Maybe I still sleep in rain
Blanketed, ice-blind
Again, the thought of midnight sun
Severs me from my riverside.
What shapes are there?
I’ll never see
What’s fallen right in front of me:
A form torn down the middle, and
Suspended from the sky.
I wrote these words when I was sixteen years old, submerged in old grasses and young stains, in fake furs and French poets. I wasn’t afraid of rhyme, at least, not as I am now. There was something in the shape of song, in the comfort that came with fluid images that just so happened to fit into a neat set of boxes that came more naturally back then. I can’t claim to have been an innocent, but my world was considerably smaller; I was yet to smear Ganges mud on my forehead, I was yet to taste arctic seawater. Hallucinations were still pleasant swirling rainbows painted onto tree bark and eyelids; they had not yet become sickening convexes or choking soil causing phobia and mania to creep inside my larynx and gain control over my hands.
I never know what to think when I look back over my teenage years; be it through writing, Polaroid pictures or memories. I can’t rhyme like I used to. I can’t drink or dance like I used to. Fear has entered the creative arenas of my mind like mycorriza; an organic network of inertia, spreading tiny fungal tendrils of hope, building up reservoirs of potential through stories of prophets in Hungarian hospitals with no other intention other than to dash them with blinding immediacy; the conceit of here and now that serves no purpose other than to make me sift through shoeboxes clogged up with old boot polish and gunpowder tea.
Why write at all?
I have little space left in my head, nowadays. The Victorian brick-laced waterway cathedrals where I keep my thoughts have slowly been filled with polystyrenes and white cubes of non-memory; the ingredients of dozens of recipes and the till codes of oak tables and papasan chairs, the texture of coach journeys, back and forth along the same corridors. The names of children I will never see. Tax return forms. Hospital etiquette. The drains are almost overflowing with little more than pub-quiz fodder and small talk, and I cannot rhyme for fear of being overtaken by a shade of myself, now eight years old and growing older, creaking like the willows along the railway lines of south London.
Blink again.
Hold it.
This may be my last view, the last from this car park.
