Cinnamon Sunshine

Sketches of Nothing

And this is the naked jump into the reflected moon, the sudden death of polite conversation, the curl of smoke before it turns invisible. This is the open ended question, the rhetoric that makes no sense but lifts something primal deep inside. This is the crack, the hole, the void, and through this shines the light, and if you mapped this, it would spill over the edges and if you sketched this, it would be rendered most faithfully in the sliding between lead and paper.

Those deep throated sounds you meant to say but instead swallowed, those razor edged moments of nothing that got inside your brain and sliced your thoughts to ribbons, those rainbows that shimmered for half a second and then faded to blank sky.

Cinnamon

It could have been perfect.

It could have been the flamboyant, triumphant, yellow and red trumpet sound of joy, of ecstasy, of victory, of dynamic successful action. But it wasn’t, so you take note and smile through gritted teeth and try to find the tambourine man with his stock of repetitive jangles that herald the sunrise.

Every sunrise foreshadows the sunset, every dawn recalls the night, and we take flight from window to window as though hoping to lose the essence of gray in violent dynamic successful action. But however fast we run, however high we fly with the jangling notes of another sunrise, the gray is always ahead, waiting.

It could have been perfect.

For a moment we tasted it, cinnamon and honey, slow roasted pine smells, an explosion of promise. But the gray lies in the shadows that underpin the light, and there is nothing solid to grasp in the helter welter of jangling cinnamon sunrise.

So it wasn’t.

Aren’t you tired of the numbers? Welcome to the double digits, you’re here for life now. There’s no turning back. Every year gets a little more difficult, a little more painful, and sooner or later it will kill you.

But life isn’t a game, and I don’t have to play with these rules, these loaded dice, these marked cards. Locked into a parabola, the games just distract from the view; win, lose, rise, fall, we all end up feeding the cycle.

Everything was made to be used, to be cherished, to be felt and consumed. The trees and the dust and the desert and the night sky. There is a maze between me and the centre, the nirvana, the God, the Union, the Love, a maze of paper and ribbon and wild dogs and scrap heaps and rubbish tips and landfills and pools of nuclear waste. Sludge Hell presided over by the selfish and the stupid.

But somewhere in the middle of my heart and reflected behind my third eye is a memory and a dream of something else, something better, something good and worth holding on to. They call it heaven, but I call it home.

It is when you take the word cunt and you make it stop meaning
filthy dirty whore fucking twat woman fear hate denouncement pain rage swallowed up and overwhelmed and you take the word cunt and you make it mean wet inviting open loving living celebration woman love birth redemption peace and beauty

—-

This is me and I am here and I am a windswept beach on an overcast day, I am a crisp autumn leaf pile flaming red brittle edges, I am a dark hole laced with spider silk and edged with frost, I am a space in which you drop your words, a mirror in which you lose your face, a pool so still and so deep you would never come up again, a broken pause in a circle of speech, the gap between words, the electric jump from retina to brain, the note that lands on the offbeat.

You are not safe here, you have never been safe here, for death is contained in life and every journey predicts its own end. There is no meaning here, there has never been meaning here, but this is the only thing there is so you might as well make yourself at home, you might as well put up some curtains and scratch your name above the door because if you don’t, someone else will, and there will always be water here, and there will always be windswept beaches here, and there will always be another and and the circle will repeat until the record stops.

—-

Sometimes, it is possible to take the bits of nonsense and reform them into something new and bright and seductive.
Sometimes, it is possible to be in love without any demands.
Sometimes, it is possible to be alive and alone and okay.
Sometimes, it is possible to find worth in the sky and the wind and the sea and the way your eyes move when you are happy and the way your fingers move tendon by tendon and sometimes I can marvel at the beautiful ingenious complexity contained within one tiny gesture and sometimes I find myself wanting to cry over the smallest and mundane of kind words of three-second thoughts of inexplicable connection of a half question formed between the space in you and the space in me and for a moment a fragile strand hangs suspended in nowhere and that is all that matters to me and that is all I ever wanted because in that fragile strand is creation and life and love and an entire universe contained within the vacuum.
Sometimes, the pattern breaks, and sometimes you can pluck a moment from a harp and know it will ripple across the world.
Sometimes, I am happy.

Give it to me, over and over again, until the limits have been reached and broken, until the boundaries dissolve into sugar lines sketched onto the pavement by crows. Break me here, and here, and here. Snap the words in my throat, snap my wishbone, snap the cables that keep me trapped, keep me grounded here, snap everything that ever meant anything, snap anything that might save me, snap the vision from my eyes and when you are done; when you are done, snap my neck.

When the mud leaks through every pore in my body, when my bones are dust, when there is nothing left but atoms swirling through a foreign universe, then maybe I’ll have something for you. Then, maybe, I will find my way home. Then, maybe, I will understand.

—-
—-

And then, as it stands, what you offer is not enough. Integration, quietness, tea and little fucks in the early hours of the morning. Rumpled sheets tangled around awkward limbs, sweat stains leaking together, don’t give me your filth. I am searching for something that can revive me, raise me, fill me with light, not your snapping reducing fingers interested in only your own survival drive. Don’t give me platitudes you don’t understand, words you don’t hold the concept of, don’t feed me lies you read on the back of a magazine. If you have to lie, make it Crowley lies, make it world-destroying, make it be so black and cold that it holds the promise of absolute brilliance within it. Or forget diametrics all together, and give me shades of the forest and sky. It’s all meaningless.

I didn’t think I’d survive, but here I am. With bones of ice and a heart of stone. The only mercy I can afford to give you is that of a clean blade and a smooth stroke. If you struggle and plea and run I can give you no guarantees. In the night, they scream. In the night, they plead for a clean blade and a smooth stroke.

—-
—-

If you put all this together, what would you have? The linguistic map of an organic surface ((we are all the same)) the charting of loops and bumps that differ only slightly from the loops and bumps of any other organic surface ((we are all the same)) the postmodern equivalent of speaking in tongues ((we are all the same)) another flailing attempt at pinning down the world in categorical terms ((we are all the same)) another rigid black and white two dimensional rule edged picture of an oozing bruise coloured four dimensional object ((we are all the same)) another list of ways to live while we survive ((we are all the same)) another stab at calling the shots another stab at speaking the truth ((we are all the same)) as though the truth sat still for a moment and as though the truth could be reduced to manipulations of sound or vision ((we are all the same)) another garbled pile of puke and shit ((we are all the same)).

—-
—-

It means whatever you want it to mean, but it doesn’t mean you are right. You are never right. Being right is beyond us. Every attempt to grasp the things above and beyond us shifts them to fit inside our fleshy construct, our linguistic boundaries, and I think that thinking this makes me crazy.

—-
—-

I have no answers for you.
I have no redemption for you.
I have no saviours, no promised land, no map that points the way home.
But hey, at least if you believe in nothing, you won’t be disappointed when you finally realise that all there is is nothing.

I was never in the market for goodtime hellos, for ragtime goodbyes. I was never in the market for a Prince with blue eyes. I was never in the market for thin happiness, fragile as a spider web, sticky as a spider web. I knew it would be hard, harder than you thought, harder than you could believe. I was born with this knowledge. Knowledge of the enroaching tides, swallowing up sand castles and cliffs alike. Knowledge of the empty space above the blue skies. Knowledge of the fickle nature of immutability. I was born knowing blood and fear and expulsion. But you gave me happiness, fragile as a spider web, sticky as a spider web. Scrub as I might, I can never clean myself of the memory of your touch. My body holds it against itself, gentle fingers, gentle fingers that never said goodbye.

I was never in the market for your blue eyes, I know of the empty space behind them. We don’t speak of the danger zone, we skirt it in parables and metaphors, with slang and silence. Just another friend, just another girl you liked, just another potential source of pain that had to be negated. I am not stupid. I feel the space within you, I feel the fear, I feel the desperate control and the panicked retreat. This is my specialisation; the broken people, I watch them, I watch them and I learn. Normal human reactions to this situation that is so abnormal. I hear the difference between truth and a lie, I know you meant it when you said save me. I know this game, this unforgivable game, cuts you down worse than you cut me down. I have been the victim of so many lies and games designed to protect the instigator from imagined danger. But I am not a victim. I have never been a victim, I never will be a victim. I am a survivor. I am a forgiver. I am a barrier. I stand at the interface between world views, and I translate. Not always well, not always accurately, but every mistake teaches me something new.

I was never in the market for your carrot, your promised nirvana, your end point, your game over; here’s the prize. I play to play, I run to run, I live to live. I love to experience love, not to gain something back. I will make myself into something that cannot be destroyed by your games, and I will be here when you lose control, when the fear backfires, when the game turns against the dealer. I will show you something greater than revenge, greater than greed, greater than fear, greater than control. I will show you what it means to be fearless. I will show you what it means to accept the pain. I will show you what it means to respect a person for who they are and not what they offer.

Failure to achieve greatness does not mean you are doomed to failure, and success at achieving greatness does not mean you are assured of success.

And these words are nonsense without you, as all words become nonsense without a receptive audience. You would not understand them, if I showed you, but we understand each other on that other level, on that primeval shadowy bloodsoaked level. We understand each other as equals, as friends, as characters in this continuing storyline that meanders from place to place, subject to subject, without ever reaching a definitive conclusion. Let us open the box, a life without hope is no life at all, and a life without pain, death, fear, loss, anger is no life at all.

Let me reach the limits of this anger then, because contained within it is your redemption.

I will fight you to save you.

Not for myself. But for the next one.

Standing naked on the rocky beach, watching the sea wash gently over stone and sand and slide back again; leaving patterns of froth over everything. Too young to have any awareness of self, standing in that scene; a part of that scene. Filtered through my eyes, my brain, my skin, my tongue. Salt in the air, a bite to the edge of the wind. No understanding then that this was merely what filtered through, no concept of what lay beyond, outside. The rushing ocean existed only there, only in that one time.

-

Lying on the fallen tree, staring up at the canopy of leaves and the dappled pattern of sun that lay beyond. Listening to the shrill yearnings of the birds, wondering what they felt, what they sang for. Home sickness palpable in my stomach, a dead weight of loss and fear. Light headed, and giddy. Unsure of all that lay around, the land a living expanding silent wave that rocketed out from me and extended forever. Each breath I took sent a pulse that rippled on and on along that wave.

-

Everything I write is true, somehow, somewhere, for someone that I might have been.

-

The smell of cooking cabbage and oil drifts through the house. Quiet mourning for that which fell away. I hope the remains of who I am don’t corkscrew out of the top of my head, and whisper away into the wave.

I walk to the bus stop in the pre-dawn, watching the mist drift around the welsh mountain tops. It is quiet, a quiet morning, no school kids, no nobody. The sky is pregnant with the promise of rain, the air is cool and damp. I want to take a photograph, have brought my camera out with me for just this purpose, but the battery is drained and it won’t switch on. Perhaps it is better. All I could do is send it to a number of faux-friends, stick some mundane comment, something witty and personable, nothing too heavy, too weird, too sentimentally cloying. Better this way, just me and the view, until the bus comes.

The bus comes, blue, red and white. Why? Patriotic? Text message logo splatters the side in giant green letters. Go2 … Caerphilly & Cardiff. I flash my pass, climb aboard. It starts raining almost immediately.

The other woman, the one who boards the bus one stop before me and also works at Tesco House, she is there. We pointedly ignore each other, pretend we have not noticed that we always take the same route at the same time. It is not done, it is not British. There is no way of making contact, unless the bus breaks down, or something spectacular happens. I sink into a seat and open my book.

I don’t read it though, even though it’s a good book, an excellent book. I hold it open in my hands, but stare out at the drifting welsh roads and houses and rain. I think about the people I know, the people I sort of know, the people I could know, the people I don’t know. I think about not getting off at the stop for Tesco, of carrying on, of getting to the train station, heading down to Gatwick, getting a plane ticket.

I think about my tent.

The day is long, pointless. We are taught how to navigate tesco.com, which is crazy, as it’s a simple easy-to-use obvious website. We are taught how to use GAS, Teleshopper, what pinpoint forms to use, the difference between eVouchers and eCoupons.

There is going to be consistent Sunday overtime offered, at double time. I think that when I am trained I will take it, think about getting a second job, think about how much money I need to earn, and how long it will take. I talk to my coworkers, stiff and stilted, we are robots following a process, a procedure of politeness and ritual. I would like to tell them about knives, blood, ambulances, dinner plates smashing, fog on mountain tops, the way I am scared of what is happening, the fact I am sick of waiting, sick of waiting, sick of waiting for my life to mean something. I want to tell them that I lie in the bath, and trace my contours and wonder why.

We talk about the overtime and the traffic.

The chair I am in has been adjusted for someone much bigger than me, and the back reclines too much. My womb aches, cramps, violently assails the surrounding organs. My bladder moans, my stomach gurgles on bile. My back hurts, christ, my entire midsection is a burning gurgling aching stabbing mass of contradicting pains. I twist and shift in the chair, pull one leg up under me. Unprofessional. Proving to all around me that I am not a Tesco monkey, that these fawn coloured trousers and decorous shirts and kitten heeled dress-up shoes that make clicking noises when I walk is just a mask, a lie. I am ignored by my collegues, finish my workbook in record time — list of stores that stock this, that, macaroni cheese, tuna sandwich filling, get bored, search for my postcode and find all the people that live in my home-town that have Tesco.com accounts. My Dad has one. I am shocked.

Out of the building by 4.35, waving bye, bye, see you tomorrow, take care, yeah, bye… click-clicking in these shoes that are not mine, though I wear them. Down the street, bus stop, my stomach and back shrieking at me, Christ, it’s not fair, it’s not like I even want kids, not like this pain is for anything, making me stronger, faster, better… flop to my knees on the pavement, curl up, don’t care, what does it matter that my shoes state that I am a professional kitten-heeled click-clicker with a clipboard and a friendly, but non-intimate telephone manner. Wish it would rain, wish I could sit curled up by the bus stop, drenched and reborn. The bus comes, not mine, a rogue bus, a bus not on the schedules, but I take it anyway. Flash my pass, some casual witty brief conversation with the driver.

The bus is packed, and for a second I panic, thinking I am going to have to stand here. Stand here with my stomach cramping, my shoes shrieking lies, clinging to the orange plastic supports. A baby right next to me, shopping piled up all around, the smell of people -

And a nice old lady waves me over, points to the seat beside her and I scramble up the bus, tripping and ungainly. She has one skinny brown liver-spotted hand that grips the back of the seat in front of her for support as the bus careens around roundabouts and junctions. White hair. A bulky coat that hides everything else.

We do not speak. It is not British.

I read my book. The baby up front starts crying. It is a beautiful baby regardless, with a perfect round face and vulnerable, love me love me eyes. The dad is so competent and proud and loving. It makes me happy. This is okay, see, the ‘little’ people. He is a wonderful Dad. They are probably not rich, they ride the bus, but his love and pride shines like a halo and his baby is so unabashed, so beautiful.

I think about how bizarre baby contests are.

My womb shrieks at me, but it doesn’t seem so bad now. This red haired Dad, who reminds me, inexplicably, of the (oh so fucking clever!) new lecturer who I had a flying crush on. You know the kind, where you think, how cute! and never go beyond that.

Yes.

Thoughts turn away, to old relationships, and then spiral into madness, back to the one who hurt me. Bitterness rankles. The bus empties, I empty with it. Walk to the station, wait for the second bus. I am sad and empty, used up, non-degradable bit of floating rubbish. A Tesco carrier bag.

Back to The Rock, where all the houses are square and dirty-yellowish and blank. Home, the dog goes nuts, she always goes nuts; where did you go!? You came back!! She jumps on me and runs in circles and then demands love. Squirming on her back, legs in the air, tongue out.

Yes.

I feel odd, empty, pointless. The others have exercised free will, have drunk coffee and taken baths and gone to the cinema, or sat in the bed playing World of Warcraft. I change into my purple nightshirt, the one from Next, the one that is obscenely short and yet otherwise so prim and plain. I make pointed comments at the flatmate, poor guy, not his fault I have worked all day and he hasn’t, not his fault that I am tired and empty and don’t want to have to fight for my computer, don’t want to have to think about laundry, don’t want to go downstairs and make hot chocolate. These aren’t his tasks either, but goddamnit, please? Please? I don’t want to. My stomach hurts, and my back hurts, and everything is dark and hot.

I think about waiting, about always waiting, about the mundane restless tasks that constitute waiting. Laundry and cooking and work and buses. Rain. Emails that do not change the world. Stupid leaflets that I need to produce and email. Doctors that need to be registered with. Trains that need to be booked. Medicine that has to be bought. Shampoo. Toothpaste. Rent. Baking soda. Laundry. Always motherfucking laundry.

I think about swords and last stands and heroic final words.

Witty cynical bitterness to mask the emptiness. Click-click kitten heeled black dress-up shoes. Raging hormones. Fear. It is dark and hot. I think about sex, try to imagine it, but all that happens is a dozen scenes from novels. That one with the apple and the dead body that falls from the ceiling right at the point of climax. That one with the car and the gear stick and a skirt riding high on her thighs. That overwritten over-pretentious Yes! Yes! Life and affirmation! That slick narrative device where the parts of the body become the sacred numbers. Rounded curves slick with sweat, tangled limbs, grunts, groans, moans, bitten lower lips, skin like alabaster, like chocolate, like water, eyes green, blue, shining, wide, closed, rolled back, leather, silk, lace flowing around some undefined body, a belly dance where the great Hope diamond gets passed from bellybutton to bellybutton.

Pointless.

Flip a coin. Luck of the draw. Running the winning streak as far as it will take you, ’till the horse founders, broken leg, and do you have the guts to shoot it? Listen to it scream.

I take up my rightful place, my knife at my belt, my eyes turned to the horizon. Storm clouds boil, but I stand in the eye and watch over it all. A wolf howls. I understand the wind, the waves. We speak now in the language of blood and tears. A palm holds a thousand tangled stories. I breathe and hold you deep within myself, safe in the hollow of my heart. As long as I draw breath you are alive in me. An electromagnetic wave splicing out to seek union with the world. Without time, there is no dialogue. Without dialogue, there is no change. Wait for me, and wait for the changes that will bring us together; this lifetime or the next.

There is no longer a single entity to whom I bend these words. You are all mangled and interwined, a splicing of features and voices, of dreams and dashed hopes.

But deep in the hollow of my heart is a space, and that space is held in reserve for you.

You have to break it apart, to put it back together.

Like a jigsaw puzzle of an abstract painting, there are multiple answers to this thing we call life.

So your pieces fit together like this, mine fit together like that. Let’s mix them together and see what we can come up with.

——
Remember when….?
——

Playing with colours and shapes. My colours went beyond the edges. You mocked me, because I couldn’t make a flat square of red, I had to make my own pictures, look eyes within this scribble, look a tree growing out from the side. I wonder now, if you still colour squares. I colour squares sometimes. I can do it now. I have learned how to reign in the impulses in favour of straight edges.

But it looks better this way!

Of course, it has to be drawn out from the scribble. Within the chaos are strands of order, and we must coax them, plead with them, for them to form for any eyes but our own. You can never truly know the world as I see it, as I feel it. I am zoned out, trippy, swirls of flavour and texture clash in a burst of synaesthesia. What colour is your smile? What sound do your fingers make? I don’t speak your language, I don’t have words for these concepts, they are formed through juxtaposition. Is this poetry? Another lie, a vain struggle to make our voices turn our experiences to sound and form. Another struggle to build edges around this fluid stream. The record skips a groove, we make music, skip a different groove, a different song.

Deep in the mushroom song I am unable to speak, entranced as I am by the fungi’s astonishment at becoming human.

Somewhere out there is pure chaos, and from this my potential to be arose and I became.

Sometime on this continuum I will return to the potential.

I can never die, though, for time is not a fixed thing. The past is never lost, we exist moment from moment, and all stages of our being are being acted out, all potentials are existing side by side, divided by seconds.

This is not a new thought.

—–
Can’t this become…?
—–

A struggle in the darkness, the sword flashes and everything it is hardens within my hands. Do you rise to the challenge of creation? You must accept responsibility for the destruction you perform. An artist never works with a blank page, she forms her images from the torn up shreds of old photographs, from the crushed powdered remains of some old red rock, from memory and desire, from your dreams and her own. She destroys the world and creates it anew. Rebirth must be preceeded with death, and death followed by rebirth. Nothing is total. Nothing is final.

—–
We sang here….
—–

God is dead, he is dying, he is alive and triumphant, she underwent a sex change, she lives in our bones and earth, she boils in our bloodstreams.

Break it apart.

Smash the mirrors.

Tear up the photographs.

Deconstruct the world, a brick at a time.

Tear up the plants and throw their remains down. Let the worms do their work. Let the seeds flourish. Let someone come with glue and a bright idea. Let the landscape skitter sideways and become something else.

No mistake is ever a final mistake. No wound is ever a fatal wound.

It comes pounding through the circuits; swelled up and sparking furious phrases that fizzle off behind it. A trail of broken hearts and blank eyes.

This is not the end of the line.

Easy to forget what comes after the neatly typed T H E  E N D, what follows the climax, what debt is left to pay when someone saves your life, what difficulties arise for anyone wanting to live happily ever after, what fairy tale endings leave to the marginal characters: we all know we’ll end up the witch sooner or later.

It is easy to find refuge in dreams of an unsustainable future, in our own prowess at some later date. We can do it when we’re pushed, and we could do it so much better if we’d had time.

This is our time.

This is today, the moment, the crux upon which your life is turning now. You don’t have to climax it for it to matter. It doesn’t have to be do or die, last minute fireworks, saving the world. It’s as simple as a phone call, a letter, a kiss, a day in the garden, a walk under the moon, pictures in the sand. Transient, meaningless, and every day should be transient because who wants to trapped in the worthy aeons? Fixed and pinned, like a butterfly on display? We are not built for this.