WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS

[25.02.26] Reading Rimbaud’s ‘cities’ this morning over a very sour cup of coffee in the 11th arondissement

perpetual snow on the ground of the grey acropolis

returning to London from Paris feels especially

I believe the French say «pertinent».’

RIMBAUD
[VILLE / CITY]

VILLE

'Je suis un éphémère

et point trop mécontent citoyen

d'une metropole

CITY

'I am an ephemeral

and not at all dissatisfied citizen

of a metropolis

[VILLES [1]/ CITIES [1]]

VILLES [1]

'L'acropole officielle outre

les conceptions de la barbarie

moderne les plus colossales.

Impossible d'exprimer le jour

mat produit par le

ciel immuablement gris.

l'éclat imperial des bâtisses,

et la neige éternelle du sol.

…A l'idée de chercher des t

héâtres sur ce circus…'

CITIES [1]

'The official acropolis beggars

the most colossal conceptions of

modern barbarity. Impossible to

express the dull light produced

by the perpetually gray sky,

the imperial glint of the

barracklike buildings, the eternal

snow on the ground. …

To the notion of seeking

out a theatre in this circus…'

IRONY is my favourite literary device. There is an irony to a piece about breaking out of cages — words are themselves barriers to communication, and hence perhaps my urgency to over punctuate. This piece challenges you to call out the emperor’s new clothes, before the jester catches you…

WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS

something about
juggle your alters—ego.
pull it out
of the box.
how many hats are you wearing?
pre-chewed. poetics.
<<poésie>>—peony—daisy

chains.
too many vowel-sounds
sounds fear.
naming pigeons. pretty like
a frederica wearing a bow
tied up
unbox your emotions.
notes of rose—
tinted nostalgia. return policy
to the self.

love is 50% off if you buy it now.
14 days keep the receipt translation
<<ticket>>, you say <<non, merci>>.
freight train passing through
it’s all smoke &—. mirror
mirror on the wall.
who is the jester out
of them all.
roses—are—red—and
so—are—the
people. power play
eeny meeny miney mo
with

flopsy—mopsy—cottontail
heads legs ears nose
would you like a carrot,
pre-sliced, <<crudités>>
pre-chewed. with a
knife. can’t slice through
self
abstract.
not a pottery class. paint
& sip. slip
into another

alter. acropolis. alliteration slip on the
sharp side of the
ego. death

blade, i meant.
welcome to the circus. now
joke is on
you.
you silent beggar &
you fool.

MESH

From Sculptor to sculptor: the sculptures of our beings take more shape as we learn about the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of others, than when we try to drag the mound of clay in front of the mirror with our grubby fingers. In this we are a chewed and spat back up meshwork of what we have consumed. So, then, what wets our appetite? What will we allow to infest our flesh and seep into our souls? Punks spit back out the circus animal feed, rejecting the machine.

Back in London, I stand in a circle with mostly poets and graphic designers. We listen to a stream of consciousness poem by a girl kneeling on the floor in front of her laptop with a microphone, the wire looped around on the floor and a projector on the wall behind her – a mime character wearing a blurry mime face mask with a hoodie 'I FELL IN LOVE ON THE INTERNET' and playing piano. In the next room, a girl is sitting behind a table full of food, livestreaming a mukbang. She eats whilst we watch. She is devouring but who is really devoured? Is this our entertainment in this grey acropolis – must be become mimes of ourselves to be entertained? Is the greatest rebellion – the most punk thing – to find one's own entertainment when the jester is here trying to addict us to his syrup? ARE WE ENTERTAINED BY THE ATROCITIES OF THE WORLD?

THE OPT-OUT SYSTEM

But no one likes their first cigarette. I rationalised it, that way-I could ask for a toke/ prop at the party: proof of assimilation. You spell it like that. I belong with you guys. But no one likes their first cigarette. There must be a hundred thousand Hotel Chelsea misfit/ maybe/ wannabe/ already/ we are all/ creatives/ penniless/ against the machine/ anti-muse/ underground/ join the movement/ organisations in every city in all the world. My Hotel Chelsea weren't all artists and avant garde pioneers, painters and let's-fuse-poetry-with-rock/ stars. But no one likes their first cigarette. Mona Lisa wasn't painted in a day. Up by 10am and there we stayed, into the night we/ writhed we/ initiated we/ assimilated we-were part of something. This chugging collective/ unconscious, melting pot contagion. No slave more blind than she/ who believes herself a master. No master more cruel. Than he/ believes himself a slave. 5am collapse-crashed on sofas, body parts and flickering eyelids, bulged blown sockets strewn amalgamated, the conscience: fused. The opt-out system, is what they ran. Shirk all prior identity: memory erasure programme/ fog/ smog/ slick/ sheen/ bodies-bodies-bodies. It's an opt-out system, sold on the door. Try it on like trying jackets at the store. Try every colour-every size-silhouette-drape-sensibility/ statement. But no one likes their first cigarette. They weren't soul-searching, as me. Don't think it made their heads reel, so. Writhing/ reeling-different journeys. Contagion doesn't seep through flesh the same. The man at the Sainsbury's Local watched me yellow. He'd seen me quiver down the fruit and veg aisle, long before Hotel Chelsea. "Think I'll be needing those, too." How did he know. Pink, my favourite colour/ I needed papers and filters, too. I didn't want my current, destiny. I'd cough it all up-on the street. Pretending. To be fused: against the machine. He saw right through the self-inflicted infection, contagion doesn't seep through flesh the same. But no one likes their first cigarette.

PUNK POETRY

Patti Smith led me to a road near Jardin du Luxembourg, with Rimbaud's poem inscribed on the wall. I stand in front of it and make sure to record it on my writing travel journal flip-camera.

PATTI SMITH [Just Kids]

'I had found solace in Arthur Rimbaud, whom I had come upon in a bookstall across from the bus depot in Philadelphia when I was sixteen. His haughty gaze reached mine from the cover of Illuminations. He possessed an irreverent intelligence that ignited me, and I embraced him as compatriot, kin, and even secret love. Not having the ninety-nine cents to buy the book, I pocketed it.

Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it…His hands chiselled a manual of heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge of him added swagger to my step and this could not be stripped away. I tossed my copy of Illuminations in a plaid suitcase. We would escape together.'

MY TREASURED OBJECTS WERE MINGLED WITH THE LAUNDRY

[16:07, sun just about to duck behind the row of Georgian terraced houses]

I'm listening to Duran Duran Save a Prayer (2009 Remaster) whilst reading Patti Smith's Just Kids through one ear bud. The song is cutting in and out as the phone signal around this part of Bristol is fickler than me when deciding what to wear on any given day. But I don't mind too much; the whirring picking up reverb sounds, dish cloth sponged with bleach on a stuck record, at the beginning of the song is the best part for me. «I was a dreamy somnambulant child». New word: «somnambulant» - its definition makes sense though; sleepwalking. She was proficient in reading but frustrated her teachers (the ADULTS) in that she was never inclined to harness this whimsical reading proficiency into anything practical. One might deem such a brilliant mind as perilously away-with-the-fairies, but I think all writers have to be a little on another planet of their own curation; their own abstraction from what is normal. Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal. [New word «paracosm». Definition implied.] She was «always somewhere else», and I feel this when I write: some veiled separation from those who are playing their cast characters in the world. I am only a silly commentator reaching at some marvellous or introspective remark on the condition of being human, body and soul; this – I think you must be a little abstracted from your grotesque humanness to comment on the human condition. And so, I do agree with Lebowitz and see myself in Patti. I am no god, though.

I'm with [retracted] and we're both wearing heeled leather cowboy boots and all-black outfits. He ordered us two cortados with oat milk and he agrees, it tastes better. I disagree in them charging an additional 70 pence per drink, though; I mean aren't we supposed to be saving the planet, adding up points to reach the Good Place after we die? At least I have something to be angry about, though. My brother always says I am looking for an argument and I think that's what he means. I need something to be angry about. But don't we all like a scapegoat? And oat milk feels like a scapegoat which won't bite back. [Retracted] is slow and methodical and has good taste in music. I think I view him as one of the coolest people on this planet. And Patti Smith. I'm writing in my commonplace book lists of art and poetry books she had on her coffee table, «[her] treasured objects [mingled] with the laundry». Life is a series of lists, though. I just document and write lists all the time…

PARIS ZOMBIES

Patti Smith and Rimbaud led me to a bookshop in Utrecht, transfixed in front of a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's America Day by Day.

'…fairground of wonders

exudes fatigue & boredom…'

'…In cylindrical glasses, which hold nearly a pint, we are served zombies (cocktails made from seven kinds of rum poured on top of each other: the amber liquid is layered from dark brown to light yellow).'

VOYEURISM

I don't know if I will make it as a writer, but they all start poor and with boyfriends cooler than them and counting their pennies and going to art galleries. They all go to Paris or New York or Dublin or London. They all live with their parents and escape. I keep reaching into my handbag for a lighter and pulling out my red lipstick. I need three things to write: too much coffee, hourly roll-up cigarettes, and my scrappy book with scrappy notes from my scattered brain. And a red lip to make me feel like a woman. I usually write to rock music because it gives me an urgency. I always have to write with an urgency. Maybe it's from living in London last summer; London makes you rush. I wake up and there's a grizzly bear chasing me from the moment I open my eyes to my second alarm. I always sleep through the first and it's a bad habit.

I am not a voyeur in the sense of being self-inflated and narcissistic; in my floating above the ether, I am a butterfly awaiting her wings. However I will confess to my wearing wired earphones entirely performatively and self-indulgently; I will sit in a coffee shop and make a drama of untangling them and sliding the little angled white buds into my ears, with no music booming out of them and a calculated gap of air such that I may be privy to whatever conversation is taking place between the two girls sitting to my left with the most intriguing-looking pink foam tiered sugary iced matcha lattes. And here comes the role of the writer in our chasing some kind of story and often having to make one ourselves. The crumbs one may be offered in the café down the street sometimes leave me practically begging them to make up tales to regale before me, I am so bored at talks of TV show gossip and friendship group disputes and laundry days. The world of entertainment does a poor job at entertaining me.

I save up my money from tutoring to travel because it's how I escape my painful episodes of writer's block where constructing an interesting sentence feels like drawing blood from a collapsed vein on the floor of a dirty club bathroom. There is a desperation and an agonising withdrawal I feel at not being able to write. I think I become more curious about the world when I am in a city which I have never called home – and others, more curious about me. Reading chapter 2 of A Rebour, by Joris Karl Huysmans – translated from French, I wonder if this is all a play I make up in my own head. This, being 'a writer' and voyeur.

Besides, he considered travel to be pointless, believing that the imagination could easily compensate for the vulgar reality of actual experience.

Travelling in the way I do feels aimless and self-indulgent; I will take three trains across countries in Europe just to sit in a café and type out some meaningless memoir which three people might like on Substack. I will take photographs of litter on the side of the street to use as poetry prompts and I will write pages and pages on a three-minute interaction with the TABAC man and leave all the parts where something 'great' happened or when I looked up from my cigarette and realised I was at some historic and important monument, unwritten. And I don't even think it's the break from normality I sell it as, to myself; I so reject any normal semblance of routine in my life anyway. Besides doing laundry, and that I seem to be forever doing…

COMMUNAL RELICS

As Patti Smith shares her escape with Rimbaud, the lighter left on the table becomes the communal relic between people who share spaces and items and stories, but sometimes only interact through the passing around of a lighter. This is intimacy extending beyond romance. But, if romance, it would be tragic. Our parasocial relationships extend beyond screens. This idea took me to a Jazz club in Ghent.

… Perhaps it was the girl from Latvia and her red lips, perhaps the fact that we sat down and immediately made acquaintances, I’m not sure. But before we knew it, another two and then three and then four more people came over to join us. Soon we were all talking and exchanging pints and joints and my lighter served as the communal relic between us. They were mostly students from Bruges and conversed with us in English. The two guys to my right were trying to make it in the music industry and I wonder if I’ll see them, famous and successful in the future. Talking with them reminded me of Patti Smith in Just Kids at one of the parties with the Chelsea Hotel clan, asking for a cigarette despite despising them; she wanted to look the part of the writer and so forced herself to smoke when on display at such gatherings of certain types of people.

Which made me think about my own Chelsea Hotel clan in second year of university and how I used to practise rolling up cigarettes in the club smoking area, helped by a girl with neon orange coffin-shaped acrylics longer than my fingers. I never knew how she did it, and I especially struggled with “getting the tuck.”

I always talk about that period of my life as falling in with the ‘wrong crowd.’ They weren’t all artists and avant garde pioneers of their craft. We were stoned by ten a.m., and we partied into the night, me often carried on top of someone’s shoulders and holding a speaker, which it was my role as the small one to wedge on the top of the fridge such that the whole kitchen would shake with the bass, crashing on sofas at five a.m. and sleeping in a full face and the same clothes for a week which reeked with weed and gin. Through them, I could opt out of being the Oxford medicine student: an identity I wanted to shirk along with any other possible identity I could tie myself to. I wanted to try on drug-taking and unprotected sex and all-day-all-night, smoke-cloud-partying like trying on shoes at the store.

I don’t know if they were all doing such soul-searching as I was. I doubt it.

Maybe they could see right through it. Through my fake tan, bleach blonde, crappy roll-up cigarettes; the cashier at the Sainsbury’s local below the university building we all lived in in first year, who’d seen me, afraid and trepid in the fruit and veg aisle scared over the calories in the pre-packaged stir fry sauces, asking for my first pouch of rolling tobacco – “just the cheapest one you have please,” because I didn’t know the names of any of them and I’d never thought to look at them all behind the counter before, “and filters and papers, too please,” I added, blushing and fumbling in my pocket for my ID, “I think I’ll be needing those, too,” he nodded and smiled, “and a lighter, dear?” “Oh, yes, a lighter too – the pink one please.”

The girl from Lativa interrupts our conversation at Chet Baker and Miles Davies and Eliza Fitzgerlad to remark that I am especially good at asking questions. I take another swig of beer. Belgian beer is strong – good, I think. I can’t do gin anymore, and February cold in Belgium is not conducive to being a good investigator. Not that my purpose in the smoking area of Hot Club Gent is investigator of people; that would deny my humanness a little too far; be self-inflated. No, you talk whilst I sit under drying paint, across from Gaugin’s blue border dividing us in the scene. Our conversation is wet-over-wet, post-impressionist. Your answers do not have to be true – in fact, the finished landscape will properly be a richer hue if you fabricate something unusual. The improv actors do it to warm-up. Conversation is just word association. It is up to the artist to fill in the shapes with feeling. My problem is I keep pouring feeling onto the canvas – I find it hard to let it flow through me, first. I ask about their music influences, who he especially likes to mix, the nuance of sampling and taboo of plagiarism in the arts, I ask about the origin story of his artist name, about the most interesting books in father’s library (the boy wearing the baker boy hat and spectacles’ father has the original copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, before the magazine articles were polished into a book for publishing), I ask what about thoughts they want to focus on in the short film they are making – whether they are overthinkers and what about, how they retain such a glass half full mentality, why they want a legacy, how they feel about plagiarism. I suppose these are all good questions, but I think the girl from Lativa has just had a few too many swigs of strong beer.

SNAP YOUR SELF-ERASURE

The circus warps the self and like Kafka's The Trial, comes knocking on your door to arrest you. This poem was written for the bots of the circus…

TikTok banned me. Charges include /impersonation of the self/ I know it's run by bots, but I think they've got a point. You see: this mirror chamber /meet-me-at-our- /make-out spot, /kiss your own reflection /ménage-à-trois /snap your self-erasure: proof of life! rippled /reflected, posture /projected /warped and lucid, unlock with face ID. Fancy dress theme: something beginning with the letter 'I', /it's rotting our skin. Hydrolysed collagen won't help /fling you off this merry go round. Careful not to scrape your neck as you land /on back-lit glass shards. /Waxing, waning. Dress-up in disguise. /I am Picasso, Schiele, disfigured-chop-me-up & /dismember me. Paint me chin up, neck fanned out, eyes down, /glued to distorted-mirror-me. /My alter-molten self, this is not dynamism-abstract, /radical /fragmented cubism, emotive /expressionist, surreal-fluidity: I'm sick. The vertigo /caught up to me. Crawled up my neck. I can taste orange and yellow and green /down the back of my throat /clamped /nauseating, reeling, echo-chamber-expressionism. /Skin prickles, swabbed with sickly green /void. I present a hundred different versions of me. /Fused & jammed together-five features make a face, right? /I have become a wax figurine. /Charges include: impersonation of the self. /TikTok-the bots, /they banned me.

WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS
DON’T LET THE JESTER CATCH YOU…

FOLLOW LYDIA GRACE ON INSTAGRAM AT @rottenangelpoetess