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this is real
Too much inspiration and my head’s exploding. Inspiration locked behind concrete walls, I mean, not my own. Hanging from the ceiling shedding little glass dew drops, a million influences and creative fireworks. Listening to grime and my god how I get transported through glass tunnels to a bright place. I’ve discovered new tunes and it’s as if an arm is stretching out. I want to become a part of that, snitch little pieces of classical stuff and throw them into a beat. Wear my Metamorphosis skirt and play games with my own creations. Sunlight spilling in and I know there’s a secret in the shadows. I’m trying to listen to…
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Night time snare
If only it were morning, she’d breathe flowers on my skin. I need that pretty, cooling breath to quieten down my limbs. Armies the size of mountain ranges march in tiny footsteps, leaving trails of dulling tiny heartbeats, that desperate urge to move. My muscles tighten, lengthen, crush, head banging to nightclubs, please ice me with sleep. I crave it, urge it on to melt into liquid stars, to cool and soothe. Let’s walk in circles, deceive this demon, capture it in my night time snare. Puppets strings, invisible yet anointed with arsenic, silver strings that pull and push at my legs. Poisonous webs that cling to my veins, keep…
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īn nīz bogzarad
Burn, molten ashen grey, fire, underwater flames. Dazzle, leap and kiss the sky, pierce its crystal blue composure. Tiny shards raining down, sharp as poison, snow white lips. I bow my head and kiss the ground, in semi-ritual, eyes upturned. To stroke the earth and pound the stones, jewels of souls long gone yet with me. I hear the breathing far below, deep tremors, cascading blackened rainbows. Cutting pieces out of the earth with stinging sharp-edged fragments of sky. This too shall pass, īn nīz bogzarad, ephemerality, a Sufi story. Intense sunlight and it’s very quiet. The heat of the evening, why so fierce? All-consuming, exquisite in its radiant hush. Windchimes sparkle…
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Drugged: a strange little story
Veiled in lace, slightly there yet mostly not, mostly not. Dive deep and marvel at a bejewelled surface, that sapphire sea in Sicily. Up on my elbows, try to be useful, think of a word or phrase, a tune. Creative engine left behind, just heavy legs and an aimless walk. A few steps, that’s it, a lap of the bed, cut an apple in quarters and crunch it in sunlight. ‘Relax and accept that you’re still very fragile’, mum’s words that make me free to lie dormant. Quiescent, a good word. The scent of jasmine at dawn. Twitching fingers with sparkling tips, create a few words or notes but not…
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fairy stories
‘With one touch of his magic wand he could people my universe with elves.’ Arthur Rackham, an artist ghost of 6 Primrose Hill Studios, sets my mind alight. How is it, as children, our insides become our outsides, our thousand senses drip trails behind us like confetti? I remember staring at the pages of Aesop’s Fables and bearing that strange weight of the grotesque and the beautiful combined. Rackham’s pictures hurt with an unavoidable certainty, the world IS a fairytale, that knowledge a burden. Every breath an intake of icy inevitability. As children and perhaps as adults, fairytales are a confirmation of what we sense, a shadow just beyond what…
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chasing indigo
Indigofera tinctoria, True Indigo, a colour of ‘radiant, ineffable beauty’ in the words of Oliver Sacks. ‘ “True indigo is the unicorn of colours, maybe hidden from us, Oliver thought, “because the colour of heaven was not to be seen on Earth.”. Himself a master of wonder, a chaser of mystery, he described indigo as a colour undefined. Poisonous, powerful, its origins unknown, a plant used in some circles for binding spells. Revenge, rebounding, a symbol of endings. This spirit of the unknown, Indigo the Unseen, my morning secret that splinters through my window crystals. I see it on the walls if the sun wants to play. I want to…
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somewhere between
Between Camden Town and Angel, or somewhere thereabouts, there exists another dragon. This deafening spectre dulls all senses, a suspension in time where I hold my breath. Today i’m grateful for its grating roar, that searing moment obliterating all conversation, all thought. The tube rattles and grinds through the dragon’s hiss and the intrusive party of five or so next to me are themselves obliterated. I embrace the dragon, for the first time not holding and covering my ears. Bright blue eyes decked in black, this girl, why is she shouting so? She is as if amplified, her babbling, exclaiming companions falling like dominoes beside her. ‘Loz’s hen night ain’t…
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moonlight in greenham common, a strange place
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mysterium lunae
First quarter moon. A piece of magic in electric blue, I glimpse it before Night draws her heavy cape across the sky. I think of it now, strung amongst stars. Mysterium lunae, the symbolism of the moon. The first quarter moon emerges out of the crescent moon, in its turn appearing from darkness, the new moon phase, positioned between the Earth and the Sun. First quarter moon, decision making. I see it through latticed glass windows, an angle of glass cut into my room as if for that very purpose. What direction is that? South I think. I live in an old artists’ haven, the huge studio rooms facing north.…
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Leake Street Arches
I found myself here tonight, a jewellery box of magic. From darkness to light, trying to find club Iklectik, I walk a catwalk of underworld treasure.
