c oli nh erd
4poem s
4 lorne street i’m standing in a gallery opening (or could it be a changing room) and the address is 4 lorne street. that’s not a joke. maybe there won’t be any jokes in this poem. i’m on the black side of the room, holding something. the guy on the blue side of the canvas is holding something too, his thing’s attached so he looks sturdier than i imagine i do. mike‐ who wasn’t here a second ago‐ stretches and binds calloused feet tumbling over bikes above the blue chalk of a man’s stiff cue. i told you. no joke. white and morbid underpants, covered up by spray, our steaming cups of armpit tea and men, supposedly frightened, but sort of concentrated & energised, lacking conversation but filled with worry.
"poetry is love in action" i was at a poetics conference and heard michael golston say in a paper on clark coolidge, ‘poetry is love in action’. i jotted it down. i desperately want that formula to be true, like bubblebaths make you sleep well (i haven't slept well in the bath since we first got together, because it frightens you to think i might slip under and not wake up. you forget i'm a little large to drown in our bath, i barely fit in, so could i drown?) but what kind of love in action's poetry? when i was a teenager, i was hopelessly in love with some guy (this happened rather often, with more than one guy so i don't have one in particular in mind) and i invariably associated a song with him, sometimes a song i'd heard him hum, or sometimes a song that just happened to play when we were both in a corridor. i'd lie in my bedroom and play the song over and over on cassette tape. play. rewind. play. rewind. play. rewind. i would do this for hours and i have to admit that although in the first instance i was filled with desire for the guy, gradually this shifted to being desire to hear the song, until at some point it would dawn on me that my desire was strongest for the gap in between when, with my finger on the button i would hear the very familiar buzz. i love that faint whurr and my anticipation
of the assertive click‐click. desire, through a conviction that it wouldn't ever be fulfilled, focused on the act of rewinding, a repetitive act, passive, lonely and, because i would lie there for hours, i surefootedly can say i was in the throes of a kind of erotically‐ charged boredom. it is surely not difficult to speculate why i so fixated on this act. i was obscenely obsessed with my own self‐pity, always going back to the start and playing it through again. schopenhauer said that boredom is just the reversal of fascination, that both depend on being on the outside of something rather than the inside, and that one leads to the other. i certainly felt 'on the outside' and as i rewound pop songs on cassette tapes my intense boredom and equally strong fascination continually outstripped each other like long‐distance runners. when one dropped back, the other steamed on. or like dough kneaded full of air and knocked back to deflation, and then re‐kneaded, and so on. i wasn't doing this through a conviction that i'd find back‐ tracked satanic messages that had been leading me and others so frighteningly astray a la the band 'cradle of filth'. (scratch that, maybe i was. up in my room rewinding tapes, i think i must have been looking for messages, my desire so used to pointing outwards fruitlessly towards guys at school that i would be willing to find some kind of response anywhere, be it spooky as you like.) i'm not sure whether it comes across for anyone else but when typing this out i sometimes felt as though i was back listening compulsively to that buzz again, caught up in conflicting senses of possibility and boring inevitability.
dodoitsu i remember being a barfly. not a MAGGOT like you said. was i swatted by the edge of the street? i do listen to people when i’m not talking myself; my husband (if i could choose) would be a raconteur. i am an atomiser from which you can squeeze a thin spray of hope, i hope. if you hug me, i’ll show you. shuddering just happily oo aa oo aa oo aa oo this isn’t what you think. there’s a stone in my shoe. i don’t know. i feel mixed up, like dough, in a cool attic. the sky just won’t stop shouting (so i’ll play pop songs). the checkoutboy (the only one i can think of) crouching on the supermarket floor. his badge says tomas. there are websites where you can track celebrity real estate transactions. i just looked. Bjork is selling a house.
elevator poem a purple pellet is being smushed into your forehead. a little more information, maybe? but the pellet could be anything. clear? it’s irrelevant. and we all stand in the corners of the elevator, smiling, thinking the same thing, at you. IT’S A BLUEBERRY, NITWIT; DON’T ALLOW HIM TO CONTINUE!!! a purple pellet is being smushed into your forehead. a little more information, maybe? but the pellet could be anything. clear? it’s irrelevant. and we all stand in the corners of the elevator, smiling, thinking the same thing, at you. IT’S A BLUEBERRY, NITWIT; DON’T ALLOW HIM TO CONTINUE!!! a purple pellet is being smushed into your forehead. a little more information, maybe? but the pellet could be anything. clear? it’s irrelevant. and we all stand in the corners of the elevator, smiling, thinking the same thing, at you. IT’S A BLUEBERRY, NITWIT; DON’T ALLOW HIM TO CONTINUE!!! a purple pellet is being smushed into your forehead. a little more information, maybe? but the pellet could be anything. clear? it’s irrelevant. and we all stand in the corners of the elevator, smiling, thinking the same thing, at you. IT’S A BLUEBERRY, NITWIT; DON’T ALLOW HIM TO CONTINUE!!! a purple pellet is being smushed into your forehead. a little more information, maybe? but the pellet could be anything. clear? it’s irrelevant. and we all stand in the corners of the elevator, smiling, thinking the same thing, at you. IT’S A BLUEBERRY, NITWIT; DON’T ALLOW HIM TO CONTINUE!!! a purple pellet is being smushed into your forehead. a little more information, maybe? but the pellet could be anything. clear? it’s irrelevant. and we all stand in the corners of the elevator, smiling, thinking the same thing, at you. IT’S A BLUEBERRY, NITWIT; DON’T ALLOW HIM TO CONTINUE!!!