Another 16th November

Today Sorrow and I took a short stroll. Pulled along like a puckered thread, it tugged me to the quieter, more innocuous spaces of my deepest revery.

Today we share the moon, Mum.

Ivory as the speckled china holding my cup of liquid comfort; as ivory as your soft woollen jumper that hangs heavily over my shoulders - I’m enmeshed and warming; and it’s the closest I can get to a hug from you.

The air is always bitter by November, and today is your birthday.

There’s no rolling tears to wipe the slate clean,

just the rolling thunder of my quiet, patient grief.

My stoicism now seems to stand someplace between steel and air;

and I guess, sometimes, I just can’t allow myself to “go there”.

So all I do, is I lean into the menial small details of this silent day.

I make space to remember you, as I bat my usual distractions away.

I gaze at the ivory bristles, the feathered plants that sit atop my empty table,

and I try align myself as closely as I can to you in that photograph...

To where you stood, full moon in the pinch of your fingertips,

surrounded by the feathered barley, wearing our woolen ivory.

And it’s here I desperately attempt to wedge myself into your moment;

to make it match with my own, somehow.

But no rolling tears, just the patience of love; passing like charging horses,

curling and hanging like a white curtain of clouds, folding over a forlorn sky.

Why look to grey, when I could tug at any hint of warmth?

The off-white is one step closer to the barley-corn that surrounded you that mid-summers night.

To the full moon we could call ours tonight, so beautifully bright.

I may be braced for winter, but I know, one day, it’ll be alright.

Saturation of the night

Throwback + musing. I keep thinking, and remembering, how poetry is the place I find most peace ~ while music appears to be this thing I continually butt heads with. A lifetime sentence I’m too stubborn to bail on. Admittedly, it left a dent the other week. It’s a shapeshifting entity that morphs whenever you think you’ve got your limbs around it. Dreams held by air, while you get all wear and tear, and it has you sinking like a ship. I could get a grip ~ but I can’t put it down; all that love in the book always struggles to meet its better end. And to keep on hoping is to play-pretend. But I can’t stop, even if I wanted to. A way of being so embedded in my bones. That’s why poetry is peace ~ and music is some other beast. That beautiful and frustrating thing; the target of too much attention. All from first arrival, and I’m sure, until final destination. Maybe best to say, it spends all of its time shaping me…

I’m in an odd space, anyway. It’s coming up to mum’s birthday and I think about all she did in her life and where it all went. The book she poured every ounce of herself into sits quietly within the waiting room of my stuffy little harddrive, keeping me held in a purgatory that I push to different parts of my mind, like food on a plate I can't stomach to contemplate. And when I stop focussing on my own world for a while, it winks; but I can’t smile). It reminds me of the enormity of everything and nothing all at once, and it keeps me riddling around what “meaning” really means. What we inject into what matters, while “meaningless” surrounds - preying quietly like a yawning black hole. What are we without our goal? When all that is left is memory, within the vaults of an organ? All we have is a measly choice to make our own meaning. To make room for the timelessness of much deeper feeling. That love that lasts long after loved ones have passed. The love that loyally waits for us within a song. That’s all we have - outside the mundanities of just existing. That black cloth can try cover the sky but the will of stars will never stop. Even in darkness, they turn up bright with promises of hope. Even if they we can’t yet see it in its undiluted, saturating glory.

🌌

End of a cycle? Start of an... explosion?

When I was 20 I released my first album then dropped off the face of the planet for years. I couldn’t stop writing but I went mute...

I grew up playing music around Liverpool when I was 14 in old grotty pubs where dad ran open mics. Life was about late school nights and a community that felt like family. At 16 I was a pop-punk Paramore wannabe and by 17 I was back to the country bops and making weird videos like the one for "Chemistry".

At 18 I moved to London as an apprentice designer. I dragged my heels but mum said I should get out, see the world and get off her sofa. I was a fish out of water, desperate to escape the 9 to 5 so by 19 I was hanging about label row in South Kensington and some jarg “mentor” had me sending dozens of songs at a time - for what reason, I don't know. I pretended it didn’t cut me up when he stuffed his phat face with pizza and butchered me with “well, you’ve got the looks but you don’t have the songs”. I put out the album anyway, everyone was on board, it got its award, but I lost steam and couldn’t keep up with where it was going. I was just in a job I hated and thought I was crap.

Truth is my journey has never been smooth and I’ve had the wind taken out my sails in many spheres of life. All I ever wanted to do was share the songs that got me through, and it’s felt like I’ve been trying to catch up since 2015 (when I was 20).

I don’t do anything in half measures cause I never know how long I’ll get a good run for. Whether I spend 2+ years on a business plan with an ex-partner I move cities for, all for it to fall through and land back on my arse in my childhood bedroom... or go record and self-fund an album in Nashville, in a desperate attempt to catch up with myself, and it never releases... or I develop a stutter, lose my job, have a cancer scare, fail miserably in love, and then when I finally set some sad music free and my mum passes away just before I do it. That's probably why I’m as mad as I seem.

I’m just trying to give back my younger self all the things she wanted when life had other plans. I’ve gotten so used to creating and keeping it all to myself that this thing I’ve been working at for years is now terrifying me - it’s all peeping around the corner, ready to jump out. So, in any case, friends - watch this space. I’ve been bursting at the seams here so expect some kind of… explosion. ok? 🫣🌈