I'm Moving!

Dear All,

Many thankyous for following me here (& if you have one of my old business cards, thankyou for looking me up!), but the time has come for me to move my blog onto something swankier, something more horrendously expensive, & something that will present my posts in an easier-to-use, more synchronistic way (to be all flowery about it). In other words, PLEASE FOLLOW ME HERE: The Importance of Being Carrie on Tumblr. You don't need a Tumblr account to visit - just click the link, it really is as simple as that.

   Love & Lined Paper,
 
       Carrie Aaron

Taking Stock

This (or the beginning of it: 'Come back,/Nothing is forgiven,/But my lifeboats have all blown up') wove its way into my head this afternoon. So I  gave it the benefit of the doubt & let it fold itself out. 

  

(A picture from all of three years ago, which seems an eternity.)

What is it about? What background information do you need for it to make any sense? Well... It's about the disjuncture between the present & the past. It's about an old (& sometimes - far too much of the time - fairly horrific) relationship I was in in my early twenties (it stretches as far back as five years ago, in the buildup to that catastrophicness) and (yet) is very much from the point-of-view of me now, over a year after it was terminated, looking back at it like a run over cat looks at the stretch of road on which it was run over. Is it a peon to a lost boyfriend, or a peon to the former half of my twenties? I'm not entirely sure. Both, perhaps. But writing it made me sad, & reading it makes me sad, so it's like a sort of dirge, I suppose. *shrugs*

Come back,

Nothing is forgiven,

But my lifeboats have all blown up

In a hundred storms in teacups

And the end

Seems like a sink at

The unplugging of the washing up –

Unclean! Unclean!

A filthy dream,

Wash it away

With UFO-beams.

Screams,

Unuttered in the day,

Come out at night to play like Poe’s

Conqueror Worm,

Remember when

We shouted it

Into the air?

The Barbican

Was beaten bronze

The darkness seemed

To rest upon

Like the water

Had melted down

From out of the night,

Plymouth Sound,

And the pushed my

Hands into my

Coatpockets hard

And tried to keep

My head as both

You and another

Man said you’d

Take me to bed

And all my future

Flashed before my

Eyes as I

Walked home alone

And laughed and talked

Into the air

About you,

You’re a

Fatal snare,

From here to there’s

A thousand years

And you are somewhere

I am here

And crying out

Years-older eyes

Under the same old

Sea-side skies

Reprise reprise,

A lullaby

That gets louder

As life goes by

To drown it out

To drown me in

My mind’s own merrygoround din,

And cry it out

And shout it out

And talk to you

As though you’re here

When you’re not here

You’ll never be,

Torn out of my

Great symphony

That has ended

Decades too soon,

Unless I crawl

Into death’s womb

So premature

That I would have

To bleed into

My boyfriend’s bath

And be found there

Amidst the paint

He’s smeared on all

The walls, my blood

Matching a shade

Of the wall’s blood,

Perhaps, when it

Is done and dried,

My life beside

Me like a towel

Draped on a chair,

To stay right there,

Abruptly stopped

As a fucked clock…

But I’m alive.

And I take stock.

Like the old brain

Of an old woman

Harking back

To hear the past

Because the present’s

Just a waiting

Room for where she’ll

Go at last. 

 

You (A Fragment)

You stalk nightmares and facebook feeds,
the sort of woman who agrees
with posts about benefits cheats
having enough - too much! - to eat.

You'd round them up and put them down,
given your way, go town to town
with a whip in your hand and drown
the witches, beat them black and brown.

You'd put them to work or to death,
take them all off their crystal meth,
and serve them right via wrong, the eff-
-ing wastes of skin and bones and breath.

You'd take away flat screen T.V.s
right left and centre, them that pleased
could work for them or feel the squeeze
of deserved famine and disease.

You'd tell them to get on their bikes
on the road to work, SCRAM!, the tykes,
and watch the ups and ups and spikes
of profit-graphs go take a hike

up North. You'd wall in North and South
today and tomorrow and mouth

librettos by Wagner and wave
fascist handgestures of the cave

as though the candle wasn't there
and switch off people's wireless air
and set and check and re-set snares
to catch the bludgers unawares.

Self-Unconsciousness (Go Away!)

Go Francis Bacon me, free me,
a static dervish on TV,
whirling around the centuries
like a pulp-vampire, a fucked clock.


Go mad, go sane, go in-between,
yo-yo between night-dreams, day-dreams,
and "doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream 
before".*

Go Edgar Allan Poe me, he 
could deconstruct, reconstruct me 
into some new monstrosity
other than this, the current one.

Away! Bang new sounds from the drum
made of my skin, lung-hollowed, strum
new sounds from my guts and RED RUM
the ghost who lives in the machine. 

Away! Away 'til kingdom come,
don't like this, want another one, 
a rising, not a setting, sun
waiting it out for the repeat. 

 Away! curtain proscenium
glimpses of the tragedy Man 
between nether darknesses, scan
the data for anomalies. 

*Please Note: The basic consistency of the syllabic structure. 

The Importance of Being Visible: PoetryVlog1

On Writing As Considered As One Of The Fine Arts (with a nod to De Quincey)

First of all, THIS is what my reference to De Quincy is, well, referencing.

Second of all, THIS:

If you're going to write, then for heaven's sake read.
I know illiteracy is fashionable.
(Semi-literacy, then. The ability to pen one's own name, and to read The Daily Mail.) I concede
that endstoppping is - rather a lot of trouble

for not much if no-one can see the end-stopping
in question, and syllabic structures are invisible unless you pause oddly in-between lines.
BUT. There is no point not reading, and writing, and hoping
nobody will notice - they'll notice - which gnosis will go quite unnoticed by you. Opine

on a poem to its poet in terms less than glowing
and - well, you can imagine the oodles of fuss,
but don't and they'll write without reading not knowing
that there's an us and them and that they are not us.

P.S.
The above is a terrible poem. I know that it's a terrible poem. That is, if you hadn't noticed, THE WHOLE POINT. To give an example of the sort of thing that happens if one ignores (not subverts - ignores) the rules.
And there ARE rules.

Fame

Gosh! Thankyou, people!