The desire to express ourselves bubbles up over the edges, it is not always a need to be understood, just a need to get it all down. When the words don’t come I move to paint or pencil but it’s not the same. I draw a picture of my wrist bleeding. I write about self injury. I cut, tentatively.

All three feel like a kind of art. More horror in the image, so seeped in intent. Poems are slippery, the meaning constantly wriggling free so that the reader feels something close to the sententia, the thought-feeling, but cannot know it. Paintings don’t speak to me like poems do. Poems can break the heart again and again and you can carry them with you, learnt in that broken heart. A salve worn against the world, or with it, to better understand.

Ut pictura poesis

I have the hunger buzz right now. It comforts me. My blood sugar has settled a little, or more precisely, my body has realised that I’m sending it back to a state of semi-starvation and has compensated.

People tell me I’m looking better. Each time they do a little fish hook of doubt digs in: Fatter, fatter, fatter. I am walking around with all my little fish hooks of doubt collected from a look, a word, a nothing substantial and I am thinking: I have to do something about this. I will shed the hooks like stones, pound by pound. I want to be clean again, no fleshy hooks, no fat.

And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name

by John Ashbery

You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
/…/

… if only for the sake

Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you

For other centers of communication…