this big sexy regret machine

There are twenty-seven episodes With Milhouse Van Houten. Strange boy of blue, The reflexive friend, Favourite of the writers room. A father found in a red racecar bed, Divorced of all age, The same, as ever. Glasses round, veering from an ego, dead. Is everything honestly coming up you? There are twenty-seven episodes With Milhouse Van Houten, None of them redeeming. Nothing is that clear. Still, to Simpsonish sensitivities, Be thee without Bart? The moment shows that as I sell my soul, Our touch is similar. As blue as you are, we are the same. Sensitive to all illness, You are, in the end, the roughshot winner. Experience has taught me To stay in your corner. You are not a plot-relevant lackey, I have in you, a friend. There are twenty-seven episodes With Milhouse Van Houten, I’d watch them all again in a heartbeat. (I have burnt out, like a final Thunderbird. I don't want to write any more words. This is a poem I wrote for a beloved friend, but something needs to be ...

I sit in the season of Self-Doubt. It is high summer, yet, a feeling of cloudiness makes all truth unhonest. Every word feels inconsistent. Nicole Gulotta describes this season in Wild Words. It’s a tome of rituals, routines and rhythms for writing. Practically, elements of it are incredibly applicable. Still, I would never recommend this book. ‘ A woman is born with microscopic eggs stored in her ovaries. Moments old, she already has everything she needs to create. Her body, by design, was made to gestate ideas, story and life. We are creators. Every month, our body reminds us of that ’ Just as pee is stored in the balls, creativity is stored in the ovaries. Gulotta casually uses uncritical bioessentialist language, making her out to be a massive TERF. Self-Doubt and not-meeting-the-Gender-Criteria go hand in hand. I wrote a whole poem about it. As a child, comparisons between me and Ron Weasley were frequent. Over time, it shifted to Ed Sheran and that was better. I hate Ter...

When you are like them, your life begins at 16. They lived inland, yet now really sought to see the ocean. Some point in murky adolescence when everything that came before becomes thoroughly recontextualised. An eruption of understanding that is a slog to reach. It took them so long to figure out, and it will take them longer to understand. Coming to terms with being them, becoming the ‘them’, the other, the no longer a part of the ‘us’. It is a tough path to walk. Why even bother? Because it took them so long to reach this precipice. They’d wonder if there was anything else that could fool them so vastly. They have reached their peace. They felt anything but peaceful. Chaos had always been in their life, but now they felt it inside. First, they needed new friends. Find people at school, in an overcast cloud of croaking hormones. The single sex secondary school sought to make that leap towards friendship thoroughly difficult. School wasn’t the right place to look. There, they wer...

Writing is this tenuous and awful challenge. Writing is putting together 1000 words each day and saying that I’m happy with that and calling it there. Writing sometimes, makes me feel like I want to be smashed against a wall and fall into one thousand little pieces of brick, each piece a petrified word. So, I’ve been going through it, lately. I realised my frustration was the only thing I was feeling. I needed to change my input, and hope that could cause a shift in the output. I’ve been watching video essays, old childish cartoons and whatever offering Youtube gives me, often something inane, but vaguely interesting. I needed to read something again. I’ve been trying to get through Tehanu, of Earthsea, but it's taking its time. I’m taking a break from Earthsea, and reading Wild Words, by Nicole Gulotta. Yesterday, she asked me ‘what is your writing origin story?’ Looking back, when I was 10-11-12, I really really enjoyed comics, in a new and refreshing way. I lov...