with love as primary source

​

Innocence and love. 

How are you supposed to know you are innocent. 

How are you to know you love. 

With open arms and wide, open, clear eyes, 

you jump in straight to the front first. 

You are a mini superhero. 

You are pure and full of it. 

Love making your bones hold you up. 

Love powering your whole being. 

You are. Because you are love.

A set of sweet breaths and sighs, a couple of turns till you are comfy, you are as easily dazzled as you are scared. Your glistening eyes exploring a room of endless possibilities. You are so adored, so admired, that you are only able to adore and admire back. 
You become, you coexist, you are formed out of the never-ending vacillating flow of feeling and flesh and energy. You are born to be loved. You are born to love. 
You become, because you are love.

With sadness more bitter than previous need-related cries, you cry knowing something is different. 
You are detached. The most awful of all horrors. 
You are separate, and now must seek to create your own love, from scratch.

A chest full of warmth, 

only seeking to hold a hand, 

waiting for all direction and help to be handed out with complete trust.

And when self-worth and independence kick in overnight, 

when teasing and sticking out the tongue with anger come to play, 

(bitterly and with such malicious intent)

it won't seem like love at all, anymore. 

It won't matter how innocent, how small or how recent you are. 

An experiment, in learning to trust, one step at a time, as I grow closer to my own again, and form a perfect loop. to complete. the circle.

Ablutions

Emmeline Pankhurst
in my bathroom
watches
me as I wash

She makes no judgements,
does not study me,
she merely observes my essence as a flow

With every movement
she holds her gaze
without
shame

I am
without shame
shamelessly
lathered up in froth excesses

while Emmeline Pankhurt
reflects
upon reflection shames,
on her silhouetted
omnipresence.

For every nipple and naughty part,
for every rude sexy hot hot hot
feminine
movement-
She stands as a statement,
a slogan a fair fair fair,
equal partner
respectful-

Shadow of hair mass
piled up
on top of her frame//
in direct juxtaposition
to my limp dripping black strangles of
fallout survivor hair.

Emmeline has little regard for her own body.
Concerned
with matters of urgency,
relevance,
and outrage,
she keeps her head jauntily at an angle
while thinking clouds of shower steam
fill the room with musty body wash.
I preen and primp
imitating adverts marketed wrong
to the wrong demographic.

I hide and seek with her figure.
She hides and seeks mine.

I stare at her
where her eyes should be
I hold her gaze

I, without a name

kuru

I have spent quite some time of this afternoon investigating 'kuru', the degenerative disease you get if you eat another human brain (maybe). It is incredibly disgusting, intimidating, raw, and frustratingly simplistic. "Like mad cow disease" an echo is heard, while I wikipedia and re-word and click on links, like an information pro, on a third cup of coffee and severe dislike for other chores at hand (or other part of a body, as hand is frozen and uncompromising).

I am brought here by something else, Twitter, somebody, who cares. And I am left unaffected. An island uninfluenced by shock or horror. Probably numb because i'm detached. Probably numb because I'm not alive. Precision in understanding material reality today, is not on the cards. I have impressed myself, impressed you, impressed and improvised further impressions and amazement at this distance. So far away it seems illogical that I am indeed part of this pillowy and well-stuffed puppet looking up information like a pro. A professional observer of one's own presence from an inevitable physical distance. Sometimes I have this thought, and check for mirrors in the rooms I'm in. It is usually a surprise to realise there aren't any mirrors, and this perception of two (the anti-philosophical paradox of my being) is merely due to seeing my body as separate to feeling where I am and who.

And recently, with all the voices that get louder (recognised your encouragement to continue not eating, grandma; and remembered your disbelief in my overall adult-life abilities, parents of my adolescence; and repeated my own internal melodies till i got sick of them and was actually sick), with all the points I make about chaos, and all the restless fights I have with people I adore, about nothing, i have began to doubt the reality of existence. What if, what if I am not alive. 

The instant I am about to make a bad judgement street-crossing, where I will skip-jog next to an unbackpacked teenager (going out to buy something?) really quickly near the station, when the traffic is peaking and the traffic signature is offensively clear.. That instant is a leap out of my body. The next instant however, is where "all the magic happens" (and yes this was in a mocking nasal voice of a posh English PR professional woman, pretending she is a famous person on MTV Cribs, because all these voices are of course based on my references and experiences). As soon as I get to the other side, I begin doubting whether I ever made it. Whether I am indeed from that point on alive or if the life I will continue from then on will forever be something only for me or in me or out of me.

I shake my head violently a few times, aching to hurt, to embody the pain and be embodied by my casing. A fan of ritual, I repeat ('come on come on come on come on' and 'OKOKOKOK') inside, given the sophisticated High Functioning label i'm wearing with all the pride,  and proceed to .."act like it's real". In the OCD and Depersonalised and Depressed and Disordered and Scared and Lonely and Lonely and Lonely heart that lives in the head in the body, or wherever, in the vicinity of me (I?) the process of acting like things are real is the same as smiling when a cue to smile has been presented, or like answering a maths question, or like brushing teeth when a new partner brushes teeth, or like asking politely if it's OK to smoke, when friends who don't smoke are eating. Until I'm back home, the matter of my reality, or material consistency if you like, is a matter-of-fact repeated chewing gum I try my hardest to believe.

And in the meta-meta-meta-cycle of reprossessing, I decide that the verification of my reality will happen again at the next time I catch myself feeling happy or alive. 

An explosion of colours, at every intimate realisation of my boundaries, when rubbed against trust and adoration. It is perceptual and experienced, and not only an idea (concept?) of what is true and what is there. I get lost in the uncertainty of what I am, like the next person, however the uncertainty of wherever I am (or not), is completely mixed up with the fact i feel thoughts and physical boundaries and ideas and being and not being, with my flesh, as much as with my mind.

Exhaustedly, I exhaust my options and reset to feeling cloudy, something I've chosen for myself, as it makes me feel safely like I am not going to have a breakdown any minute now and will need urgent attention, hurting and breaking the hearts of all the people I value as the Most Precious and thus doing the opposite of my absolute wish: to keep them happy and safe from my demons (from me?). I adopt the relaxed body posture and the complete disclosure of anything serious, at all times.

Somewhere between reading about food, food blogs, looking at images, eating blogs and images; somewhere between food, body ideas, body distortion, feeling alive, or outside my body, or too tightly packed in with no room to breathe; somehwere between reading, or hyperventilating, or crying because a spoon is offensively out of order and therefore proof i cannot possibly be real and my friends are all imaginary; somewhere along those lines, i stumble or trip over my own feet and breathe out. Kuru. it is disgusting.

but you know what? particularly of interest to lill' ol' GR me, 'kuru' is a type of greek cheesepie. More synchronised, you die.

mud breakfast

Waking in transit
between a place of unconsciousness
to a place of electrocuting dull metal pangs
felt between your nose
and your two front teeth
and a little behind your eyes.

She exposes a thigh
slid between fabric,
because she's seen this in many adverts before
and anticipates
it will somehow energise her
heavy muscles.

It does not.

A knot in the throat
now spreads in a flesh-eating-manner
across the respiratory tract
infecting without glamour -
indistinguishably
blended in
pitch-perfect skin-tone of asthma,
a raspy and gruff
Good Morning disaster.

A new dimension of directing
the bugs in the veins
to make the uptight body
upright,
to aid the out-of -focus eyes
fix up on something,
soften, or distort - besides,
she's lensless.

Sticky tar
she climbs through
and into a cave of nothingness.
Yelps echoing around for one,
then absorbed in the latex walls
of chaos,
of course.

A morning effect,
the opposite of lemons and tangy sourness,
a mess
created in her face
to obstruct from any sort of normalcy,
and blemish a tabula rasa
with horror
and self-pity,
as 'toast' with her coffee.

Occasionally she feels fully responsible for imagining such an elaborate illness all by herself.

Good Morning.

no good

no good for anything, you
no good for a decent man
no good for decency
no value
no face
no importance

a subservient subhuman subspecies
to seduce
with reduced-price alcohol
a treat before pushed in the car
-a low-cost pushover-
taken to the beach.

the ridiculous professions of love
oh how do they love to tell you they love you
to taint your perception of love forever.

you are caressed with sceptic motions
and hugged with clammy claws
and scratched with violent stubble
and lifted with intimidating strength
and pushed down past
the fresh starched shirt,
the hairy chest,
the musty waistline.

again and again
a verification
of your inability
a verification of your lack of strength
approved as a whore. tic.

the only redeeming feature:
you are far away from home
a different person.
a world you don't ever have to visit after them.
mistakenly,
as you can never take yourself
out of the picture
completely.
tainted.

but your head is clear
and your actions calculated.
a stern woman.
with admirable strength
-a high-flying jetsetter-
a flexible, capable,
fanciful operator.

again and again
a verification
of how cunning
and admirably courageous
and beautiful
you are.

go to bed and smile
for lack of a better facial expression
or for lack of promise.
nothing is forever
but you.

mental health and unhealth

We've all been in places that initially seemed normal but difficult when contacting the outside world from.

We've then looked back and realised 'oh dear, I was not very happy then' - if you are an English middle-aged voice in my head, or felt a generally 'ruffled', dusty and upside-down shame-like feeling about this now-past transition period -if you're the voice of my tidying freak obsessed with neatness - we may have come close to admitting it. This time of being off, of consistently failing at life, of not calling your dad out of lack of anything good to share, of not - just not.A firmly-lodged and completely naturally sprouting discrepancy between an ideal self and a real, one that lasts enough to warrant genuine complaints. And sighs. i hope you agree that sighs in sadness come free and legit.

and here, in this mess of brain and chewed nail clippings and occasionally a bit of dribble on the pen i'm biting with anger, is my attempt to trivially fun-size bite off, chew and spit out my view of the world of humans vs Mental Health Services Professionals and others affiliated.

Mental is anything that happens in you not caused by observable causal links.
A cough to echo inside your ears and your hair. One that slides up through the forest of follicles all ragged and rough, and meets the soft fleshy pod of the hair route. It enters by squeezing between the hair and the pod, sliding like a mouse, between cracks and enters a stream of blood or puss or both.

By itchy blood that stumbles upon particles and cells and changes direction, it is your destiny to believe what you feel. You're so attuned to recognising your body, you can reverse-control it and order it around. You are too attuned perhaps. or
- Perhaps a thought is proof of a sensation.
out of tune,
an echo of you,
eternally,
gracefully, out of tune. always. (whispering:)

your droopy eyes have decided to droop lower than usual today.
they have arranged to meet up with your shoulders,
but they are burnt from the sunlight,
from your 10 minute-long break in the sun.
the happiness hot mess
that makes everyone act so much more different than you
and you hate
and you fight off.
with. conviction.

your shoulders,
they droop along too.
burnt and droopy to match your disposition.
that of a person with nothing more than other things.

vague feelings of unworthiness.
general, vague, persistent.

it's almost as if..
it's almost as if you're making it up.
trying
to be unwell,
for some awful infliction of suffering worn as the only thing you are comfortable with.
your black day shoes.

and of course, it is so vague and debilitating it is almost obviously appealing.

but this is really not the case.
and you are not in any way faking it,
or your hands would have returned their normal size
and your mouth would have lifted from forceful drooping
and would have said something better than
'how's it going'-
the most meaningless and rude,
effectively hurtful,
awful expression
you swore never to use,
since that wanker on friends
but for some
fucking reason
you hear yourself
say.
again.
and again,
every day.

you are not a failure.
for this, i forgive you. don't cry


-------

--this is a piece of medical research feedback i gave today. i repeat my sob story and progress through the many iterations. i evolve and it evolves with me and it is a way of monitoring my progress as a human being.

I am now 'recovered' and have been for over 5 years - physically I've been a stable weight in the last 3 years, following a period of adjustment, fluctuation and 'dark times' of weekend drug abuse - to maintain body-weight. 
Despite a 'healthy' weight and look, energy, and limited rituals and fear of food, emotionally I maintain an 'auto-pilot' of guilt and shame, which i have to fight off and consciously ignore on a daily basis, with most mouthfuls consumed. I was denied treatment due to my bmi being 17.5 when i plucked up the courage to go to my gp, despite suffering from depression, generalised anxiety disorder and having reduced in over half my weight over 2 years. As a tall person with a narrow bone structure, bmi means nothing to describe what shape i should be acceptable at - clinically- , when alarm bells should ring - socially-, or when i should and should not feel conscious of my eating - emotionally. bmi also did nothing in terms of a healthy guidance, as it became a new number to fixate on and worry sick and stay up all night about, when i was advised to adjust from a number of kilos, to a number that's over a bmi of 18, at my year-long outpatient treatment at Nelson Hospital (in Merton, which I believe has now closed). 
i had to get sicker to qualify for nhs treatment, at a time of unemployment and severe isolation. i was advised to go private and had to wait 6 months to finally be seen, due to a psychiatrist who took it in her stride to get me help. i was initially assessed by an incompetent (and sadly a professor at Imperial) GP in Wimbledon, who told me i 'looked' fine 'darling' and 'go home and forget about it' and i can 'come in and be weighed once a month' if i want to. Apart from an unprofessional attitude in ignoring long-term health impact, potential future cost to the NHS, complications and comorbidity with other disorders, emotional distress and quality of life in patients not deemed as 'severe', it is outrageous to use statistical averages as means for deciding when mental health treatment is made available. I fight every day that each person that gets seen with a mental health concern is respected as an individual, rather than one of many in a long list of complaining hordes of numbers. 

I am a mental health patient, a psychology postgraduate, a mental health mentor and work in science communications. Like everyone else, i demand to be taken seriously and not fobbed off with bullshit about numbers, space, and worse - severity. If it wasn't severe i wouldn't be asking for help, I'd have not needed it, in the first place.

fear of flying

With a perfected sleek side parting,
nervous fidgeting of her sleeves,
She straightens her neck and shoulders
to appear taller.
Soles touching the floor,
knees together, slightly bent.
A pale breath in,
obstructed by an unwilling chest,
a wilted mouth,
and a deflated stomach.

At a moment of investigative genius,
she realised that nothing was important in the world.

Lifting a palm to cover
a face that didn't matter
-was wet
with streams of life.
A motion just for the sake of it,
imitating what people do
in these situations.

In reality,
the tears were only celebrating Futility.
A welcoming committee
put up a spread
of the best treats, on a Ryanair flight
from a point of caring
to a point of giving up on fear of death,
for a fear of life,
for a fear of pointlessness.

Her shadow of the world is so heavily biased
She doesn't even know to speak outside it.

Maybe this makes her God.
Maybe it makes her responsible for being laughed at.
Maybe it makes her a human. Just like the rest of them.
Pointless and uneventful. Disposable.

--

A few journeys later,
a different meaning will be given by points of reference:
Others, giving meaning to this One.

At some different universe,
an event will explain
the reasons behind
a sudden display
of tears.

At some different timeline,
an interaction will be more important
than a physical boundary
or a shared song.

But in this one, not much is any more tangible
than anything else.
Not much is salient
Or meaningful,
Or Suitable
and in this regard, She isn't either.

Keeping a calm exterior and a frozen inside,
letting go of little fighting dust mites
scooped up from Her core cavity,
letting them run off chasing each other
as she waves at them
-a romantic, with a white tissue of good will and don't come backs-
She is now sat on the seat
empty of life
and full of animation
and energy reflexes
and a proper human-like stature
blending in.

She is letting go of a holding hand,
for fear of not lining up with its magical properties,
not understanding its language,
or finding out a true that runs against Her.

It's tough being God on a plane.

pervert

what is it about me that attracts them?
is it my innocence,
my denied purity,
or my clean face,
my aversion to vulgarity?
i'm not
ill-disposed to things that are
>>vulgar
just so you know.
but my input is unrequired. rejected. like I can't reject you.

the same face
they all have the same face of absent excitement.
salivating
drooling
dogs.
they stare between the lines.
they smile
the same smile of passive titillation.
of an offer of a free beer,
slurping 'woof'
into the one they currently have
and wiping saliva
off the face, with a damp mothy sleeve.

i watch them as they try to dance
try to dance with me
try to dance
dance with me
they reject me
they want me to dance for them
dance with them
without them.
it's not about me.
it's never about me
yet why does it seem it always happens to

little me.
startled, perpetually startled,
my fate is to be taken by surprise
and innocently
not
say 'no'.
they lie, when they say you should speak up
speak out
speak.
say anything other than smile or nod.
there is no space for you
in there.
there's only space for
dick.

only space for a gigantic excitable puppy of a penis
and your prim and properness,
in your dark red chipped nail varnish, against the flesh
trying not to squeeze too hard
because you don't want to feel anything
and he doesn't know you are alive
and he would like you to smile and go with it.

and he would like you to do as you're told
and he would like it if you bit your hand and said 'ouch'
and he would like it.
do you like it?
of course you do.
you have no say.
you are not there.

everywhere i walk today i see ugliness
ugly bulging
ugly bulging smiles
absent bulging
male male
suited, booted, aftershaven
distant, absent, gentleman.

everywhere i walk today
i'm struck by the ugliness.
the suspect moles on the neck
of the alcoholic man on the tube.
the awkward jerking of the
man on the train.
ugly.

the women i see are beautiful. it is men, today, that hurt me.

humility

hot, dusty and sticky-eyed
a fat impending doom
orders calm and stillness
like nothing is ever
to change.

like The Only
is a second following when
contact breaks,
a shiver.
but for now,
impending.
Expected.
Required.
Desired.
Distorted.
Deformed.
Disgustingly precious.

but of course, there are rules.
Like how to smile when i'm not smiling,
how to communicate a loss,
when have it all.

and of course, the cat's out of the bag now
and there is nothing new to profess
or maybe nothing left, anymore.
A relief and a constant
Constant,
and a struggle to keep
things simple
or more exciting
that they might have ever been
(before?)

Expectation of exceptions,
except for that of extraction.
Nobody saw that one coming.
A pure removal
sucked up by  proverbial 'powers'
and leaving behind the cover
which i thought was you for a second
but now understand
i was fooled.
I have looked at you in different light
all this time
and have coloured-in the parts
my eyes could not see
as blinded by my
perspective.

Musty, milky patterns
of grey on brown,
and a delirious appreciation
for a single isolated freckle
in your eye,
experienced as an island,
a home, all comforts, all meaning, all hope.

alienation nation

i'm an alien and my heart was caught up in barbed wire,
as it was trying to flee the sinking ship,
and now it's made a mess on the floor
with all the drops of sticky blood.
for some reason,
blood of pain is stickier than blood of accident.
blood of negligence, more potent than blood of betrayal.
skin to skin,
i recognise and detach
i un-know and attach
lose the 'i' and adopt 'this'
look down on x-rays of hands holding hands held in hands.
a breeze expected to hit my face, never makes it.
or if it does, my skin has missed it.
such strong needs, each stomping along to their own tantrum
and 'I', the referee, suddenly awake in stripey top and football socks,
wondering when it will be logical,
when will it be comfortable,
and how will i recognise it as such.
and how will you recognise me,
when my features have blurred?
will you recognise my heart beating
and my hands holding onto you
or is everything numb to me, as i am to my shell?

i'm rushed on to the spaceship
no time to wear a spacesuit
no time to click my heels three times,
joyfully wave a tissue
or kiss you.
i feel like a cross between the hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy and ET,
i feel like a cross between border collie and hippopotamus
i feel like a cross and an axe
i feel like feeling is important
but right now who knows what this is and if my pain is happiness or nothing
and in any case, i don't want to burden you, sorry, i'll keep quiet.

ink hand

your favourite things
are listed on paper
in colourful marker pen
smudged by your hand
then smeared on your forehead
then kissed by my lips
which then bit into an orange
and spat out its peel
into my hand
dripping spit down through
those fingers too eager to care
and too old to respond.

if anything my experience has taught me
is timeliness and cleanliness
are two things i will have to
learn to forget as i age
and then remember again
and blame my demands

on my life-time.

as a keeper of objects
i keep you and your pens and your smudges and forehead
and i'll guard it with life and my death if i have
to confess that it's
less likely than anything that i'll ever lose these possessions,
i promise.

as a keeper of time,
i anticipate its passage to scar me forever.
i look forward to it, impatiently
biting the skin around my nails
so it frays more and feels like
something is
growing up.