Foundling Vibes

On writing, queerness, freedom, art

  • My breath

    My breath is like the oldest language I have known, the oldest language ever spoken the oldest I have managed to break and share with those I’ve touched like daily bread it fills me up it speaks its sullen tones through me and soothes the soft dulcet cries of the children I’ll never have. 

    It’s the lost language I inherited from all my mothers, all those mothers I’ve never known and all those brothers who I never saw die, whose funerals I never attended, thanking god you never knew them all those brothers I never lost. All that heartache I never truly felt, whose echoes are but numbing tenor calls, their gospel choirs sounding out the ebbing of my forebears’ brittle bones.

    And when it sings again its subtle song, a lullaby to bring me further still to rest and weep with tears of joy, I cannot help but ache.

  • ER

    No, I am not in the emergency room. I’m fine. This is just to say that my poetry will appear in Erotic Review magazine this month. It will be on the shelves tomorrow, and you will be able to get your lovely hands on it soon. I am thrilled to be in such an inventive, beautiful and thoughtful publication, and bursting with pride to be appearing alongside such wonderful writers in issue 4, where the theme is art and desire.

  • He sold me a book

    He sold me this book, which we read while sitting outside a cafe,

     the same sentence over and over again.

    The prophet Judith Butler says “I have to be affected to say ‘I’ at all.” 

    ‘I’ is a conversation between the world and the wanderer. The very thing we substitute for our most natural of names, implies the need for description, the need to be seen, the need to be heard, the need to be understood. 

    But come, listen children, listen close, I need to have been “affected”, I need to be influenced, to be moved to describe. I need to be seen already to want this description, to beg, to desire this knowledge of myself, to relate to another the feeling of what it means to be “me”. My description is because I already know what it is to describe, I need to be seen to want to be seen further, to describe myself. 

    My desire to describe is a desire to continue, a memory. Like the touch we crave only from remembering. Such beauty in so simple a letter, a mark on the page. A connection in a mere sound, a mere diphthong, making one of two disparate sounds.

    “You cannot build the ancient world. It is now but an echo, and you must listen for its song.” 

    We inherit through touch. My skin received it, my feet feet tap it out when alone, or happy, or contented, or melancholy, as if the echoes of the past reverberate through a body, as they reverberate through a city, remembering itself, and bringing back life to old buildings, forgotten, but not abandoned.

    We are legion. 

    Observation is my object.

  • Lenses and mirrors

    An empty photograph in my hand, the lens pointed at a monument - but too low, the horizon too high in the frame, the monument barely visible, the composition too empty,
 
no focus, 
no sound, 
no rhythm.
 
An old handbook of the city, 
Its pages coloured in, 
Some illegible hand,
Scribbled in the margins,
Tales of a yesterplace, long since lost.

Graffiti in a bathroom stall,
Hampstead Heath circled,
King’s Road marked,
Soho skewered with an arrow.
In the blank spaces, 
Memories, landscapes of                ,
Imagined,

  • If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?

    A crop top and loose fitting linen shirt over some pastel pink shorts. That’s the kind of vibe to go for I think.

  • An introduction, of sorts

    The song begins again, just as softly as it started, though the melody feels strange, as if something, an instrument, was missing. The melody rings hollow, like a film whose shots are out of sequence, or a painting without the colour red, or a life without the colour green.

    I have never felt comfortable beginning at the beginning. The beginning is never where I begin, indeed, I am never sure where things truly begin. Essays have beginnings, but often the meat of the essay requires some cultural understanding in order to be able to interpret its true meaning, and there is required some level of knowledge, at the very least the ability to read which, temporally, and culturally is no given thing. Stories may have beginnings, but one may always ask, what came before a story. It is not always wise to ask this, as it has, to an arguable extent, led to the seemingly interminable number of prequels, which seek to understand, truly understand, what happened before. I personally do not need to understand what happened before. I am perfectly happy if a story begins somewhere in the middle, and if it needs to provide me with context, it should do so later on. Flashbacks are not gimmicky, not indeed are they mere story devices, they are part of a seemingly endless process of storytelling becoming more and more like memory as every day passes. When you smell a flower, and it reminds you of a flower you smelled in Kew Gardens on a date three years ago, or of the botanical gardens when you went there to read a book several months ago, are you not also viscerally transported. Stories are ways of packaging information, and to tell one in a linear fashion, beginning at the beginning, and not in the middle, or indeed at the end, strikes me as the least human thing imaginable.

    The Constant, a Lost episode, written and released in 2008 – just after the Writer’s Strike, an eerie coincidence that it should enter my mind now – I re-watched at the end of last week as part of my attempt to inspire me to write a truly heart-wrenching love story, is also a story about time travel. It’s a story of love connecting two people across a vast distance, and the way that love can remind someone of who they once were, returning them to the present moment. I remember first watching the episode when I was seventeen, a few months before I came out, and being profoundly affected by it, because of its nostalgic utopianism. It’s an incredibly well written script, dextrously plotted, and almost watertight, as far as a time travel episode goes.

    Desmond, one of the principal characters in the series finds his consciousness suddenly dislodged from the present moment, returning him to 1996, eight years before the events of the main storyline, where he travels to and lands on a boat which is mysteriously anchored off the shore of the Island he had been stranded on for three years. As a result of this unsticking he can no longer recognise his friend Sayid in the present, and finds himself disoriented in the past too. He finds himself blanking out, one moment in the present blending into another in the past. In the present he has to find a way to anchor his mind, using a constant, an idea given to him by a physicist obsessed with exactly the form of time travel he is undergoing. This is the constant of the episode, a connecting point from one time to the next. There is one problem with this: in 1996, he’s broken up with his girlfriend Penny and joined the army in a bizarre attempt to begin himself on the journey of becoming a great man. She, therefore wants nothing to do with him. I can’t really say I blame her, much as I love Desmond as character. Undeterred and aware his life may depend on getting in contact with her, he sets himself the task of trying to find out how to get in contact, finding her father in an auction house and getting her address. Only in science fiction would this seem remotely fie when he eventually does, there is a scene where he manages to get her phone number so he can call her from the present. The most beautiful scene in the entirety of the series then occurs, where he gets through to her on Christmas Eve, and they have a tearful reunion, and pledge to find each other.

    At that time, I hadn’t experienced true love, in 2012, but some ten years later, watching the same scene back, it strikes a different chord. It’s hard to say how much it affected me to watch this, but I remember I wrote a story for my master’s thesis about the redeeming power of love, and the ways in which human connection, across time and space, can bring someone back to who they once were. It doesn’t even matter to me that they’re a heterosexual couple, or indeed that Desmond going into the army is such an incredibly masculine thing to do that it sets my teeth on edge just thinking about it. What matters to me now is the feeling of loving someone so much that simply being reminded of how much that person cares about you can bring you back to the moment, can remind you of yourself. So that you remember your friend’s name to thank them for helping you. Time and love are intertwined for all of us. Love will bring us back.