It’s a heavy burden to bear, sipping, knowing I am diluting my agency, succumbing to the cravings I condemn. Oiling my body with the damning fluid, rushing my heart rate and burning my chest. If it hadn’t felt so singular, my choice, my medication, my appointments, my blood pressure machine. If it hadn’t been at 21, maybe 11, 13 or 16- I might have felt less like a thief. Like I’m taking from someone else, myself even. I rub up against the sensation you know, after I’ve swallowed and as the hour draws in, I’m grating towards the time. As though my body is dragging to the after. Maybe if I didn’t desire it so desperately, to plunge and numb.
Or if I truly believed it were only to make the work, to organise the thoughts, my own drag in which I'm dressing to make, but wearing for Mark Fisher. Once the sensation has wiped me clean, I feel the quiet and stunting walk. The taste of sweetness comes on my tongue and dries out my mouth. My eyes kind of fall and sweep the floor, body carves itself out, sweat, stomach, heat. The guilt might be because this just isn’t of me. To sip and let run. Not pomp, though, just fear. It is so predictable, that I let zip up to move faster.
Or this is a fooling, I’m foolish enough to think this is my defining prosthesis. All other limbs I’ve strapped, not damning. As if every other suction doesn’t equally drag features from my face. No doubt because this is the one I let penetrate me.
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The flakes of graphite endure traces of your fingertips, from when you buffed them up. The knowing you’d deferred has at long last come back round. Screen is finished with your lacquer, one I’d mighted but couldn’t grasp. Or did grasp but grip slipped, all the beads you’d imparted. In solitude, it was possible for her to get the greatest enjoyment of the man she loved. If his presence had been continuous, it would’ve disappeared. I can see you scratching and humming, the hours I’d spend looting your silence. You have punctured my solitude. I roll around now and would’ve rolled around then. The witnessing isn’t sharp but it was still this stomach that boasted acid. I picture you rubbing your pencil across the words, tempered in your not-solitude, your chosen-solitude. Then I remember when you pined for the not-solitude, in your solitude. The gap had opened up that greatest enjoyment.
-
I am soaking you in amber. I glazed the bones in your cheek with dawn’s faint lick, consolled your fingers residue with dusk’s burning end. He is asking me for the only thing I own. I’ll grow to giving if it’s yours I am sustaining. Your cartilage I am plumping, and muscles I am hardening. You give a keeping I am incapable of holding. When you run me through my stock, I know the weight of bearing is heavier than the absence. You ask me if I’ll punish you for giving everything I asked for. I’m caught between what you know and what you want. The more you give, the less I can hold. I pace the hot surface trying all you’ve given me from burning. Each accomplishment suffers a defeat. Every day in growing is a longing in losing. What is it in having that outweighs all the rest. As if not having could shoulder the mass. You have saturated me, even my living suffers osmosis. I can bare only the beads and longing. Enough is too much. When I tell you this and even such candour fails to dismiss, I weigh even further.
-
I brush the dust coating my Blinked myself awake and watch as the shreds float into my atmosphere. Dust is our earthly star. A dust collector combs the skin you once touched, for loose strands he can procure. The dust with me now is still sodden with your presence, the long fingers you used to touch me. I follow as it rises through my room - beyond me is a wide, midnight ceiling twinkling with sweat, ink and blood. There is the soap I use to remove bolts of garlic and oil. Dirt from the tube and mud from my socks. The stains of smoking and taste of touching. The plastic from my pens, cotton from my bag and leather from my shoes. Sharp sprays of perfume, three or four too many. Somehow, colour and texture evade, and the dust resolves into heavy grey hairs. How some have the weight to submit themselves to settle, I do not know.
-
The sun is pumping down on us. You know when it lacquers the winter streets and sears back through you. I keep wanting to say it’s been a cold and long winter. When I think about it, it must’ve been warm and short because winters used to be unbearable, and that word hasn’t yet crossed my mind. Maybe because this summer was wide and heavy. I had brown, tacky skin thick with freckles from March through to October. It felt like it never began and might never end. I’d doubted the winter.
This morning’s air is thin and blue, the shop signs are all dusted. I look to see if the promenade's pink has got its saturation back yet. It hasn’t.
I thought I’d wait to tell you I was in love with you till the end of the month. Then I could fatten and soak the words with dinner and wine. You and I’d get coaxy, I’d puff on your cigarettes till the words had tumbled together in my mouth. Then I’d puff them through my lips quiet and slow. You’d have to ask me to repeat. I’d tell myself the incompetence was endearing. I know you find my incompetence endearing. I’ve been harbouring the thought, like a baby, for weeks now. I chew the words, my enunciation, the way you might soften your eyebrows or dip your two lips apart. I round with it over and over again. Sometimes you say it back, sometimes you say it before I even can. In the most romantic versions, you turn me down, can’t find the language to reciprocate. Maybe it’s the words, or maybe it’s the feeling. For me, the feeling always comes first, and I wade with the months trying to enliven the stomach aches with a string of letters. I know no response will ever be better than the ones I play out in bed.
-
My body has become known for seizing up. Long strings of time where the only sensation it might know itself by is static. I seem to root and crystallise in my tread. The whole event happens in a snapped sweeping motion, where my chest and limbs begin by gelatinising and then solidify. I feel it start at the very centre, my ribs cave into my sternum, the material drags more and more, my teeth, bones and tendons all jerking into this blistering mass. Sometimes I take the soft impression of my palm to the feeling. It knows to quieten a little. The patterns thicken and form a flatness; it’s heavy and warm.
-
The house I grew up in sits at the top of a large hill in a small suburban town. If you ever stumbled to the bottom of that hill, you’d re-emerge in front of a petrol station. As far as the obtrusive, impermeable nature of most structures associated with the oil industry, this particular petrol station is comparatively inoffensive. Adorned only with a neat strip of red metal that’s been mounted to the frame of the roof, the rest of the site consists of a set of tall white stilts and a small building for a corner shop; there’s a few gas pumps and a unit for pumping air into tyres. Most of the site has been monopolised by a dormant sheet of concrete.
When the company that owned the petrol station sold it this past year, the only significant change they made was replacing the red metal strip with a newer version. Now, when I find myself stumbling down the hill, it catches me a split-second earlier. On any other site, this petrol station is unlikely to have edified; it’d have faded into the background, and I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it. In fact, if you bend a half mile round the corner, there’s another, larger, white, red & blue petrol station that tucks itself neatly away.
My petrol station suffers from a case of severe incongruity amongst its surroundings. When I walk down my hill, and the scene appears, the background and foreground seem irreconcilable. Behind the petrol station is a large bank of trees stretching up and over the road, concealing the rest of the town with it. Individually, the trees are feable and weak, traditional British minors to the American national forests’ majors. They’re bare with twiggy branches and thin leaves. In aggregation though they seemed to have formed this mighty wall, pummeling into and over - absorbing the anthropic, gluttonous petrol station, marking dominance in all their gentle browns and greens.
I am describing this, of course, with Alec Soth’s Cemetery seared and pulsing in the back of my mind. The photo, of his seminal Sleeping By The Mississippi, sees a small, red-capped gas station consumed by a vast, frosted mountain glowing beyond it. The gas station appears like something from a child's toy train set as the mountain engulfs and envelops the plastic miniature in its presence. I’ve been walking, running and driving past my petrol station for the past twenty-one years and, admittedly, only known this Alec Soth photo for the past five. Before then, my mind might’ve called upon Ed Ruscha’s 21 Gas Stations or Roy Lichtenstein's wide reds.
It was only in moving away that I began to notice this town's distinct isolation and estrangement from the city. Train journeys seem to compress the true distance. They pull its aura into the suburbs, swallow and obscure it, collapsing any space in between. The distance becomes measured temporally rather than spatially, by time spent on the train crossing back and forth, not with yardsticks and trundle wheels. As I moved further into the city, the tricks those train journeys used to play on my sense of proximity began to shatter. I’ve become distinctly aware of the town's distance. I’ve also become aware of its tiring simplicity.
When I do come home now, I notice myself playing with the pictures & scenes in my head, a defence against the reality of being here. The mundanity. When I tumble on down my hill, again, in the dead of winter and watch the petrol station appear before me, my eyes glaze over, and suddenly I’m bundled up in Alec Soth’s Mississippi, resurfacing upon his snow-capped mountain and red gas station. I play the same game when I’m staring out my bedroom window at a strip of trees lining the horizon on the other side of the valley. I feel myself ringing for Mark Power’s Good Morning America, his banal stills of tangled trunks in mute greens, reds and browns. You’d never have known tree barks possessed so many different colours until you’d seen a Mark Power. When rain cakes the scape, it’s Richard Donner’s opening of The Goonies, as the camera sweeps into drooling, tree-lined stretches of Oregon, that my mind wanders to.
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