gone forever

poet / playwright / publisher / sometime musician

[forgetfulsurf]

BRIGHTON GAYS SAY:

the original german sausage in spices and herbs - £3.75

RE-ELECT cᴀʀoʟıɴᴇ L U C A S

Just to let you know, we’re in Brighton now and should be outside the place in roughly ten minutes

“I’m voting Labour”

< West Hill Community Hall

Please respect our neighbours            and leave quietly!

it’s the bubble in my/ it’s the bubble in my/ it’s the bubble in my/ bloodstream yeah yeah yeah

[forgetfulsurf]

i did not know what i had not done; i did not tremble, shake, stutter, i did not hesitate in crossing to the other side of the room, i did not look up from my book. i did not contribute to the lesson, i did not raise my voice beyond a tremolo, a flutter of vowels, did not apologise for coldshouldering him because he did not deserve an apology although i did think that he did not, perhaps, know what he had done; his skin did not deviate from its usual yellowy paleness, did not blush, did not even look across the room and pale properly white, he did not feel guilty, nor notice anything,                                  not anything at all.

[beachsloth]

poems 2013 by forgetfulsurf

                It is a nice day for a Skype Wedding. It is a nice day to get away. Skype shares everything. The world grows smaller with every new form of connection. Long ago people enjoyed the disconnection the ability to get away from it all. Now the all can be brought with them for a nominal monthly fee depending on the needs of the individuals. Love requires the Wi-Fi password to get the face to join the face time. With the power of slowly diminishing space the world gets closer and closer together. Geography is a load of nonsense now. 

                Poems try to capture the essence of what it means to be alive. A lot of poems describe the natural world. John Zerzan talks about the shrinking of the natural world as words like “MP3” are put into the dictionary as words like “Huckleberry” are removed. Gradually poetry will move to reflect what it means to be alive with technology as the natural world’s role continues to be reduced. One day the natural world will consist of weather reports as humanity slowly passes over it. Eventually even poems will talk about missed connections instead of being one with the grass and the trees. Walt Whitman’s perspective from a blade of grass will make no sense to those who grew up with cold cement beneath their feet. They will never be able to count the plants and the grass that grows green for they will never see it. 

                Numbers represent people. People resent this fact. Yet mathematically the more numbers that fill-in for a person the more valuable a person gets. Right from their birth people are given numeral identities. More tellingly they are given amounts of cash with assets whose value fluctuates depending on other people’s wants and needs. Sure plenty consider numbers to be unlovable yet they ought to embrace their numeral destiny. Everything is numbers from fertility rates to death rates to interest rates to growth rates. It is all connected and it is all important. 

                Lava serves as the maker of new worlds. Hawaii owes its existence to hot lava. Pompeii owes its status as a museum due to hot lava. Children play with hot lava imagining the floor to be hot lava. While children can easily navigate the streams of hot lava adults remain clueless forgetting the rigorous training they received during their prime childhood years. Instead adults focus on the mundane on the chain stores and dollar menus hoping one day to save enough to live well.

[forgetfulsurf]

peach pit in the stomach. my mother carved it out: results day. no worries but the sun on the rocks, no letters but my name; we scramble for calmness with pinpricks of sweat twisting from our tshirts. the horrible waiting of conclusion is upon us and when we wait it feels that now the rite is done but the moon is not yet set.

[forgetfulsurf]

when i meet new people i write the hardest. i want to get them on the page so they can’t walk away from me, i want my clock to stop, to remember a day a second a feeling. writing of due course is nondescript: deadlines, habit, black sludge, even sentences, a stanza not-too-long and entry-level metaphors. the novel is what compels me; novel as in novelty; facts do not get in the way of a good phrase or word and the new truth is a better one. the person next to me on the bench is not the person in my head is not the person on the page. i write slow, then: deleting lines irrelevant, actualities mundane, finding a dance in the sounds, finding a taste from a smell. the rowing is rough upstream-paddling, but the hard-broken sweat is better than from heat. that’s when i write best, when i have to, if i have to, when i cannot forget myself, when i cannot forget.

[forgetfulsurf]

i ripped my thumb open with my jawbone serrated along one edge and it did not gush red or blue back to the heart, but skin fell from a ridge as dandelions a mountain and when i looked down i saw my dæmons prowl. 'i'm getting worse again' they seemed to tell me 'i'm getting worse again'

[forgetfulsurf]

i am like the ship of odysseus: no part of me is myself any more. no, i disconnect my bow from my hull, and i am no less me, i place a hand on you and leave it there, and i am no less me, i vacate this body as air an accordion, and i am no less me. my sail-span is no gauge of who i am now because i am better; there is some wisp of me that survives my carcass and that is wholly me just as my hair is me, just as my name is me, just as my poems are me.

[forgetfulsurf]

a bad person / does nothing hears, speaks / sees nothing: wise monkeys, / callous hands. bone-worn, / i am tired but selfsame / in my guilt, callused / from chastising the fingertips / for touching carelessly. / space is empty / and my arms will not reach, / but they burn down below / touching flames divinely-built / as i did nothing, / but heard, but spoke, / but saw.

[forgetfulsurf]

i don't remember falling asleep with you and that's the point: there was no early-morning struggle, no duvet-wrestling pillow adjusting or opening the window for the cool air and to let the moths out. my mind didn't chatter and i didn't have to tune it to the shipping forecast. viking, north utsire, south utsire and you drowning it out with a hand draped over my back.

[forgetfulsurf]

i don't like my life without you in it: don't like staring at empty text screens or wondering if i can watch films without missing you as my poems tear-track down the page and a cool breeze in the window does not comfort me

i find myself wondering if i did something wrong that makes you not want to hold my hand any more

[forgetfulsurf]

she thinks a lot about the Person She Was and how she held herself strong, taking up space just because she could. nowadays, she is small. she has made herself small and parcelled up that space, giving it back, ounce by ounce of flesh until all that is left is the bruises on her chest and the names hurled on the street like oh-so-many stones and she stops herself, hand on a lamp-post pretending to fix her heel while she wipes her eyes and lowers her skirt and thinks on a tattoo: i am a girl i am a woman i am just me.

[forgetfulsurf]

i dont want him to leave over that said the man on the train before falling nose-first at the floor as if the entire carriage had twisted ninety degrees upon itself. i didn't want him to either, this stranger i was constructing, because he seemed caring in a fashion only existing in my head, and innocent, unaware of me and me steaming away from him as vomit dribbled from the mouth of the nose-down bleeder.

[forgetfulsurf]

it's a waltz, my heartbeat: onetwothree twotwothree like a swishing of a dress on wood-panelled flooring, a tight metre in free verse, the pacing of the universe spoon by spoon until i die, and sugar always piling up like beads in an egg-timer as the hob boils my water.

[forgetfulsurf]

you know what's the saddest thing light pollution, because it stops you seeing the stars you know what's the saddest thing blindness, because you can't see people smiling you know what's the saddest thing the ten seconds after a guitar stops playing  because it hangs in the air and that's the real music you know what's the saddest thing a moth lands on my screen when i am writing at night because i have lost track of time and eventually i stop batting him away because he's just looking for lights probably the stars, actually

[forgetfulsurf]

training

what have i learnt? well, i'm always running. always another hundred metres to catch her, fifteen seconds and then i'll be the winner. always pulling up socks on the start line, breathing long and deep and chesty. always the starter's gun and the shock of the bang and the straightening-up, the legs-pumping, frantic, to show them who i am. women's hundred metres world champion: me. i run a thousand times towards myself and never catch her running in the other race on the other track while a lean, gristled man lines up next to me and i dread the humiliation of not-even-qualifying.

[forgetfulsurf]

i lie on top of my bed with my arms stretching out to the eternal sky the itching spots on my chest the hair dye on my scalp it feels alive when there is rain on the windowpane and i am moon-powerful the only power i have is over myself but i am an eternity reaching into the sky like an obelisk marking a solstice

[forgetfulsurf]

old friend

it's moved off now, flexing its taught rainy muscles and sending families to living rooms, dogs to back doors, barking at the incomprehensibility of outside-the-house. i threw my window open to greet it and yet it lumped my throat too: it put me a thousand years back - cave, skins, burning forests, grasses and the stink of curled flesh cooked in an instant, dead, not food. it passed a good five miles from us, counting it out, one elephant, two, then headed north, up caterham way, skittering raindrops on other gardens, wrapping sinewey bolts round trees as it pulled inexorably onwards like the turning of the globe on axis, an erratic skater on unmarked ice.