by tashmcgill | Jul 22, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
I’ve often gone through periods in my life of rising in the early morning or taking respite in the late afternoon to write with pen to page. Often these minutes are a way of emptying the endless-seeming thoughts in my head on to a page, captured where I have no fear of losing them. Recently my head is so full, I fear if I was to pick up the pen I would not be able to stop for days.
People sometimes ask me, the difference between the thoughts I publish in pixels here and the thoughts that remain private, locked in paper. How strange it is that pixels can now never let me down, but my most secret self lives in frail paper and ink. It could succumb to fire, water and age. Attacked by rats or if I was to fall into a moment of rage or despair I might tear them up. I’m writing those journals of my deepest self in the hopes by the time my mind is old; some lover, child or friend will find my true self remembered there.
Writing on paper leads me to silence; silence of the clammering head. Like listening to music without lyrics or tapping out a rhythm without melody; it makes a liminal but precious space. In that space I cannot speak, cannot write but all of myself reaches out into the Universe longing to be heard. I highly recommend you open this link to the beautiful music of my friend Derek Mount. I invite you to play it while you read the rest of this post. Yup, do it now. That’s it, there you go. This piece is called ‘You Have No Idea’ from his project Brique a Braq. Just give it a second. Breathe it in.
I imagine in these moments every one I ever loved somehow feels me in their spirit, without touching. That everyone I ever embraced feels me in their blood for a moment and all that is good or bad or wise or true in me hangs like moonlight on stars and in the dust of the Universe, on the breath of the Earth. Somehow in that moment, listening for each other in the great Silence and making a beautiful fingerprint in the world, both compass and constellation to navigate by.
Ten Thousand Million Atoms Deep
Shh and
listen to me now
really listen, beyond clammering head
eyes closed and all your atoms
stretched towards me
feel the electric hum of
my atoms reaching for yours
listen with your whole body
for what touches without touching
names without naming
that remarkable thing within you.
Forgive me the frailty of language,
my incompetent hand, hip and tongue stutter –
were I trying to convey words
on a page my fingers would fly
instead my lips frozen without breath
but listen to me now, straining towards you –
remarkable you.
I concluded there is nothing to say –
but my longing is you to hear me, wholly myself
in the dust of the Universe
giddy amongst inverting stars and moon we share
in the air and blood of me
ten thousand million atoms deep
wherever you are, say without speaking
shh and listen to me now.
by tashmcgill | Jun 24, 2015 | Poems, Relationships
I once said to someone that writing requires an ability to recall a moment, a feeling, a person in an instant. To re-enter the past and all we experienced there, then step back into the present. Thus, it is possible to live with much experience and emotion close to the surface of your skin yet not live trapped in the past.
It’s muscle memory; the ability to recall, interpret and re-create those moments into new moments. It requires some remembering and some deliberate forgetting.
I saw a man in the corner of my eye the other day who may or may not have been worth remembering or forgetting but I walked quickly away; without giving myself the chance to change my mind. I think now, in reflection, he is better to be forgot.
At the crosswalk I chose to not look behind me although I was certain I could see his shadow catching up.
Regardless of what we wish for; it’s remembering that happens so fast and forgetting that takes so long.
This was born on an airport concourse, while I was travelling forward. I stopped and breathed and this time, I was not caught.
i.
Remember is quicker than Forget
on the track of a mind.
You are easy
to forget to think about
if I walk quickly in a forward direction
if I do not look back
– I do not think to think about you.
I do not write you down, I do not imagine words to shape you
Out of the nothing, back to the mind.
I do not remember to make you from memory, I would not remember to forget.
I leave nothing in memoriam, but everything is left behind regardless; in nothing-ness.
But – if I stop or pause,
if catching my breath on an airport concourse
at a train station;
driven but not driving and left to wonder
interrupted by a red light –
if I do not propel myself forward from you
in every moment unceasing;
then Remember is quicker than Forget – and catches up to me.
I encounter the memory of you
who taps me on the shoulder,
I collide with you, the thought and thinking of you.
Remember is so quick, Forget so slow.
by tashmcgill | Jan 27, 2015 | Poems
Occasionally there is an idea that can only be expressed in sentences and phrases that run on and over each other in extraordinary syntax.
They leap out as fragments, then couplets until finally you have a stanza and a verse. This poem, in three parts, is about being alone and not alone.
i.
Some people will tell you to listen
Listen and learn from your own body.
It’s good advice, to master your body, learn it.
But no one says also, here is a warning –
And a notebook to write it down because –
if you listen
to your body
You will hear everything in
one voice but a thousand sounds, plucks, scrapes, clicks and thunders.
The body makes a dozen slow, deep, thundering sounds.
Then the bzzt of a hair standing on end
The stubborn grip of the womb
moaning in protest before letting go
each month. The delicate, tiny sounds that only you can know.
The pop of hidden bones
in the ankle you rolled
Age 14, before you knew what it was like to listen.
ii.
Now you hear the wind brushing your skin;
the ice crack of goose bumps rising in response
– you think ‘I might survive on the wind’s caress’.
So now you believe you are at one with the night air silence,
and Light touches you from the moon, distant and cold.
You are bathed in mist coming off the sea
into the valley of peat and stone,
A dozen hands come close but cannot hold
– you think ‘I might remained unanchored here.’
You and your body, in a long communion.
Listening and talking together.
Sighing, your body does not sigh but a kind of hum dimishes
Slowly, like the sky sinking to earth.
iii.
Then the wind turns and grows warm,
after a long silence; in a moment I am not alone.
I feel my body’s voice rise again.
The whoosh of hidden skin pulling tight,
Calling my senses to attention.
There is the beat and throb of my pulse
Rising to match another,
Blood pushing blood.
Coming into tune for a cadence
pores humming in trumpet song,
A thousand tiny pressure valves released.
I make no noise but hear
my fingertips sigh gently as they land on
other skin, burning, singing.
Laughing aloud, saying,
‘No, no, I cannot be alone.’
I have learned my body sings
and I will let it.
by tashmcgill | Jan 2, 2015 | Poems, Prose & Poetry
I’m trying to enter this year full of positivity, good intentions and motivation to achieve some big goals. I’ve been working hard on this posture since December. So, it was challenging to come home on New Years Day to discover my second-most valuable writing tools had been stolen.
My Macbook Pro, which I use to write, edit and publish – not to mention many other day-to-day tasks. Hundreds of documents, ideas, InDesign files and otherwise. Thankfully 95% of that work is backed up in the cloud. But replacing the tools will be expensive and frustrating. It won’t happen right away.
The second, my iPad, is one of the main resources I use daily to feed my brain. I use it primarily to read and digest news articles, online magazines and books. I’m feeling teary about the bookmarks I’ve likely lost. Ugh. Still – they are only words and the good ones stick, right?
The most important writing tools – my hands, pens, journals and my mind, they are all fine. Really. I am safe, so are my housemates. Nothing else was taken, we believe they were interrupted. I know they are unlikely to return in the short-term, but there is still a moment of uncertainty. There will be new bolts on the doors and windows. I have no desire to repeat previous self-defence endeavours, regardless of my courage or capability. I will be fine, but something has been stolen from me. I can only hope that some good comes of this moment.
I am grateful for what was left untouched – my precious journals and poetry books, a ring, my guitars. So – what else is there to do but write? What was really stolen? Words. About 13,500 of them by my count – the article ideas and about a chapter of the novel I’ve been working on for such a long time. Just what wasn’t caught in the latest backup.
So here’s some words about the words that were taken.
Stolen.
It takes such a long time to drag them out,
the good ones, carefully sculpted sentences.
As if I carried them in womb, once born cord must be cut –
my ideas become their own, independent creatures.
So the labour is hard, to wrestle these thoughts from my body
and give them up into the world.
Now harder still, the wrestling is done but no life comes.
Just a space where words once were but won’t be seen, not as they intended to be born.
I’ll do the birthing, call it a born-again, always now wondering
what if, what could have been?
What sentence that on which the story once hung so sweet?
Which words of love and truth now miss their true intent?
That turn of phrase so perfect, flickers at the edge of memory –
so I must give you up, stolen moment, stolen thought.
To do it all again makes my muscles ache, my mind grows heavy.
I will whisper, only the good ones stick.
by tashmcgill | Dec 29, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Monologue
I was standing at the kitchen bench, knife in hand and a slab of ham in front of me.
‘This is what you do,’ I thought to myself. Maybe it was the coffee, maybe it was the Mimosa. It seemed like a thought that came from nowhere, yet was profound in the moment it appeared to me.
It was a thought as visual as it was constructed of nouns and verbs.
‘You slice away at the meat of life until you hit the bone.’
Sometimes holding a pen, metaphorical or otherwise) feels like holding a knife at the throat of someone you love.
Perhaps that’s why writers drink: we need the courage that comes with loosening the inhibitions, the fear, the risk.
The virtues of public and private decency compete like never before in this digital age. When anyone can publish, there is no subtle observational art in how writers write. We can publish at a moment’s notice and therefore it is as easy to assume that all observations are those of our closest acquaintance. And often it is.
There’s the truth of it – sometimes I do not write about you, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I cut away at the flesh of our very real, everyday lives until I hit the bone. Then, even then, sometimes I am tempted not to stop but to continue carving until I hit the marrow.
Then , once I have hit the bone and passed through to the marrow – I hope that I have struck the core of it.
I want my words to cut to the core of who we are, to the very deepest and sacred parts of us. I want us to be challenged. I am challenged when I think it and even more so to write these thoughts in ways sharp enough to penetrate but thoughtful enough that my good intentions are clear.
Sometimes when I feel my words are like the knife at your throat, I think about stopping, holding back. But these words ring in my ear ..
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” – Anaïs Nin
I do not write to hurt you, rather to peel you back. To give you permission to live more exposed, more real, more true. To accept you as you are and as I am, all flaws exposed and not hidden. I write to carve you out, to tease you out until you have no choice but to show yourself unbound to the world.
Whatever those ideas of identity, belief, value, truth, sex, sensuality, spirituality and ambition are – I hope to use my words to bring them to life in you, willing you to come into the light. I want to know you. I want to experience you in the same fullness I offer myself to you.
As much as I am trying to carve you out, to really see you – I am exposing my own marrow and hoping you see me.
