Pool (from memory)

First, learn to float, thin and mobile, become agile. Want water. Full of imperatives. No photos, child protection. Bounce, smiling, to your father.

Counting her visible ribs, playing them like a glockenspiel in my head, hollow, marrow sucked out.

El ano pasado, flashes of Spanish, I understand easily.

Aggressive front crawlers with flawed technique draw grumbles from surrounding bathers. Unwritten rules are being broken.

Old ladies with their hair pinned up, gossip & glide, gossip & glide.

Many shapes: compressed curves, scrambled edges, widths. It is good to see all these bodies. Still people try to say: this is me, you can tell by my sunglasses, by my gait and by who I'm with. Today I love this.

No longer longing for uniformity. Be full and multiply. Adorn yourself. Exclaim. No hate today.

Flesh spreads white and molten, careless.

Stripes florals polkas blocks florals polkas blocks stripes polkas florals blocks stripes.

Black and red ants gathering.

Colour and light, cool water, coffee with ice.

Luc Tuymans: The Swimming Pool, 1989

Joni Mitchell on the relationship between drawing and songwriting

(Irritatingly the piece she's talking about is uncopyable, go here to see it.)

At this time, the way I laid color to outline an existing line was very similar to what I was doing musically. When I recorded a song I would play and sing at the same time, which I would say represents the black line, then I would take two or three words and stack one or two harmonies to them. One harmony would be like running a band of color and two harmonies would be like running two bands of color along the black line. These drawings have a lot of space and at that time, as I say, I was just recording voice and guitar, which is by nature a lot of space. As I became more and more color conscious and added more and more lines of colors in my drawings I seemed to crave it musically too. So, aesthetically, with music and drawing, I was intuitively concerned with similar problems.

from StarArt book

Slob

She is self conscious, she walks without moving her arms, sucking her stomach in when she laughs. Her legs do not seem to move from her hips. When she wakes up she looks at the pillow to see how much eyeliner has been lost, she reapplies and puts her bra on under her pyjamas then comes down to breakfast. I am dishevelled and unsupported, my home hair cut feels suddenly obscene, an affront to something I do not understand. She winces when I paint over chipped nail polish.

Suffolk

I find an apple in my bag. Everything is simple. Love is ordinary and good and engraved onto benches and plaques along the pier. The sky’s so blue I could puke. Time is not a source of worry. Nor is age or tooth decay. Nothing matters. Only water and stones, birds and minimal shelter, trees and sea. The air smells of lunch. K is quiet and calm, but dangerous like a razored Halloween apple. Clouds brew and blacken, priming for rain. The sea will rage. I will read nothing into it. I’ll eat my apple and go inside where I will do something until I want to do something else. 

Reading

from Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son (1992)

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.


from Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941)

There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad on its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round - a monstrous inversion. So, raising his foot, he stamped on them. The mass crushed and slithered. The white canvas on his tennis shoes was bloodstained and sticky. But it was action. Action relieved him. He strode to the Barn, with blood on his shoes.

Early

There is time. Like any other. Before the others have woken. Before the postman has come. Before the sun proclaims itself. It is as though I have lifted up a rock and found a wealth of crawling insects, slithering with life, teeming. Existing regardless, existing in the dark, existing under a rock. Where I thought there was no space are whole systems of living. Even in the darkest places.

Train

In the recesses of the city pigeons cast their shadows like spells.

Liquid ball of orange sun spreads the sky light pink and wild as fuscias. Reflects off tower block windows. Someone opens one and there is a great flash, reverberating like an earthquake, like an echo - a neighbourhood mystery.

Girl with mean scraped back hair reads her Kindle. She has bright orange earplugs stuffed in her ears. The only colour in her humourless outfit. Black undermined by neon. She doesn't want to hear anyone breathe. I imagine her weighing her food out before cooking it. She will warn her children against potatoes. Hopefully they will be fat and shiny to spite her.

The Bussey Building houses hundreds of secrets, half visible through smashed windows. Red light bulbs, cork boards, evangelists and artists inside. Oh come all ye faithful. Believers in line, shade, god and hell.

Train moves on. Sun sets. Soft light. Same Ikea cutlery holder on every single kitchen windowsill. Stations now the homes of businesses not people. Transparent bin liners distorting with waste. Allotments spread patchwork-like over sudden hills. Tiny scrap of space but deep as can be.