Monday, 14 October 2013
In the Corn Field - Issue 18 of MudLusciousPress
http://mudlusciouspress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Mud-Luscious-Issue-Eighteen.pdf
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Thursday, 13 June 2013
Friday, 12 October 2012
Sunday, 12 August 2012
“When I am a granny I will still wear skinny jeans”
Thursday, 2 August 2012
Feel Little But Terrible
I stand out because I am very bright and I am split into a number of different parts. I stand out because I am the only vertical structure on this plain. My tip stretches up into lower atmospheric pressure and my peripheries flutter in the wind. Yes, I am a bright and wonderful thing.
My feet are carved into ancient volcanic rock, hardened by time and the loss of an internal heat source, black and unable to move. The heat inside my own body has escaped, important parts of my memory have become gas and risen out of my open mouth. There was a time when it was too hot to purse lips, and in that climate this had to be my fate.
My feet are smooth and the nails on my toes have been blown away. I have covered some parts of the nearby ground with extensions of my toes. It is hard to tell where this rock turns into ground and where the ground becomes me. I am blacker at the core but it fades out so slowly that the change in colour is difficult to see. My eyes are small planets that eventually rotate. My arms are dead rags in the wind.
There is a thin red line, far away and sporadic. I keep time by it. It rises and sinks. It is often tall and dominant. It is sometimes faint and weak. From its edges seem to tumble swarms of tiny particles, small red dots with pointed tops and rounded bottoms. They fly out in organised trajectory; they hit the ground, they go to sleep. The line provides me with a landmark; it gives me pit-stops wherein my temperature jolts a fraction and I am remind of the possibility of change.
That thin red line, it keeps me. Change is a slow slow thing.
My fingers have become thinning scraps of cloth. Gold leaf has lost itself to gravity and to the movements of sand. All my embellishments are stirred up in the shifting ground. There are parts of me all over. There are parts of me still able to hunt for greater things. My failed grey element-like-cotton, it feels nothing, but notices spaces between the weaves. I remember when there was fusion and when chemicals reacted.
My fingers are loose. They have almost finished being fingers. They are relics of things that once were together but are now misunderstood. The cotton coming out of me, it has almost finished being cotton, it is turning into methane or nitrogen or some other thing. A cloud rolls past and something like my fingers flap, independently of each other and of other parts of themselves. Something like a rock, something like a rock that used to be something which was more like me, is the only vertical structure on this plain.
I see heatwaves rising off the thin red line and I remember also being so volatile. I want to shout to the line, tell it to rise and fall more frugally, tell it that before too long it will be spent like these old mechanical models now lying motionless around my steadfast feet. I want to tell it about my molten knees and how these small machines with wheels were once alive with industry, pinching at me, taking portions of young red heat away from my torrents and into their snapping mouths.
I used to believe I had killed them. When I began to harden, when I saw them gripping each others necks with their beaks, I believed it was due to me that they were also slowing. I believed it was my substance in their mouths, travelling throughout their hinges, that was clogging up their vital moveable parts. I blamed my own heating and cooling. I blamed myself for letting them at me, for not collapsing immediately and flattening into the plain. They slowed faster than I and I wanted to reach over and shake myself out of them, but by then my hems were already scattering and my arms had begun turning into streams and falling apart.
Their bodies are lying around me. I try not to look down. Once every orbit my eyes do spin that way but if one of the moons lines up just right I can hide my pupils in the seas. I try to blame myself because I want to affect something, I want those mechanical bodies in that position because of me. I try to blame myself but every thought I have turns to gas and escapes.
My thoughts are the shape of clouds. They hang in the sky above me and float down as liquid methane on my face. They slide on and off my shoulder blades and collect in puddles around my feet. The ground below me is a strong river of methane. It flows hard and fast, well into the solid rock that might or might not be me. It creates canyons between my legs, giving me the illusion of being taller while not improving my ability to see. I stare at the thin red line, so far and yet so important. It reminds me of heat.
The methane flows and it is cooling. My ankles get thicker as this fast material dies and becomes me. The thin red line is expelling its bright thin redness. It is vivid and the loose flying particles appear to be growing in number. I do not feel bright and wonderful. I know that I am but, staring at this red line in the distance, I wonder if it is not becoming another vertical structure. I think about not being the only thing on this planet and my thought turns to gas and floats away.
..
My feet are carved into ancient volcanic rock, hardened by time and the loss of an internal heat source, black and unable to move. The heat inside my own body has escaped, important parts of my memory have become gas and risen out of my open mouth. There was a time when it was too hot to purse lips, and in that climate this had to be my fate.
My feet are smooth and the nails on my toes have been blown away. I have covered some parts of the nearby ground with extensions of my toes. It is hard to tell where this rock turns into ground and where the ground becomes me. I am blacker at the core but it fades out so slowly that the change in colour is difficult to see. My eyes are small planets that eventually rotate. My arms are dead rags in the wind.
There is a thin red line, far away and sporadic. I keep time by it. It rises and sinks. It is often tall and dominant. It is sometimes faint and weak. From its edges seem to tumble swarms of tiny particles, small red dots with pointed tops and rounded bottoms. They fly out in organised trajectory; they hit the ground, they go to sleep. The line provides me with a landmark; it gives me pit-stops wherein my temperature jolts a fraction and I am remind of the possibility of change.
That thin red line, it keeps me. Change is a slow slow thing.
My fingers have become thinning scraps of cloth. Gold leaf has lost itself to gravity and to the movements of sand. All my embellishments are stirred up in the shifting ground. There are parts of me all over. There are parts of me still able to hunt for greater things. My failed grey element-like-cotton, it feels nothing, but notices spaces between the weaves. I remember when there was fusion and when chemicals reacted.
My fingers are loose. They have almost finished being fingers. They are relics of things that once were together but are now misunderstood. The cotton coming out of me, it has almost finished being cotton, it is turning into methane or nitrogen or some other thing. A cloud rolls past and something like my fingers flap, independently of each other and of other parts of themselves. Something like a rock, something like a rock that used to be something which was more like me, is the only vertical structure on this plain.
I see heatwaves rising off the thin red line and I remember also being so volatile. I want to shout to the line, tell it to rise and fall more frugally, tell it that before too long it will be spent like these old mechanical models now lying motionless around my steadfast feet. I want to tell it about my molten knees and how these small machines with wheels were once alive with industry, pinching at me, taking portions of young red heat away from my torrents and into their snapping mouths.
I used to believe I had killed them. When I began to harden, when I saw them gripping each others necks with their beaks, I believed it was due to me that they were also slowing. I believed it was my substance in their mouths, travelling throughout their hinges, that was clogging up their vital moveable parts. I blamed my own heating and cooling. I blamed myself for letting them at me, for not collapsing immediately and flattening into the plain. They slowed faster than I and I wanted to reach over and shake myself out of them, but by then my hems were already scattering and my arms had begun turning into streams and falling apart.
Their bodies are lying around me. I try not to look down. Once every orbit my eyes do spin that way but if one of the moons lines up just right I can hide my pupils in the seas. I try to blame myself because I want to affect something, I want those mechanical bodies in that position because of me. I try to blame myself but every thought I have turns to gas and escapes.
My thoughts are the shape of clouds. They hang in the sky above me and float down as liquid methane on my face. They slide on and off my shoulder blades and collect in puddles around my feet. The ground below me is a strong river of methane. It flows hard and fast, well into the solid rock that might or might not be me. It creates canyons between my legs, giving me the illusion of being taller while not improving my ability to see. I stare at the thin red line, so far and yet so important. It reminds me of heat.
The methane flows and it is cooling. My ankles get thicker as this fast material dies and becomes me. The thin red line is expelling its bright thin redness. It is vivid and the loose flying particles appear to be growing in number. I do not feel bright and wonderful. I know that I am but, staring at this red line in the distance, I wonder if it is not becoming another vertical structure. I think about not being the only thing on this planet and my thought turns to gas and floats away.
..
Leprechaun
A hand that drops a pencil and points for decades 'til it hammers its nail into an eager grave. The uncertain replica of a hat by the margin of a page. A body too scared to shake. Foreign words mean less with age. A tongue vibrates and I stick my pen in. Ink into the heart of things. The spelling didn't matter anyway.
A small child tugging on the coattails of dead Victorians. The Golden Years captured on b/w reels. Laughter rising along a staircase. It is better to lie down when the wind blows. There's fire in the mountains. I have my place in the cold air that is pulled toward combustion. There is closeness and there isn't. We look at the clock and live by a series of assumptions.
A picture-frame, and within it the picture of a small child pointing. The sun casting prolonged shadows into the immortality of the young child's face. Time creases paper; old arguments die hard on the glass inside the frame. Nobody really looks when throwing glances. The child dreams on and on while the colours fade. Knuckles stiff from repetitive motion: ten pound notes piled up and knocked down. Bellies curved with good times and forgetting: words learnt at the age of sixteen: practice makes perfect again and again.
And one crude leprechaun is all it took; for one split second of so much of everything. On my page lay a hat of questionable proportions, and a few words of gaelic; useless and beautiful; something to cling to; the shapes of letters:
Thursday, 12 July 2012
W.
I see hundreds of trees. Only the burnt ones hold my interest.
I point at grains in the rocks and pretend to understand, because then it doesn't feel as if I am wasting my time.
Geology reminds me of your hotel room. White sheets like platy crystals spread out over hopeful arms and legs.
Four thousand kilometres.
Memories of former transfigurations give rocks their flavour. Eyes wet in the morning make certain surfaces appear darker. Clouds roll over the peaks of hills. A face disappears upon take-off. A phone rings somewhere in an empty house. Windows break. A rock in the fireplace (it cannot be touched but is not on fire). Falling stones reshape the earth. One circle in place of another. On that which moves too quickly, nothing can grow. I want to see the detail of the ocean.
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