My tragi-joyous cortege floats along The cobweb-flowered aisle of my crypt A funeral lament my wedding march For death himself tonight will be my groom A greying shroud will make my marriage gown A tattered winding-sheet my bridal veil An iridiscent tiara webbed by spider feet A faded lily bouquet crumbles softly away All the hymns are solemn requiems Every prayer its very own last rite The solemn guests in black and veiled Wail their eerie dirge into the night To kiss the bride is the kiss of mortality The ashen confetti falls through the close air As the doomed woman's hands close around The thrown bouquet which marks her fate The wedding breakfast a funeral wake Leaden waltz danced mournful threnody The listless tango as danse macabre Giving extreme unction with blood-redwine Time now to rejoin my sombre carriage jet-black relic-adorned marriage hearse Spirit raven-plumed horses my transport My eldritch honeymoon of mourning made My bridal home a sombre sepulture a dusty casket makes my bridal bed winding sheets and shrouds my blackened trousseau welcome now within the world of the dead Widow-bride's embrace is all-consuming Lamentations cache my cunning caress Just one kiss is forever, forever fatal One look, your first and last and always mine Tonight your final fated consummation When dark rises triumphal over light Eternal promise of anticipation That first embrace will be the final knell

This is in effect a draft. This is a piece that I have been writing for the Life Writing part of my course, to tie in with an essay which I am writing on multiple selves and multiple truths in Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Jenny Diski. It still needs revision, but this is its first outing..... It is impossible to die of unhappiness. People in novels do it all the time, they fade away gracefully, maybe helped by a bit of galloping consumption. But in reality, however wretched and miserable you are, life goes on like an eternal curse. Morning after morning, the sun rises, you invariably wake up. You can try, you can lay in bed willing your heart to stop beating, your brain to stop thinking, wishing everything to disappear into a blissful inky nothingness, to become the darkness, to be yourself no more. Though your heart and mind are wrenched apart, though your emotional viscera are laid bare for the world to see and you can take no more, the body and mind keep on against your will. So, you cannot die of inaction. Simply willing yourself to is never going to be enough, you need to pull yourself free from the whirlpool of lassitude and do something about it. But even then, your psyche conspires against you. Whatever you do, it has to be final and complete. Either that or you still wake up, hideously scarred and disfigured, or a dribbling vegetable in a wheelchair, which isn't really going to cheer you up either. Dorothy Parker was right. You might as well live. Then you have the well-meaning friends. When you are curled up under the duvet for a week, wishing that it was dark all day as well, they try to 'cheer you up'. Nothing that they say or do makes you feel any better, in fact hearing them over the cacophony in your own head is bad enough. They buy you 'cheerful' clothes (which go in the bin), happy movies (ditto), and singalong CDs (ditto, but it pleases me to jump on them first). They still haven't cottoned on that miserable clothes and dark movies are what make me happy, even when I'm depressed. How does all of this start? As Freud would ask, what was your childhood like? Nothing out of the ordinary, would be the answer, only a marginally dysfunctional family when you fit it into the general scheme of things. I've had friends with major family meltdown who've ended up much less kooky than me. I always wished that I was really stupid though. As a 'clever' child, you always stand apart, you're marked out, singled out, not enough of this, not quite like that. So you never fit in, don't have the herd mentality of the pack. I always felt that if you were really dumb you might never notice all of this, that it might all pass over your head, that you would never feel any of that unhappiness. So there you are, the too-brainy geeky loner. That morbid girl in the corner reading a book. The friends you do have are the other misfits, the flotsam and jetsam, the too-tall, too-fat, too-thin, too-foreign, too-gay, too-poor, (in single or multiple combinations), and those like yourself, the just-too-plain-weird. Get used to it. That's going to carry on for the rest of your life. The more you are alone, the more being alone seems natural, the harder it is to relate to 'normality' and 'normal' people. Left to your own devices, normality is relative. After a while observing the world from your exclusion zone, you think that you are the most eminently sane person in the world. Other people are the mad ones, your truth is the only real truth. How would you be able to tell? What do you have to compare it with? Do you care anymore? If the 'normal' world won't have you in its' club, why would you want to be a member anyhow? The problem is that you are really not quite mad enough. You are conscious of the fact that you are losing the plot, but you walk the razor-blade edge between sanity and insanity. Nobody cares as long as you keep it to yourself. You can lie in bed for a week, lose a fortnight in desparation, but nobody really notices. If you suffer from the quiet internalised hell, no-one cares. If you laid on the floor screaming, or announced to the social worker that you were Queen Victoria, all hell would break loose, but keep it within yourself and you become invisible. Even if you ask for help, you're told that if you're sane enough to ask for it, you really don't need it. Sometimes you're even told that it's your life that's the problem. No psychiatrist will even offer to help with that. How do you get to this point? How do you let yourself get to this point? You don't of course, it creeps up on you until one day it seems to sucker on to your soul and never leaves you again. Like a dark invasive fog between you and the world, colouring your vision. It comes over you in waves, each wave more overwhelming until the last one knocks you flying. You can't feel it as such, because you are becoming more and more numb and distanced as time goes on. Eventually, you can't even summon up the tears to cry at the hopelessness of it all. They don't flow any more, even they have dried up. Yet still you continue, a shell of a girl, when even a smile would crack your carapace face from side to side. The worst thing about this, is nobody seems to notice that you are eaten away from the inside like a tree- or maybe they do and they just don't care. If they tapped you, you would shatter into a million tiny fragments. Eventually you descend into a numbness, a null void. Your own unhappiness winds round you like a shroud, an impermeable shroud, a winding sheet through which nothing can penetrate. Life, death, happiness, sorrow, everything just passes you by, stuck on your emotional bypass while life shuttles by. Nothing seems real, nothing can get through. It's like being buried alive in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, you can observe everything go on around you but you are no part of it and it is no part of you. Relegated to the fringes of life. As an adult ,the prejudices change again subtly. You are not only too weird, but many other things on top. You can add new insults to the list. You are now seen to be 'deep', 'complex', 'complicated' to add to your sins. Just when you think that you are half-way towards a functional relationship with a member of the opposite sex, they offer this up on a platter as a ready-made excuse for finishing it there and then. Of course you could try the drugs. They'll offer them to you at every point, and in these you have a great and glorious choice. There are the ones that turn you into a cast member from 'Return of the Living Dead'. They don't make anything any better, but as even walking is an effort, you wouldn't care anyway. There are those that make you sleep, I say sleep, but it's more like catatonia really. There are those that send you completely loco for a week or two (whereupon they decide that you might have a 'reaction' to them). Then there are those that slightly lift the veil, and fool you into thinking that this might just work. These are the most insidious of the lot. Everything's great for a few weeks, then you realise that you can't sleep. So they give you something to make you sleep. Then you can't relax without twitching, so they give you something for that. You become a walking talking pill-bottle, but as everyone cheerily says 'you look a lot better'. Then you begin to realise that you are losing yourself in all of this. you need a pill to wake up, a pill to go to bed, a pill to exist. Your personality is dying, it attacks you, not the cuckoo that has taken up permanent residence in your psyche. So you flush the lot down the lavatory, have even worse panic attacks for months, and start all over again. At this point, I'm sure that you're waiting for me to make it all better. Not for me, but for you, that is. You would love me to say that I'm all better now, that yesterday I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with. Or that I live in pastel pink and occupy a des-res thatched cottage in the country with my three gorgeous and gifted children and my perfect husband. Lived happily ever after. Ils se marierent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants. But it's a bit like an infection in some ways. It eats into your soul, once its there, you're never quite rid of it. It lurks, somewhere in a dark corner, waiting its moment to pounce. At its best it adds a bittersweet quality to even the happiest of moments, at its worst, poisons even the most innocent pleasures. You can visualise it as a black cloud, a seeping cancerous mist that goes everywhere. Although some parts of your life can function quite normally, the rest seems to end in a pile of emotional debris. You have to evolve ways of coping with it. You come up with complex stategies so that no-one notices. You become the most skilled actor in the game of life. Eventually there are two 'yous'. There is the everyday 'you' that is seen by the public, and then there is the same private 'you' that hears the chaos inside your head. On one side the acceptably slightly dippy side of lunacy, smiling even when your face aches, and on the other, the internal you, screaming wordlessly into the void, crying silently and tearlessly behind the mask. They function in tandem, depite all your best efforts. And when you try to write it down, it complicates further. Personality as jigsaw. There are then three yous. You white, you black, and you the writer. Not so much bipolar as tripolar. Of course you could move away, change languages, cultures. Then it gets even worse. You have six of you, a black, white, writer, one in each language in bilingual hell. Is there such a word as hexpolar?. It sounds oddly appropriate. The only answer is to know thyself and love thyselves. If not love, then at least tolerate thyself a little bit. Watch for the signs, know the triggers, avoid the situations. Learn to appreciate your self(ves). At least you'll never be bored, you can always entertain yourselves. If they think you are the weirdo in the corner? So what. No one will ever like everyone, and maybe you are an acquired taste. At least you'll never be alone, you always have yourself to fall back on. Smiling, smiling eternally, whilst crying behing the flimsy mask of 'normality'.

This was from a ten-minute writing exercise in class last week, about a pair of shoes......this kind of came out by accident, as we had just been reading some Plath....sorry Sylvia, but it's tribute, not parody. I had the idea of an elderly woman looking at her late husband's dancing shoes........ You do not do, black shoe, You no longer have a place, Lying like some empty beetle carapace, Dusty in the corner of the hall. You do not do, anymore, black shoe, Any of the things that you used to do, The air of the waltz a distant memory, The kisses that followed faded and gone. But I see you, see you, black shoe Yellowed and sepia in a silver surround On the feet that once you knew, shoe, So smiling, full of life and proud. O, he shone you so, black shoe, Like shards of mirror upon his feet, A reflection of those moonbeams, He drew down for me to meet. You're all I have, black shoe, An echo of a fading past, My tangoes lost to infinity My happiness, dissolving fast. You do not do, black shoe, You are missing a vital part, That which has gone, black shoe, And in doing so, torn me apart.

WHEN: Anytime February 2, 2006. WHERE: Your blog. WHY: To celebrate the Feast of Brigid, otherwise known as Imbolc. HOW: Select a poem you like - by a favourite poet or one of your own - to post to your blog on February 2. If you're going to do this, go to Reya's blog and let her know.Feel free to pass this invitation on to any and all bloggers.

White porcelaineous unbroken Delicate china-hued expanse Tender, inviting, unsullied undefiled by human hand All too perfect pristine temptress taunting, teasing her defloration prostituting her blessed purity courting bloody apotheosis Silken slicing shimmering blade Silvery lines give carmine trails Welling scarlet subdue the pain With knife I crucify again Garnet gems grown on ivory Sombre sanguine flowing flowering Snowy sanctitude crimson stained Sacrifice to salve the pain bloody tramlines going nowhere bloody gashes baring soul bloody pain for bloody pain a bloody mess a bloody gain Black nullity bids me to wed Black maelstrom inside my head Black oblivion beckoning Black tendrils wreath around my heart Insidious seducer draws me downwards Raven blackness eternal embrace Starless ceiling of dark obsidian Draws me into the darkest place Alabaster smothered incarnadine Ritual of mine is blood not wine Self-flaying ceremony of mine Though Oblivion my only divine Black mist, red blood, flesh frosted white I go willingly into that starless good night

Should have added to the post below that the Pagan Moot is upstairs at The Morecambe Hotel, Lord Street Morecambe, and starts at 8pm on Saturday.

TraditionalGoth and I are off to see the weird and wonderful King Uther Pendragon, self-proclaimed King, who apparently once gloried in the name of Timothy, speak, at the Morecambe Pagan Moot tomorrow. When we asked Nick and Wendy, in whose pub it takes place, what he was talking about, they admitted 'they haven't got a clue, but it should be entertaining'.

Hope it is.

Here's a weblink to find out more

http://www.warband.org/introduction/king_arthur.html

My friend Kyriaki in Paris sent me this picture.....just thought that it was very cute.