O

The way he says 'I love'

A short o, I lov

A short o, shaped like a mouth

No ifs, no buts, say NO to all the cuts

UCL Occupation, Day 5

Between the meetings, discussions, updates and proposals, we dance a ceilidh. The caller is a music teacher from SOAS, heavily moustached, the other side of middle age, and wearing a bright knitted jumper. He sings in Italian. He sings a song about wallpaper that hails from Bethnal Green. We dance to his fiddle. We all get hot, not bothered, for an hour or so.

But there is something to get bothered about.
But you have to dance too.

Fabric

Mixing florals, mixing patterns,

I want to wrap myself in prints

and create paisley damask distractions.

Textiles tailored for straightjackets.

The busy shapes fail to tessellate;

they cannot fool my senses.

I wrap myself in prints

as fingers wrap themselves around

the cross-stitch strings inside organs,

plucking fingerprint beats

and pulling pulling gentle persistence,

undoing what was sewn.

Beneath cotton hibiscus bruises

I see the imprint of you.

At work I've been building forts out of boxes and books and brown parcel paper. (Plus dogs.)

Outside of work I have been trying to build forts out of gingerbread lattes and mince pies (Sainsbury's, sub par and too soon really). I've only managed a fairly flimsy cave of imagined tarpaulin.

Oh. I must read Tom Paulin on Elizabeth Bishop for class.

Such stuff as dreams are made on

Rainy November Sundays, complete with a little thunder, are for catching up, pubs and museums. Not dusty, musty, boring, compulsory family-day-out museums. But museums of EVERYTHING.

Before a warming latte, we walked to Primrose Hill, by way of Chalk Farm, and found a curiosity. The Museum of Everything. Carnival, circus, fairground, gaudy clowns, marionettes, married midgets, bearded ladies, woman-mountains, stuffed animals, two-headed lambs, tiny leathered dogs, claustrophobic tunnel of boxing squirrels at eye-level, all moth-eaten, dog-eared, the frogs and toads were the worst, I could barely look...far from Beatrix Potter is Mr Potter's stitched up anthropomorphic menagerie, yet not a load of cock robin. Scientific Automatic Palmistry - place coin in slot, read your girdle of Venus and follow your second life line...

This little Sunday life was rounded with strawberry cider.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

A shame Jane Austen
Never got lost in
Jilly Cooper's fiction;
She'd be baffled by the diction.

Write me. Write.

Anna who was mad,
I have a knife in my armpit.
When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages.
Am I some sort of infection?
Did I make you go insane?
Did I make the sounds go sour?
Did I tell you to climb out the window?
Forgive. Forgive.
Say not I did.
Say not.
Say.

Speak Mary-words into our pillow.
Take me the gangling twelve-year-old
into your sunken lap.
Whisper like a buttercup.
Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.
Take me in.
Take me.
Take.

I love Anne Sexton. And then I find that she had an aunt named Anna
who went mad. She thought of Anna as a mother. She watched her 
slowly go mad. A knife in the armpit.

Suet pudding and mashed potato, red woolen fingerless gloves, my orange Autumn coat that smells of old ladies, breathing clouds of Heaton weed, flame leaves trodden into tarmac, donating giant sparklers to children, jumpers that have to have sleeves rolled back and almost reach my knees, piling up books for my bag, new poets (to me) and old favourites, the beginnings of a bird poem (don't hold your breath), sitting on a bench between two man-brothers watching cranes to counter hangovers, wine and Downton Abbey and baklava before midnight. AND ACTUALLY READING A NOVEL.

I am eating all and sundries at the moment. Because I have an appetite? Because a person ALL full is better than a glass half empty? Because I can? What I most crave is a home-cooked meal at my home in Northumberland. I could dine for weeks on this. One of these meals could keep me going more than any amount of snacking, masticating, attacking like a gannet can when I'm away for too long. I am eating so much and so frequently because I am trying to re-create that fullness I feel when in the kitchen by the Aga reading the paper and being told to 'not to smack my lips'. Half-cream hot chocolate heated on the hob with friends, topped with cheap whipped cream that scares him, is most excellent in Autumn. But it acts as an appetiser to the weekend feast.

Guide to Being a Grown-Up

buy a pumpkin. take out its guts. disembowel it. save the seeds for toasting and adding to a questionable soup-stew. cook porridge in the pumpkin, with milk and apples and cinnamon. spoon out the porridge-pudding when steaming, each eager feaster manned with their own teaspoon. scoop the semi-soft pumpkin flesh, making perfect circles. play with a sparker-lighter, throw shards of spiky light. burn plastic-coated business cards in the holey pumpkin-husk out in the garden. add lighter fluid and burn some more. add phlegm-soaked tissues of ill people to the flames to try and burn burn burn the damned plastic. conduct a voodoo ritual around the burnt-orange, orange-flamed pumpkin. sing 'Burn Baby, Burn' into the dark. smell satisfyingly of lighter fluid all night, the stench stuck to wool jumpers.

a pumpkin should come with the keys to a starter home. they are for grown-ups.

That Night

My bed in white sheets, strewn with jumpers not all mine. Laptop, notebook, neat-angled. Sock-toasties and balled up in pyjama bottoms eating rhubarb pie and reading all my theory and criticism. Go go biro: myth touch history, sift through whatever flotsam washes up.

Then Ted cuts to the quick.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their blood tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

I find nothing in my life that I can't find more of in books. With the exception of walking on the beach, in the snowy woods, and swimming underwater.

That is one of the saddest journal entries I ever made when I was young.

Mary Reufle

Iambic Pentameter

As I blow dust across the table top
and stack up boxes, counting to myself,
the boy, the gentle man, who hails from far
South Africa reads. He reads aloud, him to me,
from Romeo and Juliet. Sonnet.
The one with pilgrims, all about true love
and that. A bore but for his accent soft.
He counts the iambs and considers well
the metric feet. Oh, I confess I would,
and do, consider more than just his feet.

Two Perfect Two-Liners

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
Ezra Pound


My mind insisted on words
having been promised the imagination
Thom Gunn

The Rape of the Lock and taxidermied moths make for insect eroticism.
The stuffed ones that once flew have beautiful names that spur me on to write again.
Victorian obsessions with death and biology and discoveries becoming preserved and pickled appeal to my darker side. Skeletons and stuffed specimens now molting crowd my head with moth balls. Write to get them out.

Stolen Jumpers and Stuffed Marrows

Gin is a devilish drink*. The spirit that harbours dark spirits. But these are soon exorcised (on the bus, orally) and good things can result from knocking back such evils. Like the jumper he found in his pocket. A large jumper folded into a small pocket. A man's, and bearing the date of a dear friend's birth. A jumper that I wear the day after the night before, following the march through the London of Important Buildings, where condom balloons fly and bounce off shiny, bald, liberal heads.

When odd things happen, when chickens lose heads, and when surreal seems to be the norm, I concentrate on little things. Like how I always sneeze when I pluck my eyebrows. Concentrate on little things, and make big things out of Sunday afternoons. Stuff a marrow with bright colours (add mince for the carnivores) and eat with friends whilst listening to Radio 4.

* Though Jilly Cooper gets hammered on sloe gin with her daughter, which sounds sublime. I would like to get a bit silly and giggly and very very tipsy with Jilly. And sloe gin conjures a gentrified countryside idyll of old. Nectar rather than noxious.

Changing Gears

[Me putting a Harry Potter hex on the Provost]

Graduand sounds rather grand, but now I am a Graduate. Unfortunately Anne Bancroft was not involved in this initiation, despite me having the same nose as Dustin Hoffman.

Now I am a Graduate, I am also a grease monkey. I change inner tubes in the hallway. I re-connect the chain when it comes off over hills. I smudge my A-Z, clothes, bare legs and face with oil. My hands are bathed in the stuff. I curse like a trooper. I get a boy to 'deal with the bike' when not even my Barbie bell can redeem it that day.

I construct bookshelves by myself. Bang bang bang. After watching the women on Madmen. I bake bread pudding. But fork it cold and straight from the souffle dish into my mouth. 'Anna, don't smack your lips'.

I drink Turkish coffee and buy a spinach-stuffed borek. Sweet sludge and savoury stodge.

I invite Iris Murdoch and Alan Hollinghurst to bed on a Sunday morning. We all lie in together.

I read Style magazines and munch apples collected from wind-fall in the conservatory as he types. Tap tap tap om nom nom.

I witness the perfect death of a villain in Castle of Cagliostro. Crushed between clock hands at the top of a tower as it strikes midnight.

Graduates wear red lipstick, become wimpy tomboys, get covered in grease, wish they were a Manga cartoon, and eat in an unladylike manner. I thought this would be enough to attract Anne Bancroft. Maybe I can do without her. I have left-over bread pudding in her place.

Organ Playing

London was upturned topsy-turvy yesterday. All those who usually dwell underground, beneath the streets, came out into the sunlight and were blinded by it. Dazzled, startled, so the streets became barmy. Sirens, buses screaming right by stops, crammed crowded like the trains in India. Roads jam jam jammed. The monster ignoring the zebra crossing was the beginning of it all. [I should have been wearing my zebra leggings, to hammer home the safari road safety]
After being run over, the city became skewiff along with my flying shoe and crisscrossed nerves.

I gave the boy with the East-European Face an East-European Stomach. I made it with sausage carved from solid meat and herrings in mustard and spiced cheese curds. We ate dinner in a restaurant wearing indoor slippers and inside-out shirts. Men sang Marvin Gaye, thinking him a hot-blooded hunk of male meat. Women knew better, secret-smiling and shaking heads. Hot-blooded males. Tepid results.

Today the tubes are running again, pumping, pulsing under city skin. I listen to witchy playlists [http://fraeuleinzucker.blogspot.com/2010/09/something-wicked-this-way-comes.html] and add REINBOLT to the database. A bolt of rain? Lightning that got damp, then sodden, round the edges as it passed through the topsy-turvy atmosphere of yesterday. Lightning teardrop. Today it rains and Mumford and Sons don't sound so bad with their hands and their hearts and their eyes in every song. They sound laughably familiar. Bodies. Tangible flesh.

Plated flesh food is gifted to us from lovely neighbours. Tempting me with tasty smackerals of aromatic dead animal, filling the hallway, and then our home, with 'mmmmm...' Grilled fish and meat curries. Caribbean blood, string vests, wide smiles. They are large loud solid. Alive! We give them thick sweet honey in return, though they are sweet enough.


[intestine sock]

My shoe flew through the air, no substance to it, but my foot has a thick skin. It is the meat that matters.

Breakfasts in Victoria Park Village. Lunches in Soho Square. Dinners in Turnpike Lane.

Wine in Hackney Wick. Ale on Highgate Road. Gin and tonics in Kilburn. Red Stripe in Brick Lane. A pint in a plastic cup in Clapham.

Take-away tea on the 236.