Baa Baa Blogging

Borrowed, Blue

2009-08-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

Because of the increased length and non-blog-friendliness of the stuff I've been writing lately, I have found less and less utility in having a blog at all. Sadly, then, I think it's time to retire Baa Baa Blogging - at least for the moment - and I thought I'd let people know rather than allowing my older posts to sit here abandoned at the top of the page.

Y'all are still welcome to follow me on Twitter (of course) and I also have a rather more bloggish blog on wordpress, which you might enjoy if you like skinny teenagers, lowercase headers and paragraph-sized excerpts from longer stories. It's called The Other Scrapbook and it's got writing, photography, music and probably some fashion, etc. It's just a baby at the moment, it can't even walk yet.

Best of luck to all the lovely people who read this blog, and take care.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2009-06-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

I'm off on holidays today until next Saturday -- hopefully with no internet access as I could use, but will not willingly take, a break.

Since my last post, of course, the world lost the greatly talented and profoundly disturbed Michael Jackson. While his death - after years of drug addiction and mental illness - may not have been a tragedy, his fifty-year-long life certainly was. His abuse as a child himself can not and does not excuse his involvement with children as an adult (to whatever extent that involvement occurred), but it does go some way to explaining his shockingly evident self-hatred. The plastic surgeries, the eating disorders and the medical dependence seem more and more like desperate attempts to alter and ultimately eradicate himself. Like in that spooky, kooky "Thriller" video from long before I was born, the monster was inside him after all.

And meanwhile, innocent women and men are shot dead on the streets of Iran. Nothing is ever very simple for very long.

The following poem, however, is about as simple as they come. Enjoy, and take care.

We are leaving for a little while;

there is time for this, even

time for leaving and returning now.

We will wander like tourists

along the Left Bank and eat ice-cream

outside Notre Dam. I do not fear

this leaving, because I will take

you with me. I will keep you

like a secret in my mouth.

The Nameless (Part Two)

2009-06-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

Summer has finally arrived. It may be raining, it may be cold, there may be no ice-cream vans in sight, but my exams are finished and I finally get to indulge all those hobbies that seemed so interesting when I was trying to study (this week: teaching myself bass guitar!). For now, here's the next bit of this story. Enjoy.

They spent the rest of the day in their yard playing obscure card games, yelling at each other and letting stray cats eat scraps on the porch. Ethan especially liked the strays. I watched him watching them and when no one was there he’d reach out and pat them hard between the ears, even if they didn’t like it. Sometimes the boys fought out there too. It was Cameron who mainly ended up fighting; he was real thin, all delicate and narrow, with dark hair and a pretty kind of face. The other boys bullied him when they got bored of playing cards. If he got really beat up and his nose was bleeding, Ethan would tell them to stop. Sometimes he even bought Cameron sweet things in town, ice-cream or nectarines. One night I saw them lying out on the porch and Ethan was petting him like a stray, smoothing tangles through his hair.

They knew all the girls’ names, and whenever they walked down the street they’d say hey, how are you, and sometimes curl a strand of hair around their fingers. Everybody loved them, even the serious girls who didn’t usually have boyfriends. I saw Caroline Dalton in the pick-up truck with Matthew one night, and they had the radio on and she was laughing and laughing, with this little cardigan buttoned up around her throat, and everyone knew she wanted to be a doctor and she never ever went out with boys.

As it happened, the week I first met them was also the week carnival came into town. I watched the Big Dipper being put up from my bedroom window, a couple of blocks away from Three Roses, in the car lot behind the bowling alley. The Dipper was the scary ride that I guess everyone was excited about, but I liked the dumb kids’ stuff more: the Funhouse and the Bumper Cars and the games where you got to win toys. Usually I’d go to the carnival with my parents, but I was too old that year. I just sat inside my room watching the Big Dipper go around and around and sometimes hearing faint screams.

On Wednesday afternoon I lay out in the garden reading the encyclopedia. It was almost too hot to read, and I had to keep rearranging the book on my stomach because it was so heavy. Sometime around two o’clock, Ethan came outside and lay on his porch steps with sunglasses on. I looked up and he was looking over at me. I went back reading for a while, but whenever I looked up, he looked back at me. I started feeling the strangest sensation, as if I was a kid and I could tell that something was going to happen, or was already happening, and no one would believe me. After a while he took his sunglasses off and laughed.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You been to the carnival already?”

“No.”

“Oh, really?”

I was going to tell him I had no one to go with and then suddenly I didn’t want to. “No.”

“We’re gonna go tonight, I think.” He stared into the sky. “You wanna come with?”

“Um – well – are you – would you mind?”

“I’m asking.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He shrugged and put his sunglasses back on. “We’re leaving at eight.”

I put the book under my arm awkwardly and went inside. My mother was sitting right at the kitchen table, reading out of a recipe book. I crossed my feet and then uncrossed them and then did a little cough.

“You okay, sweetie?”

“Um, I’m going to the carnival with the boys across the street tonight.”

She looked up over her glasses. “Oh?”

“Well, yeah. See, they invited me and I thought it would be rude to say no.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay.” She looked back down at her book. “Well, if you want to go and they asked you, there’s no problem. Is Ethan going to drive you?”

It felt inexplicably strange to hear my mother saying “Ethan” very casually like that. It was like listening to her explain about where babies come from. I wondered for a second had she ever looked at Ethan and thought he was extremely good looking like all the other girls did.

“I don’t know,” I said. I waited for a second and then ran upstairs and into my room.

The Nameless

2009-06-14T05:01:00.000-07:00

After a prolonged absence from the world of blogging, interspersed with a few lonely little poems, I am delighted to be back (despite one final exam looming on the Wednesday morning horizon). This is the first part of a completed short story that I'm planning to post in sections, but God knows how many times I've said that and not done it, so let's see how it goes.

Enjoy, and happy summer.

---

I watched them: the scavengers, the nameless boys. They arrived in Three Roses one day in June, hanging out the back of their mother’s pick-up truck. No father around. They were all bare arms and dirty faces, dragging suitcases into the clapboard house right across the street that we thought was going to be bulldozed, kicking beer bottles away from the door. Their mother stood on the porch gently crunching the glass with her shoes, as if she was curious about what glass was made of. Then she cried. My mother stood at the kitchen sink, hands beaded with glistening suds, and, watching, mopped her brow with the dry part of her arm and said, “you be nice to those kids, now,” because we were a liberal neighbourhood.

There were four of them: the oldest, Jacob, was nineteen; the youngest, Cameron, just five years younger than him. Matthew and Ethan were sixteen and seventeen respectively. We found out from one of my father’s friends that their mother’s last name was Miller. For the first week they lived there, I never spoke to them, but one night at home I heard them shouting, rattling doors and crashing dishes and calling: Ma! Ma, come on! My father shook his head sympathetically and I held my fists in my lap until the noise stopped. I wondered if someone would come out of the house, but nobody did. When I went to bed, I pretended to be one of them. I laid in the dark stroking my arms and imagining them bare and sticky with sweat.

I was fourteen that summer – notionally the same age as Cameron – but I was an only child, used to those deserted months when I never saw any of my friends. I stayed inside a lot reading books of the encyclopedia, because I wanted to be a scientist. I was also intensely private from my parents, and would become hysterical if anyone touched the door handle while I was in the bathroom. Sometimes at night I locked my bedroom door and closed my curtains and examined myself in the mirror like a tumour. Once I even made a list, in order or preference, of all the different cosmetic procedures I would have when I was older, starting with the removal of this scar I had down the inside of my left leg from a time I fell off a bike when I was nine, and ending with my teeth, which were crooked.

On Sunday, the boys came to church in ironed shirts. Afterwards, when I was done talking to some of the girls from school about where the boys came from and how come they were here, my father gave me money to get myself some soda. I saw them in the car lot, sitting in the dust. I called over hello, partly because my mother told me to be nice, and partly because I was pretty confident around boys, since all my cousins were boys and I was the oldest. They squinted back at me from between cars.

“Where you going?”

“Get soda,” I said.

“You mind if we come with?”

“No.”

They got up slowly and came over, all skinny with their sleeves rolled up. I watched them and pretended not to watch them and felt the sun throbbing hot on my scalp. They were as different as new candles or strips of coloured ribbon: shiny and smelling of soap, like something I had loved and then forgotten.

“So, you live right across from us, huh?”

I told them yes.

I would have told them anything.

The Excavation

2009-05-15T07:07:00.001-07:00

I am not sad because I miss you.

But I have found a starling that the cats caught

and lifted his mangled body to feel

needling bones and slick feathers.

I have seen daylight spread over empty tulip fields.

I have made snow angels in a housing estate.

I have seen the fountains of Paris and on them

floated small wooden boats with red paper sails.

I have dreamed of bus windows.

I have watched interviews with no sound and felt

that sudden quiet loss, and turned from you

like a boulder from a tomb,

like the virgin lake reeds turn from something

they loved once and love no more.

These are my sadnesses.

I lift and cradle them like broken birds.

I have always been beyond your saving.

Sometimes It Rains, Sometimes Not

2009-04-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

The first piece of fiction I've posted here in what feels like, oh, a couple of months at least. I've written the second part but it's too long to post in one piece. It leans pretty heavily on a few sources (spot them if you can) but given the imminence of exams, my brain's probably not up to much. Here goes.

Cindy first insisted that he was the son of a Baptist minister and had spent his childhood travelling from state to state. Although we had no evidence to support this claim, there must have been something about it – maybe just the image of him pressed between fat bespectacled women in so many sweaty Southern churches – that rang true for us. No sooner were the words spoken than they became his unofficial history.

Caleb Fields was, as far as we could gather, sixteen years old when his family moved to Four Roses, making him two or three years older than us. His father was some kind of pastor, though whether a travelling Baptist one, we never could discern; his mother was vague and crinkled. Our first recorded viewing of the Fields family was late that March, when the pink cherry blossoms were breaking into early flower and their Chevrolet first parked itself in the driveway of the empty Mann house. He emerged from the car in tapered black jeans; dark-eyed and hollow-cheeked, almost girlishly slender.

We had never known love like it.

He appeared in school the following Monday. Because he was not in our classes, we had to glean what information we could from older siblings and babysitters: yes, he was quiet, they said, and he smiled to himself at moments that didn’t seem to be funny. Eventually, they started waving us off when we approached with questions. At the end of the week, we pooled our data among the floral wallpaper and oppressive heat of Rita Phelps’ living room.

“I just really want to know,” Cindy said, and we agreed that wanting to know was the most normal thing we could want, that it was an end unto itself, that the knowing was the thing we yearned for most, and that when we knew everything we would settle back into our respective lives with scarcely a thought for the Fields family. Yes, we said: it was the enigma we really loved.

The first week of April saw a heatwave sweep Four Roses. It slept in our classrooms, smudging our neat handwriting with sweat, trickling down our spines. It was the weather of dried grass, of tank tops and sticks of gum, of ice-cream cones that melted all the way to your fingers. Our mothers paused over their sinks to sigh, and wipe their foreheads with sudsy fingers and say it was inexplicable, but we knew how to explain it. It was the arrival of the Fields that was melting tar and wilting roses; it was Caleb littering the sidewalks with cherry blossom petals and waking us up at night with damp unknowing heat.

On Tuesday, Therese and Susan reported seeing him alone near the bleachers during lunch. We took to spending our lunchtimes from then on huddled on the dry grass, keeping a lookout. Within a week, we had watched him smoking on the baseball stands, saw the tips of his cigarettes flare briefly at his mouth; observed from a safe distance the small mirror he kept inside his locker, how he paused sometimes to smooth down his fringe; watched his hands flutter occasionally to the silver crucifix he wore around his neck. Every significant sighting was recorded. On Friday at lunchtime, our third vigil on the grass, we designated a small green notebook of Cindy’s for the purpose of recordkeeping.

It is due to this stenographic care that we can report when it was that we first heard Caleb’s voice. It was 13:34pm on Thursday the 28^th of March, nearly a week later, while he was on his way back from the bleachers – at that sacred point when he passed right by us where we sat – when suddenly and without fair warning Cindy Dalton called out.

“Hey! Caleb!”

He turned around, only three or four feet away. His face was inscrutable behind Aviator sunglasses, framed by the tilted sun.

“Yeah?”

His accent was by all accounts unplaceable, but to us spoke of wide deserted plains, tall summer heat and night-time car journeys. The coolness of ice clinking in water. The stations of the cross.

She shaded her eyes with a hand and smiled. “Nice glasses.”

“You like them?” He took them off and inspected them briefly, then folded them and threw them to her. She caught them delicately, as if she expected it, grinning like a bad actor who anticipates the play. He had already turned around and was walking away, chewing on a stick of gum like he always did. We recorded the incident in silence.

That Saturday, we convened in Mona’s room to discuss the unguessable facts of Caleb’s childhood. Cindy remained wordless, perched on the window-seat and stroking the frames of his sunglasses in her lap. Finally, when cool evening began to gather around the street and we had moved on to other topics of conversation, she spoke.

“I wonder if he’s a virgin.”

In all our discussion of Caleb’s life, we had not yet touched the subject of girls, not even expressing our own wish – however formless, however unsettling – to taste his mouth on ours. Cindy, however, seemed unaware of her trespassing on hallowed territory. The question came to her as naturally as the unfathomable Aviators: sudden but somehow unsurprising, exhilarating and unthinkable at once. In our hesitation, we began to see him as a kind of Christ, holy and laminated, innocent both of every sin and of none, immaculately conceived by a Chevrolet and born between car doors on a lawn in Four Roses, already sixteen. We could not imagine that he had ever touched a girl; we could not believe that he hadn’t.

While we kindled our indignation at Cindy’s sacrilege, Caleb himself came out of his house across the street and got in the driver’s seat of his father’s Chevy. We fell silent at the window as he backed out of the driveway and down the street, craning to watch him disappear until our breath misted the glass so that we could not tell his tail-lights from the street-lamps way out across town.

“Probably some party somewhere,” Cindy said.

“But he doesn’t know anyone here,” Mona pointed out.

Cindy shrugged, then pulled her sleeve over her hand to clean the lenses of his glasses.

Less and less now did Cindy come to our houses after school or help us to fill in the green notebook. One day she wore coral-coloured lipstick to school. She was becoming bony and angelic-looking, with tousled blonde hair and cupid’s-bow lips. Only her presence with us at lunchtime was assured: every day she’d stretch out in the sun-yellowed grass and watch Caleb’s narrow figure on the bleachers with the rest of us. One Tuesday, sitting with her knees tucked up under her chin and Caleb’s Aviators on, she told us she had started smoking. We squawked with questions. She stole the cigarettes from her mother, she said, and smoked them in her wardrobe, breathing the smoke out into a coat that had gotten too small. Despite our shock, she seemed somewhat disinterested in telling us about it, and abruptly trailed off into silence.

When Caleb came back from the bleachers that day, he nodded at her as he walked toward us. “Nice shades.”

“Oh, you like them?” she said.

He laughed, standing in front of us with the sun behind him again. He looked down and – in a strange and somehow uncharacteristic gesture – kicked the grass at his feet. When no word from Cindy seemed forthcoming, he continued walking back into the school. She kept on staring out at the bleachers, as smooth and cryptic as marble.

rich white boys

2009-04-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

you tell me that women are no longer oppressed.

I ask about honour killings, about mutilation

about rape victims who are jailed and beaten

about silence and slavery.

you say you are talking about the west, about our world

but really you are talking about yours.

I wonder if your body has ever been anyone else’s property

if you know what it means to be powerless

or to kneel in the dark and pick up the buttons from your blouse.

you say that I hate men.

but I cannot explain anymore

that there is only one world

or that I love more than I should.

instead I will go to the sea

to touch again the level waters

which are older than men and women

which will not try to tell me that my people are free.

St. Patrick's Day

2009-03-18T06:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't been writing much lately, due to various exam-based reasons. I did get a break yesterday to roam the town and take a few pictures of the St. Patrick's Day festivities, so I thought at could at least post the results. Here are a few, the rest are on my flickr photostream.

Drift

2009-03-06T17:20:00.000-08:00

Some more free verse. Woo.

Drift

my sister turns under the streetlamp

and she is dotted with snowflakes

as if someone was gently erasing her

it tastes good, she says

the world has shrunk to fit this little scene

the envelope of hush and sweep

it was this time last year I met you

and stayed up late to keep you company

when you worked the nightshift

and we were both untouched in love

and anger

On Sorrow

2009-02-06T07:11:00.000-08:00

These last few weeks have been difficult

abraded by the cold tapwater mornings

the watery sunless afternoons and all

the beads of bad news which hang heavy

together, all this buffeting by failure, by

failed promises and failed expectations

yes, these things happen, and they have

happened now. You are torn for a while

by disappointments, by the loss of long-

held imaginings. We all are, sometimes.

Still, there is a cat sleeping in a slant

of sunlight; there is a flock of girls on

the green, a windless fall of snow, and

a film you want to see in the cinema.

Shake out from the cloth of the month

those few hours that troubled you

and let them fall. Take comfort.

They are no longer in your future.

They can never hurt so much again.

February

2009-02-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

After my last post about the importance of formalism in poetry, I thought I'd shake things up with a little free verse. Enjoy.

February 2^nd, 14:45

This is a good day.

There is washing damp and starchy on the line

sunlight learning geometry on the grass

the new month unpacking itself in the sky.

I should use all of this

to say goodbye to you sweetly, without regret

without love or sadness, but with the same ease

of parting as a blackbird and a branch,

our usefulness together

now exhausted, and my memory bird-like

unclouded by your loveliness. Yes, I will

wash myself clean of you today.

A Sestina

2009-01-26T10:07:00.001-08:00

I often wonder about rhyme and other formal schemes when it comes to poetry. Why bother? (I ask, assuming the role of punchy internet kid). Why not let the words say what they want to say?

But I still can't deny that all the poems I feel are my best have been written with a rhyming scheme. They start out free verse, and I chop them into shape, and it helps. I think of myself as a rigorous editor with or without the guiding hand of formalism, but somehow it seems to work its magic for me (when I'm lucky).

My good friend Ken Armstrong has voiced the theory that by forcing your poetry into a strict metre, you become inventive out of necessity. It's a good theory - better than anything I can come up with - so I pushed it to its logical extreme and wrote a sestina.

(I explain what a sestina is for the benefit of people like me, who had no idea what it was until today - don't be offended if you've been rhyming them off since the age of eight). A sestina is poem of six verses, each with six lines, and a three-line tercet. Each of the six lines in the six verses must end with the same six words, and they must repeat themselves in a strict order. The tercet includes two of the words per line.

This was, I have to say, a lot of fun to write. Whether it is of any literary merit, well... no. Not really. But fun is good, right?

Sestina

Now there is all this distance.

The places where the buildings of your city

rise on the dark coast like teeth

and the sheltered terrain of my home;

the gaps where this rain-battered love

flutters uncertainly toward you.

And – 638 kilometres away – you

remain ambivalent to this unchanging distance

and my brief, excited promises of love

yet to happen. Instead you tell me about the city

and the mirrored coffee-table in your hall at home

with legs marked by the dog’s teeth.

I dreamt last night of sinking my teeth

in your wrist, and woke up missing you

or believing somehow that you were home,

as if something carried you across the distance

westward, out of your colourless city

while I slept and dreamt of love.

You hate these dreams, this expansive-sounding love

or worse, you shrug it off. I feel my teeth

water, and your letters swim in diagonals. You

don’t respond. This weekend I will go to the city

and forget about you until I come home.

I remember when you wished away this distance

and how grateful I was for our common enemies: distance

and time, finance and logic; later, probably love.

We wanted to share a kind of home –

I wanted bedclothes, the touch of your teeth,

keys rattling in the door, and you wanted a city

we both knew. I still love you

because I don’t know how you feel, because you

are scared of me, maybe. I love this distance

because I know its climate, and this city

because it is a secret you keep from me. I love

without subtlety, your collarbone and teeth

and the places we might have been home.

Carefully, I measure the distance between your city

and my home, with a piece of string torn by my teeth.

You would never ask me to love you.

Women Obscure in Their Labour

2009-01-20T12:54:00.001-08:00

Took a whole (Super) Tuesday off homework to watch the Inaugural Address, and wrote this kind-of response to it. This is still pretty rough, but I'm not thinking I'll have much time to work on it in the near future.

I guess this, like a lot of my work, is concerned with gender and what it is and why it is. And obviously, I'm coming at it from a feminist perspective - I consider this a feminist blog, really - but even the definition and principles of feminism are difficult and often contradictory. This isn't necessarily a criticism: I am a feminist, and I expect most good people are. Whether they identify as "feminist" or not is another issue, and because of some really pathetic stereotypes, lots of young women don't.

I don't know what point this poem is trying to make, exactly. It's all a little bit vague and celebratory or something. Also, if you Google the title, its relevance should become apparent.

Enjoy.

Women Obscure in Their Labour

The inauguration comes

one month before my eighteenth birthday

along with day-late prickling of cramps.

My mother is in the city

and the girls from school sign out

to apply for university before the deadline.

At home, I switch the television on and

watch thousands of tiny flags blur into pink

and my best friend texts me:

“things are changing today”.

This is not a love poem

unless it is for her, or for myself,

for the trumpet players, flag-wavers

swaddled in coats and badges

for Nancy, Hillary and Michelle

for those who watch this in London

dreaming of home and for those who

watch at home, dreaming of Washington

for this flush restless fertility

which is both mine and not mine

or somehow shared because in this

hope – and there is hope –

we all are bound together, each to each.

The Big Reveal

2009-01-08T11:00:00.001-08:00

Hey, guys. Haven't been doing much writing lately, and truth be told am feeling somewhat glum. I don't know if I will have time to keep up the blog given the approach of the mock exams/oral exams/real exams, and I know I keep saying that, but this time it may actually - gasp! - be true.

It remains for me to thank you all for reading thus far, and hope that I'll be able to make the odd appearance between now and June. You never know.

Oh, and I had a short story of mine published in a collection fairly recently; it's available on Amazon at the moment and for the forseeable future. It also makes a great post-Christmas present, I hear.

And would that be my name listed fourth from last on the cover? I'll never tell...

Hard to Explain: 3

2009-01-05T07:41:00.001-08:00

The third in a series of chapters I've been posting from my young adult novel, Hard to Explain. The first and second chapters are also up.

This probably gets past PG-13 at points, so consider yourselves warned...

The plane touched down at two thirty. Jared’s mother would have run her finger along every surface in the airport and shuddered.

His aunt Meg was waiting for him in arrivals. As soon as he got into her car, he wanted to shut his eyes and bite down very hard on his fists because this was all just like what happened last time and he didn’t want to be here then and he didn’t want to be here now. Meg was talking. The radio was on. Jared switched on his iPod and turned the volume up uncomfortably loud. He imagined that he was like a piece of knitting that had snagged on something in New York and there was a line of wool stretched tight over the Atlantic ocean, pointing back to everything he missed. He felt kind of car-sick. He listened to Fleet Foxes and watched a factory swallowed up by the yellow hills.

The journey took an hour and a half.

He remembered Meg’s house only slightly differently. It was a white two-storey house with a front lawn, next to lots of other two-storey houses with front lawns. A damp pink tricycle lay on its side, streamers trailing in the grass.

Meg opened the door, let him in and showed him to his room upstairs. It had a small cold bed and an old television and dusty purple curtains. She told him they had ordered the school uniform as soon as they heard but it wasn’t in yet and she fixed it up with the principal so he could go in his own clothes just for a few days. She told him that the girls had already started back at school and she’d be going to pick them up in half an hour and then they’d all have lunch. Eventually she left and he sat on his new bed and looked at the window.

His head throbbed with visions of Manhattan. That night in Treble when MGMT were playing. The tables ringed with beer stains – his right hand with that little red stamp on it – shitty stage lights pulsing the primary colours – the girls in a colourful flock at the bar, talking to someone from a band, all collarbones and bangles – Matthew peeling the label off his beer and talking about Sandra – then the crush of people around the stage, the perfume and sweat – some girl’s wrist in the air in front of him with a little wooden bracelet on – later he sees her in the corridor outside the bathroom and she’s Spanish-looking and she smiles when she walks past –

There were other nights. He remembered the Spanish girl probably because he didn’t look at her for long enough to notice her make-up was kind of smudged or to start wondering if he really did like her or whether he wanted to go over and try to talk to her and whether he would totally regret it and feel sick afterwards if she had a boyfriend or if she liked him back. The Spanish girl made him feel cool, like a person you could just walk past in corridors and smile at. There were nights in Treble that ended with kissing and phone numbers, but it was always awkward and he could never hear what the girls were saying and they never really got his jokes and afterwards he felt stupid and more frustrated than before.

Matthew once asked if he was gay. The actual fact of knowing Matthew made Jared want to smile. When he asked if Jared was gay, he asked it with absolutely zero offhandedness, like as if it was both the most important and serious question ever, but also the least important because Matthew just totally would not mind what the answer was. At the time, Jared was lying on Matthew’s bed wearing oversized sunglasses and Matthew was sitting on the computer chair kind of swivelling from side to side.

“Depends who’s asking,” Jared had replied.

“If I was asking.”

“You’re pretty cute, Matt, but I don’t know about –”

Matthew laughed. “Go fuck yourself.”

“What, with you watching? Please.”

There was a pause.

“Are you, like, bisexual, then?”

“Seriously, man, does it matter?”

“I guess not. I’d just like to know. I’m supposed to be your wingman.”

Jared sat up and removed the sunglasses. “Matthew. If I ever, ever, like ever use the word ‘wingman’ in your presence – just promise you will shoot me. Preferably in the face.”

Matthew swivelled back to face the computer. “Done and done.”

Jared didn’t know what he was. At the time, Matthew asking him made him feel better about the whole thing, like he could brush it off and nothing bad would happen. The more he thought about it, the more nervous it made him. He’d kind of gotten used to being an entity, like a whole thing, like an entire Jared all in one. All the usual parts of his identity were self-contained: eye colour (brown), favourite shoes (black All Stars), drink of choice (vodka and lemonade). He struggled to include his tenuous, undefined relationships with other people as a part of his actual self. It felt like standing in a room and stretching his arms out until they almost brushed the other people in the room but didn’t actually, and then trying to make that mean something.

Sometimes he liked girls and sometimes not. It wasn’t that he never thought about being gay: it was more that Jared didn’t really get desire. He didn’t have big epic feelings about anything. Okay, he did – when First Impressions of Earth came out; when he first saw Vampire Weekend live – but nothing sexy. Frustration, on the other hand, Jared got that. A lot. It was sort of everywhere, all immediate and dislocated, with that detached random fury that made him think about people in alarming ways. Even Matthew. Okay, alright, probably especially Matthew.

Jared didn’t know what to do with sexual frustration. Once, and once only, he had watched porn. It was a video of a couple having sex in the back of a Nissan Sentra. He didn’t identify the car make from the interior: it said it on the page title. Anyway, the gimmick was apparently the fact that the car was moving. At one point, the camera swung completely away from the action to film the passing cars out the window. It was on one of those freeways with a million lanes, bright and hot, somewhere in LA maybe. Anyway. He didn’t really want to think about that.

Suddenly the door opened and his cousins came in. Jared had only seen Christmas cards of them since they were babies: in real-life they looked much stickier and more intrusive. He could’ve been doing anything in there on his own. They were six and eight. The eight-year-old had curly brown hair and freckles. The six-year-old had blonde hair and a big plastic sword for some reason. He couldn’t remember their names, but he knew he didn’t like them.

“Who are you?” the six-year-old said.

“He’s your cousin!” the older sister giggled. “You know that! Mum told us!”

“I thought our cousin was a girl.”

They whispered something together, then turned to face him again with mournful eyes. This lasted only a few seconds.

“What’s your name?” the six-year-old said lispingly.

“Jared,” he said.

They both laughed and looked at each other and looked back at him and laughed again, stuffing their faces into their hands.

“What kind of trousers are you wearing, Jared?” the six-year-old said. The eight-year-old elbowed her.

“Aoife! Shut up!”

Aoife. That was it. And the other one must have been Sinead. The kids weren’t even Irish: Meg wasn’t Irish. She moved there to get in touch with her roots, even though the family’s last connection to Ireland was back in like the 1600s when they owned a part of it.

The trousers thing, Jared didn’t get.

“Look at his trousers!” Aoife squealed again.

“She thinks your trousers are funny,” Sinead said, red-faced with laughter.

“What’s funny about them?”

“Look!” Aoife cried, poking him in the shins. “They’re like what a girl would wear!”

Apparently, and unbeknownst to Jared, his cousins had grown up as the male college staff at his father’s office. Next thing they would be asking him how the boyfriend was and sniggering.

“Mum says to come down for lunch,” the older one said, grasping Aoife’s hand and tugging her out of the reach of his jeans. “We’re having fish fingers.”

They left, snorting and giggling. He got up and followed them down, thinking angry racist thoughts about Ireland and the Irish and most especially those who pretended to be Irish even when they still pronounced the word “coffee” like “cawffee” and called themselves a “mom”.

The kitchen was low-ceilinged, with lino on the floor and a shiny tablecloth with a pattern of pineapples on it. His mother used to sit at the table when it had a different tablecloth and pinch at her bony fingers as if there was something hidden in her skin. Every window had curtains, even the sink window. And none of the doors closed properly into their frames.

Fish fingers turned out to be rectangles of fish cooked in breadcrumbs. Jared didn’t like them.

That night, he lay in bed and listened to his cousins coughing and mumbling in the next room and the smell of rain and dust and then it was silent. He had not heard silence in so long. It reminded him of things.

He didn’t like it.

The Happiest of New Years

2009-01-01T16:09:00.000-08:00

My apologies again for neglecting this blog - two posts in two months! eep! - and more seriously, for neglecting your blogs. I am sure that in my absence I've missed loads of excellent material. Sadly, I am now entering the final phase of my last year in school, which means I probably won't be making as many appearances here as I would like.

My writing energy lately has been focused on polishing up my aforementioned novel, Hard to Explain, so I'll post the second excerpt of that here. It is also the second chapter; the first one is available here (and the third is now here). Criticism welcomed with open arms and possible cups of tea.

Oh - just before I post that, actually, I may mention a tiny side-project I am (unwisely) embarking on. It's called The Ingénue Diaries, and it is composed of writing which does not belong here because it's all part of one diary. A diary which is of unspecified truth.

Also, may I take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy new year. Here's to a better 2009.

* * *

The seatbelt light went off above his head. Beneath him, through the rounded window, Jared could still see the sprawling city, the island of Manhattan, the clawing fingers of the American coastline, and then nothing. He opened his seatbelt and leaned back.

They had thrown a going-away party for him at Sandra’s place. Pretty much everyone he knew from school was there saying they’d miss him and they gave him a card full of Irish money or European money or whatever and it was all way too nice. There was cake. Sandra and Matt made it themselves. He thanked people for coming like a hundred times and said he’d add everyone on MySpace and made sad funny jokes about Ireland not having electricity or running water or American Apparel. Damn it. He would really miss American Apparel.

There was another list to add to “clothes” and “items other than clothes”: Things Jared Would Miss About New York.

Treble. Final Vinyl. That one time Susan from Geology swore that Julian Casablancas came into the Starbucks where she worked. Matthew and Sandra and Louise and Noah and everyone. A whole year of school.

It had all started eight weeks ago.

Jared’s mother would disagree with this statement – they had been unhappy for years now, she would say; they had dealt with Claudia in different ways; there’d been talk since Christmas at least – but for Jared, none of that mattered. His parents splitting up? Big deal. Really. He was seventeen. His parents floated out at the edges of his life. He didn’t want to be callous about it. Sure, he wanted them to be happy: if divorce was making them happy, he wanted them to get divorced. Whatever.

But then there was the fighting. They fought over the flat, the car, the house in Rhode Island; they fought over Jared, even, who was going to Columbia anyway in two years. His father wanted to move back to Florida, and his mother was staying in the city, so they fought about that. They fought about who Jared would stay with for how long and for which parts of the year, and they fought about school and his airfare even – they fought about money, which no one in Jared’s family had ever fought about before. No one in Jared’s family had ever really fought about anything.

And then.

Since he was sixteen, Jared and Matthew plus a bunch of guys and girls from school would try more or less every weekend to get into this club called Treble about four blocks from Jared’s house. Treble was this really small exclusive garage rock club where the girls had short hair and the boys had long hair and everyone wore really tight tapered jeans. They all got in one night about three weeks ago and some security guy came up to them and asked for ID and they got kicked out and parents were called.

Jared’s parents took this as a sign that he was not coping well with the separation. He had grown up with an IRS guy for a father and a maritime lawyer for a mother: at home they watched MSNBC and drank fair trade coffee. He didn’t know how to argue. He didn’t know how to tell them that Treble was an okay kind of place, that nobody had ever tried to sell him drugs, that the music was good – that the music was incredible, it was everything – and he hadn’t fallen in with anyone, it was really just him and Matthew, and he didn’t even drink much alcohol and he was still pretty much a virgin.

Actually, ‘pretty much’ was a massive exaggeration. He was totally a virgin. Like as much as it was possible to be.

The truth was that Jared wasn’t particularly cool. Most kids in school probably didn’t even know his name. Sometimes, he could hear himself and Matthew self-consciously implying themselves into coolness: saying things like “the guys,” when they meant the only two other guys they occasionally hung out with. And they wouldn’t have even known those two if it wasn’t for the school chess club, not that they went to that anymore, but still.

He didn’t know how to say any of that. His apartment was too quiet for him to raise his voice. It was a civilised, talk radio place. It would have been like shouting in the library.

So they decided it would be good for Jared to get out of the country for a while. His mother said it was a bad environment. Jared felt like he always felt, which was like a pinball, bouncing off things without any control whatsoever over what was bad and what was good. His mother had this sister Meg in Ireland who used to come to visit every Christmas when Jared was younger. They’d all gone to stay with her for a couple of months after Claudia and everything, because his mother had thought they just needed to get away. Jared disagreed. Jared had wanted to stay in New York and crawl under Claudia’s bed and bang his head repeatedly, but his mother made him leave. Anyway that was years ago and, yeah, whatever.

His mother was all like “you love Europe, Jared,” which, okay, Jared had been to Paris one time when he was like eight and to be fair, yes, it seemed pretty good. It’s just that it didn’t necessarily follow that he would want to miss an entire year of school to go live in Ireland, just because he got to have chocolate croissants for breakfast once. But lately his mother was always shouting down the phone and crying and it never seemed like the right time to say, actually mom, this whole thing is a terrible idea.

A perfumed stewardess wheeled past and he pretended to be asleep. It would be a long flight.

Poetry: Where We Belong

2008-12-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

Some more rhyme-y stuff. This is mildly racy (well not really, just slightly racier than other stuff I've posted - possibly) so avert your eyes if you're of a sensitive disposition. Okay, not that racy.

Also, I'm giving an advance "no comment" on the factuality of the story contained herein.

Where We Belong

The art room: pastels, brushes stiff with glue

papier-mâché, the Japanese silk screen

and prints – Matisse and Turner, Monet, Dou.

I don’t belong here with last year’s display

my hands too small, too fine for inks and chalk

these narrow wrists too delicate for clay;

and yet I find my features here, in paint

subjected to wide centuries of longing

in every pretty mute Renaissance saint

and every passive, sultry silhouette

oh all Lolitas with their teasing hunger

whose artists are tormented even yet.

Art and pornography, the oldest ruse

and we are not exempt from this ballet

the ancient arabesque of artist-muse.

Let’s not keep secrets: you are twenty-four

and I am seventeen, unschooled, unpractised

trembling Madonna, unromantic whore

depending on your mood. I am not wrong

to say I know what thrill you want from me

to say we’re both aware where we belong.

(her): a Prose Poem

2008-11-24T09:41:00.000-08:00

I broke this one up into paragraphs to make it more user-friendly (because I think that way it'll get more comments. Oh yes. I'm quite ruthless like that).

(her)

day breaks after your argument. she wakes at twelve, fitful, sore-eyed, and deletes your emails from her inbox. then a shower. she cuts her finger on a razorblade and the skin peels off but it does not bleed. she dresses, eats lunch, wraps her finger in a bandage.

her mother drives her to her grandmother’s house. the pontoon road is sheer and yellow in cloudless november daylight. they listen to kate and anna mcgarrigle singing kiss and say goodbye, singing heart like a wheel, singing the swimming song. he is flying in from the continent tonight. the expectation blooms in her shallow throat. the fear of expectation. she probably won’t see him until tomorrow. she thinks of all the emails she deleted from her inbox and she misses you.

at her grandmother’s house the trees have been cut back and the roses are rotted on their stems. sunlight stares through bare branches and dead leaves. inside it is warm, dark and curtained. they eat fruit pastilles. they look at photographs.

her grandmother in 1942. july in glenisland, her summer arms wrapped round her knees, her dark eyes and ringless fingers.

her mother in 1978. a photo booth in tottenham court road, and she had just had her hair highlighted, and she and her friend smiling breathlessly at the camera, all scarves and buttoned cotton.

herself in 1992. enniscrone. the sea glistening invisibly behind her. the tiny woollen hat. the fleshy baby face, the dimples in her knuckles. sucking her thumb.

the tall stride of her mother’s eldest brother. the french wedding. the first colour in 1966: pink and blue seersucker dresses, tanned legs. the tropics of lesotho, where her mother lost her engagement ring in the indian ocean.

they put away the photo albums and she goes to the bookshelves. her uncle’s college thesis. more photographs. a crumbling newspaper clipping of her grandfather’s gaelic team. a dictionary of flowers. she slides it out and thumbs through it, making bouquets in her head. for you: anemone, wormwood, geranium rose. hydrangea which means frigidity, heartlessness, vanity, thank you for understanding. sweet-pea which says goodbye. forget me not. for him: forsynthia, wisteria, primrose, peach rosebud and blue salvia. viscaria for will you dance with me?

darkness runs its fingernails down the sky. rain-stars on the windshield. in the car going home they listen to the strokes and they are singing the modern age singing someday singing hard to explain.

The Waiting Week

2008-11-20T13:35:00.001-08:00

I was recently tagged with a lovely meme by the lovely Dave at Pics and Poems. I have never done a meme on this blog before, and as it is of a vaguely personal (I mean as opposed to artistic) nature, I'm not sure I could come up with anything interesting. While I encourage you to go and see what a good job he's made of it, here's some more poetry.

Unusually for me, this follows a pretty strict metre, which the enjambment kind of wrecks at a lot of points. I'm sure you'll spot them and shake your head in disappointment. Other than that, enjoy.

(And although I am still considering that meme, I may as well mention that the following contains at least seven separate facts about me...)

The Waiting Week

The windscreen wipers in my father’s car;

my sister conjugates French verbs in time

with indicator’s rhythm. Foggy stars

of brake lights on the school run: your exams

will start tomorrow and I know you are

staying home to study for them now.

I think of you, asleep, your mouth still slack

unturned by morning’s curtain-light alarm –

outside the winter daylight bleeds grey-black.

Biology. We study respiration.

Rain licks the windows and I think about

Sucking your fingertips. Such education.

My best friend laughs and all is damp again

nail-varnished and sweet-smelling like shampoo.

Next we have Maths, and I imagine you’re

examined, asked to name the points and turns

the sultry coefficient correlation.

Outside: the sycamore, the gorse, the ferns.

On Thursday morning you are flying out

to Belgium with your Public Speaking team.

I talk to my Careers teacher about

the universities and plans and details.

I sit and watch the paint as it peels off

the outside drainpipe. Nothing inside stirs.

I would rather tell her about you

how you speak such lovely Irish, and about

the words you use, the pretty things you do.

In school this week, I’m restless and daydream

about your school tie and your shoulder-blades

and your Toyota Highlander. I mean

I don’t know what to think. I am uncertain:

a floating retina, a dislocation.

But still, I find the happiness in this

potential. This uncertainty of fate.

The question: firm, remaining to be seen

the week: irresolute, not yet too late.

Something of this remains when it is done –

and anyway I cynically suspect

it would not be so thrilling, if begun –

this sense of ambiguity and hope

that you might bring me gifts back home from Belgium

and I would call you up on Sunday night.

If I could always have this same ability

to know we are unfixed, unhooked, undestined

surrounded constantly by possibility.

Mathematical Poetry

2008-11-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem which reflects how much I listen in Maths class.

Solve For y The Equation Reading…

I will calculate our probability,

the biological likelihoods.

We could be charted on a graph:

you are a parabolic curve and

I am analysing our points of intersection,

using my same old variables.

Let x equal the distance between us

when we dressed up for Halloween

the axis between your drivers’ seat

and my fingers on your back window.

Let y be a metaphor for attraction

the eye contact, that Coronas song

the tennis courts at night

when we counted the money with the others

and remembered how we met.

Dissolve me into numbers and allow

this probability. Let us equal one another:

constant for variable, x for y.

Prose Poem

2008-11-10T09:36:00.001-08:00

I don't think I actually know what a prose poem is, but it sounds like it should be something like the following. I like this piece, but I'm not sure what it's for or actually what it's about. Enjoy anyway.

* * *

she will go home and abuse the keyboard with drunken confessions of love and apologies even though she is not drunk. what other excuse to remind him that she loves him even though he is miles away, what other way to say that she remembers the time he got drunk and called her at two in the morning and woke her up and didn’t have anything to say. her friend’s cigarette smoke makes her itchy and restless. she is flooded with a faint urge, a sudden and quiet desire. she thinks about being attacked outside the marquee here, beyond the patio heater and the pool of yellow shed light and she imagines how deeply her nails would sink into someone’s skin, how she would break his fingers and kick his shins and gouge his eyes out with her hands. waiting for something to happen. the light revolves on the ceiling in shades of primary. a lit cigarette tip. a stiletto heel. a small hole in the side of the white marquee that lets in the darkness. a flooding of the synapses, the distant sound of thousands of neurons firing within her own brain. outside, waves of hailstones pass the streetlamp like a black ocean cresting in the light. she shivers. the dj mumbles into his microphone. her best friend is kissing someone and nobody knows who he is. an empty bottle rolls toward her foot. someone standing on a table showers the room with dutch gold. it forms a tiny pool on her bare shoulder and glistens in the revolving light. blue yellow. blue yellow red. she could run out of the marquee with hailstones nicking her bare arms and taxis spitting at her feet and not stop until everything was different. a firework screeches outside, writhing on the ground like a wounded animal. they crowd toward the marquee entrance. she watches over their heads. it screams toward the sky. it is green. she will not pretend to be drunk tonight. instead she will say that all this is worth something, even if she does not know what it is worth, even if the one she loves is miles away. even if it seems that the only thing worth loving about him is that uncrossable distance.

5.11 (Poetry)

2008-11-05T06:43:00.001-08:00

Being as I am directly in the middle of my Christmas examinations, I thought it would be a splendid idea to write a poem. It is a simple poem in three parts. It's not quite finished, I'm happy with one of the verses and unhappy with the other two. See what you think anyway.

5.11

I waited up last night for the early call from Virginia

and this morning I heard the news.

I am different in this radio static

today, the beginning of Christmas exams

and somebody lighting firecrackers outside my school.

There is a parcel waiting at lunchtime

labelled Air Mail. I tear it open. Six copies

of the book inside and my name is on the cover.

The solipsistic joy of letters

how suddenly your name means more when it is

printed in some font that’s not your own.

And you send me a message on MySpace

to say that I should come see you sometime.

Let nothing ever stop this sense of reaching out

this endless connection, this effortless tide of

being, of being more than one.

Hard to Explain

2008-11-02T09:51:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in my last post, I have been working on a little something, which contains a lot of other somethings that have previously been posted here. It's called Hard to Explain, after The Strokes' song rather than the plot, and it's currently running at about 35,000 words long - should end up somewhere near 40,000, which I think is acceptable short-novel/novella length - and the first few chapters are really the only ones that make any sense at the moment. Feel free to assure me that they do not. Here's number one.

Edited to add: And here is number two.

He had condensed everything into a suitcase. As if when he had decided what to bring and packed it all away and zipped it up, that would be it. Even though he knew that this was not it – that this was hardly even the beginning – it was still something, it was a thing, and because it was the only thing he could think about, he thought about it a lot. He made a list of clothes, and another list of other things that were not clothes. He packed and unpacked and packed everything in a different geometrical pattern so he could fit an extra sweater.

The phone rang in the kitchen and he heard his mother pick it up.

His checked shirt from Gap. He never really wore it any more, but still. Could it go in one of the side pockets?

“Jared?” she called, while he folded the checked shirt up very small.

“Yeah?”

“Matthew’s on the phone, sweetheart.”

He left it on top of the suitcase and went through to the kitchen. Everything in the apartment was mirrored. He saw his mother’s angular frame reflected fifteen times at once while she ate noodles at the kitchen island. He held the receiver to his ear.

“Jared?”

“Yeah, man, what’s up?” he said.

“You want to go to that movie tonight?”

“I can’t, really. I’m basically going to bed right now.”

A short pause. “What time are you flying out?”

“Like seven. From JFK, so that’s like, whatever, an hour’s drive. So yeah.”

“Shit, man.”

Jared smiled. “Yeah, I know.”

“Well, listen. We’ll all miss you and everything.”

“Don’t be a fag just because I’m leaving the country, Matt.”

“Right,” his best friend said, laughing. “Well, you know I’m just disappointed that I didn’t get any from you while you were here.”

“I’ll be back next year, you know. Also, my mom is in the room.”

“Am I on speakerphone?”

Jared looked over at his mother. She was still eating noodles with her back turned, but in the mirror her face betrayed nothing. He swung the receiver back toward his mouth. “Sure.”

“Did I ever mention your mom gives great head?”

“No. Although everyone knows your dad does.” He heard Matthew laughing again, and it made his stomach hurt. “I better go, man.”

“Sure. You get your beauty sleep. Hey, have a good flight tomorrow.” Another pause. “Take care and all.”

When he’d hung up, his mother looked up from her noodles. “Are you going to bed, honey?”

“Yeah.”

“Goodnight, then.”

The Gap shirt wouldn’t go into his suitcase. He left it out. It was the kind of thing he would probably end up missing. He switched the light off and lay wide-eyed in the New York dark, listening to the sirens cry outside. The city would move on, swallowing lives and coffee cups and loose change, spitting up yellow cabs and record stores. The hacking, wheezing city, with its bloodshot traffic-light eyes, its nicotine-stained boulevards. It would not wait for him.

Jared was afraid that nobody would.

A Hesitant Comeback Post

2008-10-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

Hmm. It has been a while.

While school has been sucking my blood quite a bit, part of the reason I was away was because I started writing a novella which I didn't want to post. Mainly because it is composed of things I've stolen from stuff that I have posted here, and you guys would recognise it immediately for the copy-and-paste job that it is.

Anyway, I am here for now at least - and while I am, I would like to extend my gratitude to Francis at the very excellent Caught in the Stream who included me in his list of seven favourite blogs. You should now go immediately and check out his site - which is full of rather brilliant art, poetry and fiction - unless you are him, in which case, cheers again Francis.

I do have a tiny bit of poetry to post, so here goes.

Halloween

These clouds wash out

October’s orange dregs;

there are fireworks tonight

and I am in love.

Let the silt of these autumn hours

block sadness from my heart.

May I always remember

when everything was good.

Poetry

2008-09-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

London

I light a candle for her mother

in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square

five hundred miles from home

do I do wrong by widening this loss

what comfort is there after all

in my stopping without telling her

to light a candle without praying?

what comfort here for her in untold light?

the hotel room is a maze of shopping bags

and I am phoning home

they tell me you have run away

that the police are searching

and your name is on the radio

I wonder where you are: a car somewhere in Donegal

he has pulled over and it is raining

the trunk weighed down with your black bag full of clothes

and do you know her mother has died

and are you scared and when will you come home

I win twenty pounds on a scratchcard

in Marble Arch station. I spend it in Sainsbury’s

on hot croissants, on plums and nectarines

a box of cereal, a pint of ice-cold milk

a copy of the Times. No one is as lucky

or as guilty. I have never earned the right to be unhappy.