They say all art is a representation of the artist

And I like my words to tumble and fall and after you’ve finished reading them to not know immediately the why or how of where you’ve been, but to know that it struck some place deep inside you. I want my words to carry barbs deep into your flesh, so deep you get phrases stuck in your head on repeat like a song you can’t be rid of. I want your fingers to smell of the places I’ve shown you and I want your dreams to get them mixed up with reality. I want my words to creep slowly into your bed at night like a lover come home late, leaving the scent of them in your hair, reminding you of all the parts of yourself that haven’t yet been explored. I want to make you an adventurer, charting the territory of you and me and every other person. I want to show you a mirror and sit back and watch as you become entranced by your own possibility. I want to be that mirror, reflecting back all the things you’ve deep down known to be true but never found a way to articulate them. I want to teach you of the sort of travelling one does by standing still and letting each place- every city and town and ocean and mountain- move through you, stopping at all the beautiful points and taking photographs of them back to their loved ones. I want to show you what it's like to see the world for the first time, to find words for things you never knew existed- to open up a whole city of paths in articulating the city in your mind. And if I fail, at least I will have left you in such a tizzy that you’ll put pen to paper, or fingers to keys and start that process for yourself.

The secret society of people who have songs chronically stuck in their heads.

What was once a matter of joking and fun has turned into a serious condition for some. Anna* has suffered for three years with Justin Beiber’s “Baby” stuck continuously in her head. “This is a real and serious condition”, she says, looking down at her tea, “I’ve had to stop going places. I sleep with Mozart in the hope that his compositions will rescue me from my inner torment.”

There is no cure for this condition. All these victims can hope for is a few moments of respite, and a few bars of undisturbed Chopin.

*Name has been changed for privacy.

The Mapmaker.

There is a man who draws maps of the cities in his head.

One day he sat down and began to draw the places in his head. He started at the doorstep, his mouth, and began to explore the world surrounding his fingers. The cities his hands built grew larger and larger until the paper in front of him could no longer hold all he gave. It began to sink under the weight of the lives this man drew, all the heartaches and pains and happiness, all the new romances and old lives and people living with secrets like anxiety and pregnancy and arachnophobia. He drew and drew, each place became a part of himself, his fingers in the smoky jazz bar that the man with one suit finally found the courage to talk to the dark haired girl. His eyebrows were in the centre of the park, hiding all the lost balls and Frisbees and the memory of that one night where the new couple who drank too much found out what else they liked about each other. The street where the young boy made his first mugging was the scar above his right knee, and there he wrote graffiti of the things he told himself not to forget, but one day the council would come and try to erase it all. Before he knew it, he was drawing a whole world of himself, all the places he had sworn to never forget, the people he had met and loved and admired on the train, all the contradictions and stupidities and immensities and tiny parts of himself were not ties up, drawn into this world. Now he is not sure which is more real, this person who holds the pen or the world he has created out of himself.

The Fisherman.

The Fisherman.

Poets always write about the fisherman as if they know him, he thought. But how do you really know someone. Is it from pulling apart their skin, knowing what colour their scalp is, knowing what they had for breakfast. Or is it enough to know what I do with my hands, the way the smell of the ocean never will fully leave my skin, now that I’ve been here too long. Do they know my evenings, sitting with the nets, darning, fixing them as lovingly as a mother tends to her children’s socks and petticoats and elbow patches.

How much do they really know about me. Do they know that all this, all that I do is for her. Delmare. Redemption.

The wooden table was rougher then. Time had yet to smooth it down. I sat across from her, and stared. What else could I do. She was so clean compared to everything around her and for that moment I felt like the filthiest thing on the planet. Why did she want to come here, I wanted to ask her, but all I managed to say was something about her hands. God, her hands were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. They were the only thing getting in the way of letting myself love her completely. How can you love something so perfect when all you see of yourself is flaws.

If I loved her completely, like she wanted me to, like I did, I would have taken her to be mine. I would have never spent a day without her and at night, I would take her in my arms and smell the ocean in her hair, softer and more feminine from her than it ever did from me. In the mornings she would wake with the first light and pull the sheets off me. Some mornings she would smile to herself and leave the room silently, padding on the wooden floors that would get smoother the more days she spent with me. Everything became smoother when she was around. Other mornings, she would jump onto the bed, as if this day’s sun was stronger than most and gave her more energy, and she would pull and grab at any part of me that she could get. Her white hands would know which parts of me were the ticklish parts, and dive for them.

In the evenings, we would sit side by side, tending to the nets like they were our children, hands becoming green with the scent of age and salt.

But that did not happen. I could not let myself love her. Like a child who only knows about broken things, I didn’t know how to hold her. I knew only where my hands wanted to go, where I wanted to feel her skin against mine, but I was too afraid to trust myself, I feared the strength in my hands too much. Delmare. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Dark as the ocean when the moon has gone to sing her songs at the sun. I became a storm around her, my body holding the raging seas that fill gutters and drown streets. My blood filled the Atlantic, the Arctic and the Indian, stretching my fingers over the snow plains of her back, and I sat beside her with hands trembling as I did not touch her. In my mind, we crossed deserts and oceans while I crossed my heart and swore I would not break her.

To me, she was a child, washed up in the rushes: sent from someone else and not mine to keep. I would watch her over the stove, too shy to say a word as she moved from sink to pot, stirring, tasting, her blue floral dress brushing against her bare ankles and reminding me of how small her hands and feet were. A man imprisoned in his own skin, I was nothing. I become no one, a non-entity, a ghost of the person I was meant to be, a shadow of the man her father had agreed to marry this girl-woman to.

Time like this does not last long. Delmare. Swept away like the tides. No matter how vast the ocean inside me was, none of it could hold her because these hands were too afraid to touch and to fail. One night, when the night was dark and her eyes darker, she removed herself from my life. I could not say “stop” or “stay”, I could not say anything, for fear that I would break what I had already broken. So I sit alone, the fish and myself, two oceans parted only by skin, and the tables and floors that are smoother by time and no longer by her.

Synaesthetes

Synesthesia. 

Also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiæ or synæsthesiæ), from the ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation," is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

In a variation of this theory, babies don't have five distinct senses but rather one all-encompassing sense that responds to the total amount of incoming stimulation. So when a baby hears her mother's voice, she is also seeing it and smelling it.

"If you ask synesthetes if they'd wish to be rid of it, they almost always say no. For them, it feels like that's what normal experience is like. To have that taken away would make them feel like they were being deprived of one sense."

-- Simon Baron-Cohen, synesthesia researcher at the University of Cambridge

Underneath Tigerland

I

Underneath Tigerland, I lie floating:

A picture of Chagall’s lovers: blue, with flowers

Surrounded by everything and nothing, and all the spaces in between.

Lovers whom I know nothing of

Speak with the gesture of

Skin touching skin, a silent dance between fingers that flicker like lightning over the ocean.

The tigers stand above the path that hands make over mountains

I trace them through Nepal, fingers following love

Hidden like those secret ways that even the natives weren’t sure existed.

Love always makes the truest paths.

I wanted to tell the world all the secrets I’d learnt from listening at doors

But my hands told my mind that you already knew.

Practicality never begets honour but your eyes could bleed me dry of everything I’ve ever known.

II

At the day of the dead, all the ghosts begin to move under the skin of the earth

Thanking the living for understanding

And the barefoot children whom everyone has forgotten their names

Will dance out in the streets once more.

There are bones floating around underneath my skin

And the devil keeps asking me to dance

So I tell the café chair that faces out towards the street

How much I want the sky.

I had a dream that I was your teeth, and all I wanted was to let you know

How much I loved the sound of your voice

And the way that gold looks against your skin

All anyone ever wants is to be wanted.

But when we walked down the main strip in a city pouring with rain

Your hand was the furthest thing from mine

And it would have been easier to reach through those clouds and grasp the sun

Then it was to reach past what people think about love.

III

Recently I’ve been falling in love with the hands of strangers

Hoping that underneath their fingernails I will find the history I lost

But all I find is the ghosts of people I will never meet

And the skin of another whose scent makes me think I should remember.

Remember the white beach house, after the villa

When the moon cut through the sky while the waves played their love songs

And we’d stand before the water

Naked as the day we came and in that moment I knew what it must have been like to discover electricity.

My heart began beating that day,

Syncopated as it caught the rhythm of the planets

Changing until it circled yours perfectly

And forced my face towards yours like a light forced in the face by an interrogator.

IV

I will tell you all the things I’ve noted,

Counted down to a fox

Swept outwards

Rushing towards a river of brushes and trees

Along the winter line.

You told me I smelled of cinnamon and cloves and vanilla.

That I look like the moon you keep in your pocket

Saving for when the month grows full and deep and the oceans begin to teach the world about darkness.

You said you would pull me out then.

“Take off those skins and move towards the water” I say,

“And then I’ll teach you how to fly”

But the weight of the day hung about your feet and kept you still.

So I circle around you, facing inwards, floating upside-down while you keep to reality, and I, to Tigerland.