grading

Clarity comes tomorrow.

I'll burst from the moon's glare,
see both eyes level

Mercury and I,
backwards so long
(it feels like we-)
here now I'm forwards,
here I start 

and I felt

                something

                                  in my grip over you
and yours 'round my shoulders

        maybe there's the magic
that'll keep my nostalgia
   from wandering K' Rd
with that light in my eye
matching men who've
                                    fed
                                           my ambition, and
boys oblivious to/o
                                being under it

I worry.
because I know

comfort dictates
         / and denies
that habit of mine

and because I know

my lungs could still love you
and love inhaling the night
       an alternating respiring
of my aloneness
       and / pressing noses with you.          

"Western culture has confused mystery with "something to be solved", rather than something "to be serenaded."

- Helen Avery

We wanted to see, but were made blind. 

So electrified by the infinite possibilities, we rendered ourselves useless, unable to motion a single step towards greatness. 

Our flesh fatigued and our heads weary but wired, we gave in to the exhaustion of our own expectations.

All images by Blair McTaggart.

Everything Anyone Ever Wanted | Black Sheep Productions 

21 - 25 June 2016 @ Q Theatre

everything

The base things that anyone ever wanted can be reduced into a few simple words: Love. Happiness. Fulfilment. Simplicity. But these are not simple concepts. "What makes me happy?" is not a simple question, nor is it one that many people can even answer for themselves. Love often doesn't arrive - not from ourselves least of all - and doing that which fulfils you isn't always sustainable enough to fulfil you totally.

If you could have any one thing in your life right now, what would it be? How would you reduce the thing that brings you happiness into a single word ?

"We live together we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."

- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. 

in-Orchid (II)

we begin in an empty space
we birth it a life
we root umbilical chords out through our feet and into the ground
when they emerge,
   we hold our children upside down

we run into walls
we navigate one aother
we speak an unspoken language
we pick apart the symbols woven into our bodies

we place our hands on ourselves,
   each other, our foreheads,
   between our own legs
we comfort ourselves by stroking our own hair

we incite mythical deities
   and ingest orchids
we curl our toes towards our faces
we conjure the devil herself
   up through the floor
we drive knives through our ribs
we smash our knees into our cheeks
  not to punish, but to feel
  the empowerment of purging

we study the alchemy of life
we gargle spells to ourselves
  laden with eights, memoirs, directions
we are kings, magicians,
  maidens, witches
we are women, dancers, orchids:
  we cling to dust
  and flourish in dark spaces.

wading

This is the second time I've waded naked into these waters. The first in broad daylight, a baptismal ritual. The first cleansing from love, the second falling into. With, and alone - in oppositions of literal and figurative.

The first; dragging him in with me to escape the shift of the years, but very much in my own orchestrated realm. I am so good at that. I instigated, I decided, I enacted, I fulfilled, I regurgitated it back out. I watched him squirm in the hours that followed, coy around the campfire, gauche as his parents anchored ashore the next day. Messages unanswered, him being too young to understand the notion of play - especially from my female end.

And this time, by my own proximity and with joined heads. I have confessed my secret to those with me but in terms that bear no weight for them. They only know forevers, ongoings. The water holds my gushing heart; my body feels lithe with love. It speaks to me throughout the night, crashing: "I know, I know."

I'm glad it knows.

A pod of dolphins swim past us, mum is squealing with feigned delight - this is the perfect story to impart in weeks to come. I'm quiet with love, much in the way that I was when I became awash with bloodflood in the carpark of 2013. Where I sewed myself together and picked him and I apart. A mistake to be repeated.

You've the same triangles as those three, but you know the geometry of yours. And for that, I already love you.

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching…"

- Martha Graham

"...his hands at any rate are intelligent, they move over me delicately as a blind man's reading Braille, skilled, moulding me like a vase, they're learning me; they repeat patterns he's tried before, they've found out what works, and my body responds that way too, anticipates him, educated, crisp as a typewriter."

- Surfacing, Margaret Atwood.

puddled

In the shower. Red hair sits hatched over my wrists, the strands like opened veins. Draped perfectly to demonstrate my anatomy, or at least as imagined; an indication of where my head would like to be: swimming swirling down the drain with the water dirtied by my skin. So much of me has slid down the drain in my lifetime. You could probably produce a life-sized sculpture from the parts of my body that have evaded me - my hair, my eyelashes, my skin flakes, pimple pus. My saliva into others' mouths.

I recall your forearms; their huge, vertical carvings that wield memories of your best friend running two kilometers to the beach to find you in fully-fledged panic. I had only just met you both and had no idea how to help. I probably couldn't have done anything to help. I sat at home bewildered. I tried to cry and couldn't.

Eighteen months ago I walked into Levin town, and thought how easy it would be to become part of the train. I could press myself into the steel and leave traces of me on the tracks, leaving no trace. I didn't feel like a person. I didn't feel like myself. I wasn't myself. I was the insides of you, a part of your organs and their revolting chaos - subject to your self-abuse and adopting it myself. As if I hadn't already swallowed enough into my own lungs.

Sometimes when I'm driving, I think of setting my route to chance. Especially on the motorway. But I worry I'd only sit again, this time forever, and that would be worse. I'm not sure if that idea floats around my head because you suggested it when I was sixteen. Before I had my licence, I berated you for it. And now I am it.

When I'm in high places, I feel like I could jump off them and my body would never touch the ground. I told you this on Friday night as we leaned off the building without barriers. I think there's a term for this feeling but I can't remember it.

One time, I said out loud that suicide is something everyone must have thought about at some stage. Not necessarily seriously wanted, but considered the possibility of. You said it had never crossed your mind. I felt like someone had prised my eyelids wide apart with their fingernails.