Sad songs for sad Sundays

My empty arms caught the morning rain

As I fell victim to this feeling of Sunday 

Comprising if battered photographs, cream paper and bruised fingernails 

When tried to unearth the lies I had buried years before

Wrapping them in crimson paper

With 'do not disturb' written over their bones

And I fell victim to this feeling of Sunday

Whisperings of new beginnings swung their legs on the window pane 

But there were doors that had come unstuck

I walked for miles that day

Their keys sit under drainpipe covers and rest in potholes

Your roses smell like decay

And Sunday feels impenetrable now 

A War Poem

Falling over hilltop and mound

Like cattle strung up by the neck

Only days ago was this a spot

For plump gentlemen, children

Battling it out with sticks 

If we could only have rearranged

Those faces which line 

The pews of the Commons

For we trudge, empty handed with

War's steamroller chasing our broken footsteps 

An open letter to my friend Instagram

I feel I'm one of many teenagers who desperately need to prioritize, I feel as though people within my age group find this particularly hard because we're at that stage where it feels we're suddenly being pushed out of the nest and dog tagged with things called "responsibilities". 

It's glaringly obvious to me that social media needs to be forced down my list of priorities, I get a shaky, seasick kinda feeling when I think about the hours of my life I've wasted watching cats doing stupid stuff and reading "10 things every Londoner understands" and the like, despite the fact that I do not nor have ever lived in London. 

The most ridiculous form of social media that I admit to using - in my opinion - is definitely Instagram. Don't get me wrong, conceptually it's pretty flawless, a website intended for sharing pictures you have taken with you iPhone, who doesn't want to marvel at the fact that a picture as beautiful as that can be captured without photoshop or fancy lenses on DSLR cameras? It's the way in which this concept has been altered that grinds my gears, it has become a form of social media when I don't think that was ever the intention, the intention being - in my eyes - a mobile form of things like Flickr, making professional standard photography and photo sharing accessible to those who don't have all the gimmicks. 

Instagram can be pretty detrimental in my eyes, like all social media, it has become a form of one upmanship: who can "out-selfie" their friends? Whose weekend looked the most exciting behind that smokescreen of filters and clever angles? It's become a competition, as if the number of likes you get determines your worth as a human being. Like you aren't worth so much more than that, like your charm, passion and inner-strength don't mean more than a bunch of numbers on a picture of your cat. Like the way the sunlight hits your face on a morning and the chime of your laughter isn't far more beautiful than any "no make-up selfie". 

Of course, I'm not going to pretend I don't use it, social media is renowned for being addictive and enticing. Not to mention the fact that the prevailing paradox of our society (this term + that context = me cringing) is that not to conform is also to conform. But the reshuffle within my ministerial cabinet of priorities has proved time and again that I don't NEED Instagram, why do I need to seek validation from strangers through a screen? Why do I need validation at all?

Instagram, it's been great, but it's time we cooled things off. I'm narcissistic and psychopathic enough without you.  

*** I haven't written prose for years but I found a scrap of paper in my desk drawer with the opening two sentences on and I felt really inspired ***

...And all that happened was that it imminently dawned upon me that you can't find solace in a single person, nor can you seek completion in something as incomplete as yourself. The metallic bite of this statement lingered in my mouth as I lay, defeated.

That had been the whole point of this adventure; discovery of self, self-sufficiency etc etc etc until I begin to sound like an upper-class art student who is "just so damn oppressed by this capitalist haven". But, with only twenty dollars left in my battered jeans, I realised that I'd spent a stupid amount of money pretending I was Jack Kerouac, forgetting in my excitement that my life was not a novel.

I laughed to recall the lonely motel nights, surfing the web for cool things to do in whatever city I'd happened to end up in, then sighing and watching a straight-to-DVD movie, trying to find poetic meaning in the static of the cable channel. Trying to avoid my own company as the walls stared back, blank with apathy and the sunlight reluctantly crept in, worrying that it had disturbed the perfect "woe-is-me" cliché that I had created.

For alas, no police stations did I sit tempestuously in, cold coffee and panda eyes. No buses did I flirt my way onto for free. I learned a lot about independence... I'm grateful to myself for that, but I also learned that as much as you may want to, you cannot crawl back inside yourself to escape from the ghosts that hide in the canvas metropolis of your soul. I discovered that I wasn't trying to find myself at all, I was trying to lose myself amongst neon glares and catcalls and kamikaze bars... I almost succeeded.

However. When I least expected it, feeling the epitome of smug liberation, the essence of who I am would creep back to me across sticky nightclub floors. The least gentle reminder of the jigsaw puzzle pieces I had strewn from bar to flat to cab to park. The "burnt-coffee" smell of realisation that I was actually just as dependent, flawed and insecure as everybody else who pretended they were ok being alone. But that's fine.

When your plans with friends turn to shit - UNFINISHED

We pass through dusk, nonchalant shoulders tilted
Too soon, the colour drains from the street
Extremist pamphlets reign upon your shutters
The house longs for new friends.

The night makes the floorboards creak.
Anticipating, we turn to dust
Whilst the ghost face of the wind
Meets our rattling window panes

We become ash-grey
Skin bouncing off moonlight
Radiating hollowed eyes and hair,
Transformed into a mass of sleeplessness curls.

And so we sit, 2am
Devoured by expectation
Drinking tea
Listening to the flicker
Of black and white film

Innocence//Experience

"

If I were able to count using
Every cell on my burning skin
I still could not count
The number of times
That I have thrown myself
In a purposeless heap
Onto your unwashed bedsheets

Nor could I count
The number of times that
I have gagged on the porcelain crotch
Of the toilet bowl
The shower blasting
To conceal my moans

There are multitudes of
“3:35am and I don’t know what I’m doing with my life”
They creep behind my shuttered lids
Whilst I shiver in the unheated box
Of my cold water flat
They refuse to rise and be counted

Really, who could blame them.

"

Tree

“Tree, I stand.

Abandoned by square shaped eyes
Burning with apathy
The flickering ‘grams
And the deep curl of bass
Thundering down oil slicked flagstones.

Tree.
No feet caress your proud carriage
That carried, life
Into the lungs of those
With the fairy dust eyes
And the sleep shuffled hair
Sitting by the glare
Of flickering picture
Neurone destroyer”