May 2013
1 post
5 tags
The wanting
Greasy and hung-over on a South Eastern train
I busted out of London’s smog-cocoon, where I had once again reached
the full limit of myself.
I bought instant coffee from a man with eyes as cloudy as semen. He blinked his ugly DNA and I blinked back and told him, if he wanted to,
he could have my heart in a bowl
and rip it into confetti,
but he never replied. Like foldaway furniture
I...
April 2013
1 post
4 tags
This Exploding Girl
I exploded in his flat banged my head on a mountain bike a bruise the shape of my country grew across my cheek. It was funny but I wish I saw the warning in that purple stain he colonized my brain and I thought we’d be laughing together, forever.
I’ve exploded since then in more troubling ways my heart spews a black toxin that makes me run along the Piccadilly line hopping platforms, looking...
February 2013
1 post
Typing heartbreak into Google
Girl walks into a bar red dress flares up in the corner of his eye I-I-I the stammer of a pick-up line.
You wanna be the pathogen?
I’ll be the leukocyte.
We were infected, our love spread like a common cold coughing up luminous doughnuts we placed above our heads. Together we shone brighter than a sex shop sign that promises everything we already have but multiplied: girls girl girls open all...
January 2013
2 posts
3 tags
Young Female Poets
This is a junkyard of voices a scrap heap raised like a stage for poetry’s five-minute meltdowns and those who hope to melt us down before we press record.
The first girl reads a poem on love, a celebration I think but it’s boring, I’m bored. My mind skips across unconsciousness like stones over water. My boyfriend hates poetry and I know hers does too as she pulls a metaphor out of patches of...
Chapter Five: Matthew
Matt leans against the outside wall of his flat, more awkward and annoyed than Armani model. Rain trickles down the side of his face and his tailored leather jacket isn’t keeping him warm. He wonders if he should go back inside and call Hugo with an excuse: the Novo virus, a broken toe but just as he gets his key out of his pocket a black Bentley pulls over.
Matt My Man! Get in, it’s pissing it...
December 2012
1 post
A christmas carol, kind of.
Our Christmas is like the long quiet after a joke, that hollow space where dad pours wine till his glass overflows staining the carpet like a leaky heart.
Mum stays in bed without wine without us a calendar of cats can’t make her smile not even April cat that wears sunglasses not even June cat that swims in a bowl.
Wait, I can tell already that you think I’m too sad that I’m being too much like...
November 2012
1 post
Élodie
It began with a drink
and nowhere to go me and my footloose American Dream perched on the Left Bank where I’d never seen that kind of green in a glass
Drink up pal!
It’s just Kool-Aid with a hard-on.
She forgot again that I’m not American and those little green bubbles gnashed through my mind.
Could I reinvent myself as a number and multiply?
I awoke in a bed where Ginsberg once slept and...
October 2012
1 post
Love Story by Florian Habicht
I wanted to go to the movies, but I stayed on the train because of this girl.
Florian Habicht is a 37 year old filmmaker from New Zeeland. His film, Love Story, was born out of a failed artist residency in New York City. Originally he was in the city to create a work of fiction for which he was writing the script. He (thankfully for us) abandoned the project and instead created this improvised...
July 2012
2 posts
Chapter Two: Matthew
Matthew opens his eyes. Matthew opens his laptop. Human and machine wake up simultaneously. He logs onto Facebook. There are fifteen notifications; mostly from events he has promised to attend and group alerts he does not care about. There is one new message occupying his inbox, sent at 03:00 am from the girl he met on the night bus.
Hey You ☺ x
Matthew ignores the message but decides to give...
Leonard
A waning heart drifts over London’s peaks sleepy concrete that makes me remember a boy, crazier than me and how I shrugged him off like an ill-fitting blouse.
At three in the morning in a Turkish café he turned to me to say:
“my biggest mistake was being born”
I dismissed it with a kiss just to stop him from making more theatrical statements.
I didn’t acknowledge the depth of his feeling...
June 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Daisy
The jubilee line pulls into the platform and Daisy’s mind is submerged in a single puddle of thought: This train is going too slow. If I jump, it won’t kill me. Daisy is not suicidal; she’s just had a tough evening.
Daisy takes an empty seat. She gets out a small sequined bag and dismounts the toolkit across her lap. There’s a lot that needs fixing. Evening old teardrops have streaked through her...
Oceanic
The bottom of the sea frightens me like the sound you make when you breathe like the trail of blood on porcelain white like the time we fought with no goodbye
Those flowers your mum sent from Mozambique: bright, tumescent, with proud stamen – only highlight the fact we hadn’t touched in weeks
but I’d rather swallow glass than ask if you still love me.
Hiding behind a laptop screen I write...
May 2012
1 post
Beyoetiful
We live in this city but our hearts belong to somewhere else.
Slumped in our bedsit forgotten by the world two sad little astronauts sucking memories from a pipe.
Months ago we had hopes and dreams and we stroked each other’s feet but now
an empty balloon shrivels inside my chest a dead thing that still asphyxiates progress.
I’m going to Amsterdam all by myself and I look forward to doing...
March 2012
1 post
Bad Habits
Slurping on water a mouthful of memories a bubbling conscience that I try to drown in flashing images on screen.
Someone once told me that life is a sequence of hotel rooms and I wonder what I will leave behind in here:
yesterday’s to-do list, a chunk of heart or dirty underwear?
A rapid turn of events: limbs shoot out of sleeves like they knew this would happen. Violent red across my...
January 2012
1 post
Resting my head against your bedroom door
We are drawn to each other our wounds are magnetic our wrists together form train tracks to your bedroom
where I undress you like a nurse. Each item of clothing is a bandage to unravel. The darkness swallows our exposed parts. Our beating hearts remain sealed in a catatonic state, a tupperware to be shelved for a later date for never.
When I hear the noises you make with others, I wish I could...
December 2011
1 post
Jerome
There are three layers to your face: the top is a masculine sheet of skin it’s thin but deep creases around the mouth and nose could get you a part as an action hero.
Sometimes it flashes cherry-red like the time I let you see me naked. Streetlights revealed strips of my flesh and a corner shop sign glowed between my legs.
The second layer is one you don’t want people to know about. It’s still...
November 2011
2 posts
Space
A kiss spreads slow like mist and I almost forget the reason we were crying as tenuous sheets of rain cloak our sad little flat and echoes from last night are caught in drops of water.
If the Chrysanthemums could speak they’d tell us to stop screaming but sometimes I find it hard to reach you without raising my voice.
Your body is wrapped in a high voltage fence, if I come too close I’ll burn...
Cowgirls in Oxford Circus
This is the part where a Dutch girl loses herself in smoke only to find herself again in the letterbox eyes of an Iranian woman at the back of a bus heading two stops away from where she really ought to be
This the part where a librarian with a pierced nose and fifty percent shaved head chases a rude boy down the poetry aisle after he slobbers milkshake all over Ginsberg’s Cosmpolitan Greetings...
October 2011
2 posts
OK Cupid
My hecatomb heart beats a sacrificial rhythm for boys who do not care about a flick of hair standing out of line.
I do not want to lend my hair drier to you.
I want to roll around in creasy sheets and tickle you into hysteria.
I want you to hold my hair when I vomit and I will reward you with a flash of skin on video chat.
I want to surrender myself on the hood of your car, whispering...
Nola Darling
A sparrow flaps through our carriage
frosted meadows reflect across espresso skin
her lume-blue hoodie glows like graffiti that etched the station some stops ago.
She sits so self-assured not like me boxy and downcast hiding from iPad guy whose pupils climb up my tights.
If I were Nola I wouldn’t allow this I’d gorge on his extricated eyeballs like marshmallows on a stick.
And then, as a...
September 2011
3 posts
Lonerism at an underground dance festival
Tell me lies about compassion and pride whilst emails fly behind my back with doctor this and doctor that and doctor please help us please because she’s broken but you see,
it’s easy being alone in places like this, anonymous and hidden I hear Whose got a cig? and shuffle my Pall Mall under the sand
music takes me away, I close my eyes like the beautiful mdma monster next to me but I can...
Bandages
I need you
to squish my face between your hands and push out a breath
but you left
and the dust that follows destruction swims through my body like smoke
there’s no exit here, in our place
where even the walls seem to bleed and tubular snakes cry rusty tears
your tarred jacket lies splattered on the floor like spilled ink over hop-scotch tiles in
black and white and sometimes blue when we...
Nevaeh
My first day on the run brings me to a pit-stop café beneath a haloey sign that radiates a promise of pancakes and milkshakes
I blow into my straw a brew of pink poison with blistering bubbles that splatter onto the plastic menu
Number 53. reminds me too much of home, of my sister dribbling raspberry jam onto her fingertip wearing it like lipstick until father slaps it off with the...
August 2011
5 posts
Blueberry Pie
My dad and I have blueberry pie on Sunday afternoons
we meet in the lobby of Chateau Marmont and intertwine our lanky arms to form a pretzel-shaped hug
we won’t get much closer than that not in words or touch or breath and I do admit, I desire sometimes to tell him –
he kisses hello a needle-thin blonde who plucks a blueberry from my plate and my eyes escape the ruinous site of...
Vicious
I tore that girl apart in the backseat of my brother’s car dope-smoke camouflaged us until
icebox eyes met mine and I cried because she wasn’t who I thought she was
and she ran to the train her face, freckled with stains
this isn’t love or anything like it or anything that tries to be like it and fails
my disorganized heart opens up and blasts apart and my brain alone is too...
Fat Girl
I’m big I’m broken I can’t change form the chemical cheese they feed me has slowly seeped into the hollows of my bones and I am so full
stasis and distance pour out of my throat when I try to say
I’ve had enough
night falls on my sister with Steve and I pretend to sleep she rolls around, over and beneath as the clock ticks away seconds it can never regain
I know he couldn’t hold...
All the women in my family smoke
“He felt no pain, his death was instant”
words that lashed my brain into a hurricane
an instant how instant?
like coffee, a blink, a microwave meal? The instant it takes three women to click a flame, to synchronize a suck and exhale?
Dressed in black and huddled round a plastic table, silver trails of smoke swirled and slow danced through caffeine steam.
I wash away the scene in a...
Road-kill Beautiful
Little knives in Tracey’s mind carve tunnels to better places but I’m glad she was there that day on the bus, wrapped like baby Jesus in a shower curtain and bruises and bright red cuts
Shoulder to shoulder I ask about her life, a sharp turn and we collide – tangerine hair that smells of youth and through her lips I discover we are bound by the delicate fabric of loneliness
“I’m...
July 2011
2 posts
http://abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/one-shirley-...
Butterflies on scrap bits of paper wrinkled and damp
drawing and praying that’s all I do, praying to be snapped in two so there’s another one of me in the noise and the damp and I could colour with me, together
Dad’s voice booms over my head his molars like microphones pushing him into ears and he jokes about his heart, one attack away from death
I search the room for patterns and ...
Love is like holding your head to an electric fan,...
“To survive heartache you’ve got to stay busy”
Well, I’m not busy enough to dismantle all the sticky stuff that clings and makes me weak
I met you
in our orthodontist’s waiting room. A pocket of pain throbbed against my cheek but I managed a squeak, a hi, and you spoke in vowels as your train track teeth twisted tight.
Untangle the reel and yank it forward
YOUR SECRETS MAKE ME SICK ...
June 2011
1 post
Even in death you look pretty
Would you like me now Mr Death?
Up high on catatonia hill wrapped in an aureole of aloneness, too far away to care about my messy hair or the pimples on my forehead
When I allow myself to dream I see milky arms around me but I would never let you kiss me like this.
Remember when we were equally messed up?
but you ran out of secrets and mine weren’t good enough.
You slept over on...
May 2011
2 posts
Diary of a daughter who didn't get the part
1.
You lie miles apart in sleep as I cling onto consciousness in my camouflage of static black, thick like tar, thick like shame in a house of mirrors I can’t escape.
There’s a haunting here
taking shape beneath the sticky smell of your tulip breath - in and out - connecting me to you
as I lip sync the words that were never exhaled.
2.
On Sundays we performed with cherry pie, ...
tellmumimokay
I am collecting fragments of myself not knowing how to piece them together image by image or word by word
delicately constructing me like a first kiss.
Let’s begin with:
blond hair back-lit by the sun and how I lost myself in the malachite patterns of half-closed eyes and papery skin that glowed like a Chinese lantern when we kissed
on Thursdays we listened to Elliot Smith, that CD you...
April 2011
2 posts
Diary of a fearful poet
1.
I started loving you on the second day that we talked and on the third day when I saw you in the pub, my heart thumped like thunder, your eyes, a hyssop blue matched the colour of
the portable radio in my doctor’s waiting room, where I passed the time wondering what songs entered your ears and inside I spoke about stress and flu and all things unrelated to you, because you are a...
1 tag
Diary of a twenty-first century son
1.
They’ve found a diamond in the allotment next to our house
where Wendy’s cousin screamed into the Friday night and later when stitches criss-crossed her scissored skin you said it was a shame that she lost her pretty face.
We had a barbecue there once a heart-shaped steak smoked in the heat of percolated petrol and plastic sweat the ooze of blood made me marvel at the similarity:...
March 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Diary of someone who opens an email
1.
You open an email finger tips and bleeps and clicks fade out until all you hear: a Styrofoam squeak – nails digging into morning coffee
You open an email the whole world rushes out you inhale, you exhale the whole world surges back – ten times harder because of what you read because of what you learn because of the fact that life will never take the direction that you secretly ...
Diary of a man lost in Amsterdam
1.
I haven’t been able to write since I got here and I can’t remember when that was my brain – fogged up with early morning steam from canals in which I see a version of myself projected onto a bridge and on the next and on the next
a foreign snarl breaks the infinity-me I wonder why I’m here and not some place else – with you? You’re laughing, I know you are.
2.
Twenty euros...
January 2011
2 posts
In the car
The sisters enjoyed the quiet of the car journey. Sydney rested her forehead against the window; her skull tingled, her teeth vibrated as streaks of cars and indistinguishable landscape raced past in brown and green. She imagined running along those distorted hills, at the same speed as the vehicle, running her legs into a fleshy blur but her eyes couldn’t keep up with the fantasy run, her...
Cammy & Paul
CAMMY and PAUL sit on the edge of their bed in total silence. PAUL’s mobile alarm goes off. They both ignore it. PAUL presses the snooze button. A few moments later the alarm goes off again. PAUL stands up.
PAUL I have to go. I have to write that piece on the Canadian guy, the Eternal Voice or whatever it is they call him.
CAMMY The Golden Voice.
PAUL What?
CAMMY They call him the Golden...
November 2010
2 posts
Diary of a girl with low self-esteem
1.
Pendulum limbs swing across a cold bed frame, bones echo over metal, a bell rings outside, the disarrayed ant army lines up in military units. I stretch my neck for better view barred by paper maché hands that crunch across my forehead. The interior brain beats a deep throb not unlike my mother’s fist against the bathroom door:
open-up, open-up, open-up
I can’t remember the last...
The Origins of Snow
I watch the window. I focus on the foggy glass, on the grey skies, foggy glass, grey skies, foggy glass, snowfall. Outside I can see snowflakes whirl around the garden, chasing each other in chaotic clouds, up and down, round and round, round and round, circling trees, diving under cars, swirling through the tire swing. It’s difficult to tell where the snow is coming from: the sky or the...
October 2010
5 posts
Diary of a soulless guy
1.
Stitches unravel, black threads poke through broken skin with every blow, your door: a punching bag much harder than skulls and thigh bones.
Louder: BAM BAM BAM indenting chipped paint, bloody and concave. I leave money for repairs the council won’t make.
It’s two AM and I’m in pain you still won’t open
Spat out by an incandescent moon glowing bloodred and superior I slump...
Quiet and undisturbed; the world outside Sydney’s cocoon was silenced. The soft soapy water encompassed her body, gently rocking it back and forth within the confines of the tub. Sydney took a deep breath and dropped her head below the surface. On top lay a distorted world of liquid shapes, glaring in an out of white light.
“Syd, can I come in?”
Isabelle carefully entered her sister’s...
I know silence
I know the silence of snowfall
silence of tears
I know silence of a car park at night
silence of an empty room
I know the silence of a house on fire, of a burning cigarette
I know the silence of scars
I know angry silence, awkward silence, cowardly silence, miserable silence, silence when no one calls, silence of a...
Diary of an adolescent in love and it's a lot like...
1.
We sit on the hood of Tim’s scratchy Mustang parked by a railway track, beneath a bridge we talk about dead-weight and dead-dreams and dead- minds. Pretty little poets who never write anything down - only sometimes on underground walls or undersides of arms.
You flip your limb to show me:
“Love is hell”
I nod, ignoring the internal cringe, the cliché, the wasted pain.
Before us, our...
The morning after the wedding.
Read Here
September 2010
1 post
Diary of a Motel Receptionist.
1.
I wish things had been a little different today and I apologize to myself for being the same way that I always have been and I always am
as predictable as that man I see stumbling into the same motel room across a leaf-scattered parking lot, he peers over the same left shoulder, the same spiny fingers wrapped around a briefcase. He never changes, the room never changes, only the women – ...
August 2010
8 posts
Isn't that what they say about dying?
http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/isnt-what-they-say-about-dying
sometimes I don’t actually want to
be
here
And together our arms with your freckles and my scars run like connect-the-dots over unbeaten tracks you and me and the stars
