the map is not the territory

I should have guessed:
the map is not the territory -
what can't be known must be felt,
must be lived in vivid shades.

but what of this darkness?
it must be faced blind and
raw as a red baby, it must
be touched by skinned hands
and mortal years.

do all of us go by the same road?
for all our armour, do we sleep
with equal innocence, and fight
for our small corners
with the same animal surety?

pain travels under so many names:
a universal unknowable - it
cannot be borne, cannot be
translated, carried each to each,
across all those human borders.

preda tory years

I found a notebook from my second year of university. I went through all the notes I'd made and scrawled over in angry pencil marks. Back then I didn't think the words were good enough, but now I look through them with the precision we had as we scoured the banks of the Thames yesterday looking for relics of ordinary lives.

Here are some lines I found. At the time I thought they were ideas that didn't go anywhere but now I think I can let them stand alone.

.......................

Stand back.

I don’t want your

blood on my hands.

………….

I don't sleep for fear

I will wake too soon.

...........

I shall fight a war for independence &

my weapons shall be words.

................

Cards down. Lights out. All in.

Darlin'.

............

On the coldest night of my life

we woke up to find

England, dressed in white.

..............

In times to come we will laugh about all this.

No defeat is so final that we cannot rebuild.

You said you feel like a post-war city, grey,

all weakness burned away.

............

'a real human being and a real hero'

one amongst us is missing.

one amongst us has left his clothes on the shore.

one amongst us is absent in our laughter,

one less shadow like a slow disaster

one less voice leaves us briefly silent;

deaf after the explosion

numb after the exposure

five senses and a loss

of one shade in the spectrum.

one amongst us has left his boots at the door,

and taken naked barefoot to that wild.

the first poem i've written since moving back to london.

I feel life starting like waves crashing on the shore in recurring dreams

east end streets crowded in the evenings with the energy of elsewhere

ramadan passing outside barber shops and boys who are all talk on the corner

offer me drugs on saturday night after work. now I finally understand the weekend,

I suppose this is adulthood. well, didn’t it just slip in through the back door?

not far between cambridge and cambridge heath but don’t the nights smell different,

with the rain falling on cable street the day after blackshirts in wifebeaters

tried their luck a second time. the words don’t come easily to me like they did -

that’s a kind of innocence, I traded it for that easy confidence you buy with

weekly essays and white stones. circling back to the place I was born I find it foreign,

circling back to the old words I find they’re coming unbidden like sickness or passion

they pass just as fast. walking the ditches and fields of the city like ley lines that might lead

to some essential truth, brushing cold shoulders with the suits that seem unburdened

by the history lying grave deep beneath us, I remember we promised to live on for

those we left in the earth, to feel life crashing like the waves, retreating only to return.

Winter's Bone

It's been a while. Here's a review I wrote earlier in the year for Varsity. I find it more exciting to review films that I love. And I really loved Winter's Bone. I gave it 5 stars.




Ree Dolly is teaching her little brother to skin a squirrel. Pulling out the guts and innards, he looks up at his sister and asks, ‘Do we eat these?’ She pauses. ‘Not yet.’ It is a rare moment of dark humour in the otherwise heart-breaking Winter’s Bone.

Set deep in the backcountry of rural Missouri, this exquisite film is a devastating portrait of a forgotten America plagued by poverty and running on a black market of crystal meth.

Ree’s father Jessop is a meth ‘cook’, recently arrested and now missing. Jessop has put up the family’s house and surrounding wood-land as collateral for his bail and Ree must find him before it is seized and her mentally-ill mother and two young siblings are thrown out to ‘live like dogs in the field’. She embarks on a journey that takes her deeper into the harsh landscape of the Ozark mountains and its cattle markets, hill-billy bars, burnt-out meth labs and bare frozen forests. Her determination and fortitude against mafia-like silence and startling violence eventually lead her to the darkest depths of her community in the film’s genuinely shocking climax.

Ree Dolly is played with extraordinary skill by twenty-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, who has even been tipped for an Oscar for her performance. Ree’s raw strength and resolute spirit makes her perhaps one of the most arresting female characters in recent American film.

Winter’s Bone has already received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. I can only add my voice to the chorus of praise. This is an unforgettably haunting film and, despite all its bleakness, contains moments of incredible beauty. The final shots of Ree with her younger brother and sister echo Dorothea Lange’s famous portrait of a migrant woman and her children in the Dust Bowl.

Winter’s Bone is finally a story of survival and dignity in the face of poverty and struggle. Like Lange’s photographs, it belongs to a poignant tradition of alternative histories of the United States and is a testament to the indomitable strength of the human spirit.

................

'I will die, but Palestine will live.'

I wrote this poem after attending the funeral of Juliano Mer Khamis in Haifa. Everywhere I travelled in the West Bank I found people grieving for him, even those who had never met him. I found his face stencilled on walls, his plays showing in Ramallah, his posters flying above young men occupying their town squares and calling for unity. Whilst it was a baptism of fire into the region and its politics for me, his death was one among so many for the Palestinians I met. Watching the faces of the children and young people from the Freedom Theatre at the side of Juliano's grave, I could not imagine the challenge of staying human and struggling for freedom in such a place. Only a few days later Vittorio Arrigoni, another man who devoted his life to Palestinian freedom, was murdered in Gaza. This poem is named for him.

................................

Staying human

Go forth now hardened hearts –

hearing that strange word murder

attached to bodies we have loved.

How can we let them rest?

These restless hearts go forth

to bodies we have yet to love.

Under steep red clay earth,

on disputed hills, in guarded houses;

hardened eyes avoid the horizon.

Restless children have seen horror

attached to bodies they have loved,

tied endlessly to that word murder.

We cannot let you harden.

Leaving flowers here on red clay earth,

love rages in these restless hearts.

.....................................................

Leave No Trace - Short Story

In case you've been living in a cupboard under the stairs for the last few years you've probably realised that vampires are pretty popular. Now, I liked vampires before they were cool. I was into vampires when Buffy was on BBC 2 at 6.45pm after school. I had a poster of Spike on my wall. I was a teenage goth. Aside from a few worthy exceptions (like this and this) vampires these days seem sterile. They are all good looks and no substance. We seem to have forgotten the very sinister fact that vampires are actually dead bodies walking among us with the potential to maim and kill. I think we need to put some of the threat back into these creatures. With that in my mind I wrote this short story. It's called, 'Leave No Trace'.

Leave No Trace

He is on the floor spitting blood like a dog that has been kicked in the mouth. They are all like this at first. It lasts a long time. With the right attention, the right training, the process might be quicker. But as far as he is concerned he is alone. My presence in this room is of no consequence. I am one of the many lengthening shadows of this summer evening.

I wonder how old he was. It is hard for me to tell anymore, there is so little difference between the young ones.

He is dying.

It takes much longer than you might imagine.

Usually it is different. On any other day his body would have been dry and in pieces by this time.

That is what they always get so wrong in all those books, all those moving pictures. How strange an idea it is that we would ever leave a body behind, when the blood is only the first step. The blood is a rush, a clamouring in the ears, like a plunge into dark water from a great height. It is almost terrible, almost sickening, almost unbearable. But it dries up fast and then the real work starts. The flesh and the organs and finally the bone marrow. The real energy. The substances we need to continue.

A true kill is a rare thing. A single body can last us a long time.

Imagine the panic if it was not so. If the gutters were filled with corpses come each morning. Even the thought is ludicrous. Perhaps such ideas are easier to accept than the truth. The truth is not so romantic. Not the pale master half-bent over a languishing bed but the pure animal fact. Like the hunter of any other species we consume in entirety, leaving nothing to waste.

That is not to say that we are uncivilised, that we go without any ritual at all. Ours is also an existence bound by law.

By the one rule obeyed above all. Leave No Trace.

Our numbers must be kept as they are. Too many and all of us are in danger. Only if one is lost can one be made. There are no exceptions. Everything must be done as it has been done before.

Except this time, it seems.

He is lying doubled up on the floor. He has stopped moving. The room seems so much quieter without his heartbeat. His muscles are beginning to stiffen. Soon they will be hard. The cells in his eyes are beginning to die. When he opens them at first he will be almost blind.

Some of us can never discern colour in quite the same way again.

So it is in the beginning. Our first movements must be violent. We must force an unwilling body into action, a body that has come to its natural conclusion. Everything must be relearned. Propelled by pure hunger back into the world.

Lifeless hair is ripped away from the scalp, yellowing skin clawed clean, blackened nails pulled out. The traces of death itch. They demand removal.

Our bodies have no history, no name, no families. By the time we have learned enough to understand these words, to understand the world they come from, to be even slightly curious about these adornments of life, they are gone.

The vocal chords take the longest to regain their strength. Speech is a last straw. Community the most unpleasant side-effect.

Because of course there are others. And you will always be found. They will sniff you out. They will seek the signs you take care to disguise. The packs that move together, hunt together, kill together. Sticking close to the edges, dependent on the margins, on the human waste of the cities.

The Missing. The Disappeared. The Illegal. The Dispossessed. They are ours. Fake addresses, fake identities. The blind spot in the security systems. The loophole in the law. The ones you never wanted anyway.

Like this one. This man. This dead man. This dead man about to awake.

No one wants this one. He belongs on neither side. And that is why he and I are together here. We will save each other. We are two of a kind.

In a matter of hours they will be here. Who knows how many. They will sense this room, my presence here and the emergence of something new. And they will know something is amiss, something is broken and must be fixed. Something cannot be allowed to stand.

He will need to eat soon.

The first moments are empty of sensation. Fried nerves and automatic reflexes. He is wild now. A mess of instinct with no meaning. When are first made we are nothing. It is only when we kill that we start to exist.

Just like your children we must be taught our manners, how to conduct ourselves, sustain ourselves. There is no time now. Someone else will have to do this work, to be patient but hard, to get him in line. How could I be the one to act as mentor? After all that I have said and done, how could teach another to play by the rules without shame? But it will not be a problem. He is not mine to keep.

Already they are coming. I feel it like a tremble of feet, like the scatter of leaves in the distance, like the fall of rain in the mountains. Not here yet but coming without question.

A true loss is a rare thing. We have already died and it is not easy to do so again. We kill and are not killed. There is no predator to threaten us, no virus to decimate us, to weapon to damage us. The world turns and we remain.

A true loss is a rare thing but not unknown. There is a silent history of transgression. And always the laws are obeyed. The debts are collected.

Leave No Trace.

He is growling quietly. He cannot hear himself, but perhaps he can feel the vibrations in his throat. Perhaps it is a comfort to him now, newborn and vicious.

I am old and unfeeling. This is a dying world. Rubble, ash and wasteland. Nothing is gradual for me. Your destruction does not come in drips. It flows smoothly. You are a species grown too large in its greed.

More and more flesh tastes of poison.

I have walked in nuclear dawns where no sun rises. All of you, all of you are lucky. You will all be gone before the worst of it. And when you are gone we will be left. And not what of us knows what such a thing would mean.

Undying in an empty world. Reduced to the bare bones of what we are. A half-life in the half-life.

The pack is almost here. They come with the rush and roar of the group. They are coming to claim a new child. A child that should not be, whose making is my unmaking.

His hands are opening and closing, clenching at the floor, at the wall. He is pulling himself upright. Like a foal his limbs are unsteady. He tries to stand and falls. He kneels. The lacrimal fluid, the last left in his body, is seeping from the tear ducts. He looks almost human. But it is only the last of his biology, abandoning its host.

When they get here what will they do? Only what must be done as it has always been done. Only if one is lost can one be made. There will have to be a choice between the two bodies in this room. This anomaly must be undone.

For once, this man, this dead man who has just awoken, will be wanted. He will be chosen. He will be revered. He will be the first newborn that most can remember.

He will be the last thing I see before they rip me limb from limb.

Leave No Trace.

Gender Agenda

A little post to mark my birthday. I recently had some poems published in Gender Agenda , a fantastic feminist magazine and blog. I wanted to write something positive about female sexuality, and even promiscuity. I came up with this.

sitting in a room opposite a man I slept with but

our bodies are not what they were.

we have new nails, new hair, new skin.

our bodies existing only in the present

have no memory of the act,

they do not retain, but flow

never the same twice again

sure only of moments in their moment:

nothing of us recalls the other.

we are free.

James Ellroy

Anyone who knows me well will know how much I love crime fiction. So imagine how excited I was when earlier in the year I interviewed James Ellroy, author of L.A Confidential and The Black Dahlia. Between you and me he didn't come across as the nicest man and insisted on telling me all about his faith in the Pax America and Israel and the United States defending the world against the 'barbarians'. For more information on how that is not a good thing check this out . I think he was just trying to get a rise out of a young blonde girl. Anyway, here's the interview, first published in Varsity.



The first thing James Ellroy asks me is, "Have you read my book? Do you hate me yet?"

It’s hard to say.

Known for his bestsellers L.A Confidential and The Black Dahlia, Ellroy has been called "the demon dog of America crime fiction". His latest autobiographical work, The Hilliker Curse, takes as its starting point the events leading up to his mother’s murder in 1958. Ellroy issued the curse of the title when he wished his mother dead during an argument three months before she was killed. Her murderer was never found and he has been haunted by guilt ever since.

As a young man Ellroy turned to drugs, drink and petty crime, breaking into women’s houses in his native Los Angeles and stealing their underwear. It was not until he was in his thirties, sober and working as a golf-caddy that he wrote his first novel Brown’s Requiem. His work often returns to 1950s and 60s Los Angeles at the height of noir. He tells me his male protagonists are "men who want things and who become so utterly exhausted with their own essential maleness that they are only teachable by women. And I’ve been that way my entire life."

The Hilliker Curse is a departure from fiction and a companion piece to Ellroy’s 1995 memoir My Dark Places, which details his inconclusive attempt, with the help of a detective, to solve his mother’s murder. It was written following the dissolution of his marriage and a nervous breakdown.

Realising that he and his mother "comprised a love story rather than a crime story," he saw at last that the "‘primary journey’ of his life had been women."

Ellroy has been a life-long, self-proclaimed obsessive pursuer of women. He claims that the new book attempts to grant each of the major women in his life a "separate and distinct selfhood, whilst acknowledging that this drive has rendered all of them a blur," adding, "There are faces that I can recall of women glimpsed in train stations fifty years ago who I think of on a daily basis."

Is The Hilliker Curse really about women at all? It reads more like an exploration of Ellroy’s own psyche. He admits that this might be the case, telling me, "It’s about the notion in the abstract of formative trauma as progenitor of sexuality and romantic ardour. I am formed in trauma."

Don’t read The Hilliker Curse looking for a love story: more than a romance, it is a dark and disturbing chronicle of one man’s fixation.

Interview with Ronald Harwood

I was lucky enough to visit screenwriter and playwright Ronald Harwood, author of The Pianist, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Dresser and An English Tragedy, at his home in London. He was an extremely welcoming and engaging man. It was probably the most enjoyable interview I've ever done. He offered me countless cigarettes and cups of coffee and we talked for more than two hours. Sadly, I couldn't include half of the stories he told me. But here's the final interview I wrote up for Varsity.