A Short History of Nearly Nothing

I don’t believe you.

Tonight my house makes noises 
like footsteps on the stairs
And the rain is too light to wash my hands
but heavy enough to hear,
Heavy enough to reflect the glare
of lights from the freeway and the sprawl. 
I creak and moan with the wind
Or scrape along the floor
with phantom chairs,
and heels, and tables.
The scratches call for sympathy
But I’ve only enough pity
for myself tonight.

Last week my brother said
it’s always sunny in the East,
that the Western suburbs suffer in silence
and in rain.
And he points out the difference
as we drive through the tunnel
From storms to an overcast calm, 
but my palm is still cold against the window
and there are still bloodstains
on my stockings, 
So I love him for speaking in poetry,
but I don’t believe him.

Now my nights are formed by fragments, 
Moments my mind fought me for
- a third glance from across the room
- a question (do you really mean that?)  
- an answer (today I do)
- leading a strange hand outside
- the effort of conversation.
My days trick me into the deprivation 
of sleep, or solitude,
into searching for connections
I need not form.
My hands shake in the wake of
repetition, retaliation; 
I missed my chance, again.

He said I force myself to speak
And he can tell the difference in every word
as I scratch quietly
at the inside of my arm.
I feel the difference
Every day I spend
Outside of myself
Outside of absolutes. 

Now I finally understand
the way I speak,
Even as the air gets thinner,
and the world unclear, 
‘good night’s turn into ‘good morning’s. 
Through the fog I hear myself say
“I can’t sleep alone tonight”
So we’ll share it, for now,
And we’ll share the regret tomorrow,
and I’ll cry,
and make everyone uncomfortable.

But I hear the house’s voice
with more clarity than I ever heard yours, 
Or any ex-near-lover
-significant-other. 
Any crush, any fuck.
I feel more for the cars
Drifting along the freeway
At 11 o’clock at night
Than I could ever feel for you.  

On music

“It drains me and it shakes me and it hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you’re going to have your dog put down and it’s wagging its tail all the way there. That’s what they all look like to me and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn’t picked us as its catalysts, and so I don’t claim it. It asks too much. I didn’t write that song.”  - Thom Yorke of Radiohead on Street Sprit (fade out).

There are some songs that shouldn’t have been written. They shouldn’t be heard. They are hypnotic, consuming, and a thousand times more than the sum of their parts. More than their meanings, more than their creators.

The key word here is visceral. You don’t just hear these songs, or even empathise with them. You feel them viscerally, on a physical level; they become an extension of you. They touch you and hold you and grasp at your insides and take you over to the point that you’re outside yourself. No, inside yourself. Everything external becomes false, desaturated, and the only thing that could possibly retain meaning is the music. It’s a beautiful, liberating thing, to feel that you no longer matter, to feel for something other than yourself. It is at once the epitome of self-indulgence (even when you feel for others you are feeling in reference to yourself) and as far away from it as you could travel (this music means more than you or even those responsible for the music’s creation ever could – the music becomes a living entity).

One

[The bass and drums begin and then a whirling, high pitched guitar; the sense of spiralling, circling, spinning in and out and the room has gone dark. With each repetition of that bass line another layer of guitar is added until you can barely distinguish anything within the wall of noise from anything else. Except that one lead guitar line; screeching, wailing, trying desperately to hold itself back from the edge as everything around me turns grey. Black. To ashes.

And then everything drops back and a muffled voice sings
“I know I was a scout I should’ve found a way out so everyone could find a way out
It’s the last time we were happy, ever happy.”

Everything edges closer towards where the cliff meets the ocean and the sky is grey and angry and pieces of rock crumble off and I struggle to keep up with the speed of my heart and head with all the weight of the music pressing into me and GODDAMN this must be what it’s like to explode from the inside and I swear I’m falling apart with this sound and my eyes close and I scatter around the room and it just keeps building and my body does not belong to me and I am no longer myself and I am not here.

And then it stops.
 
My veins fill once more with my own blood instead of a stranger’s melodies. Was I myself at all? Did I become part of the music? Was I my hand moving across the page and the sounds in my ears so completely that there was no room left for me? If I had a choice, that moment would have lasted forever and I would not return to the rest of life. I would build myself a shelter between the bass line and drum beat and let the guitars and vocals soar above my head like clouds across the moon on a clear night]

And of course
…
                        of  course
…
of course it gives me the chance to escape my own skin.

That’s why I love it so much.

***

They say scent is the strongest trigger for memory, but I don’t remember smells (vodka makes me sick and the house down the street smells like marijuana) the wayI remember songs, albums.

A boy I almost loved telling me he’d play Motion Picture Soundtrack (the pinnacle of bitterness and regret and I always swore we’d happen eventually but I become less sure with every month we don’t see each other)at my wedding when I was with someone who wasn’t him.

[the hierarchy of lust and love and infatuation, roles and values I haven’t yet figured out. But I know I have never loved anyone. I have been loved, but I have never loved.]

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A few things to keep in mind while sitting down to write a poem:

illuminatedbeing:

1. Don’t tell the readers what they already know about life.
2. Don’t assume you’re the only one in the world who suffers.
3. Some of the greatest poems in the language are sonnets and poems not many lines longer than that, so don’t overwrite.
4. The use of images, similes and metaphors make poems concise. Close your eyes, and let your imagination tell you what to do.
5. Say the words you are writing aloud and let your ear decide what word comes next.
6. What you are writing down is a draft that will need additional tinkering, perhaps many months, and even years of tinkering.
7. Remember, a poem is a time machine you are constructing, a vehicle that will allow someone to travel in their own mind, so don’t be surprised if it takes a while to get all its engine parts properly working.

- Charles Simic

While some of these points are worthwhile and worth noting, you can’t take them as law. Take nothing anyone says about writing of any description as law, because every single person has a different way of approaching the task. Some write in bursts and barely think as the words are transferred from mind to paper, and some go over every single detail and form the phrases perfectly before writing. Sometimes some one’s approach to writing poetry is totally different to how they write prose or short stories. I, for instance, do not plan poetry, it just happens, and then I spend a week or so meticulously editing. With prose, I have the idea sitting in my head sometimes for months before attempting to get started. A one size fits all philosophy will not work. Your approach to writing should be as individual as your writing style and your mind. This applies to every art. Listen to advice, take it on board, but ultimately, only you will know what works for you, and never let anyone convince you what you are doing is wrong or that they know better. They could not possibly know better. 

To Pause.

The train stopped three carriages short of the end of the platform with no visible explanation, the doors still sealed, the passengers seated, people outside looking at one another in confusion.
Samuel Brixton looked at his watch anxiously, picked at a scab on his neck and half rose in his seat before returning to his former position, hastily disguising his movement as an adjustment of his coats.
Three minutes had passed.
The 8:43, by this stage, would be the 8:46, at best, and his excuses of a delayed train would either be dismissed or disbelieved.
“This is the second time this week you’ve been late because of ‘train delays’. You’re already on probation, Brixton, and I would be very, very careful about bumbling around on such thin ice” his supervisor would say, tapping plum-painted fingernails on his desk (skull pounding with each collision of nail and wood), leering, sheer delight hidden underneath a mask of displeasure.

Two more minutes had passed and 2 carriages down sat Charlotte Bailly, staring in concern out the smeared, scratched up window; a small woman had her hand on her chest, and was speaking with distressed, theatrical gestures to those about her – the effort people made to avoid eye contact with stranger would be startling if it weren’t so commonplace.
[the dogs who howl in pain, tortured near crowded streets and the women raped in back alleys and televised wars and death only matters when the soldiers/women/animals belong to us]
A crowd was gathering, though, and the women wiped her eyes (or did she press her fingertips against her forehead, as if the whole event were simply the onset of a particularly nasty migraine?)
The crowd craned its neck towards where the woman was pointing, as many people on the train were doing (fruitlessly, as they soon realised the walls were not transparent).
Charlotte felt an anchor weighing down her stomach and pulling her features with it. The worst must be assumed, regardless of what we’d like to believe.
“Mum, what’s going on?” asked Elsie, Charlotte’s daughter, sitting on her lap and twisting restlessly to peer out at what the mass was attempting to see.
A non-automated voice came over the speaker.
“Mum?”
“Shh, darling”
“Attention passengers, this service will no longer be running. It has been confirmed that a man has in fact been struck by the train, and the authorities have been contacted. I repeat, this service will not be running. A transportation officer will be making his way through the carriages to assist passengers onto the platform, and direct you to the nearest replacement bus station. Please do not attempt to leave the train until assisted off”
The voice cut out and Charlotte looked darkly out at the slowly dissipating crowd on the opposite platform, then to the others on board the train, calling whoever to say they’d be late by however long as the officer walked through briskly and informed them they were “right to get off” as their carriage was one of the few which lined up with the platform. 

“Mummy?” Elsie began quietly as they walked along outside amongst the gathering men and women in uniform, and those in standard clothes who looked so lost and aimless, so bothered, so desirous of further instruction.
“Yes, Elsie?” 
“How did that man get on the train tracks?”
Charlotte hesitated, having hoped Elsie had remained blissfully unaware, or at least unaffected, but she was frowning and looking up with a disturbed curiousity, thinking hard about something out of her depth.
“Well, I’m not sure. He could’ve fallen, or-” Charlotte instantly wished she’d stopped one earlier. Her instincts were telling her to stop, telling her to say “never mind” and carry on; to protect her.
[the mothers keeping their children out of the sun and out of the mud and the dirt of the world and creating allergies, deficiencies, a world of unreality for the stunted future adults and creating an irony of intention and consequence]
It was too late. Her obstinate little girl would take no answer as a personal offence.
“They could have jumped.” 
“You mean they suicicided?”
“It could have been suicide, yes.”
They were quiet for a while, sitting in wait for the replacement bus, other passengers building up in numbers around them.
- “This is the second time this week trains haven’t been running. Our public transport system is a joke,” said a nearby middle aged woman.
“Oh, I know, it’s absolutely shameful.”
- “I heard cops saying it was a jumper,” 
“Poor bastard”
Teenagers talking casually, flippantly, adults complaining of the inconvenience, the inefficiency; no one spoke of grief. They carried on and read their novels and listened to their music, tapping feet and nodding heads – nothing stopped.
“Why do people suicide?” came Elsie’s voice above the murmurs.
“There are a lots of reasons, sweetheart.”
“Like what?”
“Well, sometimes people just-” (how to explain suicide and depression to a child?) “sometimes people get so sad that they don’t want to live any more” Charlotte said as delicately as possible.
Why indeed? Why was always the question. How happened to be especially dramatic in this instance, but it was still a matter of why? The superficial answer could be anything, it could be nothing – debt, heartbreak, loss of a loved one, mental illness – but that was barely even important. It would clarify(/solve/soothe/soften) next to nothing, and certainly wouldn’t satisfy the precocious Elsie. 

(a read more for the benefit of scrollers - it’s a bit long)

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I asked you who you thought you were, how you would define yourself, and you barely hesitated before saying “I am a girl who is in love” and goddamn I wish you had hesitated. I wish you hadn’t answered, I wish you’d looked down quietly at your hands and scowled with deep melancholia at those white, squared, manicured nails of yours. It’s a sad truth of life that we can never honestly/completely answer the ever-pressing “who am I?”, but it’s a tragedy not to know that it is unanswerable; to assume you know yourself and know who you are when you can’t possibly have a clue. To define yourself through some one else and assume that makes you a solid person, for the first and foremost, stand-out trait, most important feature of who you are to simply be that you feel for another is unimaginable, terrifying. 

What will you be when you can’t love them any more? 

Today I wrote one of those glorious pieces where there was barely any thought involved, where it was almost as if I blacked out for the time I wrote. The first line comes and then there’s no choice. I was in the car with my parents and wrote it out as a draft text message. All I remember thinking for the entire time, other than taking in the scenery and turning it into a motif was “I have to find a way to link the end with the beginning” and writing towards that point. 

I hope it’s as good as it felt. 

How Chinese Whispers Works.

Still in uniform, the pair won’t let their profession desert them and they walk threateningly, aggressively, almost; flanks of an army, proud, concentrated, to the store counter and order two long blacks in their gruff (a prerequisite, of course)voices. 

Now they’re standing with their crossed arms, and soon, a drop in the act as one hits the other in jest and the unnoticeable, invisible woman at the back looks up from a not quite all consuming article and laughs shortly, before fumbling to catch it and dropping it gracefully into a little cough and an appropriately disapproving grimace at the general way of everything, the assumed apathy-cum-understated snobbish annoyance that a woman of her type must maintain (it’s bad enough to be in such a tacky little chain ‘cafe’, what happened to those nice, quaint, boutique coffee places where they brought your hot chocolate to your table in a mug with a marshmallow and not a cardboard cup) and she averts her gaze from the three wheeled troupe trapsing through the door. 

The awkward spare limb of the trio orders last and shakes her head (they’re not even going out, this is bull shit) and becomes overtly aware of her own unwanted presence (they won’t shuttup and she told me to come so it wouldn’t be uncomfortable, I thought he was supposed to go home half an hour ago) and begrudgingly makes some unnoticed comment about all the comfy chairs being taken up by one woman reading the paper (they won’t even listen to me for a few seconds) 

“This weather forecast is proudly presented by Continental” flashes up on a nearby screen and one of them says they could go a cup-a-soup right now, while a cynical 20-something 5 tables away makes a scathing remark about the state of the world when the weather needs a sponsor. 
Two middle aged women entrenched in an intense, foreign tongued conversation would shout up in agreement if they’d cared to hear about anything outside themselves in that time frame 
(insert effortless, changing over of shift workers and a red cheeked, out of breath teenage boy removing his out-of-uniform grey jacket in between chews of gum and struggles to find a valid excuse for being an hour late, settling on the truth/a hangover).

The spare girl looks him up and down while collecting her drink and strides past the security guards with a skip/double time/half running step every few paces to catch the other two up (I know she doesn’t realise when she does this, ignoring who ever she doesn’t want to be the centre of her world at that precise moment in time but it hurts and I should just fucking go home) and crashes into two little pre-pubescents who are running for no reason but naievty and that refreshing idealism that makes girls of that age so much freer than the rest of us, the forgettable freedom that the woman with her newspaper and the boy at the counter (whose jacket is now on a chair in the office) alike look down on. Subconscious resentment. Envy disguised as disdain. 

Now they run,
[they really should look where they’re going/oh god, we were never like that, were we?/they’re so irritating]
pulling on each other’s sleeves and are able to be excited by the rebellion of seeing how far up the elevator goes.
And if the woman at the back had bothered to look up she’d have laughed in a similar way to the slip up in the boy at the counter’s persona as she cleaned his teeth with his tongue and wiped his nose with his sleeve and every minute detail of the now overwhelmingly crowded cafe. She’d have heard the girls (oh my god I have such a phobia of heights/lol what if we get caught on the roof and our parents get called up) screaming and shouting for an ambulance and seen a second before one of the men hit the other all friendly on the arm that he’d earned it through turning off his pager and the disapproval would’ve been more genuine instead of a farce and it all could have been just that bit more genuine. 

Hindsight is easier than acting in the moment, but the nudges of a now open ignorance are in everyone’s sides, two paces to the left of guilt, not quite there, but close enough that there’s the question of what should be felt, what is not being felt, the anxious niggling sensation that says will will be felt, a so far unnoticed feeling that’s worse that the emotion itself will be. 
[I’m not going to give up my one half hour break just on the off chance that some kid will off himself (guilt)/he never seemed down(guilt again)/I didn’t even notice him working(so much guilt)/we can’t blame ourselves, it happens]
And the girls tell it like gossip so it makes sense to their friends as they start to blend into the culture/politics that will take them over, and the rest will turn it into Chinese Whispers. The occasional unnoticed slip of a syllable will turn it into the type of legend where names and facts aren’t important, where everything is so exaggerated that nothing can be sure. No one will be sure if it’s even true, in a few years time, nor will they care.