The End.

Hello and thanks to everyone who's read the blog over the year: whether you've seen them all or picked a couple here and there, I have appreciated your unknown presence spurring me on.

If you're interested in seeing what happens next, feel free join me at CatalogueTwentySix. I'm not sure what this is yet, but we'll soon find out.

xx

This is it! The end of the year!

Self portrait one year on.

One...

From everywhere else to a first memory

I come from, and sing of, green carpet
up the side of the bath and false memory
of the feel of that. I come from a bed I slept on for years

as a mattress on the floor, from the painting of a tree
in the corner above me, from a wonderment for the thrill
of the wind and its movement through leaves. There is more to me

than this, you understand, but impediment is rife. I come from
house parties and sitting on my dad’s tapping feet
while he played sessions in pub after pub and our own front room.

None of these is first because some will always be wrong
I am germolene on my first spot, hands-and-knees-horses,
poems and poems and back-tickled songs sung in the dark.

I am in a room in a dream I have no memory of otherwise
and so come upon the idea that this must be the first: fear
and a resolution I am told it is impossible to engineer.

Two...

Portrait of a moment in Glasgow.

Three...

Dissection

The eyes are prominent as would be expected
in an animal as wary was the rabbit. Note the position
of the eyes on the head and how this compares
with the position of yours. The movable upper and lower eyelids
are provided with eyelashes. You will also see the edge of a third,
the nictitating membrane, which is whitish and fairly thick.
Draw it across the eye with the forceps.

The white of the eye is not visible until the upper lid is raised
or the lower lid drawn down. The size of the iris
and the pupil will depend upon the extent to which the iris
is contracted. The pupil is a window through the iris.
You will be able to note the presence of glands
that are pink due to the presence of blood vessels.
Take the upper eyelid in the forceps and roll it outwards.

Four...

Holding hands

How it becomes an easy regularity
is a mystery to me, but it seems strange,
now, not to be attached from one side.

How is it that something so easily abandoned
becomes something so readily missed
when it is a possibility again with you around?

All I can think is that my hand temperature
is normalised now only with yours in it.
Without it I am colder than I thought,
even with gloves on.

Five...

Colour co-ordination

It is not about the colour, but the naming of it.
We stand around gesticulating with arms spread wide

for brights, our posture closed in for cosy reds.
One girl stands looking up with one arm out and one by her side

and we all take this to be blue. But our room is only blue and green
by circumstance of naming: it is not about the colour

until we read out the shades we find: Pepper Grass,
Green Trance, Treasure Isle, Cozumel.

I can barely keep my eyes open.

Quiet revelation

It’s the sort of tired that makes everything almost,
and nothing for sure. Even air has negative connotations
on a tickly throat, and sleep is no guarantee for tomorrow.

There is nothing I can think of that is entirely without
the influence—except perhaps what you said to me today
and how it changes everything, knowing that.

Very near the end, now.

Ad for a partner

You want somebody who can land
just like that, with the air shooed
to the curls in their hair.

You want somebody who can stop dead
in your arms with their weight gone
hovering somewhere.

You want someone who proves
a point in the flair
of detail.

I'd like to say you want someone
like me; but it's never as simple as that.

Portrait of a party.

No, really... a backlog perhaps but I haven't forgotten!

Thoughts on kitchens

You are the breeze that shoos garlic skins
to underneath the fridge. I watch them drift
urgently to their resting place, dream lazily
of a future when they are finally discovered again,
brittle and crackled. It will be many years
from now, I think, as this house is home and home
means not cleaning under permanent appliances.

Your hands are pungent and you’re dressed
in a pinny I used to wear for Home Economics at school.

Time treats us well, I think, in the end.
Even if we end up papery and brittle like your favourite Grandma’s hands.

I haven't forgotten!

Sooz's legses.

Do you know the difference?

Do you want to sail the stars, or the universe?

I am told the difference is political
but don’t know which way round I’d be if
it was me. Perhaps I would know the meaning of serene.

It must be the brink, an existence like that,
the Earth hovering and the blackness
elsewhere. My own paranoia

would be tenfold: at every creak and whistle
the threat of nothingness and implosion
from the very idea of it. And free from gravity?

The pull of my body would not exist,
the tugging, the nagging—gone.
Only functions would be left. Basic need.

In light of all of this it would seem irrelevant,
perhaps, to choose between the stars
and the universe. Do you sail for the sights,

or for the inbetween? Choose your side,
they’d say. Astronaut,
or Cosmonaut?