cake mix

fuck. and i thought of ending this blog and starting a happy one! screams from new cross. i currently feel so ground down by life that i could be used as a smooth flour in a cake mixture.

my beloved sister

my computer is taking so long to load that
by the time it loads
my inspiration has run dry...
however i am gonna try to tap back into it if i can remember what the hell it was
i wanted to post on  this my
albatross
blog.

as many an alcoholic may peruse,
or reason with their fetish (can i call it that?)
alcohol does strange things to a body.
a body who is walking along the street, two cans of lager in her pockets, through the busy night streets of new cross,(London)
she suddenly dry cries to her sister
...i am sorry, she says
that i cry,
or dry cry at that, when i am a little intoxicated.
I am sorry it is then that i call (quietly)
to you in the darkness and say 'but why?'
and utter her name into the damp street.

but a kind soul
who would never begrudge you another glass for the road,
i know she understands that sometimes it is a drink which allows you to cry those tears
which sit in your chest otherwise,
uncried.
a salty box or tiny vase of uncried tears
 in the space directly opposite the shoulder blades on your front.
the solar plexus.

... dry crying doesn't alleviate these, it must be said! ..

it is still hard to understand her absence.
a girl you shared a room with and played 'cowbank' with
(we broke it)
and 'libraries'
(you know),
who i threw a tap shoe at
and who sellotaped my things to the wall when i overstepped a mark of some thing or other.
she that i sang love me or leave me with....
walked endlessly across the heath to ballet with
my beloved sister.

chewy toothpaste

or the cherry sweets,
the bread peas or the
Jumbo moment....
can i say that and Country girl next to each other...?
 i was in heaven with you...heady memories
where i was fit to burst with love for living
These are our memories and I can't share them with anyone else dear sister.
and now you went.
or you are, it seems, very much gone.
but when i chuckle or take life simply and again
chuckle and flirt with life,
i remember you and your untamed ways...
and miss you desperately.



i love you
i love you
and i love you always.

vertical box

at the moment in my life so chemistry must have arranged i feel as though i am contained within an invisible box.
A bit like a coffin i suppose but upright, vertical. Not horizontal.
As i witness the antagonism between my son and his step dad
i feel the wooden sides of the box pressing my arms to my side
and as the sun shines into the cold April garden i feel my tongue silenced in my head as
i feel something like sorrow and sadness fill my my heart
and my vision is clouded with sad ghostly premonitions.

like when someone presses your arms down while you resist their pressure and then as they release their pressure your arms float up as though they are flying...
I long to feel a release from this coffin and fly
without guilt or recriminations
or children screeching at me.
father time.
I remember.

i am clearly miserable and long to wake up with eyes unclouded by what must be depression of some sort.

i can't help putting this pen to paper though for all i know it could be feeding my feelings.

i could pretend i suppose that i am a shiny happy person.
though i have tried and the darkness pervades.

shiny happy people

How to articulate this.
Sometimes in Spring time
I get quite low.
Like the opposite of SAD.
As people shed their outer layers and walk in a more relaxed gait in the sun
chatter and walk and smile brightly
I feel more like dressing darkly
sunglasses on and looking down to avoid the cheer.

since a child living on a big housing estate
I hated summer as people would turn up their music really loud
and then i thought they'd gather like ants on walls and on swings and gravitate towards a centre.

My kids have been taken to a park by their uncle at my request
since i need to do 'housework'
i walked through the paths of new cross passing shiny happy people
all gay in the insipid clouded sun
and i brought looroll and washing up liquid and not sunday lunch
since we are still on a diet of frugality

and i didn't raise my head to smile at passing strangers
or share in the awakening bashful welcome of a sunny sunday.

now housework untouched and children gone
i am left with a guilty blue feeling in my chest
and a historical anxiety that springtime brings to me.

in the fridge sits one can of lager
it is before three
but i pull it open and drink
i cannot face the housework
and i am barely ever alone
i want to bottle aloneness
and drink it from time to time.

not sure i articulated anything.
but there you go...

my sister

she died. Feb 7th 2012. Charles dickens' birthday.
I miss her.
very much.
sometimes you manage to think things are temporary
for a bit and then as you are sweeping the kitchen floor
you realise that some things are not temporary and that some things
are really permanent.
Like death.
Unless you chose to temporarily believe in heaven
until then it is permanent.
I miss her so much
here is her song
https://soundcloud.com/loveforlifelondon/a-brighter-day2-1

if you can get it via this....

she was too cool for school!
xxxxxxxxxx

This is Anonymous Thank Ford

'I thought we'd be more.....more together here - with nothing but the sea and moon. More together than in that crowd, or even in my rooms. Don't you understand that?'

'I don't understand anything,' she said with decision, determined to preserve her incomprehension intact. 'Nothing. Least of all why you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly. So jolly,' she repeated and smiled, for all the puzzled anxiety in her eyes, what was meant to be an inviting and voluptuous cajolery.

He looked at her in silence , his face unresponsive  and very grave - looked at her intently.    ....

When Bernard spoke at last, it was in a small tired voice. 'All right, then,' he said, 'we'll go back.'

Bernard Marx and  Lenina in Brave New World  Aldous Huxley

Am reading Brave New World to my fifteen year old son at the moment- he is doing it at school. It is damned hard to get into but it is brilliant once you do.
Ford is the new God.

Today is horrible for me. Utterly horrible.

First I wake up thinking my finances are in order only to discover the new Electricity and Gas supplier I changed to in the hope of getting some free shopping have raided my bank account into the minuses and I am yet again penniless. Hilariously, I think the tariff is higher with this new supplier but I was lured in by the free shopping.......... roundabouts and swings. What a Dodo. An extinct Bird.

I have about three rolling cigarettes worth of tobacco left and am raiding the internet to find a soda bread recipe that doesn't involve buttermilk as we are out of bread for the near future.

The shoes I brought my daughter for school yesterday were actually too big this morning...these things happen. So we put faith in Ford and dashed to the supermarket before school on an empty tank of no petrol to swap to a smaller size...one success.
We are not paying rent this week. It has been a bad week.
Then I get a text from my son at school. He wants me to make a doctor's appointment now cause little shits in the shit hole called school are 'teasing' him about his hair which was plaited during the school holidays.

I want him to come home.
I hate school and all the nasty pieces of shit in it right now.
I half don't blame him if he chose to punch the whole load of cretinous 'teasers' off their chairs and resign.
School just aint the place for everyone.
It can be lonely and cruel where you have to just take shit on the nose and toughen up.
How hard is that when you have a bunch of malicious school uniformed cretins of all shapes and sizes and shades winding you up and goading you till you are fit to break.
Not to mention the teachers half of whom are virtually still in nappies, flirting with the boys who smoke and chastising the ones who are still caught between childhood and adulthood....A rock and a hard place.

Most schools are so full of shit, in face they remind me pretty much of a brave new world. They don't give a toss about the individual child, and a child that is not one of these ones that meanders through with confidence and acumen and all that damn crap, just hate it there and get shit results probably to boot.

Since my boy was small i have considered home schooling him haha, but seriously now I just think why not?
What the f did my GCSE's get me? nothing.
Perhaps it would be best to just throw in the towel and try something else. University is priced out for most kids anyway and the schools are government slave cults run by corrupt bully bureaucratic teachers.

Bad Day.
I hope it gets better.
Actually, first thing this morning I woke up to a very distant thought in the recess of my brain how time passes and erases (i need some suma) and how shit it is that i am always moaning about stuff when one day i will look back and wish i could visit my mum, or have my little ones with me (now grown...i am really old i guess in this distant thought) or all sorts of hypothetical regrets and longings.

But it just don't seem to change my mind.

I 'wake up' when I think of how I want to be............then i walk back into this giant invisible wall of survival and i still can't embrace my prison. I know if i could it might be ok. But i can't

Oh Bernard come find me in the savage garden i will talk with you all night and we can make plans.

and then the police were called

Sometimes when she walked to the shop after dark she felt momentarily free; the black sky above her, the headlights of the oncoming traffic. It seemed to her a ridiculous thought that a walk to the local off licence after-dark could denote to her a freedom, but it did somehow. She would leave her house by the front door and the opening of the gate; the lifting of the latch; the silence of the dark street... it would feel a dash to freedom as she quickly loosened the fact of what left inside.

In that short walk alone to the shop her head was cleansed and she became a body of the other bodies going about anonymously.
To the shop she went, drinking in the black sky and the charging headlights and the chicken shop and the Polish shop and the off licences and the men smoking their cigarettes in the doorway of the pub and the man fly tipping unnoticed on the corner of the busy street.

The shop itself was another matter with it's narrow doorway and garish lighting. Today it was the unfriendly one who did not speak or smile. As she gathered together her shopping in order of priority: bread, milk, four cans of lager and a packet of tobacco she decided not to make the effort of even talking or smiling as she might with a more friendly staff member, and the exchange was silent and unsmiling with no hello,  goodbye or thank yous in sight. sShe had not the effort .

Glancing in the black reinforced glass of the door she caught an impression of her reflection and saw a woman removing her alcohol and bread and milk and tobacco from the counter and putting it in the bag. She looked tired and sad. She didn't look how she felt when she stepped out through the gate and walked to a brief freedom.  

There were four knocks at the door this morning after the rage had ended. Sharp knocks. Police knocks. Like gunshot, it may not be a sound you should recognize for not hearing it regularly, but when you hear it you know it is a gun being shot, or the police knocking. It is plain and characterless knocking, not threatening like a bailiffs knock, but just cold.  She was actually glad they had been called. She had wanted to call them herself when the two were fighting entwined with desire of hatred. Step father and stepson wrestling with intent, knocking the cooker against the wall and splashing extra virgin olive oil onto the ceiling that she would have to clear up later, she couldn't help but think, whilst struggling to separate the passionate containers of sudden condensed hatred.

On the way back from the shop she felt heavier and flat approaching her house. She didn't know who had called he police, a concerned neighbour said the police man. Sorry about the noise she'd said to one earlier... Noise?I haven't heard anything she had replied...........

She had cried a bit, exasperated. He is under a lot of stress she said, he works and works to pay the bills, he is not bad. They were fighting. He was not fighting, he was shouting and my son grew angry. They fought.

My daughter was crying, it felt Victorian, she thought the police would take away her daddy.
But they left unworried about our safety but warning that next time this happened they would involve social services.

She just felt slapped hard in the face.
It was rubbish having the police come.
It was rubbish having a situation where the police had to come. She was glad they had come  it was a warning, but she was sad that she had to have a life where the police needed to be called.
What about the daisies and the daffodils and the happy things.
Fields of yellow and blue?

Everything seemed so complicated.
She wasn't sure of another way of things where she'd needent even buy the lager and the tobacco with the bread and milk, where a walk to the shop wouldn't be the pinnacle of her freedom.

She wondered how the other her was doing right now the one that got away and who didn't buy beer and tobacco with her bread and milk and who didn't have neighbours call the police because of the noise.

The other she's brother didn't become horribly unwell when she was 15 and be taken from the house sectioned and stolen from her; the other she never pretended she'd lost the key only to discover it when she saw her fate was sealed.
The other she didn't have to bear with anger from people she knew or brittle cold conversations with her son when he was angry and in a mood with her.
 The other she's sister was still alive, singing and published and happy with her little boy and giving her advice at times like this, breaking it down, ahhing and sympathizing really?ing and offering useful nuggets of wisdom about it all whilst planning a next adventure of sunny days and rose wine and children playing in the secret garden or a fine egg on toast.

The other she didn't stop dancing and pretend to lose her key.
She was out there somewhere in a parallel place doing things just how they were meant to be. All suntanned and confident and cosy with life and doing it all just right and everyone she came into contact with were well formed with no issues and she was the best mother ever imbuing everything just right for the best always.

The floor was dirty where the hurricane had broken and the salt bowl had spilled and the bowls had smashed and tomorrow she'd have to start all over again and clear it all up.
The other she lay down comfortably and happily snuggled in her bed and went to sleep.