this clinical landscape made up of
fake words and meaningless likes,
forced emoticons
shining soullessly in blue and white

Shade Her

Chord

I was born a day late following an 18 hour labor, a poignant premonition of a hesitant attitude prone to agonizing and procrastinating yet to develop in my psyche. By the time I came along my parents had been married for five years, my young mother’s tubes were blocked and she had had to undergo various procedures before she could conceive. It eventually happened only a few months after the death of my great grandmother on my Italian side, Nona. This poetic piece of information which spoke of death and re-birth acquired a precious place in my heart. I believed that it gave me a special connection to that which came before me, a supernatural umbilical chord uniting me directly with her and, with my ancestry. 

As I grew, this magical chord quietly coiled its way around and within me, weaving worry and weariness into my developing wisdoms of the world. With a snide snaking strength it squeezed my small organs as if intent on abstracting any lingering of purity or free will. A serpent-like keeper of all things past (and therefore to come) it swallowed me into moments and lifetimes cut with sadness and self loathing. Building a dark inner landscape in which the slightest sense of self lay violently obscured by innate repressed anger. 

Today as an adult I find myself naturally at the forefront of the ancestral lines, enquiring. I look back with untamed black eyes, like those of a heretic compelled to dismantle the archaic and accepted workings of an internal cellular landscape transmitted to me chronically on compulsory and instinctive levels.

Sepia

I was always a lonely child. I have vivid memories, like permanent story boards in my head, of being the girl on the outside of everything looking in. The world, tinged in a bright happy yellow with little sepia colored children playing together, unified in their non-questioning joy and automatic acceptance of what it is to be.

Later on an older girl stood with me, her tall shoulder slightly above mine quietly propped me as I surveyed nursery school life with a sense of uninformed disorientation. The rules were never explained; I had little understanding of what was expected from me.

One grey, big day I stood small in the playground, staring down helplessly at the thick orange cup balanced in my hand, the smell of the cow’s souring milk wafting up with every tight little breath. ‘Don’t come in until you’ve drunk it’ were her instructions. Her - the teacher, the leader, the one who knew best. In the classroom darts of colour moved around as the children busied themselves with new tasks for the day, unaware of the invisible little girl lost outside.

Another time, admonished and therefore ashamed I moved away from the others. ‘You stand back there if you aren’t going to take part!' The words smacked my ears as the boys and girls unclothed and began gyrating eagerly in a pool of mud on the dirty, grassy ground, her hand waving an encouraging pipe of water on their careless, bare, bouncing bodies.

Children’s distant laughs, screams, conversations and giggles formed the air in a world in which I didn't know how to breathe. And so, unconsciously as a child I learnt how to live in suffocation.

Rombouts

ant study i

At a loss

28.07.2011

The sound was calmer last night, still there but not as disruptive. Only audible in complete silence and in the silence has the ability to become quite loud.

Yesterday afternoon there was a bit of a pop in my right ear.

On some level I wonder if the problems with my ears are partially manifested by hearing and not being heard, not wanting to hear, not wanting to hear what I am hearing.

A resistance to what I am being forced to hear.

I am in the world and I am terrified. Terrified of living, terrified of dying, terrified of being so negative and depressed, terrified of loss, terrified of doing it wrong, terrified of having done so much wrong.

I can’t move beyond this negativity and now I fear that it is manifesting in a blockage in my head, loud white noise, resulting in constant panic, anxiety and fear.

I try to be with the feelings and not resist them, but this takes practice and I wonder if I have the time to hold it all before I land up really sick.

The creative door has certainly opened, but growth here is slow and is constantly up against my ruthless and consistent judgment of me.

If anything I’d love to be able to channel this mass of negativity into creativity on paper, in form, in words, in lines that describe the poetry of what it is to be on this planet.

sankofa

Sankofa can mean  "go back and take" (Sanko- go back, fa- take) or the Asante Adinkra symbols of a a bird with its head turned backwards taking an egg off its back, or of a stylised heart shape. It is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," which translates "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."
It symbolizes one taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress through the benevolent use of knowledge. Adinkra symbols are used by the Akan people to express proverbs and other philosophical ideas. Taken from Wikipedia.

hiding from me

learning to fly ii

The Ocean of True Self - Guy Finley

See the ocean: it does not run after its own waves, as it knows they must return to rest in her depths. And so it is for us: whether we speak of joy, peace, strength, or love itself — no greater illusion exists than that we should somehow find, searching outside of ourselves, the source of our True Self.

~

Much as ocean tides surge and ebb upon waiting shores – always changing, yet changing nothing – your True Self is greater than any wave of thoughts or feelings that pass through it.

learning to fly

(process drawing)

bijou

Why can't I be you?

wow

Most of it hurt, some of it was beautiful. I exist. What a MIND FUCK. WOW.                                                                   

         (words of the intoxicated self discovered months later by the sober self)                                                                                

missing

something in you

what is it

in me

that i cannot find?

the noise of the world

the noise of the world
leaves me lonely and overwhelmed
as it did when i was just a small child,
as it has always done
its distant living sounds
...

15.03.2011

eleven

years ago to this day

a moment filled with power

promise and play

a kiss

made of wonder

i'll never forget

your eyes willed

your hunger

the day our hearts met

A Homage poem to Sylvia Plath by 'Champagne'

What is this itching within me

Fighting me, scratching?-

I want to break free of something

Mother Nature can only articulate -

Without blushing,

And I know it is not shame which binds me

To Purity but History,

And all those lost girls before me.

That keep my kisses neat

And clean,

That keep my belly warm

And aching,

That keep the boys

Anxiously waiting, 

For appearence of the first bud 

Opening.

Those boys' eyes;

Hungry with possibility,

Stung with a goodnight miss.

Left leaning outside my door,

Like a forgotten unfinished book, or

A half-eaten apple left browning.

(published 2001)

Sylvia Plath Quarterly, Oxford, England, 2001, 2002