I’m moving to London

I’m going to live in London for a while. I spontaneously applied for a two year UK visa and it was approved surprisingly quickly and I booked a flight to London for July and then I resigned from my job. I’ve been in a daze for weeks, too tired to function. Thinking about acceptance, selfishness, sacrifice, serendipity, foolishness, fate, ambition, self-awareness. Feel like walls are closing in on me but also collapsing at the same time. Whatever happens was always inevitable. I’ve never had access to a lot of physical space to make and store work and now that I’m only able to take a small amount of things with me to London I have had to adjust things even further until I leave. I’ve been making art works with small pieces of paper and in my imagination. I’m writing a lot, typing and writing words on paper. I want to write on huge pieces of paper but I’m keeping them small for now. Years ago when something very bad happened to me, I soothed myself with the mantra: “if very bad things can happen to me unexpectedly, then very good things can happen to me unexpectedly too.” Things are always moving around, changing, I barely recognise myself but there is also no other way that things could have been.

loaded questions on Instagram

poems written in 2023

I made a page on my website with every poem I wrote in 2023. In 2023 I wrote a poem every day of the year, similar to Sermon on the Body, except Sermon was a minimum of one sentence written per day for one year and those sentences now make up what I mostly view as one poem. The poems written in 2023 are 365 separate poems with their own titles. Here are a few that stood out to me when I was reading back over them as I moved them to my website:

bby
melting days in a humid house
i discover misplaced earrings in a tiny handbag
moisturise my entire damp body,,
imbalance my chemistry with a citrus perfume
lying naked on my bed i call the tax department
little droplets of guilt when i remember
i am creating my own discomfort
steam vegetables, sell my clothes
wipe dust from a tile with my finger
i am just a girl!!

Ask me anything
does her body contribute
what is she if she has nothing left at all
she floats above us, above me, at least

The Park
assign you to your City
deliver you there, says god
now these are the places you will know
hear that bird fall with a thump from a tree
How long am i here
can i extract a little peace
can I hold extra fruits in my hands
can I be bound to you with red ribbon, forever.

Writing Sermon on the Body was an exercise in forcing myself to create some small proof of my existence each day for a year during a very hard time. Writing the 365 2023 poems was gruelling at times but the discipline was worthwhile. I write poems quickly and intuitively. I edit them quickly and intuitively. I like to allow grammatical incorrectness and I type quickly so there is often punctuation that is quite awkward which I will either keep or leave in depending on how I feel. I edit by feeling. If I try too hard to analyse my decisions when editing a poem, I usually won’t like the way it turns out. I like using poetry as a form of cryptic diary keeping, I can look back at a lot of these poems and remember exactly what inspired them.