You are poetry - an infernal, cascading harmony, dousing Life in wreaths

Of sorrow

You are not that chafing, maddening sadness itching in my very bones and teeth - you are

Relief

You are poetry

Wallowing, murmuring in each and every whit,

On every branch, in every ditch - you are not

The sad and derelict field of lonely thoughts,

Rosy hopes abounding against the droughts

You are that sad solitude itself to me

The diffusion of everything with everything -

Though you are everything, and everything is poetry.

You are poetry

As you sigh and unfold along moribund years,

And howl with stormy, hopeful tears - you are not

Some epochal essence which Time disowned,

Some farewell drink some separation downed

You dug at Life and buried yourself in me

A trace of hope abounding in a drought -

Though you are a rose, and a rose is poetry.

You are poetry

The chaste transcendence where coming myths lie,

Where the sea is wedded to the sky - you are not

The bleeding Sun above despair uprist

The aching thirst, the salt on my parched lips

You drown in words spoken by all but me,

Transcending each word's bitter separation

For you are despair, and despair is poetry.

You are poetry - an infernal, cascading harmony dousing Life in wreaths

Of sorrow

You are not that chafing, maddening sadness itching in my very bonesand teeth -you are

Me

(separate poetry)

A gentle breeze against my face, a glimmer of sunshine amid those drab and solemn old English days which seem to topple onto each other as some kind of joke at our collective expense; a quiet little street leading nowhere in particular, a person smiling without connotations. All these things are but sweet consolations flowing like warm summer days around my unshakeable sense of utter failure - a failure which seeps into everything and anything, to the point were it degrades and dismantles even itself.

The moment I begin to study and imagine the world, I fail. Finding a placebo in pure observation, I am more intimately acquainted with this restless society than any (post-)bohemian. I smile at the interconnectedness of everything. I smile at how the poor, lovestruck artisan (dressed well in order to distinguish himself from other artisans) feels an almighty weight fall in his heart as his beloved turns away in order to engage in a scintillating conversation about chalk, frost, sawdust - anything but him. I smile because she thinks of noone and nothing but him, and in so doing she surrenders all that she is and never was to a cultural inheritance which makes her behave with such vulgarity as to hurt the poor chap. I smile because she does not smile - at least not to him - because she saw an advert about choice and felt free, or saw a film about freedom and felt oppressed. She composes a symphony of life and imposes it on him.

This is failure. In recognising the sheer harmony of everything, I exclude myself from it. I Romanticise it in order to make it bearable, so any thought or idea of mine perishes in my heart the moment I begin to voice it. I suffer in silence, like a cold day.

Yet even to suffer is a monumental failure! I am so self-aware that I have become aware of myself as a copy of so many self-aware failures of the past - and, indeed, the present. Wallowing, as I do, in aesthetics, I repulsed by translating my thoughts into irony, or politics, or psychology, or anything which may be described as an 'issue'. I am nothing if not an infinite regress.

Nothing hurts like love because nothing is so illusory...

It is frequently said that human beings are 'social' animals. Certainly, I see that this is the case: I write these very words using implements I could never have created alone and I write them in an inevitable reaction to the writing of others. It is consciousness - consciousness of our possessious, our limitations, our morality, which binds us.

And yet, consciousness leads me back into myself. Such is the act of life, the spectacle of exteriority so many others present to each other - each individual performing so many variations that it is often hard to keep up - that I sometimes feel I cannot even pretend to trust the consistency of another. I shyly spurn society precisely because I cannot act. I cannot act because I am so genuinely multiple, so antagonistic to any consistent singularity, that I am able to project nothing into the world. My breathing, panting, sighing body is the mundane flesh of what I shall never be; while others appear to have learned which act to perform and upon which stage, I am so relentlessly conscious of the emptiness of the whole thing that I simply cannot act - like a child who, having been told not to lie, runs around aimlessly telling the truth.

Consciousness is a desolate plain where, perhaps, there was once Life.

I live for the night because it is the night which justifies me. By day, each laboured smile of acquiescience, each exchange of empty phrases, each and every last second of monotony drenched in the rabid dramas of others, tears at any semblance of imagination I may have. I am not allowed to feel this way. The modernists did away with any hope for the suffering, thinking people of the world by writing them into novels. The Hunger-Artist is a cliche, probably played by some Gerard Butler-type in the film version. Yet what people appear - still - not to understand is that those of us not blessed with an affinity with the world strong enough for poetry do not suffer for art. We suffer for consciousness. We suffer for the very fact that our suffering is not art but, instead, a state of being. By day, we stubbornly cling to the fantastical fragments of the imagination we have carved for ourselves from out of the dead wood of the world. Yet, even this state of being is little more than our inheritance from the critics of the arts. By day, their observations on the introverted, self-obsessed, self-(de)constructing art of yesteryear peck at the very soul of those of us for whom the sadness of the highest poetry is an artless way of life.

And yet, night-time! So free of the world, wrapping herself around me like a desperate lover hanging (herself) on my every word or whim. So often, I write myself into tears, fetishising that peculiar brand of suffering unrecognised by those intelligent enough not to think: tedium. So often, I hurt myself with words I shall never speak, shimmering as they do in the light of overt consciousness and meekly rolling against each other in some vain hope of becoming something more than their creator. By night, it matters little that I transpose the weightiest of feelings into kitsch, nor that I stare into the abyss and react by drawing a two-dimensional well of despair with hand-me-down words. I think to myself and only for myself. I snuggle the absence of pressure. I continue this way for hours, waiting for sleep to come, knowing that should it not come, I shall be alive for longer.

I have long thought that we build continuity into the world because we, ourselves, lack it entirely.

The wildest passions exist to be extinguished. They cannot exist permanently, for in so doing they would outlive us. We would be integrated into them, just as we are integrated into abstract things - things we have created ourselves - such as society. We long for that sense of permanence because we fear loss, yet it is precisely the sense of loss which drives us! A novel ravishes our intellect because, before it existed, we were ripe for it. It cannot do so again, for in the act of reading we plant seeds which will blossom when we read another; and I believe the same follows for all emotion. We love only so that we may love again, but with greater fervour! We kiss so that we may reach that blissful moment when we stop, when the lips part and we realise that the kiss, which is everything, will never be enough!

Mercilessly lonely, I write these worthless parodies of beautiful literature in the tranquil early hours in the full knowledge that, in the shattering light of day, I shall no longer be the same person. Indeed, the very act of writing soothes the tumultuous collisions of my contradictory thoughts, it eases the sea-sickness of my soul and holds me upright, so that I may rest. Tomorrow, my face will crack in more or less the same fashion when I automatically acknowledge my neighbour as I do each morning; my voice will still waver when I buy the newspaper at my local shop and I consider asking the chap who has served me there for seven years how he is, before burying the question in my larynx. It has been seven years and each day that I did not ask re-inforced the unacceptability of even considering it. In short, my exterior being, the 'self' which our noisey and brutally insecure society takes as for a person's whole, will change little. Yet the raging passion of thought, that indescribable phantasma which took me by the hand and lead me out of Life and into being - my private state of utter sadness - will be written out like a bad soap character. Writing is my constant, the state of permanence others see in relationships, or novels.

I am gagged and bound by self-knowledge. I cannot conduct a conversation without realising that it is simply another way for me to be alone. I impose the most wonderful of literary touches on people because I can; it is not that I believe others revolve around me and my private thoughts. I just feel separate. My wallowing is harmless; after all, unlike the fantasists of literature, I expect nothing from Life. I am more than content with the vulgar and alluring apparition of it all.

I write, and I am placid - like a river, shimmering in the dolorous sunlight, winding its gentle and inevitable way towards the eternal ocean with a serene restlessness. The pen drops, and the seeds are planted.

To truly feel a thing is to attribute to it a significance beyond all comprehension. To be utterly enveloped in one's own sentiments, for feeling to overcome all thought, is tantamount to drowning; the spurned lover commits suicide because the beast of a human being who performed the act of spurning has taken on a value beyond themselves. They have become the sorry receptacle of dysfunctional dreams, a punching bag for the immature philosophy of those who refuse to abandon hope yet think, feel, behave and, occasionally, even write as though they had attained some wondrous insight into the allegory of life. I pity neither.

Yet, it has never been enough for me simply to love. I am constantly in love; I am besotted by the near-photographic idylls I snap in the blink of an eye and charge with fictitious strands of poetry ripped from the depths of my consciousness. I worship the radiant beauty I once saw and smother it in perfume - no! In the smell of lingering perfume in an unchanged pillowcase - for now I have a fantasy (a memory, the ripest of all grounds for such) contained within a fantasy. That radiant beauty is the heart-wrenching splendour of something which cracked into a thousand pieces before my eyes, before I had so much as laid my hand upon it. So radiant are my thoughts that I convince myself that the loss they represent is as real as the spark which created them; I stagger from place to place tormented by passions I have never felt, kisses I have never received! That I love cannot be denied. Yet the very force of that raw, unbridled feeling - so unbecoming of an introvert like myself - throws itself quite deliberately in front of a train of metaphors and dreams. I think so much that such feelings cannot hope to live long without facing annihilation.

So it is that I punish myself for being human. To contradict one's own sentiments with metaphor, smilie or song - that is the root of Sadness!