Confused By Everything

Glancing down your Twitter feed

you’re as mental now as you were then.

It’s constantly the same old shit,

it only takes four days to loop round again.

So self-mythologising: you’re the Earth

and everyone else orbits like the moon,

but naw, you’re a fucking carousel

and I couldn’t get off too soon.

I am my own fleeting thought,

the abstract picture in the back

of my own brain. I am the final

third of my final pint, the two

paracetamol and the glass of water

I down before bed. I am the books

I don’t finish and the songs I turn

off halfway through. I am more the

poems I don’t write than the poems

I do. I am my own fleeting thought.

I am more the future I never had

than the experiences I did. I am Tuesday,

not Monday. September, not May.

I am wrestling DVDs and broken

calculators. I am the doors I open and

the windows I close. I am less manufactured

than I am an accidental occurrence. I am

my own fleeting thought.

Man, it’s really hard to get a girl who you’ve been told is gay to confirm whether or not she’s a lesbian without directly asking.

Because, like, if it turns out she’s not I’d ask her out some time, but directly asking if someone is attracted to men or women or both seems rude somehow.

fucking yawn

NB: This is a very small snippet of an idea. Calling it a night, but this is as far as I got.

Empty. Mostly empty. Just her. Jess and the bar staff. Jess, the bar staff, and a few others.

Three young guys. She recognises them. Kind of. They were here two weeks ago. Not last week though. She wonders where they were last week. Jess picks her drink off the bar. Vodka and lemonade. She scoops the ice cubes out with her fingers. Places them on the bar. They’re already half-melted. Pooling into water. The water evaporating into gas. Three states of being. She wonders: how many states of being are there? She disregards and walks away from the bar.

The club is cold. Draughty. The cave walls sweat anyway. The shelves, free of empties, already start to get sticky with condensation. Jess runs her fingers along their edges as she walks past. Observes with her touch. Taking it in. She is still learning. She has been here every Tuesday night since she turned 18. So this is her third night.

Jess stops at the top of the steps and looks down onto the middle dance floor. The three guys skank beneath her. Less Than Jake. Less than nothing. More than everything. On the stage, the DJ fidgets with his laptop. Secure in his importance. Godly on his perch. The DJ’s girlfriend stands next to him, playing with her signal-less phone. Bored already(/not yet entertained?). Jess moves on. Slowly, she negotiates the stairs and moves across the floor. Walks past the boys and, with all her self-discipline, doesn’t look to see if they’re looking and seeing. She makes for the tunnel through to the main bar and silently prays she doesn’t slip on the tiles as she heads up the narrow passage.

Upright, she emerges, birthed into the fresher air of the quieter room. There’s no-one there but the bar staff who lazily lounge near their liquor, pretending to clean. In reality they just banter with one another, uproariously laughing at their in-jokes or, more likely, bitching about absent colleagues. All Jess hears is the laughter. Immediately she becomes self-conscious, paranoid of every sound. You’re not the friend you won’t miss anyhow…. Less Than Jake fades out as she crosses the bar and heads up the second passageway to the second dance floor.