touching showed.

When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted:  and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself--no cost,
No past, no people else at all--
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

philip larkin actually is my god.  that cranky old masturbatory librarian.

he is broken and ugly.  and i love him.   23 days til i fly out. 

more tattoos

i am going to try and write slightly more in here. and start a blog for travelling.  the one linked to here, probably not, as it's going to be filled with SMUT and i'd rather keep it nameless and unconnected to people i know, apart from Dom. 

we got tattoos last week; dom a line from a nick cave song on her ribs, and me, a line from Aubade, by Larkin, on mine.  we are going to get more next weekend. it is sort of a birthday thing. i am almost 27, and what am i doing with my life?  i know. getting tattoos with my Lady every other weekend and driving to nowra, and not cooking at home.

i dip in and out of blogging. this is my attempt to start again. i'm not sure how fruitful it will be, and if i feel the need to draw back around myself and not let the world into my mind for a bit. i find it hard not to confess and violate those sorts of quiet spaces that One Should Keep To Oneself. 

it is under a month until america.  and one month exactly until Tucson. this is significant, in a way i'm not sure of, but in a way which makes me both gleeful and embarrassed and apologetic, all at the same time, and leaves me questioning again, how much of an adult i am, and what the Fuck i am doing with myself.

Radiohead - Codex

this is the song for right now.

words again

it is hard, to describe in words, something that is, in honestly, nothing more than words.

can i re-use words that have been used in this context to make sense of it?  or am i just an idealist? do i just have an overactive imagination?  am i drawing this out of nothingness again?  i like to live in words; it's a habit i fall into in darker times, over and over again.

but this is not dark. i have my Dom, and my house. i have my place, i have my job, and a world that's real.  it's not like this is filling nothing. 

and i know, i'm stopping the gaps. this is not ideal. this is JUST an ideal.  sate it, elizabeth. make it solid.  you have done this before.  and i don't want it to end the same.

oh oh oh.  i do not sense sense. i do not sense it well. i walk in the dark because i blind myself, and gleefully try and find my way through with hungry fingers. and now they are left with the keyboard, and they bring you out, into me. and i wonder. and i raise my eyebrows, and i feel, yes, like a fool.  like a small hungry fool.

but you know, i am an optimist, i think, in some ways. maybe this time, things are different. ha.

books read in 2011

ok, going to try and keep this a little better this time. not sure how to, however. need a better bibliography Thing.  put them in endnotes? maybe i could have a word document of them.

JAN
My Invented Life - 5.1

Pretty Things 5.1

The Side Door 6.1 

grubby metaphores

i can't be bothered rifling around for them. 

this year, it is simple. i am getting my mental health sorted out far better than i have this year. my head's stayed above water, yeah.  i've had no major breakdowns, no complete moments of utter self destruction, but the lapping feelings of misery are getting more and more regular. i wake up and i cannot move.  i cannot fucking move. i sit up to try and leave, and every bone in my body is begging me to lie down again, and hide, HIDE hide, don't LEAVE the room, don't leave your house, just close your eyes.  if i push it, my brain starts pushing back angrily with a constant influx of internal monologue.  it's a stream of hate and loathing, and it sounds like it's not my voice.  then i doze.  throughout the day, and night, i'll be awake for patches, but unable to read more than a few chapters of anything, and numb to the point of apathy. i don't even care i am missing work. i don't care i am losing money. i don't care i am paralyzed here. i'll have mild aural hallucinations - voices speaking to me just out of what i can hear - and if i try to do anything much, i feel as though i am being flayed. 

i've had enough.  i'm getting a full bipolar assessment done at the black dog institute. 

the mania is fine. the mania is delicious. the mania is also really fucking destructive and needs to be managed because it's the Other Fucking Side of this.

i've also drawn the curtains on a four month relationship.  this makes me achingly tired, because i stupidly, optimistically, thought that this time, it could be someone i may be able to start a life with. but not.  and that's ok, i know, but i feel older and older, and more and more tired and unsure of what i want, apart from someone to walk with me and hold my hand when it's cold outside.

more reading. go team

perhaps this is more indicative of my desire to procrastinate?  i really fucking hate writing assignments.

i fond this book amazingly pleasing in a way i find hard to define.  i felt fond and warm and sometimes, a bit horrified.

the narrative was a bit too loose in a way that seemed a bit too tricksy, but that's more a personal preference; i like tight narratives, and not cross sections sliced out and put under the microscope. i feel that i only got to know little fragments of Leah, but despite that, i loved her in a way i don't tend to usually love characters. it was a damp and heavy sort of book at times, but the writing, if not the narrative, was amazingly tightly polished.


i liked it more than i like a lot of the new young shiny things that i tend to think are too much glaze and not enough solidity. it was a book that makes me think i might consider buying other things by the writer. but it didn't change me. i think about this, verses something like 'gilead' which comes in and sucks you dry and ecstatic and the narrative and the writing fit so incredibly...

but yeah. i finished it, happily, and felt i was glad for reading it.