Selected Writing 2021

Have you been here before?

Have you been here before? it’s not like you

are you

have you

it’s not like you to be like that

like this like here have you

been here before?

There was one strip of space down that black-and-beer-painted stairway that fit just right loud thumping bassy bodily anticipation and at the bottom I found you atop two wrists facing face reading face making face making yourself us.

There are no spills in your voice; no lavs in the lads’ lavs; no phrasing for when we become I you she he them all of it too much for those unspeakable booths that we keep telling each other bona about before the voice came and comes and keep on coming:

“Each man kills the thing he looooves,”

 Have you been here before?                                                                         turn to your right, right? You left and let them blister and sleep away tens and tens and tens and tens of times put marbles on the ground and A WHOLE DAMN BUNCH OF PINK NEON JUST FUCKING ALL OVER THE PLACE it’s great something not really and then the DJ came and made it all Blue feeling did you see? Let’s grab a handful of hyacinths.

P      U     T                          M            B,

B                                                                                                                                           right?

Too bright: there was one strip of space here before with too many of us of you of the lights I think I saw a bear with a pair of cigarettes oh yassss both of them at once in his mouth outside there once but it’s all going the same grey way now but O, those yews and thews brought us back to your place after tomorrow night, yeah? Still have a bottle of rosso left…

What did you say? Have you been here before? Have you been here before? 

This is just the rehearsal room for manoeuvre you get to practice who you are want to be could be or could indeed never think of if it’s worth glancing at. The music’s coming too, let’s move together let’s move together let’s move together let’s move together four times over that’s it you found the beat fuck me with these two left feet we’re overlapping it up what do you mean I’ve never seen your eek around here before not under the strung-up lights strung out in a pile in the corner.

Have all those feelings gone away? Oh yes yes you could never bring yourself to step through that door and say - the name that had been in that lined-up moey - say here is the you that you never were never are never can be it’s so you so beautiful before you’d been here.

Orange

Hear me out: we go, we knock a few back, see if there’s some trade going, make our excuses, then it’s all done. No? No. I can’t tell if it’s the air in here, or just what’s in it. The pull and thrust of speakers and hips and curtains; just between us the wetness of vodka slowly seeping into the ceiling as they breathe together oh come on! with the grinding of teeth.

I can feel it in my own jaw.

There it goes again,

The key change,

The breakdowns,                                                                 I’m not paying for it this time, then.

The taste of iron… 

TONIGHT ONLY! This time, it’s silk, or leather, or skin ONLY TONIGHT or only every first Friday of the month at least, I mean just come whenever the fuck you want, it’s all going on anyway, whether you like it or not no, and don’t wear a bloody coat this time. We all feel the cold. You have to get right in there; feel it; learn it. Hear me - no. I just want you to show up in blue again.

There they go again,                     only 2km away

The gym-sculpted midriffs,

The not-saying-anything movements of the chin,

The red lights… 

But what can you say when you don’t like techno?

Yeah, I saw that in your pocket.

But what can you say...

Some Gestures

A lost grey handkerchief, approximately thirty centimeters square, with an elephant printed quite small in one corner

Trying to reconcile yourself with the idea that Kate never actually found a fox

A 5x7 glossy photograph of an ex-partner’s parents on holiday in the South of Spain in 1988

(is that John Waters on the left in the back?!)

Remembering the number of Budget Taxis right before you got chips, the other night around three

A message saved in the notes of your phone that reads “Get the good coffee / Desire itself is empty but it indicates psychological direction O.T.?”

The Spotify playlist I made last September that you find too messy

A copy of PING by Samuel Beckett, fixed to my studio wall with masking tape, and the memory of a particular portrait just because of the hair

Six hours and thirty four minutes and nineteen seconds of field recordings taken from a shut-down nightclub beginning at 6:04 a.m. that began to play back at 6:04 p.m. yesterday 

Nobody was shouting. Nobody came.

My navy blue turtleneck jumper, hanging on the drying rack alongside your underwear

A slightly faded and wrinkled photograph in a window of a man in a suit with immaculate hair but a fairly thin and terrible moustache

Queen Bitch by David Bowie, 1971

The toilets on the third floor of the shopping centre above the Starbucks

A white plaster cast of a hand on a bookshelf there’s dust gathering in the crease of the thumb

Fascination with cottagecore magazines in other people’s living rooms

Your kitsch seaside jewellery, put on display

Minimal abstract paintings in the waiting room of your local dental surgery, predominantly pink

Cher

Google translating your hookup’s last message while you wait for pasta to finish boiling

You know what I mean, right?

You know what I mean, right? I don’t have to say it… You know what I mean, right? I don’t have to say it! You know what I mean, right? I don’t have to say it? You know what I mean, right? I don’t have to say it.

Do I?

Do you?

I don’t know what I meant to say just there, I just keep looking at your shoes it’s really quite sad, the thought of you tying me up like that and the pin on your collar ohhhh I didn’t know people still did that. 

But what do I know, you know what I mean?

You told me you read the obituaries section of yesterday’s paper I didn’t know people still did that and it was just all the people you’d forgotten we’d forgotten I knew. I mean, anyway, you didn’t really tell me, but you TOLD me, you know what I mean?

I just kept looking at your shoes. You just kept looking at that blue screen behind me. It’s very black and white no I’m sure I didn’t forget to plug it in! but that’s not really yes I can hear it, of course what things are like these days, there’s so much more in the middle and who asked you anyway?! The label on your teabag is talking to you, pushing you, asking you the hard stuff, and everyone in here is speaking French for some reason this is bitter just keep saying what you mean and eventually we can all have it.

If you wear it on your sleeve, you can hide it with a light jacket.

You’ve seen each other now so now we all know who you’re going home with at the end of the night what kind of dialogue is that? We’re just making some movements in the right direction, some gestures in someone’s direction I’m looking a bit ropey, now, though I thought about it earlier too! You know what I mean?