Poetry To A Beat

Today Mr Next Door knocked on the door, but I was naked so I quickly put some clothes on and went downstairs but by the time I got there he was at the end of the drive. I shut the door again and hid. He was putting all the bin bags sitting out the front of our house into the bin. He did not look impressed. But at least I didn't have to deal with all the rubbish the bin men refused to take. The hiding reminded me of when I was younger and I had a fear of phones and answering the door. I think it must have been when I was off school with shingles or something, in year 8. A man in a white van knocked on the front door. I was in the office. I hid, crouched down by the filing cabinet and hoped he wouldn't see me. I was pretty sure he had though as he just kept knocking, he wouldn't give up. But I was petrified, and I don't even know why. After a while he went away.

I never used to be a person who cried a lot. When I was really depressed at 14/15 I went so far past the point of tears that I only used to cry at gigs. The first time I wrote to Nerina I signed off as 'the girl in the front row who cries a lot'. Back then it was 'Mr King' and 'Idaho', in the 'Fires' era. There was nothing I could do to stop it, the chords rang out and plunged deep into my chest; the tears came silently. The first time I heard 'Coming Home', Dad was in hospital having heart surgery. It's a song about her Dad, and in that moment it became mine. I wasn't expecting it of a song I hadn't heard before,but the tears came thick and fast. After she sang it at his funeral I couldn't listen to it anymore. It came on in Wilkinson's not long ago, which is unusual but they always seem to play songs of hers that were never released as singles. And when I hear one of her songs playing in a shop, I can't leave until its finished. And my opinion of the shop in question goes up dramatically. Anyway, I didn't cry. I just listened. These days it's 'Grace' that gets me, and 'This Will Be Our Year', and an old classic, 'If I Know You'. And if she plays 'Coming Home', it's okay, it's 3 minutes, 42 seconds in which I can think about my Dad, and I have friends holding my hands, handing me tissues, squeezing my arm and thinking of me. Besides 'Coming Home', which to be honest I usually skip these days, I don't cry while listening to these songs at home. It's just something about hearing them live that brings them even more to life than they already were. Perhaps it's the acoustics, perhaps the unpredictability of a live performance that evokes new meanings in the same words. I'm a bit scared about you seeing me at a Nerina concert, mostly because of the uncontrollable crying. And maybe a little because you'll think I'm a massive geek because I turn up 4 hours early, and talk to James and Ricardo and Dr Mike, Becky, Zoe, Toby and Tom, Daz and Tim, Daniel, Lauren, Kerena, and all the others about Nerina and not much else. But I'd love you to come with me. To squeeze my hand in the sad songs and laugh at me for my geekiness. And I want Nerina to meet the person who makes me happy.

I want to stand with you, glass of wine in hand, and take this all in. And if you hate it, if it's not your kind of music, just humour me. Because her words have contributed to the construction of the person I am today.

'Time' Doesn't Look Like A Word Anymore

I love that I can write things here and you find them without me having to say anything. I'm really awake because I slept til 5pm today. I didn't mean to, I kept snoozing the alarm. I had some strange dreams last night. I dreamt that my skin was crawling with these tiny black flies, then I woke up scratching my scalp like mad trying to get them out, I had scratches all over my arms. Took me a while to realise it was a dream; I was in that haze where absurdity bleeds into reality, like oil into water. And Sian the ginger lesbian was in my dream too. It seems like the things you say rattle around my head until they're released as unconscious musings, or put into writing. Here's a question: Why do the clocks go back at 2am? Surely they should go back at 1am, or midnight. I don't understand the clock system. I don't think time is a thing that should be messed with. Time as a concept in itself confuses me. Like, who decided how long a second would be? Also the whole clocks going back or forwards business hurts my brain, I can't get my head around it. So I'm not changing the time on my phone, I'm going to stay in my time, until whenever the clocks go forward(?) again. I like being fifty fifty, half the year in time with the rest of the country and half the year in my time. And the best part of it all is when I wake up on a uni day, see the time is 10am, and think shit, better get ready, then realise that the actual time is only 9am and I can have another hour of sleep. It's strange how your relationship with sleep fluctuates as you age. I never slept well as a child. My parents could never get me to sleep before midnight as a baby, and then I'd be awake again at 4am with copious amounts of energy to cause havoc, and they'd have to get up to entertain me. In primary school I could never get to sleep easily at night; I remembered hearing that the average person takes 7 minutes to get to sleep and thinking that was impossible. But I'd watch my dad fall asleep in front of the television, and my brothers fall asleep on long car journeys so figured it was possible, and that I just wasn't average. I went into my brother's room one night and asked him for tips on how to get to sleep quickly. He said he didn't know how he did it, he just did. In secondary school I used to want to sleep late in the mornings, instead of getting up for breakfast. Then the insomnia happened and I'd never sleep before 4am. At it's worst I would get to sleep at 6.30am, then be up getting ready for school at quarter to eight. At weekends I'd sleep til 4pm, In the Christmas holidays of year 10 I didn't see sunlight for four days. In first year at Kingston I never fell asleep before midnight. And now an early night is my favourite thing. But tonight I can't sleep. I swear this house feels so much colder when you're not here next to me. I have to change. I have to get better at talking to you. I need to learn to let down the guards I've put up. I need to open up. I'm sorry it's not a thing I've realised sooner; I get so wrapped up in my own little dramas. I want to be able to tell you anything and everything, I want you to know what's in my head. So, as of now, I'm blogging again. This is where I start trying.

The Knife In The Oyster

I'm in love with you. I can't promise the future, I can't promise perfection, because we're us, and I'm me and who knows what will happen. But in my heart, I am sure. I'm in love with you Sophie Shirley. And I hope you're in love with me too.

Youth

"The goal of therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting."

Coetzee, you put the thoughts that collide with the walls of my skull into words better than I ever could have done.