Chutney Girl

Chutney Girl

No one can sleep in a house made of sour
and the chance of me sleeping gets less by the hour.
I'm a little green onion all trapped in a jar.
A chilli wrapped relic from my myanmar.

Then I can't sleep, I'm falling apart,
simmered in time and gingered folk art.
Chutney girl has pickled her heart.

And there's always a limit, you canot preserve,
you cannot pretend it int what we deserve.
I crack like the bottles on midnight kid's shelf.
Vinegar shrivels. I'm jamming myself.

Pick when they're green, fruit never went red.
We put it with sugar and boiled it instead.
I'll never go bad but I'll never be ripe.
Perfectly sweet was never my type.

Vinegar keeps but it comes at a price.
Saving the useless was always my vice.
Here I am keeping but no one has come,
Cos no one likes pickles, he'll never succumb.

But I can keep, but by falling apart,
simmered in time and gingered folk art.
Chutney girl has pickled her heart.

Isabel

It occured to Isabel that she had unfortunately, inconveniently, fallen in love. She could not pinpoint the precise moment that she had realised this fact, perhaps it was the rainy morning when he had left her at almost midday to sink into the sheets hoping that it was the beginning, or the first time she cried because he didn't come out when he said he would. Maybe it was even as far back as the first time she saw him after their long Summer seperation and became suddenly overwhelmed by the perplexing desire to kiss him. Whatever the origin of these feelings, however, their nature was certain. Somehow the void, or indeed the fine line, between sister-like love and falling into love had been bridged, and Isabel found her heart to be in the process of being ruthlessly torn apart by her best friend.

She was sure that there was no intenton on his part to torment her, although he must have been aware of the potential result of allowing himself to fall into bed with her at opportune moments. He had stated so many a time, and she had no reason to believe to the contrary and Isabel was convinced, with fairly good reason, that he was even more unaware as he was of her feelings, of his own. It was not, however, that she had been able to conceal her own feelings from so a good a friend. Indeed, she felt that it was fitting that he should be made acutely aware of her own internal breakages were something, not in order to inspire guilt, but in the knowledge that had any other man been the breaker, she would have been equally eager to open her hurts to him, and also in the vague hope that the reason for his lack of reciprication was a lack confidence in her romantic regard for him.

win win

I have decided, that I am in a win win situation. Either he was telling the truth when he said he wasn't ready for another relationship (understandable but frustrating, but then I clearly have nothing better to do with my life but hang around and wait, and at least I know that it isn't me that's the problem), or he and she will get together (goodness knows why he would even consider it, as not only is she irritating and immature but she has nothing special about her at all) which means that he lied to me and I get to bollock him for it.

Portrait Of An Unfinished Lady

Made of words I am.
When I was written, there was something,
a small thing left out.
A detail missing which makes me not
quite real. In their zeal, my Writer
gave me the ability to feel, however
something unidentifiable got left out
of the deal.

I was in a dream.
But when my dreamer woke up,
there was a part they forgot to tell.
An unimportant snippet,
as, after all, I was just a girl
from a dream
that began to unfurl
but left a piece behind.

I am Antoinette, L'infante, the incomplete,
the girl with the missing piece.
I watched the girl, the other one,
as she sat with the end of my puzzle,
sipping my drink,
I think she knew.
My gin, my essence, my sense,
all stolen in one shout to the bar.
I watched as half a girl
as she pretended to want you
even half as much
as me.

sickness

Loving you makes me ill.
My throat is sore and I hope I got it from you.
I want to share these palpatations.
It makes me sick to think I'll never have you.
I drink music like toddies.
I drink music I was given by you.
Sleep won't come because I already daydreamt.
We can't be together and I not be with you.
I can't not be with you when we're together.
I want to be in the arms of you.
Hold me through my fever.
Tell me what's going on with you.
I have a fever,
and also I love you.

plain

Walking on the smooth parts of the road

I wish you could absolve of the accidents that hold me

to this agony that's really getting old.

You know what I would give you to be yours

and I don't quite know what you see when you hesitate to want me

and I want it back to how it was before.

I've no idea what let me lapse again

but when I knew where I was it was so much smoother because

I wasn't forcing me to take the blame.

A hot day and a cloudless, homeless night

makes me feel that I need the thing we agreed

quite simpy, plainly really wasn't right.

So love me please, oh god, please love me now

and you know what I would do to be walking home with you

just to love, so tell me, please just tell me how.

Mark

What Mark didn't know when he woke up far too early in the morning, before the clouds had come back out, and found her still lying next to him was that she'd already been awake for quite a long time. He tried not to look at her while she slept, but he couldn't help but notice that most of her hair had fallen out from her plait and some of it was caught on her mouth. In fact, she looked a mess, with most of her make up rubbed away and all of her clothes still on. He moved the piece of hair away and turned over. She took a deep breath in her sleep.

He didn't wake again until the alarm went off right by her ear. She didn't start, but shifted slowly, stretching a little and sighing before closing her eyes again. He hit the snooze and put his chin on her forhead, where it seemed it would fit, and it did. In his tar clogged, beer puddled, sleep soaked head, the thought was only gradually occurring to him that letting her sleep in his bed hadn't been the best of plans. He probably should have gone and slept somewhere else after she passed out, but then another thought nudged its way through the mess and it occurred to him that, all things considered, he hadn't slept so well in weeks.

The alarm went off again and he silenced it without even thinking. He put his arms around her and held her there, all folded up, and briefly hoped that she wasn't taking his affection to mean the wrong thing. He wanted to hold her, to have her, but he didn't want her. He had thought he did when he kissed her first but now he definately didn't want her. A fleeting cloud of nonsense made him wonder why, but he brushed it away because he didn't know himself.

He hoped she was alright. He had assumed she was once she started speaking to him again but it always bothered him that it had taken the accident to make that happen. It had taken the accident for her to be frank, and only now did he wonder whether she had expected something in return, but it didn't bother him. He had made himself clear, he thought.

The alarm rang again, and she did start this time. She sighed and rolled over onto her back. Mark buried his face in her shoulder and thought back to the night before, from when she had come into his room while everything else was going on downstairs. She'd sat at the end of the bed and said, 'We are okay, aren't we?' Mark had wondered what the right answer was, and then what the true one was and then decided to go for the latter, because it was the only one of the two he knew.

'I don't know,' he replied.

He knew she was drunk because she was using a lot of 'like's and making hand gestures that he could see even in the dark. He wished he could see her face. He also knew that she was drunk because she'd drunk a bottle of wine. He knew he was drunk because he'd had a lot of beer. She was asking what went wrong, telling him that she'd thought it was going to be fine. He never cought the reason why it wasn't fine, which was a shame, because he'd been wondering that himself, but by the time she'd finished talking he realised that she had assumed that she wasn't going to get any answers from him, which was a fair assumption because she usually didn't, and lain down next to him. He'd put his arms around her and realised that her face was slightly wet and all her hair was in it. He moved it all away and tucked it behind her ears. He wasn't annoyed that she was upset. She wasn't sobbing. If he'd taken them for tears of frustration, he probably would have been right.

He had wondered last night if he ought to tell her something to indicate what he felt about her, but when the alarm was going of again this morning, he realised how relieved he was that he hadn't. Besides, there were no words. She had begun to float the tips of her fingers back and forwards on his elbow and he felt himself drifting off again.

When the alarm went off the next time, he knew he was going to have to get up. She'd opened her eyes and was staring at the ceiling. Then she turned over to look at him and closed them. 'Do you have something on today then?' she said.

'Do you think I'd be getting up if I didn't?'

'Good point,' she replied, in the kind of derisive voice that she seemed to save for him.

He left her lying there and went to retrieve his jeans from the dirty washing, stopping to pick last night's shirt off the floor on the way. When he got back she was sitting cross legged on the bed putting her hair back where it belonged. 'I'll let you get dressed' she said and disappeared off down the stairs. Mark wondered whether anyone else would be up. He hoped that if they did then they wouldn't get the wrong idea about what had happened. As normal as it was for people to end up sleeping in their house, she had never done it before, and she wasn't the type to crash.

He found her in the kitchen boiling the kettle. He had to leave in five minutes and when she saw him all dressed she must have realised because she went into the hallway to put on her shoes and sat watching him on the bottom step while he packed his bag. Then when he was ready, she followed him out the door.

It was still early by his standards and the sun was still shining. It was warm and he was glad he hadn't had time to find a jacket. she rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and undid the top button. It was pale green and strictly speaking shouldn't have suited her. He hadn't thought much of it last night, but then there had been the girl in the skirt who was making eyes at him and ended up in his bed just before her.

When they reached the turning that he was taking, she hugged him and didn't say anything. Mark was glad that they no longer had to think of things to say to each other if they didn't want to. He walked away and looked once through the trees where he could still see her on the other road. She was holding the collar of the blouse to her nose and her eyes were shut.

Green Felt

Green Felt


And there are seven other people
around the green felt
like a very adult picnic.
Gin and tonics on a summer night,
around green felt grass.
Large glass, lots of ice,
I'll keep my head, think twice,
but never take my own advice.

Party games,
a range of cards to be played
insanely on the lawn,
drunks' croquet
on green felt, with you accross the way.
Rummy, snap,
I was always good at those.
Just goes to show that all cards aren't the same.

It's still in here, but still
I hold my hand tight,
it feels like it might just blow away
and you'll see my fist of shamrocks,
darly dangerous
and clamouring for luck
as I watch the leafy spades and tulip hearts
float and settle on the green felt grass

This is a summer night,
and despite the walls, the cold, the others, the dark,
It's you and I, a game, a park,
I play my part.
Not as a cloud or a breeze,
a dusky burd, the hissing in the trees.
I'm the green felt.
Play me please.

Rubric

Rubric

The rubric was, 'Solve the puzzle'.
My task: to unscramble your heart,
your cube of a heart, regular,
three by three, eighties red, blue, green,
yellow, blue, white, each colour a feeling,
a quadratic to be lined up,
unmixed,
undone.

Unravelling the parallel, perpendicular contours
of your mathematical, athematical organ
wasn't easy for mine: rounded, unboundaried,
its linguistical, unlateral muscles melting
and moulding themselves over the hardsharp corners
of yours. But I pushed, I struggled, I took
the iron from my blood, melted, smelted in my chest
and galvanised my aching atriums,
and I tried to solve your riddle.

In fingerless gloves
I etched the patterns on my petalled valves,
the formulae strangely alien, archaic,
like something primeval, a cave painting
in the dust of my beating flesh.
I daubed algorithms along my arteries.
And I learnt them all by heart.

But when I moved your pieces,
rotating them around their even sphere
and I matched each emotion to an edge,
there was nothing but cold squares,
each just two dimensional, unreal, undecipherable,
just a ruse to confuse.
My rubik's cube.

Trouble sleeping

I'm lying in bed trying to feel my heart beating in my chest but I can't. It's pulsing in my gut where I'm hungry for you. It will be a while before I'll be able to sleep. Love, your insomniac.

Dear idiot

I missed you a lot these past few days. I don't know whether it was becasue of what happened at the weekend or simply the fact that you should have been there with us and everyone noticed your absence. We all missed you. I'm fairly sure I missed you the most. I ache constantly. It's hurt before but not like this. Maybe it's because this time feels more real. I know it's real because I care about you so much as a friend, and because it could have worked for us and it should have worked and I don't know what went wrong in your head but one day I'd like to know.

I'm torn between giving up on our friendship and saving myself more pain but that hasn't worked out so far because I'm missing you more than ever. You're on a knife edge and on the other side is the possiblity that we can put this behind us, that I can put this behind us and we can go back to normal on the condition that you never mention to me or to anyone else the way I feel about you, and that you never give me any reason to be jealous.

I though that the email would be more of a release than this. But what use is me telling you exactly how I feel if I don't get a response, even if it's a confirmation that you don't feel the same way. Yes, I do want you to tell me things I already know. It makes them more final, and let's face it, it's not as if I havn'e been wrong second guessing you before now. I'm still struggling, but I suppose I'm just going to have to tread water until the currents die down. I wish I knew when that would be.

You're so far away from me, and tomorrow it will be further. I wish I didn't love you, you idiot.

Memo

Dont let me forget, when I come and visit, I'll bring you an apple pie.

Thoughts on the aftermath

It's strange, this feeling of no hope. Earlier I was pacing the floor. I got up, sat down, on the floor on the bed. I cried intermittently. But now I feel oddly calm. It isn't relief because this isn't the kind of moment where I move on. Perhaps it's just the acceptance of the fact that these feeling are here to stay and I have to put up with them. It won't be easy. For two months I hoped that there was something there for you too, that maybe it was going to take me telling you how I feel for you to have the courage to do the same. Now you know everything and no response is forthcoming. Which I take to mean that you feel nothing. I don't regret telling you everything. It needed to be said and I'm still glad I said it. Perhaps if our friendship doesn't survive this I might come to wish I'd never done it but I very much doubt it.

I want to cry now. I have done ever since I lay down to try and sleep but I can't. If I could they would be tears of frustration and disappointment. But I seem to have run out of tears and after the week I've had that doesn't surprise me. I think I used up most of my tear quota on Friday night. When I heard you were in hospital, I got straight in a cab and went there. Of course it was two in the morning and you'd just had an operation so there was no way they were going to let me see you, but I didn't know that. I didn't even know what was wrong with you. It could have been something terrible for all I knew.

I just lied. I knew it was nothing that serious, but I panicked all the same. I wanted to be there all the same. What better way to make up having not spoken for two months that for you to wake up with me at your bedside? But of course when the nurse rang your ward and found out you were sound asleep I went home and probably seriously dehydrated myself instead. I didn't sleep well that night. In the morning I sent the email and tried to hide the fact that I had rushed to the hospital to see you. In the afternoon I found out that somehow you had found out anyway. Perhaps some well meaning nurse had been impressed by my dedication to you and thought you ought to know. They thought I was your girlfriend.

I do love you. I would never tell you that. It would sound false and melodramatic after everything that's happened. I loved you before I loved you like this but in the other way, the sisterly way. Now I love you in the way that makes me want you sleeping next to me. Not in the laugh at your jokes, smile at everything you say, you are perfect, won't last very long way. I love you in the way that I can hate you at the same time, that I can sometimes not like the person you are, find you irritating, frustrating, rude, will hold grudges against you, will tell you when you're wrong, will do pretty much anything to make you happy, will laugh at your stupidity and let you laugh at mine but love you anyway kind of way. That means much more to me.

tear

if you dont fix her shes just going to carry on breaking til theres nothing left but crumbs

Coding

I've lost an airway,
blown a pupil,
Train Wreck Code.

O2 stat dropping,
abdomen distended,
need a Lavage.

Need a crash cart,
bag her,
run the fluids Wide Open.

Dopamine,
a pacing wire,
No Pulse.

I am coding,
crashing,
burning.

The opposite of sinister

It all began with the strangest few days she had ever had. One bottle of whisky, two of vodka, three of wine and four mararitas on friday night had led to a moment of madness where kissing Stuart Etheridge had seemed like a good idea and brought on a headache the size of Jupiter the next morning. The Etheridge incident had reached the ears of everyone who knew them both by precisely twenty past eleven which meant a day of epic embarrassment for Lucy and of obvious jokes for everyone else. Not only did Lucy quite openly dislike Etheridge, for various reasons, namely his distinctly more dexter position on the politcal compass and the fact that he irritated everyone he met, but the last thing she needed was another man to worry about. At least refusing his lunch invitation wasn't going to be a problem as she didn't have to worry about bruising his ego. It could take it.

But it wasn't because of Etheridge that she decided to top up her already rocketing blood alchohol levels on the Saturday. She liked to think that it was just out of politeness that she had to get spectacularly drunk at her own house party, but she had an aweful suspicion that the other he had something to do with it. The decision to consume massive quantities of unmixed spirits had certainly coincided with his decision to leave, his cliched reason for the early departure and his unfeasible excuse for not having made time for the talk that he finally suggested should happen. In fact the more she thought about it, the need to reapply eye make up had occurred then as well. Thats when she first thought up the plan to drink straight from the spirit bottles rather than have the inconvenience of having to use a glass. She wasn't quite sure when the cigarettes got thrown into the mix, nor when the cigarettes began to be replaced by joints, but exhaustion, alcohol and pot were proving to be a pretty damaging mix. Perhaps this could be construed as a good thing, as when people started doing coke of the kitchen worksurface, the various narcotics in her system changed this potentially quite worrying act into an object of she amusement as she wantched stoned drunks try and roll fivers straight.

For me, attacking her.

For me, attacking her.


I did see you
out there in front, just to the right, ruining my sightline.
You were away from your lover.
Ruined her maybe. Spat down from above her.
It wouldn't be the first time.
She was to the left.
Ten o'clock bitch.
Two o'clock witch.
Actual witch.

I walked home,
taught
tense
warped.
My step quickened at the thought
of you and what you did and how you probably never knew
and if you did it makes it worse.
You are the curse of womankind, you are.

My fists tightened in my pockets like cliches.
My nails scratched my palms as yours probably scratched his back
I'll scratch you back. Your face, your eyes.
It will probably be the only way you'll ever see.

Antiochus

Antoichus loved a woman, way back in ancient Greece.
The woman was a beauty and her name was Berenice.
He was a king, and here's the thing,
He could have married anyone.
He wanted Berenice.

Their friendship grew in Palestine, at first it was enough.
Antiochus felt for Berenice, she felt for him
but Berenice she knew that this new feeling
was was fond but not in love.
Antiochus, he had a little trouble dealing
with a woman who was more, much more
to him than any woman quite before.

Perhaps he should have told her, and there was once he did.
He told her that he knew that this new feeling
was more, so much more than what he ever had before.
She hid.

So he shut his mouth and didn't speak no more
about the love that smothered anything before,
And they slipped into the phase, that terribubble phase,
where friends come first. And oh my days,
did poor Antiochus hate each minute that his Berenice
wasn't his but passed from kiss to kiss with other men.
But get this, she came to him with man troubles,
with sighs and tears and rants and weary confusion:
he said this, what does that mean?
He said that, what does that mean?
Loves me? Loves me not?
Thinls I'm ugly? Thinks I'm hot?
And desperate she clung to his robe,
whilst inside he never gave up hope.

You may feel cheated, as this tale, it has no end.
He loved her forever; they were never more than friends.
I wonder if he'd told her, whether she would take him in,
like a puppy on the pavement with a love endearing grin.
So there's the story, siyanora, das vidanya, peace.
I have been your Antiochus, you have been my Berenice.

...

...in fact it was you...

For him, in apology for her

For him, in apology for her.

If I ever see you again, I can't think what I'd do.
I can't see how you could
tear and
rent and
break like that and not regret
the fact that you begat that heartache.
Yes all that 'heartache'.
Fact.

I'd like to think I would break and tear you too,
to rend anew,
but the feeling persists: it ain't my battle,
resist.

He has a voice you know.
Did you know?
Probably not. No.
It was your voice, you know, secret voice,
I heard it too.
By accident.
It was probably meant for you.

Roux 1

It was a Tuesday when Kim first realised that she was in love with Roux. She called him Roux because he reminded her of the gypsy in Chocalat, partly because of his red hair, and partly because he had a certain enigmatic quality that she couldn't quite pin down. He came accross very straightforward and then once you knew him there was something that implied that he would probably make a very good gypsy, always moving, taking life as it came. He was down to earth, but Kim always got the sense that his sould was up in the air, not quite sure where to settle, perhaps not really wanting to, but she also got the sense that there weren't many people who could see that.

Kim was a pragmatist. At least, Kim appeared to be a pragmatist to everybody else; all rational and reasonable and sensible when in fact most of the time, inside she was struggling and sinking. But then, of course, no one else knew that. Perhaps this was why she loved Roux, because he wasn't really what he seemed to be, just like she wasn't, and she thought she could see him, understand him, or at least understand that she wasn't meant to understand him, and that made her more inclined to love him.

Roux was a friend of a friend, at least that was how Kim met him. He worked in an office, which was very unlike his true nature, but then, so did she, and that was so very unlike hers. All of Kim's friends worked in offices, apart from the ones who didn't work, or the ones that were still students, but unlike her, it suited them, she thought. Kim didn't like to be alone with Roux at first. She didn't like to be alone with anyone she didn't really know, having to keep the conversation going but trying not to say anything stupid.

Kim was one of those people that has to fill up the silences, the gaps in every conversation, lest there be any awkwardness, although this was often very counterproductive. Perhaps one of the biggest reasons she and Roux got on was because he was the same. He would say things way beyond the necessary, just for the sake of it. Whilst Kim worried that she might say something silly and look stupid, Roux didn't care. No, Roux went beyond not caring, he actively sought the line that oughtn't be crossed and bounded joyfully over it just so that people would pay attention.

Kim remembers when her boss joined them after work for drinks one evening. Kim's boss had a very similar way of attracting attention to himself as Roux, but he was cruder, funnier and had a better sense of where to stop. That night she could sense the competition between them and no one else could. It was like they were battling for everone's approval. Kim's boss one and Roux backed down, dejected. Kim was glad he didn't know the things that people said about him behind her back.

One day, and Kim wasn't quite sure what happened, everything fell into place. Roux became a confidant, and for Kim, that was a position seldom proffered. They stopped having to fill each others' silences and things became much easier. Kim liked that.

When she realised that she loved him, on a mediochre, sunny spelled afternoon in October, Kim began to suspect that this has been going on without her knowledge for a while now. There had been that time at Sophie's dinner party when she had looked accross the room in a red wine haze and thought how much she'd really like to kiss him, a thought that had never even occurred to her before. She had imagined him telling her he had feelings for her. She would hold out to make him want her more and then give in. Then there had been that actual kiss. That very, very drunken kiss that had caught her off guard even though sh'ed been wanting it. They never mentioned it between them.

It was a Friday that Kim realised she couldn't be with him. Kim, being sensible, just knew that that it would never work, in that clicheed old way. He wouldn't talk to her. She'd get frustrated and they'd argue. Kim also had that horrible feeling that he didn't want her anyway. Kim also knew, being pragmatic, that just carrying on, just accepting that she loved him wasn't going to work either. She needed to get over it and she needed to get over it fast.

It was a Monday when Kim came up with a plan of how she was going to fall out of love with Roux. Not seeing him would never work. They had the same friends and they worked next door to each other. True, sometimes she would go for weeks on end not seeing him and not actually missing him that muh, but not seeing him indefinately was too much. Who knew when the feelings were going to disappear. There wasn't really any question of her finding someone else and transferring them over. When it came to relationships, Kim took what she could get rather than actively sought them. She stalwartly believed that if the time was right, something would come along, and that time really wasn't right.

It was another friend that gave Kim the idea of how to get over Roux. She had told no one about the kiss or the love but that woudn't last long. Once it wasn't so raw, she'd tell Sophie, but it was Sophie's cousin who solved the problem without knowig it. Sophie's cousin Rachel met them for lunch on a Thursday. She was one of those strong women, a little bit like Kim as far as everyone else was concerned, except that she wasn't because Kim was different inside. She liked to make men fall in love with her, which Kim probably would have quite liked to be able to do as well but she only had a limited amount of that kind of power. Rachel had made a man fall in love with her who she didn't want, but he wanted her. So Rachel found someone else and the man realised that he wasn't in love with her anymore.

It seemed so simple to Kim. If she could find another woman who would have Roux, then she would be able to cure herself of this weakening affliction. If Roux was with someone else, then Kim couldn't have him: problem solved.

justice

its not fair. i did not instigate this. why should i have to feel like this. you made it happen. not me, its not fair

I need to say this here before I end up saying it in person. I want you. And the reason I came round tonight wasn't to watch TV. It wasn't even to try and sleep with you. It was to tell you that that can never happen again

Why?

I feel better now I've spoken to you, awkward as it was and unrelated to what happened the other night. I spoke to Cate too, and it helped to talk it through, even though the conclusion was that I should talk to you about it. I know you don't do talking but I think we need to. Cate asked me why we weren't together. Why is that? I can't find a reason why not, although part of me would like to, it would give me an excuse not to raise the subject. But there isn't one is there, and I know that I'm going to have to be the one to bring it up. I don't want to be. I want you to. I want you to tell me how you feel.

The last time

I spend the early hours of this morning wishin I had this bed to myself, because then I would be able to sleep, and now I do I can't. Everything smells of you. The air smells of you even where you haven't been and it's torture. My head is playing out situations and I can't get it to stop thinking about wanting to be with you, because I don't want to want that. At least I don't want to want this much. And I suppose now that everyone must know, because they saw you leave last night and not go back until today, it might not happen any more, and that would probably be a good thing because stopping this now, right now, is the only way I'm going to be able to get back in control and we can be friends again, same old same old, although not doubt I'll still be wishing that we'd carried on.