Discourse On Modern Living

1. Fire is not a friend

2. Nightly dose of nitrous oxide, nicely, icily, into my lungs

3. Virginity is lost in a park

4. Nervous in churches

5. Things always already over or ending.

6. Supermarkets are comforting

7. Smog is the new rain

8. The absolute minimum all the time

9. There are too many questions, there are too many sirens, there are too many illnesses

10. I discover, I devour, I desire, I discover, I devour, I desire

11. 'Is it real or is it Memorex?'

12. Matthew Broderick in War Games is the ideal man

13. You kiss like a washing machine

14. The culture of smoke, the culture of water, the culture of mud

15. 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism'

16. There are too many quotations, there are too many sciences, there are too many revisions

17. Discontent, dissent, descent

18. Disc content, assent, ascent

19. Cravings

20. Fridge noises

1. Donna Summer- State of Independence

2. Four Tet- Angel Echoes

3. Cluster- Fur Luise

Witches

I asked him, Please remove your straw from my milkshake, your strawberry froth will ruin my fur coat.

He asked if I had carried on acting and playing the violin since we last spoke.

I told him No, no way. Not since I auditioned for Tamora.

Theatre was boring anyway, ever since all those overcast afternoons in primary school, putting together thorny crowns for the prop department. It wasn't a department at all. It was that woman with the terrible neuralgia whose son died in the faraway country. Is she dead now? No one told me what neuralgia was. Someone said it was like the cow illness only longer. I found the condition in a red library encyclopaedia and there was a picture of a neuralgic patient: he had lightning striking his face and he was screaming and he was screaming until the encyclopaedia thudded shut.

A splotch of milkshake kisses fake fur.

Violin? He prompted, rustling through some broken biscuits.

Calluses, I said. Each finger like a winter branch.

I asked about all the afternoons we had spent holding hands by the river, all that tar and fire and sickly sun and nights with sore skin on our lips. He said we wasted them. I didn't say Yes, we did. He was always scared of the river anyway. He was frightened of falling. When we went to the river it never looked particularly strong. The last thing to drown in that river was a witch.

Whatever happened to witches? They probably still exist but we are looking in the wrong places. Where would witches live today?

There, he drew.

Slow afternoon light.

Christian Marclay in 'Ghost (I Don't Live Today)'. No copyright infringement intended.

Fosterchildren

A sad midwinter afternoon... frost scrawled all over the windows as we do a dance to a sonata as delicate as children's hands, the gradual oranging of the afternoon, and the slow construction of a sickly moon (that wasn't meant to rhyme).

Once, when we were kittens, me and Hazel were told to paint. The teacher is a ghost now, but she said to paint 'home' What does home look like, she said.

(This is the only way I can write.) What colour is home? And we both drew anonymous buildings like factories, like churches, like prisons, like offices in thick smoggy grey and licked our fingers because that made the clouds more life-like.

Our bodies later found in empty baths. Sophie playing piano in a half-empty room for an asleep audience. Out in the woods in a world full of rain... dense greenery spangling over my eyes like (I don't know how to finish this bit) dense greenery scattered over my eyes exploding here like a dirty heap of stars. When I was younger I thought it was pronounced frosterchild and now I find this very difficult to say. All the other children, like cats, prowling.

My mattress, muddy, on the kerb.

Two accidental orphans and a sonata like water down the plug hole.

(I cut this out, I black this out, I forget this)

1. John Cage- Music for Marcel Duchamp

2. Nico- Ari's Song

3. Hood- In Iron Light

Photograph of Kim Gordon onstange in Holland in 1991. No copyright infringement intended.