depression

Every Damn Time

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I carry this world on my shoulders
‘You can’t save the world.’ Says a voice in my ear.
I hold it in the hollow of my skull, smooth as a pebble worn by the babbling brook
Each syllable I have worn down
I have turned them till each edge is smoothed, childproof.
I know the words. I hear the words. I know what they mean.
but I don’t grasp them, quite.

I live under
where all sounds are shorn and clipped
dulled, distant.
Yet, clearly, I can hear my own eyes with each blink
clinking like coins.
Neon light spills over my dirigible head, reflecting back from the slick wet pavement
beaming up to my twin coins
splitting my head into that ache I always carry.

The rain is cascading down like a waterfall.
Extreme weather events
Say that to someone
They don’t say much; they might even shrug their shoulders.
‘Don’t look up!’ I tell them.
They always look up.


They see nothing. They hear nothing. They look back at their screens.

I see it in the eyes of the wild
bewilderment.
I am too.
And each time I see that their freedom isn’t all that
that we each suffer in our own alien way

My head expands with a whimper
We expanded ourselves with the clang of hammers and tongues.
We clash, we break, we fix, we mend.
Stick a plaster over the gas leak from my dirigible head.

But what if not all things can be rooted
held secure, anchored, fixed?

I have seen girls with spiral eyes, staircases up to the light’ouse
Seen boys with ‘em too.
Irises gleaming white against bloodshot kintsugi porcelain plates
the white lotus pearl of electrical snow bleeding into all of us eyes
Lost in the splizer zeeth watching white noise in a tubers teeth!

Politicians smiling on TV with teeth for the radio
Roadkill badgers zipped past burred windows
a nation of nature lovers

and Tom foolery knows as much as fuck knows; ask him, he’ll tell ya.
You can’t save everyone

 and it kills me.
Every. Damn. Time.

On The Apathy Of A Banal Life

Matt12 Comments

The following was written for this weeks W3 linked here

All sundayfied in funeral raiment
each like wilting angels trumpets
noses down in pursuit of frolic and folly
vicissitudes of restlessness
poke from beneath the skin
startled by the suns dim-witted banality
into frenzied parodies of butterfly wings
skirting and fluttering to dashing urgencies
yet never quite with the tenacity to breach fully, the surface
and in solemenity to our trivilialities
we cut ourselves to the quick

Mr Eons comes for tea

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Mr. Eons came to sit with me for tea
I confessed to him that I feel like he’s always there
Mr Eons shook his head and said, ‘Always, there is a sad melody that underpins the webs i weave’
‘I don’t really like tea’ I told him in between the tocks of the ticking clock
I turned to look Mr. Eons in his many eyes, ‘why do you never leave, always harvesting the flies in me! If i had buttetflies it would be a sign of motion. But here I sit. Here I waste away, and yet, I can see it in your eyes, it is not a waste when there is no waste to be!’
‘It is true, my friend’ started he, ‘you’re not even worthy of being waste, which is a waste you see. In your space another could be, but alas here you are, that I surely see.’
And the clock ticked, the wallpaper peeled
And his lips sipped and his legs slowly crept
And I cried and begged for breath untreacled
Mr. Eons wrapped himself around me
My teeth chattered in the dark
And my ears picked up the melody
as he dragged me into the darkest periphery

The clipped Sounds Of Drowning In Autumn

Matt7 Comments

Welcoming the pitter patter of rain
we pull on our boots
walking hunchacked under looming clouds
the voices of builders amongst the bangs and drills
clipped in our cotton wooled ears Bleating absences sheepishly grey in our years
And through the hustle and bustle Depression whistles
as if through the teeth of a biting wind
Our noses cold, dripping with the tumble of leaves
Centipedes scratching at the leather of our boots
looking for crevices to dig through.

This is for W3

Depressions Shadow Always Follows

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Shimmering cats-eyes in my rear view
This road superimposed
in the void perched in encroaching whispers
my heart beats the ghosts
shedding you, this
Flowers at the side of the road in memorandum
Noting every absence
And to the edges of me
Is my shadow
A creature of deplorable emptiness
Swerving these rounded bends
Up and down these silent knolls
On the brink, it all hits again
That jolt that churns the stomach
The strings that stir the tears
And in my blurred vision
Its all just sparks and mirrors
Reading mirth in my skeletal passenger
As we reach the point of collision

Melancholia

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The machines outside whirred and buzzed like flies, and I noticed how with every spoonful of soup some dripped back into the bowl.
The air was fetid with melancholia as the wind drew dancing shadows with the branches of trees.
The machines outside carried on with their hums.
‘Life is just a liminal space between death.’ A voice in my head said. And I nodded.
It was a mundane Thursday, and the dust was making me sick, along with the melancholy which burdened the air with its treacle.
‘The world eats us all in the end.’ The friend in my head said.
The nausea rose from my guts, and my head started to ache.
And I ate the treacled air till I was empty inside.
The floor under my feet was no longer solid. I needed the talons of a predator to grasp the moment, but vertigo had me in its clutches.
It should have been a Sunday; it felt like a Sunday
This melancholic disease is the defining symptom of a Sunday.
But alas, it was Thursday.
and melancholy on a Thursday goes deeper
I sat and ate that treacled air until I was empty

and was just liminal space.

Fuck it.

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Fuck it.

I’ve never meant it more than this
I want to crawl out of my own skin
traverse the earth and watch it burn
a skeletal aftermath
of my all-consuming wrath
the monsters I created in my head
are all the people I have and will ever be
caught in this emptiness
this machine that cradled us

I could never be good enough
to break free from this space
I’m becoming the monsters
the smug face ripped off my nemesis
is mine to take
basking in his out of this world place
where I own the world
and you’re all just pawns in my game

Fuck it.

Holding up this glass, half-empty
a toast to the monster I became.

Diary of a superfical cunt

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I don’t think I really like nature. It’s too cruel for my soft little half-hearted pitter-patter of a beating fucking heart.

What I’ve really been admiring all this time is the individual animal, the cleaned-up looking images that make the aesthetics of nature look harmonious. That is what I’ve been chasing after, the perfect imagery of all ‘peace’ and ‘green’ and so far removed from the truth of the brutality of it all.

And I suspect that’s also what most others mean when they say they love nature. No, the truth is we only love what we wish nature was like.

People say things like, ‘isn’t the British countryside so beautiful.’ But all I have ever seen in our oh so quaint British countryside is the same greenery turning brown, over and over and over and over…A vast emptiness in which a liminal space hangs between us and the dread we’re so clearly meant to be feeling.

I’m not talking about the brown of autumn as the green slips and slides into reds, browns and yellows. I’m talking about how it looks to me throughout the year. A vast carcass upon which you all stand and talk about how beautiful it is, with the sun glaring in the sky for this one frightful opportunity of light to see a vast nothingness, a desert you don’t see because it’s dressed in shades of green.
Am I really so far removed from the beauty? Is my perception really so out of wack that we can be seeing the same damn fucking thing?

And in my quest for some semblance of life within this rotten kingdom we call united, I have looked to the woodlands (what little there is left) and nature reserves.

And this is what I’ve learnt, there is no real beauty out there that isn’t only surface deep. Underneath it all is the stark truth of an inherently godless world. And if there is such a thing as a God, it’s worse even still because that God made it this way which can only speak to their absurd level of cruelty.

The truth is British people aren’t a nation of nature lovers, we’re a nation of people who think we’re nature lovers. It might behoove us to know the difference.

And many would say this is the rambling of a mind in a current Depressive state, and I’d say I agree, but then I have to ask, am I wrong? Look at the evidence before you.

People will shriek at the idea of insects, worms worming their way underground, death and the maggots that brings with it. Yet that is all part of the natural world, as is disease, parasites and shit.

Don’t get me wrong there are people who genuinely appear to love nature, and I can only look on at them with jealousy because I sure can’t fathom it.
I thought I belonged to that crowd but the more I contemplate it, the more I fight inside my head every time I try to decide if I want to go out into that world out there, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that it truly is superficial for me.

Scratch under the surface a little, I bleed a hatred that I hold inside of me, a resentment toward nature for being so absolutely bloody, cruel and gross.