Nothing riles me more [this is a lie as you’re about to read a book which is essentially a long list of things that rile me to the point of medication punctuated only by rhyme and the rare smatter of hope] than an introduction whereby the writer refers to the infancy of the book’s process. It leaves me with a bored, bourgeois sour taste of someone else’s self-importance, but as I’ve been hailed as an #instapoet I fear I owe it to some sanctimonious troll to exceed a slither of expectation. So let us suck the soured serotonin out of my life lemon.
I pre-empted this. I knew almost so certainly I was on the cusp of complete digital burnout that I pitched this collection thinking I was saving myself from it. Charly from the past, all omniscient, and evidently omnipotent, cackled her way through a Google doc, tripping over a cocktail of www.woes that she knew were exhausting but perhaps important and valid and witty, and hit send. Charly from the past but a few weeks later delighted at the idea of being able to use poetic licence for the first time in her sad, sad life. What fun! You need not sell the last fragment of your young and underdeveloped soul and past trauma! You can use FORESIGHT! And now Charly in the present is furiously walking to Marylebone station at 5am because her contactless card doesn’t work so she can’t get the tube and is desperately aware that everyone is staring at her in the night before’s party dress, mascara on her chin and a hospital bracelet. She’s also talking into her phone in third person, so I need not break this to tell you how far away from the grand dreams of poetic licence she is. This collection, albeit caricatured, is true. Some of it was written on grand spanking highs in expensive hotels in Los Angeles where I (ever the optimist in irony) searched for physical validation, a boyfriend, stardom and a good Instagram opportunity; some of it in bed wheezy on Venlafaxine, Propranolol and an algorithm that hates my content; some of it in Ubers and on trains; some of it to the soundtrack of the men in my local, little countryside pub; some of it leaving a hospital working out if I shouldn’t have run away from it. But all of it was written on my phone and all of it is because of the curse of exactly that.
There. That’s how we got here. This thing in my hand that stole all of my smarts so it could preface its own name with them.
Hello, my name is Charly Cox and I am code-dependent. So would you please, please just validate me.
My rhetoric is changing
My need for love confused
I’ve lost my inner monologue
And sold it all for views.
Click to Accept the Terms and Conditions
Shout a little louder
Come a little closer
Let me lead you to the void
The blank expanse
Let yourself fly in a seat
That is pants
Boom across a room
That cares for you little
Wipe off a slick
Of your new hungry spittle
That we’ll sell you as gold
Come grab a feel
Of a hand you can’t hold
Come be a person
That you never knew
Feel grand and feel gorgeous
Then feel worthless and through
Take a trip down the tubes
Get settled in
Welcome, you’ve signed up
It’s all about to begin.
Validate Me Part 1
Thought as much
Famed as such
Faked the touch
Of what excites us
Who we are and will always be
Unites us
But we seldom invite that side enough
Swapped it out to sell new love
As though it’s not inside us
Think too much
Fame is such
A thing we’ll fake as something that excites us
Spin it until we’re spinning plates we can’t dine off
Starving
Is this what we’ll die of?
Vapid monsters in a sea of breeding nonsense, jealousy
Portraits of unfulfilled and pretty
Best lives or misery
Rooted to mis-sold faith in a downloaded commodity
Do you like me?
Do you like me?
I don’t know who I am any more
I don’t know who you are
Fascinate me as I fabricate me
Castigate me as I congratulate me
Salivate as I let you navigate me
Masturbate at how inadequate I find me
I’m putting it all out to see
No idea of what I want or who I am sans vanity
No idea of how to please our grumbling society
No idea of where I can slip off silently
I am halves with who I’m wholly miscalculating
Please, would you just validate me?
#candid
You only take photos when you think something might die
You only post photos hoping that it’ll survive.
#fitspo
Smelling of fags and biscuits
Embers the colour of the bits that I missed.
The Party
The door opens quickly just as my earring falls out and breaks. Steph catches it and puts it in her pocket, seamlessly, and stares confidently at the man leaning and swaying on the frame. ‘We’re here for the party. Right house?’ She says this with a vague tone of annoyance because it’s bastard-freezing outside. Neither of us have tights on and he’s just stood there gawping, assessing, working out if he’ll get off with one of us by the dregs of the evening. Music crawls in muted tendrils down the tall staircase behind him. No bass.
‘Well, hello girls. Who are you then?’ An over-exaggerated mockney accent dribbles down his polo; when had people started to think that being mindful of your privilege meant performing a class act?
‘This isn’t Mahiki, mate. Let us in, would you?’ It wasn’t, thank God. It was a flat in Denmark Hill, with