Words by Steve Woods
At first, I just wanted to feel something. Just wanted escape, if only for a moment.
That’s why I met up with Squid. He was a user, everyone could tell. He had changed in the last year, his vocabulary exploding. Strange words would form in his mouth like sour candy, surprising him even as they danced out over his tongue. Sometimes he would speak in odd rhythms, lyrical and airy, or quick and punchy. Dead giveaways.
We called him Squid as kids—as in Squidward—because he had a big ole drooper of a nose. I felt a bit guilty about it, seeing him again now that we were older. Not that he had ever seemed to care about the name. Actually, more people seemed to know him by Squid than his real name.
‘It’s like experiencing life in 4K,’ Squid said, pulling something out of his pocket. We were off the main streets, in a graffiti-splashed alley. ‘A lil somethin’ to sing to the soul.’
A slip of paper in a plastic baggy. Thin and delicate, Squid held it lightly in his fingers. Words were written on the paper, arranged in half sentences.
‘Pure fuckin’ poetry,’ Squid said, opening the bag and pulling out the paper by the edges, careful not to let the letters absorb into his skin. ‘Here, go ahead.’
I took the paper by an edge and pressed it into the skin of my forearm.
Paper to skin and sinking in. The words flowing into my bloodstream. It hit like the Netflix intro. Swoosh. A rush of blood to the head.
‘Fuck,’ I said, and had to sit down. Squid just laughed.
The words were inside me. Running up and down my skin, following a track, on rails, each word flowing into the next. And they spoke, right into my ears, into my brain, rippling over the wrinkles like a rollercoaster riding a soundwave.
I could smell the roses red. The violet blues. The emotion behind them. Tears formed in my eyes from that orgasm of language. Tingles up the back of my neck with a lick like ice, goosebumps pimpling.
And then it eased off. Slowed plus reverb.
‘How’s it feel?’ Squid asked, kneeling down, eyes bright in the dark orange light of the alley.
‘It feels like music,’ I said, my chest tight, throat restricted. I felt like I might let out a sob at any second.
I got deep. Finger snapping deep. Me and Squid, we’d wait around Right Bank, a little alley where our favourite poet, Bet, printed out her stuff.
‘Got the new shit, fresh off the printer,’ Squid said, slapping the piece of paper onto his forehead. He claimed it hit harder. I pressed mine into my chest, because the ink took several days to fade and, unlike Squid, I didn’t want people to know what I was into.
A word rush which turned into a jumbled sentence crush. It hit all wrong, like a song without a beat. Furry on the tongue. It didn’t satisfy, and lingered in the back of the throat like a cough.
‘I don’t know about this,’ I said. ‘I don’t get it. It feels weird.’
‘Nah it’s supposed to be like that, it’s prose poetry. Don’t think too much about it. Just let it settle.’
‘Nah, this shit is just words.’
‘And food is just chemicals, that doesn’t mean KFC doesn’t slap.’
‘True.’ I took a beat. Focusing on the way the words crashed into each other in a constant stream. ‘You know, I’ve never really understood that.’
‘What?’
‘Like, if food is just chemicals, how come we can’t like, mix milk with pineapple and make arsenic or something? All the chemical reactions in food only ever seem to make things thicker, tastier, or fizzier.’
‘Feeling pretty fizzy right now actually,’ Squid said, sitting down on the brick stairs.
I had a headache. Words in my head, running their same looping tracks. It was a rush of noise, loud enough to drown out conscious thought. But it did nothing to itch my artistic desire.
I needed to stimulate. Simulate. Emotionally satiate.
I wanted it to make me scream. Make me cry. Make me want to die.
Bet had been giving us more and more experimental shit.
‘I call this one the Cycle,’ she said, handing us each a piece of paper with the words formatted into the shape of a half moon.
‘I preferred what you gave us last week. Acrostic poetry just hits all the buttons in my brain,’ Squid said.
I hesitated, holding the poem on the ends of my fingers, the thin paper starting to dissolve into my fingertips. ‘Do you ever feel them still inside you?’ I asked them. ‘The words, I mean. Bouncing around your head, like they’re trying to burrow into your DNA and rearrange all the letters of your genes into words.’
‘Nah bro,’ Squid said.
It had stopped satisfying. The emotions had been wrung dry. It was all just paper and ink. Drawings on a page.
I needed the old stuff. Bet’s early poetry. The stuff with rhyme and meter and a delicate flow of sustained emotion. It didn’t even matter what the emotion was, I just wanted to feel it.
‘I’m sick of this shit,’ I said, pushing away Bet’s offerings.
‘What’s wrong with it? I haven’t had any complaints.’
‘You must have some of your old stuff still around? You know, the stuff that’s like a song, and all wrapped up in a feeling, or a moment.’
‘I’m done with that.’
‘But I don’t feel the words.’
‘Eh?’
‘In your new stuff. I don’t feel the words.’
‘That’s not a thing, they’re—’
‘They’re just fucking letters! They’re just letters in an order. They don’t even mean anything anymore. I need the raw shit, the stuff that makes you feel the soul behind the sentences.’
Bet’s mouth thinned into a line. ‘What makes you think that exists?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m a poet, I make this shit. This is all there is. It’s only representation, it’s not real.’
‘Nah. There has to be a source. There’s too much meaning in—’
‘When does real life ever have meaning? Think about it. We’re the ones who give it meaning. No, I give it meaning. That’s my fucking job, to make people feel as though there’s meaning. Order to a collection of random words.’
‘But—’
‘Look, if mine’s not good enough for you, then fuck off and make your own.’
Bet was right. If I wanted to find the magic, I would have to make it myself.
Getting fired from my job helped. I suddenly had time to make my own inks and paper. I built my own printer. It took days to get the recipes right, for the paper to sink in and the words to sing smooth and confident rather than all wobbly and hesitant.
I wrote my own poetry. Words tangling together, all rhythm and rhyme, meaning and meter. I spent all my time labouring over the keys, assembling letters into words, and words into sentences. Pouring myself into the paper.
And there were moments when the emotion actually carried through, maybe one out of every ten. A lick of the real thing. But even that still felt fake. Thin. Not representation, more like cheap imitation. Layers of artifice, rather than art.
‘Damn dude,’ Squid said, trying my poetry for the first time.
I just shook my head. ‘I can’t do it. I keep trying, keep putting all this thought and effort into everything I make, but it never hits right. Never feels like the real thing.’
My hands were balled up. Head hanging.
‘Nah man, this is art. This is art man. It sure feels real to me,’ Squid said, sniffing loudly through his nostrils. I looked over at him and saw tears swimming on his eyelids.
It took me some time to process that. Squid, moved to tears by lyrical lies. It made me sick. Made me think back to my first time trying a poem, when I had teared up myself. I had felt the same way.
‘I think I get it now,’ I told Bet, some weeks later. We were sat on the stairs of Right Bank, drinking soju while the cold bricks sucked the body heat out of our asses. The cold made the bricks feel harder somehow.
‘Get what?’
‘Why you started making the prose stuff. The experimental stuff.’
‘Yeah? And why do you think that is?’ She was struggling to make a rollie out of poetry paper. It kept sticking to her fingers as she tried to roll it.
‘Because you gained power over what you were doing, made method of the magic, and the magic is never the same once you’ve seen behind the curtain. So, I think you started to deconstruct it instead, to try and find what made it work.’
I took a long drink from my bottle of soju. Bet finally got the paper rolled and lit. Her deep brown eyes reflecting the glowing tip when she looked across at me.
‘I think you’re talking about yourself. I already told you, there is no soul beneath it all. No magic. Only the curtain. I changed because I got bored, that’s all. I found the experimental shit interesting.’ She took a drag and then spoke on the exhale. ‘It’s less tired and clichéd.’
‘You said that there was only representation?’
‘Yep.’
‘Then how can I make Squid cry, when my curtains are so sheer that you can see right through them?’
Bet took a breath and swapped with me, rollie for soju. ‘You’re forgetting that you made it, so you can see the pattern and the stitching. Squid can’t. To him its real, not because of what you put into it, but because of what he read into it.’
I sat back. ‘So, it’s all a fluke then? People only get out what they themselves put in?’
‘The eye of the beholder. Art is subjective.’
‘Oh, so now it’s okay to use fucking clichés?’
‘Life is derivative. Deal with it.’
We swapped back, and I finished off the bottle.
‘I dunno though,’ I said. ‘I think there’s gotta be more to it. Some things just hit. Maybe it’s relative, rather than subjective. Maybe there’s an objective truth—or objective emotion maybe—dependent upon something inside you. Some feeling, or memory, or experience.’
Bet finished smoking, flicking it away into the dark. ‘Poetry isn’t a fucking theory, and you’re no Einstein. Stop trying to make it something it’s not.’
Finally, I wrote a poem that captured something. A poem that hit me like the old ones had. It made me feel vulnerable and exposed. I was proud of it. I thought it was the best thing I had ever written.
It captured something brittle. It felt as though it could snap in half like dried spaghetti the second you put any weight on it. It was experimental, fluid and almost nonsensical in places. I had written it with Bet in mind. It was about her, really.
I invited Squid and Bet over to my shabby apartment to share it with them.
Squid frowned when he took it, eyebrows knitting together above his big drooping nose. ‘This is different from your normal stuff. I don’t think I like it.’ His mouth twisted, as though a bad taste lingered on his tongue and he was trying to scrape it off with his teeth.
Bet had a different reaction. She started to cry. Slowly at first, and then with increasing violence, her lip quivering and shoulders shaking as she held back a sob. She glared across at me while the tears ran down her cheeks.
After the poem had run its course, she grabbed her things and left the apartment.
Squid watched her in confusion. Asked what her problem was.
He didn’t get it.
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