I began experimenting with blackout poetry more seriously in 2016, using only articles that appear in The Observer Magazine. It soon became clear to me that I was attempting to find myself in the pages. This was a search and scan for identity and meaning. Both in the words I selected to keep as my story, and in that visual sense of what was ‘blacked out’. So there is always an awareness of what is hidden, sitting beneath the blankness, just out of sight. Both here and not here. Could I write my memoir this way?

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More books than friends

To participate in the world
have more books than friends.
Days are sometimes hard, and I'm
wary of a certain life goal.

I took for granted I was going
to live. I have for about a decade or
five, just able to summon the energy.
But I don't really get it.

I have always missed
the present moment,
seeking, bumbling.

Tag harder

I repeat words, and
not in an ironic way.

Thinking, thinking.

I think about the girl
I was and wasn't.

A woman in 2017,
I forget whole weekends.

Hair clippers help
my emotional needs
by blocking the
year-on-year backstory.

This is me, literally
a catalogue of fragments
in this magazine.

I find ways to write –
a little more, a little less.
Simply repeating words.

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