Ephemeral guff: New poems/half thoughts

Some words that don't know where they belong

Hello. Hi. It’s been a while. Sorry. I’ve had a lot on. This newsletter thing was supposed to be a means to shed off my loose change thoughts and have a place to put them. To make space for the inarticulate whispers that may, on second reflection, reveal wee kernels of truth. But the busier I’ve been the more pressure I’ve put on myself to solidify my disparate half ideas into tangible, coherent wholes. Which is not the point! And who needs anyones tangible coherent wholes anyway. I’d much rather hear about the messiness, the dregs, the endy bits. 

So I will do that and float between stuff that’s been twirling around my mind recently while I’ve been working too much. I’ve said before that my writing rarely ever happens in allotted, scheduled time slots, but appears in fleeting pockets, parallel to actual life stuff while I’m bored or overstimulated. My last month or so has been mainly on a bike, crushing my lumber spine vertebrae with a an overpacked backpack, sweat dripping as I cart myself across Manchester; between schools, theatres and charities, often meeting different people every day, trying to compose myself, arrange my personality around the particular requirements of the group of people I will be working with.

I’m also writing a couple of scripts for theatre projects, one of which is my solo show, Golden Time and other behavioural management strategies that I will be performing at the Roundhouse on June 20th. Devoting so much time to this (currently 80 page) text has meant that it’s difficult to create fuller ideas with all my scribbled bits of writing. Usually a small fleeting note is later used for a larger arching narrative in one of my long spoken word pieces, or forms the basis of a future collection of page poetry that I have been collecting and editing. But I want this sub stack to be a place where I can put stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into a prescribed category yet; that falls somewhere between a story/essay/thought tangent. So here we are, and I hope I keep doing this as an act of service to my stuffed and overflowing brain. As a means of clarifying my thoughts and letting myself breathe.

This post will contain sub categories of completely random sections that may or may not link to each other but i felt were worth sharing and not hoarding.

Belfast Tourists

I’m writing this while I’m in Belfast with my mum. She has just retired after 30 years working in sexual health, playing an active role in implementing first-hand, trauma informed care to victims of sexual violence in Glasgow. She has chosen to round off this mentally taxing role with a packed itinerary exploring the history of the troubles in Northern Ireland. Nothing like a wee bit of generational trauma and sectarian violence to drown out the horrifying reality of what she has witnessed in her job. But I’m grateful to be here, with her, and to learn about this very recent strand of British history. But I am struck by the weird cognitive dissonance that comes from being a trauma tourist, trundling around the city on an open top bus tour over the Falls and Shankhill Road. I could maybe fool myself into thinking I had a more reasoned and impassioned frame of reference than the misty eyed American couple we saw heavily romanticising the whole experience by claiming they had Irish in the family dating back to the 1700’s. Scots grow up with a better understanding of the troubles than the average English person. We have a lot of Irish immigrants in Glasgow, and a microcosm of the sectarian fuelled violence can be seen in football between Rangers and Celtic. But nothing prepared me for the sheer volume of the iconography on every street corner. Every mural a highly emblematic honouring of fallen paramilitaries, martyrs, gun violence. The place is taut with a heavily fraught past on the knife edge of two highly opposing but inextricably linked identities, both posturing their buffed up, overblown symbolic prowess to shout down the other. This is not a civil war in the ancient past. This is frighteningly recent, and still very much alive in the current generation. The attitudes in these areas have barely changed. Yes, there isn’t warfare, but the conflict lives on in the flesh and blood of the people on these streets.

History is fiction, it is a version of a memory, a truth that corrupts itself when held against a different story. I wrote some words on the back of a ‘Troubles Tour’ leaflet:

Front row on the troubles tour

getting our fix

on a whistle stop wonder world

open top

trauma on tap

a voice

tells us about George Best

the footballer who fell into the drink

died with nothing left

his descent

a passing anecdote to kill time

between the Falls Road and Shankhill

the ambient overhead delivers

prerecorded tragedies

burned buildings and

multiple casualties

the belfast mona lisa is

a mural of two gun wielding UDF

whose rifles follow your eye line

the crowd goes wild!

hold their breath

a thriving industry

the stories we tell ourselves

to make it make sense

we paint on walls

to commemorate

the ceaseless

violence and death

and at least then, when there’s nothing left

you know that there will be a future time

when people will take the pain and

turn it into something palatable,

a trinket, a shrine

placards and warning signs

of what not to touch and

where to stand behind the line

maybe then

you’ll know

what it was all for.

Adam’s Side Piece

I got to do a really amazing writer’s retreat in the highlands last year and one of the tutors was Joelle Taylor. A formidable force of a writer who I learned a lot from. One of her writing prompts was to write from the point of view of the unheard spouse or partner of a historical figure eg; Napoleon’s wife. For some reason I was drawn to Adam and Eve, but wanted to write from the viewpoint of Adam’s other girlfriend. I wanted to explore what it was like to live in the shadow of someone.

For a while I had been trying to find a safe form to explore certain men I had dated in 2019-2020. All of which happened to be actors, and left a lot of bruising on my self esteem and sense of self when I was 21 years old. I was drawn to their talent and magnetism, but soon learned that this was a carefully constructed facade designed to mask the deep well of self loathing they were burdened with. I learned at this point in my life that a hugely pronounced ego is usually matched with self hatred, and the alignment between outer self perception and inner self talk is so widely unmatched, so disproportionately unaligned, that these relationships were doomed from the start. Not to turn this into a gossip column but one of the men ended up becoming particularly famous, and the poem I ended up writing during Joelle’s workshop, makes reference to encountering someone who has just experienced intense adoration and fame.

As a performer, I don’t ever want to appear self indulgent. The stage is a place to connect, not harbour validation for a grandiose sense of the depth of my individual experience, so I struggle to share this one out loud, but the vehicle of a historical figure helped me to go at it slant, to find another direction rather than staring it plainly in the face.

Here is the piece in its current iteration, i am trying to grapple with multiple ideas here; ego, sex, loneliness, attention. It needs more drafts, but it’s also nice to share it in a messier prepubescent version before it meets its final form:

Adam’s side piece

I lie here, in the residue of you,

This earth shattering, crash test man

The guinea pig, prototype, 

First edition, wonder kid, 

Freshly unboxed

Got that new man smell. 

I was told never to compare yourself to his dating history,

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that his first, 

Was not only his first everything, 

But the first first of all first times, full stop, the inaugural, 

The blue print 

premier 

So it’s hard not to overthink the fact that his first time with her

Was a pioneering event, 

A cataclismic implosion of limbs

And god-shaped lust, 

The skin blushed hush of licked limb, sweat slicked and dripped, 

Each moment pressed into the memory foam fabric of history

This immaculately conceived,

mother nature of all

holy horny hook ups

Her tender apple devoured 

The taste and sense and swell of it, unpeeled to its core, pip licked and flicked

lodged in your throat

Oh boy

Whizz kid, revelation

How we mythologise you

Project our fantasies onto the surface of your back as we lie here 

Curled on the fold out bed

in your flat

You snoring

like a dog

under anaesthetic

the deep sleep of someone so adored

so enraptured by his own disguise

oh boy its easy to mask yourself when we cant look in your eyes

golden boy

Different, special, a cut above the rest

You leave us to bleed out

Wrapped in soft sheets of shame

You deal in hard and soft

Cut from a different cloth 

Im lying next to you while you’re scrolling

fridge door open 

left the flat freezing 

came back 

broken

i pushed myself into shapes

cardboard templates

where the slim of my back lay

i dont say no but i didnt say yes

and i suppose 

thats all there is

too late to learn

to reencounter myself from within 

inside out 

i am only a spectator sport

a hand held

device

why relearn 

why not abstain 

Resist his affection

you cant undo the pain

segment your affection, cut it up in a bowl

reserve your vulnerability, the creation king with your crown you cloak yourself in shame

hows your soul holding up?

With the ego, the fame?

 the first one

Unprecedented, singular, debut

Prized prince spinning daintily on your pedestal

It’s just funny that in spite of all the rage and lust and longing

you couldn’t hold me properly

flimsy and unfixed with your wandering hands

you struggled in the darkness to understand 

the brushstrokes my skin demands

careless with the curvurtures of my neck

its funny looking at you

adonyous, stallion

a perfectly crisp, marble, delicate

alibastair stag

despite all that newness

all that holiness

You’re still just

a fucking shit shag. 

Writing and sharing this, I feel quite mean spirited and exposed. But I think sharing stuff that is scary/shameful in doses is important. It gives people permission. To hold it and process it. And if you have ever dated an actor, I can only offer my condolences.

Parallel Play

Parallel play is when children play next to each other but not together. It is the act of doing a task, or action, in community but not necessarily interacting. Me and my friends have co-opted this pedagogical term and use it when we want to meet up with each other. With ADHD, I am making peace with how stressful I find social situations. I like to have a way to transfer my energy and anxiety onto a task, externalise it in my hands. The feeling of being in commune with a friend, doing a collage, watching a film or creating a t theatre show together, is so warm and gratifying as it feels like simply existing without the pressures of performing a self. I find direct eye contact hard and not getting distracted really difficult. It’s increasingly hard to find ‘third spaces’ (somewhere separate from the home or work; traditionally a social club, church or community centre) where there is built in community with the ethos to come as you are. Having friends who also have found the language of just wanting to be with each other without the tension of constant conversation or performance is extremely healing. I wrote a sort of lullaby to parallel play, I’ve been trying it with my friend Robin to music, we’ll see what it becomes, but this is it so far:

Parallel Play

Let me play next to you

I’ll sit by your side 

We’ll do

something simple 

fold ourselves 

and hide

We’ll not speak 

just read 

between 

the lines 

do something

repetitive with our hands

Let me play next to you

While we cast out 

The demands 

of grand plans

Let us fly

 measure the length of our bodies by the diameter of our wing span

succumb to the mercy of our 

attention spans 

Let us face the world 

Together 

Parallel twins 

Observing

The frenetic 

Repetitive spin

The hum drum day to day

The running late

Hairs a state

Clutching our cardboard

heart

Cant catch a break

Let us watch while we sit and play

Let me play next to you

I’ll sit by your side 

While we do 

something simple 

fold ourselves in half and hide

We’ll not speak just read between the lines and do something

repetitive with our hands

Let us unlearn

The tendency 

To fill the room with noise

Assessing and performing

Let us just be boys

Running through 

An army base

i can feel you next to me dont need to see your face

Eyes laser beam on the screen

Let us decide when the times right

To talk about our heartaches and dreams

Through head sets 

part time pundits lets jump off a building

Do something in real life we’d regret

Let’s play next to each other

I want to read your mind 

I want to telepathically replay our shared memories

pause and rewind

Let’s go to adult dance classes

Lets unravel loose ends

from old jumpers

Lets top and tail in a single bed

Let’s spread our palms flat on the grass

Lets dig for elements for gold

Lets burrow into the ground plant ourselves

 in parallel holes

Lets watch water drip from a tap 

Lets create minature maps in the gaps

 lets crawl through your neighbours cat flap 

lets cut our hair with kitchen scissors

or set a car on fire 

a burning idol to our parallel rage

lets bleed ourselves dry

let the acid wash

wet seep onto the page

lets get into gun fights 

bouncing between barracades

lets be ocean divers

rally car drivers

lets snort crushed up salt with discontinued fivers

Lets do hopscotch 

Lets dress up and play pretend 

Lets roll around like  we are birds we are worms

Lets build a den 

Lets circle back around start again

pretend we are ten

We are one step closer to the sun

Let us believe that the person we are is all we will become

Let me go let me swim 

I’ll paddle on my back like an otter

Let the world and all its

Noise soak into my skin

Let it moisturize me to the brim

Let me play next to you

While we cast out 

The demands 

of grand plans

And let ourselves succumb to the mercy of our 

attention spans 

Let me play next to you

I’ll sit by your side 

While we do 

something simple 

fold ourselves in half and hide

We’ll not speak just read between the lines and do something

repetitive with our hands

No pressure, no commands

succumb to the mercy of our attention spans.

I’ll see you soon for more ephemeral guff. Look after yourself xxxxx

Kate xxxxx