A tender creature, a fever
Disarming, fluorescent
O babeling burning brite, how I hum and hover to thee! Stifled by a deep dark rut, in a bog, in a cellar, mud-crimson, betwixt petulant stench I rise: a body bewitched by fatigue. Suspended in stasis, cold and foreboding, I here slump - violet veins beneath powdered palms protrude deliciously. Demons breathe in chorus, as bells bleed into fog.
I must confess, with love and adoration, that I have fearfully neglected mine writing desk until the small hours - a horrid habit, dear darling, that I doth wish to rid. Wading wistful, whitened eyes rolling bakwarde, I wield words with fraught tension in mine chest. Midnite clouds begin to clear as lightening strikes mine heart and head, all the while asleep in bed!
I dream, dream, of poetry.
In truth, angel, I feel at once overwhelmed by ideas and drowned by the sheer weight of them.
The Evil Dead (1981) dir. Sam Raimi.
As I write with ink-stained palms, one year on following mine first letter to you, I remain reminded of that fated churchyard upon one mournful day. I see that wound begin to form within mine mind: recoiling with horror at the knowledge of barefoot Druidic priests, shrieking to the skies. That curiosity never ceased - no, no, no - only grew and grew as moss atop limestone.
Following mine foray into Druidic tradition, in hidden figures shrouded in mythos, mine nightstand - sullied with tea leaves and feline fur - depicts script to be read with fervent urgency. A book I could kiss weighted in mine palms is, in fact, The Works of the Gawain Poet, a sterling silver remnant of medieval literature, awash with Middle English, dead.
A purportedly unknown author of the 14th century, the Pearl Poet was regarded for tales of triumph and romance including Patience, Pearl, Cleanness and, most notably, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
I hope, with time, to scrawl though thine text with filthy paws, to decipher and digest its language, and to weave it slowly within mine own storytelling. I have always wished, with earnest, to establish a language, a code, a construct of symbols distinct to mine own work. Many moons prior, besotted by Holzer, Kruger and Weiner, I birthed a glossary, alive and ongoing: a syntax of epigrams and epithets to pick at will and work with, alluding to love, loss and heartbreak.
The Exorcist III (1990) dir. William Peter Blatty.
This vocabulary, wet and heavy, now finds itself in few forms - buried in feeble notes, in scraps and scrawls of muddied paper, in endless love letters to thee, here and now. Imbued with mutual anger, love and elation, I envisage words to be slicked with silk and oil, etched into stone, yelled with blurry eyes, tears-streaming! A girl in magick on all fours, pleading! What I would give, babe, to master tarot.
I often reason with myself the ways in which we as artists produce work and why, ultimately, that may be so. I have begun to deduce, dear lover, that the earnest yearning, pain and heat to make and do and feel exists primarily as a means of affirming ones’ identity, experience and place within the greater world. I think, as always, of painting. Feelings, textures, urges and outbursts to tentatively world-build fictional scripture. Give me moons: I gift you a portal.
Only now has that delicate growth begun to spew and fester as I write to thee month by month. Pontificating to friends and lovers, hands ringing anxiously, I often feel sweat-sodden by the isolating toll of being an artist in all its pretences: that uncomfortable calling I cannot quite shake. To exorcise, expunge, expel that fire in mine belly or remain forever haunted by its passing.
I daren’t dream to rid this compulsion, this unbridled urge to paint the feeling, for I fear the emptiness left without it.
Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) dir. Richard Quine.
Amidst mine stewed romantic dredge, I continue to constantly dream and do. You may recall mine longing to cement letters to thee within physical scripture bound by thick, pink ribbon. In broadsheet fashion, babe, blood-stained soon rests Emotional Outbursts: Year One at the foot of thine door. Beautifully printed by George Gibson, the newsprint publication threads together the first ten issues of Outbursts, from Druids and Desperate Housewives, to Monroe and ‘magical thinking’.
She shalt live in days to come.
As I sink and sulk and write with abandon, in early April, dear reader, I shalt host a writing workshop at Eastside Projects, Birmingham. As a loving part of Dinosaur Kilby’s If It Thunders on All Fools Day alongside Ishmail De Niro, within thine coming week I will present Poem for a Potential Darling, referencing the love letters of Outbursts.
Unravelling mine own poetry to begin, I hope to guide GLOAM, Chaos Magic and The Field in marrying auto-fiction and Early Modern English, to conceive thine own ‘poem for a potential darling’. An ode to audiences past, present and future, the groups will produce a fable, a script, a love letter to blossom and bloom year upon year.Â
Where art thou now, heart’s gleam, and where dost thou wish to be?
Unsubsiding, pining
Now and forever