Sudden Little Drops has been recently resurrected so I could talk about music! Check out the new Albums of 2011 post below, and hopefully there will be more new content coming soon.

Thursday 23 September 2010

Morvah

We have come to mark it.
We have come to Morvah
to make our fucking mark on the place –

and the road that holds,
and the road that holds
old sun-scorched marks that call out
to be touched by young fingers.
                The rocks are set,
droning a long note that begs
for us
to chop and mix it up
with squelching buzzing synths and
cut-up vocal chirps and hi-hat hits.
                We are the young.
Our path is a magic marker scrawl
across your quiet lull. And you need us,
Morvah, you
motherfucking need us.

*

For three days we scream
from our house on the hill,
blasting out 60s music, dancing,
aching with borrowed nostalgia.
                We cut it raw, burn
on the bare essentials, fuelled
by romantic notions of self-sufficiency.
Lungs full of cool air.
                The actual fucking details,
they hardly even matter.
More vital is the overall picture:
a vast, expansive haze.
                We make endless lists,
instant snapping commentary.
Here are the most important moments
as they happen
as a list:

   1. the growl of the sea as it raged
   2. the great expanse of land
   3. the drunken touching of fingers
   4. the stumbling over the sand
   5. the heavy drench of the sun
   6. the apathetic birds
   7. the silent pull of the evening
   8. the morning’s lightning burst

   9. the cave that was smaller and darker and more intense than the one you’d imagined before, but which, by being suddenly real, captured for a fleeting moment all your fractured expansive ideals, in a small tangible way, warm with the presence of friends, with rocks you could cut and scrape your skin on, with touching and laughing and bleeding and bleeding and bleeding...
   10. the drag of the waves receding

*

                Our last day.
We watch the sea. It
fights and breaks into waves
that mark their way
up the beach – a temporary
path, a low layered bank
carved in the ever-changing sand.
We build a dam. We change the water,
trap it in our glorious pool.
And the sea is slow to react, pawing
leisurely behind us
in it’s way –

                But sure enough it comes,
not angry or melodramatic,
but gushing with enough measured force
to collapse our walls. It drags
clumps of sand back
into its churn
and smashes against rock.

                For this is not home. There,
we saturate in vacant strangers’ passing faces
and coat our desires in obscene amounts of reverb
to drown out the terrifying
                                                empty
                                                                spaces.
But here –

Here,
there is nothing but space,
nothing but stone and rock and call of sea.

And it feels nothing of our fiery resolve.
Our aching spirits pass over
like the shadows of drifting clouds

and are absorbed into the lull.
We could not touch the long and droning note;
only dissolve.

Read More...

Things We Left Untouched

Here is where the side holds unwashed dishes, moulds expanding
slowly from the centres of unfinished mugs of coffee,
spreading white ambition to an edge
they cannot reach.

Here is where the parsley has got old,
shooting its spindly fingers into air,
yellowing.

Here is where the forest sleeping grumbles,
yawns its wide open mouth. Inside it
the leaves make tiny movements;
their sound is like slow
static, quietening.

Read More...

Wednesday 22 September 2010

Late Night Poem

I wrote you a poem on my body,
Lying naked in my bed.
I scrawled the words all down my torso.
I wrote your name. I loved you then.

I felt. I felt
These marks were real,
This ink on skin,
It removed the distance, brought you in,
Inside, close. I drew the outline of your ghost.

When I woke
It was all smudge on the sheets,
Deep blue smears on my Caucasian skin,
Half-ideas blurred in the sprawl;
A more suitable expression.

Read More...

Tuesday 14 September 2010

In Reverse

(an old poem)

In reverse she seems to take on a new life,
Deconstructing the rules of gravity and time,
Leaping back through the frames:

Unsaying the things she had said,
Uncausing the things she had caused,
Unlearning the things she had learned,
Unwalking the path she had walked,
Undoing, unlaughing, uncrying,
Unsmiling, unspeaking,
Unspooling...

Read More...