By way of drifted wood that longs to belong,
being carried away, wishing to soak into floorboards,
abandoned like a swollen ballerina,
spread, bent, pinned down with needles,
with paintbrushes rupturing canvas,
devoid of ache, learning to cast spells. 

At Christmas I will become
a shiver of dust hoping for a silver sparrow
to caress me with its broken featherwing.
Louder and louder hoping
over the scratchings of bones
across crepuscular skies,
hoping to encounter you
on the corner of streets.

Coughing mournfuly loud under the snow
at the dawn of a damned winter.
Picking my frozen ear from the ground,
gone deaf from all the drums and gallops.
Whole life has passed since we last danced
in clock-driven heaven, red hair, black hair,
entangling our skins together.
Four lungs suckling on fearful ghosts,
shadows of stolen mornings dripping, cold.

A swan flew out of your chest bone all of a sudden,
it crushed me, a tear rushed down its beak.
Nobody wondered whether it was mine,
no one imagined that swans cannot cry.

I posted this a while ago but had to delete it. It’s bad but today especially I realize I cannot care about what that very anonymous number of strangers think.

Todd Klassy

the secret palace
we built of goldpaper stars
caugh on fire and we
rushed back with stirred minds
like unpolished rubies
in silence we fell
on our knees and
made love in ashes of the future
we never saw die
but the evidence lied there
our transparent bodies
the last exit

The April weather feels chilly to the body but caffeine daydreams complement the fast drizzle and the colours seem glorious and strange not bleak like worn out, doughy, staring faces on public transport with eyes starless.

The cat meows his pleas for warm milk, what else is there to long for?

To look at our palms and fingers outstretched, for the first time truly seeing life they hold. It doesn’t matter what colour your eyes are, they shine bright with light.

Nights want to snatch it away often, nights haven’t been friendly and the dreams that cover me whole, heavy like lead, they disturb my mind. Am I crazy? Will I become a murderer? Will I be thrown from a great height and break?

‘Let’s go to Paris.’ he looks at me with hope. ‘I don’t know you,’ is what I do not say.

Am I tired of cities I haven’t landed in already? Really, really? I yearn hungrily for deserted lands and ancient trees, lands that haven’t stepped away before the steps of men.

Or maybe I myself wish to be deserted, left alone and forgotten. How else can I become free when I’m imprisoned in labyrinths of other people’s minds, living lives I do not know about? Resting in chambers where I am blind, waving my arms in search for the walls.

I don’t want your heart. I don’t want to tear it out and suck the blood out like a beast. I do not know love only hunger and thirst and when we stare at each other we try to deceive ourselves into feeling. Trying to dig out that thing, to be treasured through our touch, our bodies but it’s buried too deep or maybe it was only a myth created who knows when in the first place.

But I am done, I am done. I want to surround myself with raw beauty that doesn’t think, it only whispers life through wordless oceans, forests and winds. 

A girl eating a sponge/peach/cream cake dully, chewing, eyes wide open to see out of her window, to find something new in this old view that is imprinted on her brain like plague. The clouds rush to cause a change of weather somewhere and outlines of four pigeon wings flutter off into the uncombed trees. If she stretches her neck out, imagining herself to be a giraffe, she can see the perfectly maintained grassplot. Nobody ever walks on it with bare feet, for the sheer pleasure. The whole picture is just for looking, to present a proof (the pressure of aquaintances) to this long longed for dream that is present but nobody is living it.

‘I will sit in the garden in the summer,’ the oldest one says, knitting inbetween deceived muttering (laments of age), daring to plan.

I hate fences, the girl thinks, always looking up at the sky, remembering forbidden ventures to neighbouring lands. A strip of sky. To be up there but fearless, lungs full of air, hair mad in flight. She wants to be a cloud and amaze dreamless people with her shapes making them unsure about what she evokes to them. No one would ever dare to determine her. She could be so much.

Putting down the plate, it’s time to fold her palms over her face, make herself believe in the present (feel how it bites?) and be present and do resentful things fearfully until a sweet embrace of time takes her and leaps away.

photographs by Adrein Broom and Laura Albano

‘Do you need the credit card anymore?’

‘No.’

‘Have you bought everything you needed?’

‘No.’

‘Can’t you talk to us like a normal person or what?’

‘I haven’t found any suitable clothes.’

Eat the broccoli. Why does your throat revolt? It’s just another meal and soon it will be gone and you can leave. Nobody ever walked towards their bathroom so slowly, like a broken robot, without a mind. It is even more absurd due to the absence of witnesses. Hot water is the last thing that can save you tonight. Yes, yes, everything will evaporate and you can lay down under and not be for an hour. You forget words. You couldn’t remember what a witness is called, in any language. It happens so often these days.What is wrong with you? doesn’t  really break it. It’s not a rhetorical or momentary question anymore.

When I lost you I lost a whole world. Isn’t it staggering how we can numb ourselves and be able to dine, go for a walk, submerge our limbs underwater, trying to seal the pain inside until it cracks open again? In the intervals I relearn obvious things. That the earth travels around a big burning star and if I got too close it would melt my body. That my fingertips could melt wandering snowlakes if I stepped outside. That I cannot step out of my body. That the art created on Earth doesn’t stand still but it lifts up the veil that is darkness nestled on our souls. It also travels through air, by roads, clothed in glass, paper and plastic the canvases waiting to breathe in another year like a speck of dust, another million of eyes. I will see Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Gogh and whole collections of their impressions. It will move me.

I will never see you again. Your eyes that trusted, wondered and always loved. Always nothing less than love. I held you when I knew you would go in an hour or two and you hurt, wondered, trusted, loved and didn’t suspect a thing about the place that would make you lighter. An hour or two. How does one say goodbye forever? One doesn’t, one can’t. Words slipped my mouth drowning themselves in a meaningless waterfall and with your eyes still open you stopped being present and became a past. ‘In a better place now, in a better place now, in a better place now’…an echo resonating in the cave of my mind. I wish a palm could be pressed onto the strings to terminate all sounds escaping the awful mouths. No need to reply to voices ever again. The ground sleeps under snow, everything is silent. You sleep in the ground, there is no rythm to it, no need to listen if you breathe. So silent. I walk and the snow under me creaks and laughs under my clumsy feet, so human and loud. So alive.

I wish to stop wanting, expecting things and affirmations from people and from myself too. But the heart just won’t let go of anything. How it clings and swarms towards things it cannot see and yearns for them with nonsensical determination. Foolish heart. I’m not trying to be romantic. Nor bitter. I may vomit this feeling that starts sickening, inflaming this body, like handing out a list of resignation.

I spent the day sitting on this chair, idle, looking at things. My black IKEA bookshelf sits to the right and I always turn my head to it when I need to delve into a thought I haven’t quite caught yet. I look at my books as if expecting they will talk back to me. There is a shelf full of Woolf (while typing it I left it mispelled as ‘Wool’ which made me smirk), my eyes always rest there first. I spotted my copy of To The Lighthouse and tears filled up my vision. I couldn’t tell why. Sometimes I get a sense of missing Virginia but how bizarre is that? How could I miss someone I never met? Maybe it’s just missing the sensation of the first time I read her books. Or the story connected witch each one of them. 

This Lighthouse copy is worn-out. A sticker has been stuck to it and partly torn off again and it seems as if had been carried by waves to the lighthouse itself or perhaps just fallen to someone’s bathtub. There are scarce notes in it. I purchased it in Greenwich, London. It was more of a gift. Vera dragged me enthusiastically to a secondhand shop with porcelain dolls, trays and weird and lovely useless stuff. There were some books… Dick Francis, Danielle Steele. So I couldn’t  believe my luck to have found this gem. The man at the counter genuinly looked like a retired sailor, with a beard, a cap and a crooked smile. The book is 20p he said. On the sticker 4 pounds was written with elegant yet hasty hand. I had to ask again for I barely understood him. His voice was heavy, deep and muffled. Then I flooded him with words of gratitude and smiles and skipped away down the street.

I think it was 2010 when I read most of Virginia’s work. I felt like a vase or a glass bottle being filled with her beautiful sentences and intricacies of phrases and words that I hadn’t encountered before. And when I was full and her words swam and bubbled in me relentlessly, colliding with each other, dissintegrating and transforming themselves, myself. Eventually they started to overflow so I spilled some of them onto paper. I haven’t been that inspired since that. The sentences created themselves and I realized how important it is to read. But no books inspired me like hers. To me she is the best dancer with words.

She’s the most important person that happened to me literature-wise and I’m glad she lived in the age that she did. I tell myself that I don’t think she’d become a writer in this age but perhaps she would. Would she become an astronaut? Maybe something else would catch her interest and would her writing be different, would it get published (oh of course!). Well no use pondering that but I still do sometimes. 

I’ve been reading her letters. I’m in 1903 when her father was seriously ill which then lead to his death. The letters are sent from 22 Hyde Park Gate. I can’t describe what feeling it is to have been there, even though only outside of the house. It is a very high building. White. Glorious. There are a few steps down towards the door and chess-like tiling. Plants. Flower pot in a window. Scarlet geraniums. The day was so beautiful, warm and the sun was shining. Unlikely for London is a cliché to be uttered. Half an hour earlier I was lying on Hyde Park grass, chatting with M., my head rested on his belly. And now I was standing in the street where Virginia walked every day. It was very quiet, nobody there. It was a blind alley and I’m sure the London’s uproar could be heard but I can’t remember it. I felt small and exhilarated. I wondered who lives in her room today and what the interior looks like. I took pictures. There was a rush. A woman opened a window, leaned out to water the geraniums. She smiled at us. There was something knowing in the smile. It was probably clear why we are there. Not the only Woolfians to stop by.

There was a large red brick house on the opposite side of the road. Winston Churchill’s house. ‘Oh are you joking?’ I asked the plaque. ‘No.’

I was wearing a yellow dress with marvellous puffy shoulders and it was a perfect day to wear it. I haven’t worn it since. This experience made it too precious for my sweat in this lost town with smoke-filled skyline. Then we spotted a luxurious car and well-tended men looking vicious, like mafiosos. So we walked away. I felt dizzy, a melancholy starting to clutch my heart already and after crossing the road toward Kensington Gardens I realized we had forgotten our Whittard bags with tea in front of Ginia’s house! Would she run after us with it if she’d seen us out of the window? Oh, oh… 

It feels inadequate writing about her and calling her familiarly but she is dead, she doesn’t mind. Happy birthday, V.