Everyone is moving to Berlin

It’s all going down in East Berlin.She swept her long hair over her shoulder and swayed the table decisively. He looked at her and took a little sip of his cool beer. He'll never be able to fit me in, she thought, between that faded old sofa and the cranky fridge with half-drunk bottles of Weisswein and the hung-up washing and steaming cups of dark tea on the sideboard of the shop. Never, if not tonight. She thought he'd liked her that day on the U-Bahn. She couldn’t work out what was a memory and what she’d invented. Was he itching to take her bottom lip between his teeth, as she was, and gently bite?

He paid for her drink and winced. “Sorry, my contacts, hang on a sec.” He was so polite, it was exhausting. It was a little cold. She wanted him to warm her up, to put his electrifying fingers on her shoulders and squeeze.

“Got a light?”

“Sure.” He flicked a flame between their lips, briefly. Crumpled lung chrysalis. Was it just breath, or was there something else forming between them, as sweet and flickering as smoke?

(This post was inspired by Lail Arad's song, Everyone is moving to Berlin and first appeared on The Doodle Caboodle)

Blackberry Sonnet

I love this man, now and for forever. His pupils were split berries, black on
white irises. Her hair was spilt libation on his forehead. She tipped
her liquid lips to his, and drank to the world he'd turned his back on.
She turned and said a silent thanks to the world that had stripped her
of him, that had held his neck crooked across the cliff
and wondered
what the sea tasted like
------------from that great height

-------------------------what bones sound like
--------------------------------------when the whole world sucks them stiff.
She turned, kiss still on mouth, and cursed the world that never really let them be.
As silence rose, she caught sight of his snagged arms, poured earth
over his forehead and turned and fled, weeping
--------------------------------------------------------to the silent sea.

This sonnet was inspired byLaura Marling's song, Blackberry Stone
and was first published on The Doodle Caboodle

Dental Trauma

I
I have bit
my tongue for too long
on this one.

I know that conscience
and the cold bite hard,
and rhyme is a twisting

tongue, is a sound leaf
caught between
two lines of teeth,

but this was torture.

II
Your cigarette
was a lovebite at the night's
cold neck

a brush of teeth along her black
back, a perfect kiss
in the cold air. So when

your lips brushed mine
I could not help but wonder
how,

between the rush
of teenage lust and tooth
and tongue, salivasap,

your lip
managed to trap
itself between my metal brace

and gum, biting
itself into submission
bleeding, suffering, then numb

as kisses became kickboxing
attempts
to escape, save face,

to free your tongue
like a bird of song
from its newfound cage:

my bruising, glinting brace.

This poem first appeared here: The Doodle Caboodle

The Doodle Caboodle

OK, so this is a bit of a shameless plug; my apologies. I'm writing for an art blog called "The Doodle Caboodle". It's run by a friend of mine (Alex Moore; her website is the Threepenny Orchestra). One day she rang me up and said that she was starting a blog with a group of her friends from art school, and would I like to contribute? The blog is a space to collect work by all kinds of people, centred around a theme that changed monthly.

Yes please. So I am now writing for the blog. I'll post my pieces here too. In the meanwhile, do visit The Doodle Caboodle if you have time, as it's supercool and the artists illustrating on it are very talented indeed.

On the Move II

Is a house like a Greek chorus? Doesn't your home seem to speak to you sometimes? Reminding you of the past, singing your future fate, warning you to turn back at every photo, every crack, every faded patch. Recording your progress. And do we move houses so often because we are afraid of stagnating, of having our last house determine our fate by holding onto us? When we move house, do we redesign our future too? Or in buying a new house, are we just purchasing a new illusion for ourselves: namely, the renewed illusion of freedom?

On the Move

After a year of moving around, from London to Paris to Berlin and back, I've been thinking about the way that surroundings affect people. I am convinced, now, that habitats influence a person's state of mind, that they affect and reflect the shape of the human soul. A home's aesthetic is a person's aesthetic: the glow from the very walls infuses into a person and emits memories at them. I'm not quite saying that Naturalism runs riot. Instead, I'm arguing that a sticky surface - a kind of memory bank - is enacted by each wall.

Lacking a home, I have used the internet as a wall: a sticky surface, a memory bank, a permanent place in my itinerant lifes, which will welcome me whenever I need to return, whenever I feel sad or nostalgic or homesick.

I've been itinerant the whole year, and when you move around a lot, the fung shui of foreign flats and rooms has a different effect. Surroundings affect the traveller profoundly, since they are very different to home. Travellers don't get so attached to the places they stay in, because they know they're moving, but these places sometimes affect travellers more than inhabitants, who have gotten used to their hometown's aesthetic and are no longer affected by it.

Bleibenblurb II

Over the weekend I watched a Dr Who episode where the Doctor and his assistant are living in 2 worlds, both of which feel very real. They have to choose which one is real and which is the dream. If they die in the dream, they wake up in the real world, but if they die in the real world then they just "die, stupid."
Basically, their lives are at stake.

This episode got me thinking about the nature of travelling and the life narrative. Normally, when tourists travel to another country, they stitch their journey-chapter into their narrative; when they return, there will be others who remember the holiday and what was seen and done. Thus the holiday, though in another place, is easily recogniseable as part of the tourist's narrative.

Yet when I travel, to Berlin, to Paris, I do not travel with others from home, who will remember. When I return to London, there are none there who know my life in those other cities, no collective memory of that time, and so it feels as though I am switching lives, walking between worlds. There will be hardly any evidence, save perhaps the inches of dust rolling up in my room, to show that I have been anywhere else at all. I have built up new lives in these other places; made new friends; told new jokes and anecdotes; stocked new kitchen cupboards; formed new favourites; frequented new cafes, bakeries, clubs, cinemas, bookshops.

When Proust wrote of selves proliferating, he was referring to one individual whose various selves were divided by time and age: an older Marcel was able to write down younger Marcel's impressions. Yet for modern travellers, who can reach half way around the world in a number of hours, the multiplicity of selves results from a dislocation, not in time, but in space.
So my sejourn here in Europe is not just a continuation of the narrative; it is a fragment. It is a different life in a different world. I have barely aged between being in Paris and Berlin, yet these are two existences in which I, the "I", is a very different being, in which my worlds are galaxies apart. Even the plane journey felt like a Tardis trip. Viewed through the telescope of time, in hindsight, these two worlds will once again be fragments; anomalies; dreams. They feel so real now but will seem light years away when I go back* - sleepsung, sandy-eyed, awaking from that familiarly elusive Proustian dream - when I return to the milky, familiar cosmos of life in London.


* back in space but forwards in time.