

next to something that stings,

and they pool together

like watercolours against a sky

where you can pluck your finger

from the air and lay claim to the spot

where you think the end might be.

If you want the end to be yours,

then take it. Tell me

how I should be going about this,

and if you can watch as I

ruin everything again, let yourself

become dust in the air

and surround me with the control

that I do not have.

I’m not in control.

I’m never in control.

And there’s something absurd in the air

that pushes the day to the horizon

again.

It’s up to you now.

Pause. Rewind.

What Makes the Man Jack Torrance

You wanna talk balance, huh?

You got a lecture to give,

and I’m not allowed to pour a drink

to get me through? Well damn,

if this ain’t ridiculous,

but I’ll listen. Nothing else to do

up here in the snow and the solitude and the shining.

You say things started alright,

and I nod, sip something unreal,

and say yes, my dear,

yes, perhaps I broke his arm

but I’ve vented the pressure

out of the boiler now.

And ain’t it a damn shame

that I don’t talk to Al any more?

‘Cept to sneer about the history

of a place that’s too far away to push

him back to drink.

So sure, tell me I’m unravelling,

and I’ll call you a bitch

and you’ll lock yourself up in the room.

Give him the key, I’ll show him

that the shit in 217 is far worse

than a broken arm and a ruined career,

because this will take me away.

Who’s the other one inside me,

worming into a space

that I thought was mine?

Two in one body, a fuckin’ perfect

discount deal on everything

that can destroy a family;

check one, a son with a broken

arm and a fractured mind,

check two, a bitch for a wife,

and check three, me

the head of it all,

proclamation, divination, damnation

of the foundation of this stutter

looking over, overlooking,

a broken record skipping to the part

where I fuck the pressure,

fuck the boiler.

I’ll see you in the next one.

Fin.

Boa

There should be a space

between my head, neck, shoulders,

but I know there isn’t

because I feel every inch of myself

against every other inch of myself

and I can’t move

from here.

I echo,

the voice of myself

barreling against metal walls

to get away from me,

words that defined me

defy me

until I am in the silence of the pipeline

again.

Still moving forward,

my body, parasite,

contorting and coiling

to chase the echo;

my back arched

in desperation to spiral

itself and become

the thing of constriction.

There should be a space

for me to breathe,

but I’ve said this before

and I’m doing this again;

me, in the spiral

in the constriction

in the pipeline of the thing.

I can’t crane my neck

to look back,

see if I’ve left a breadcrumb trail

of the metres I’ve moved

this year;

maybe I’ve passed decades in here,

biting my fingernails

so I never have to see

time move on.

I never have time to move on.

I’m back here again,

the echo behind me now,

coming around, coming around,

biting me

with the idea

that I was here,

and still am.

Hallucinations

I wrote a love letter. This is not it.

But it existed,

you’ll have to take my word for that.

Existed being past tense,

because on the eve of adulthood

I took a glass jar

and my parents’ matches,

and I burned the damn thing to dust.

Which raises a question,

I suppose, of whether

things destroyed become ghosts.

Unnatural death sparking

life again in those same ashes,

a postal service with no return address.

How long before

the subject, unnamed,

would miss what never came?

Or does that even matter?

Yes, I’m asking you

to clarify so far what you think all this means.

Three years later,

I watched as everything imaginable

took shape in the picture of a flame.

Slight movement, repetition, almost,

against a television screen,

but the world became so, so wild,

and then everything was an oil painting

and I was Dorian Gray.

Slow, murmuring, hapless rubble

taking baby steps across my mind,

an experience of imagination

that says, I brought you a love letter,

once, and you crafted that into dust,

so here, take form from ash;

get up and be what you cling to.

I wrote a love letter. This is not it.

But I sent it to fate, to burn.

The fire, artificial, loved me back.

3am Carousel with Myself

What would I promise you?

If only you could take it - god,

the things I would do

if the world could be wrapped up

and handed to me.

And anything you take

might taste dissimilar

to the experiences you pull,

inwards and towards me;

so let’s circle round one more time,

and see if we can find

the spot where this all starts.

Who was it who said

that we are all in the gutter?

I won’t pay reparations

for looking at the stars,

nor will I claim space

against your chest

and pull pills from our hands.

We won’t kill ourselves this New Year.

When I want to wrap up

this narrative, it starts again,

like - ‘hello, who are you?’

or - ‘I remember how you take your coffee,’

or - ‘we never saw that star in the sky last time.’

So there are promises

I have never made,

but they are so dear to me that they beat

hummingbird wings against

the lower lids of my eyes;

my own goals lulling me to sleep,

and it isn’t New Year,

so I do not have a will, or pearls

to clutch.

There’s nothing fresh about making it.

Nothing new about the way

you pluck the mint leaves

and we swill them in our cup of tea,

with the silence,

and the begging,

telling me please, god, please

stop the world.

Well, we know how that one ends,

at least.

Isadora

She plays mother,

wraps a scarf around her neck.

Red, once,

a proclamation of this,

of who she is.

In her letters,

she writes of little strong hands

taking her

up and up to the end of the world,

the breathlessness

of love, in which she thought,

and afterwards wrote,

and afterwards danced.

The world takes her

and she paints her neck

with something beautiful;

there’s a lot here

about getting to the roots

of it all.

And from this,

something grows.

Something, now, is cultivated

in the passive tense,

and then poets flock to her,

their little strong hands

grasping against her neck

for a taste of the bruises

and the colours.

But she is a spiral in herself,

a coil waiting to snap,

she is the roots of it all.

And the world wants

what the world wants;

to dig it all up

and plant something acceptable.

Still,

the silkworm woman

will not yield,

caught in the effervescence

of spider webs and champagne

she sings,

she shouts,

opens her mouth,

and silence pours out

of the wound.

“I Think Imma Die Alone Inside My Room”

Picture it:

one of us is foaming at the mouth.

Who really cares what the other is doing?

Because the spotlight

hangs like a noose against the overdose;

oh, how beautiful and pale white

one of us will soon be.

Flashback, one hour,

laughter plucking the chords

behind our tongues,

spitting slick

bouncing off the walls

of the tour bus.

Forward, one year;

I turn twenty. One day

I will catch up to you.

Minus five days, I sink

and think, god,

did they ever bury you

without the lights on?

I know. I don’t need

it explaining to me

that the inevitable takes us all

one day, that of addiction,

that gaunt-white

Dickensian phantom,

comes to claim back

the transactions.

Only,

it was never like that.

I never knew you,

and there was no danger

of losing my own spotlight

to your noose.

I’ll just go, now,

and pick up a repeat prescription.

I’m talking to nobody.

You said it yourself.

Fledgling Lullaby

She sings to you,

and you know she has returned

with food once more.

She’d kill herself

to throw it back up

into your mouth,

where it will ruminate

in your stomach

until you fly.

It tastes of love and bile,

and you lap it up;

there are things

in this nest

that you cannot name.

You try to

creak out the word

nourishment

but the crackle

in your throat

makes you sing instead.

She wants the best for you.

And off she goes,

her elegance beating

hard against the wind,

wings angelic,

archangel to you

as you watch the vultures

pry their slick bodies

from the shadows.

Take them in,

their greasy rapture

hovering,

and you’ve never understood

circles, but you know now

that you hate them.

It’s a relief when she returns,

exhausted,

stomach full.

There’s more vomit,

and you would think,

if you could,

of what it must be like to die

alone.

Then, you fly.

You must.

You do.

Who Picks up the Threads?

You’re reading this poem

and I’m picking at the hem of my dress

until the circle of fabric

that graced my feet

now sits uncertainly

at my ankles.

You’re not passive,

no longer can you claim actionless;

for every line you read

I’m pulling more

and now my knees are exposed

to the cold scrutiny.

Which line, I wonder,

will you like enough to remember,

and will it be worth anything

when you’re done?

I’m asking you this

not quite rhetorically,

but I don’t think you can see past

the thighs shaking in the winter.

It’s not your fault, of course,

not you, or you,

but you’re still reading,

and I’m still unwinding

the thread,

so let’s make the claim,

you and I,

that we’re both at fault here.

It’ll be too late by the time these words reach you.

There’ll come a point,

where you look away,

and I wonder which part of myself

was too much;

which part of myself

made you turn away,

and which part of myself

needs further work to be presentable

in anything other than excess.

I apologise. I’m rambling, and still pulling at the thread. The idea here is to make this harder to read, because god damn it, I won’t stoop so low as to beg you to stop, but it’s getting colder the more I pull. Soon enough, I’ll be bare in front of you, and what are we to do, then?

What are we ever to do?

It’s alright to stop reading, now,

because there’s no thread left to unravel,

just a pile of loose fabric at my feet, and

you can close the book, now. You can close

it, and I’ll pick up the needle.

2018-2019