War is hell. People around the globe are widely in agreement on this simple statement, which is pretty impressive, seeing as we can barely agree on the day of the week most of the time. And yet, for some reason, we’ve only managed about three years without war since WWII. We’ve seen the Greek civil war, The Jewish insurgency in Palestine, the South East Asia conflicts, the Malayan emergency, the Korean war, the Anglo-Egyptian war, the Mau Mau insurgency, the Cyprus emergency, the Suez/Sinai war, the Muscat and Oman intervention, the Jordan intervention, the Indonesia conflicts, the Ugandan army mutiny, the Aden conflict, the Northern Ireland conflict, the Falklands war, both Gulf wars, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Former Yugoslavia peacekeeping operations and the Libyan war, and those are just the wars that Britain has been involved in. And it looks like things are about to get pretty intense in North Korea soon, but that’s another kettle of fish entirely.

These wars have always been about the deaths of individuals. The number of young men your country is able or willing to put forward to defend an ideal, attack an ideal, protect your territory, or invade someone else’s has ultimately always been the deciding factor in who gets to claim to be the winner. The science of warfare has grown around two simple premises. You can improve your chances by making it less likely that the bad guys can kill your guys, or you can make it more likely that your guys can kill the bad guys.

Today, I came across a video of a laser cannon mounted on a US ship destroying a US drone. It wasn’t as spectacular as I was hoping – I wanted an explosion, the drone to evaporate into thin air. That said, it was still pretty impressive. The drone burst into flame, and lost control, crashing into the sea. The video’s below, and regardless of what you think about this article, it’s worth watching.

But you see, it got me thinking. There’s been a move to using UAVs in a number of theatres recently to minimise casualties among soldiers, to allow dangerous areas to be reconnoitred before troops move in, or, in some cases, to actually launch strikes against the enemy without our troops ever moving within rifle range. It is, no doubt, an incredible feat of engineering. The drones themselves are sophisticated, and the amount of work that has gone into trying to ensure our troops’ safety is phenomenal.

Think about how far we’ve come since the first battles were fought. One man against another for a hunk of meat developed into a group of men against another group of men for land and resources. At some point, it is believed that the Sumerians were the first to train and equip what we would call an army. This was significant, because it was no longer citizen against citizen, it was trained and armed professionals fighting against each other to demonstrate their superiority. In a sense, this created the first “civilians” in the sense that we use the word today. There were now people who didn’t fight, because others did the fighting for them. Society has benefited immensely from this. People could get on with making the world around them a better place, and could specialise in skills like science, mathematics, agriculture. And it has led us to the point we find ourselves at today.

Warfare has always been relatively symmetrical. Introducing this level of machine-versus-machine technology into warfare makes for some interesting philosophical questions (if a drone falls in the woods, and no-one notices it’s gone, does it matter if it was shot down or if it was ‘operator error’?), but most significantly, it forces the opponent to make a choice. They have three options:

1. Continue to send young men to their deaths, despite knowing that they will never get close enough to a real live enemy to have an effect on the outcome of the war.
2. Adapt, and develop machine weapons of their own, which abstracts the conflict into a question of “who has more resources”, that could in fact be answered without any material losses for either side.
3. Adopt an asymmetrical strategy. Begin a campaign of terror. Start to target the public. The number of civilian casualties would drastically increase, but the number of soldiers who die in combat would plummet.

In the past, war has been an effective (if rather uncivilised) way of resolving disputes because the stakes are so high. We roll the dice against each other, and the losses are painful. By introducing technology like this, we are effectively changing the stakes, and what’s worse, it’s only those who can afford the big losses who have access to the technology and resources to allow them to avoid them.

This doesn’t mean that wars will cease to occur. It means that the nature of war will change. The Goliathan countries that can afford the technology will soon be faced with Davids who can’t compete in terms of might, and so will attack where the armour is weak. There are a lot of parallels I can draw with the story of David and Goliath, but the most important is to remember that David wins … and he was the good guy (well … despite going on to have more than ten wives and another ten concubines, sleeping with Bathsheba, the wife of one of his top men, then trying to get him killed so he could add her to his hareem).

Terrorism will become the only way for a vastly outnumbered and outgunned opponent to resolve issues outside diplomatic channels. We will blame it on the opponents being cruel and inhuman, as we have done for thousands of years, but the truth is that we will have brought it on ourselves, by taking away the possibility for armed combat to inflict serious losses.

“It’s the army’s job to die for their country”, is often countered with the rejoinder that “it’s the army’s job to fight for their country”. But this simply doesn’t make sense. As long as people are prepared to kill for what they believe in, we need people who are prepared to die for what they believe in too. Because if we swap our battlefields and armies for drones and cruise missiles, then the people that die will be ordinary civilians.

On April 27th, Hoxton Docks will play host to the first ever official Shoreditch fashion show. The show promises to be “a truly immersive, dynamic and creative experience” for all guests – a promise that looks to be well kept as the show will also feature illustrations, installations and photography as well as the hottest new fashion talent. This is set to be much more than your average catwalk show.

There will be eight featured artists at the show, from Tagen Donovan whose colourful creations have been described as “Hollywood on speed” to the more feminine prints of UCA graduate, Kelly Bromfield. With such a diverse range of artists, I can already guarantee this is going to be a visual delight.

The show’s curators – Made in Shoreditch magazine, OffBeat and The Vivid Fashion Group – have been on the lookout since January for two emerging designers to showcase their pieces on the catwalk. The judging panel, compiled of fashion heavyweights, included fashion icon Mischa Barton, the ever quirky Eliza Doolittle and Serge De Nimes founder (and Made in Chelsea god) Oliver Proudlock. The two final winners were announced last week as Runaway88 and Lily Stodel.

Runaway88 specialise in luxury outerwear and were selected by Oliver Proudlock as one of the winners, although it seems they are already a hit amongst celebs with Rosie Fortescue and Loren Ridinger both tweeting their love for the brand and its fabulous jackets. The Runaway88 have already had the fantastic opportunity of presenting their designs to fashion royalty at London Fashion Week back in February. Since then the brand has taken a more global stage, being recognised as Italy’s TheMAG.it.

Newcomer Lily Stodel was chosen by Eliza Doolittle which is no surprise when you look at her work, it’s Eliza in a nutshell – a fun and girly statement-maker. Lily’s designs, actually inspired by the Spice Girls, impressed at Graduate Fashion Week back in June last year. Lily’s collection could not be more different from Runaway88′s which I think is a hint of what is to come from the show – a range of ideas, collections and designers to meet all tastes.

What I am most looking forward to in the show is getting an insight of what the future has in store for British fashion and design. The majority of the works on show are works by current students or recent graduates. This show is set to inspire and encourage creativity and I just cannot wait!

Check out the Made in Shoreditch site here and follow winning designers on Twitter @Runaway88 and @LilyAmelia.

As much as social networking has undoubtedly enriched our lives, there remain some people who seem to abuse the opportunity to connect with hundreds or even thousands of people by updating the entirety of Facebook/Twitter with ‘news’ that really, really isn’t news at all. The act of informing the nation of mundane activities is now fabulously illustrated by the aid of the iPhone and the Smartphone, so now you don’t just have to read about it, you can see it too! Ain’t that just the best news. So, after spending a lot of time researching, by which I mean sitting on Facebook refreshing the homepage every 20 seconds, I have compiled a list of my least favourite photo updates.

#5 The Pet
Okay, so one or two cute pictures are generally okay, however if your cat is in every photo you ever take, you may want to think carefully about maybe leaving the house sometime. It’s also a lot less interesting if your pet is doing something utterly boring; sleeping is often highly unimpressive. If I were to take a photo of you sleeping and put it on Facebook nobody would be impressed. Disturbed maybe? But not impressed. In fact I would probably be sent home to await some sort of phone call, court date or prison sentence. In short, your cat needs to look like Hitler for it to be really Facebook-worthy. Other historical figures may be accepted.

#4 The Couple
The phrase ‘get a room’ springs to mind, but clearly this pair are more than happy to share their relationship not only with friends and family, but with strangers on the internet too. Congratulations, you’ve found someone as soppy as yourself and you’re not afraid to tell everyone you know about it. Please, check yourselves in at Nando’s so we can all see how cute you guys look kissing atop a spicy chicken carcass. But people forget that these photos last forever on the internet and your ‘next’ probably won’t like to see you loved up with your ‘ex’. Cold hearted as that is, it’s true, so keep it at home kids.

#3 The Dinner
Usually accompanied by the couple, those net-workers who take photos of their food before they eat it; making me A -hungry and B – disappointed with what the world has come to. Eating really is one of the most natural human acts, and apparently even this needs to be shared with the Twitter community. If it hasn’t got a sparkler in it, or isn’t of Man V Food-esque proportions, it needs to come off my news feed and fast. We get it, you can cook, now just promise not to upload an ‘after’ shot to accompany the ‘before’?

#2 The Pre-Night-Out
I can totally understand that you want a few photos before you head to the club, while your eyelashes are still where you left them, and your shoes aren’t hung around your neck like boxing gloves. But, the place for this isn’t standing alone rocking the classic teapot (for those who don’t know, hand on hip, weight on one leg) in your mate’s bathroom. Whether this is taken by a friend, or by you, this is not a good look. You might be a socialite in real life, but this photo makes you look about as popular as an incoming text from PPI ClaimsDirect does. Get a friend involved, presuming you have some – you can always crop them out if you love being alone so much.

#1 The Selfy
Firstly, the fact that this kind of photo has its own abbreviated title really says it all for its popularity. If you have taken a photo of yourself, by yourself, doing nothing of much interest apart from looking at yourself, attempting to smoulder into the camera of your Samsung Galaxy, I won’t be admiring it. It’s just about acceptable if you ‘need’ a new profile picture, it is not okay to do just for fun. Do not expect me to ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ that kind of post, and PLEASE don’t be that kind of person that pops up on chat asking people to like your new profile picture. Yep, people like that genuinely exist. Don’t be that guy.

Of course, there are exceptions and I’m sure there are many people who love sharing these kinds of photos with their family and friends, but if you suddenly find your number of friends has dipped a touch after a storm of useless photos hitting your profile, don’t be surprised if my name has disappeared off the radar. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m a cynic, maybe it’s because I’m pretty bitter, I personally think it’s a combination of the two.

Featured image courtesy of Chris Lott

The other day, a friend, (perhaps I should mention, a male friend), held the door open for me. I thanked him, and walked through. I did not stop in my tracks, turn on him for misogynistic and old-fashioned views, and shunt him on forwards in front of me. After all, why should I? I am as fervent a feminist as anyone, but it hardly seems to me that this position calls for an all-encompassing ban on what is essentially a form of politeness, wherever that politeness originated from. My friend, in opening the door, was not implying that I was in somehow inferior to him: clearly those of us who function day-to-day without testosterone pumping through our veins still have the physical strength to hold a door open without collapsing into a quivering, tearful heap and demanding the smelling-salts.

Do all forms of politeness have to be political? I’m pretty sure that if I deliberately held the door open for most people they’d go through regardless of my sex, (although this being England perhaps I shouldn’t be so sure: we may end up locked within the self-perpetuating maze of British politeness that actually stops anyone going anywhere… “after you”, “no, no, after YOU”…)
Watch any Jane Austen film (clearly an accurate form of historical evidence) and you’ll see the men leaping to their feet as soon as an adult woman walks in the room: presumably a gendered form of acknowledgement rather than the result of a frequent and rapidly-passing desire to take a stroll. Clearly this level of “manners” is now out-dated, old-fashioned, and most importantly a one-way custom that marked a difference between men and women. But holding doors is not the same. Men can hold doors for women, and… women can and do hold doors for men. Either way, in the twenty-first century, even though gender-equality is still far from being a redundant issue, a friendly person of either sex stopping the door from slamming shut as you struggle through with piles of bags and books on your way to the student library is probably something to be thankful for.

1. Developing heart disease becomes a valid lifestyle choice.

One minute you’re fresh from the gym promising to stick to only two vodka and Diet Cokes, the next you’re shoveling down three dodgy kebabs with all the grace of a feral child who hasn’t eaten in three weeks.  Enjoy the smell of grease and shame that you’ll wake up to the next day; good luck getting it out of your room.

2. Drunk-dialling your ex is suddenly a fantastic decision.

The days of Facebook stalking them and every member of the opposite sex they’re tagged in a picture with are long gone. You’ve got a haircut, new-found confidence and have even flirted with a couple of people. In your mind. But fast forward to five Jägerbombs later and you’re hunched in a corner clutching your phone, howling away about how you miss them “sooooooo much”. Girls, beware of this situation – if you cry, your mascara WILL run and you’ll spend the rest of the night looking like a very sad panda indeed.

3. You become Beyoncé. Or Kylie. Or Whitney.

“ANDDDDD IIIIIIIII WIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLL ALWAAAAAAAYYYYYYYSSSSSS LOVEEEEEEE YOUUUUUUUU…” That’s nice, but your neighbours definitely do not love you. Especially after yowling like a traumatised cat at 4am on a weekday.

4. All your former classiness disappears.

Drunkenness really does bring out the worst in people. While you’d never dream of it in day-to-day life, when you’ve had a few drinks being sick in public, flashing your underwear to the world and competing in the Drunk Olympics (wheelbarrow races anyone?) seem like brilliant fun. When it’s not you in a state though, it’s particularly entertaining to watch your “refined” friend who puts on airs and graces spilling garlic mayonnaise down themselves and having a nap in the bus shelter.

5. Your housemate/course friend/creepy guy you’ve been trying to avoid all year suddenly becomes very attractive.

I’m feeling creative, I’ve written a haiku about this for you:
No no no no no
No no no no no no no
No no. You know why.

6. You decide to sit in the bath.

It seems great for some reason – perhaps because we all think we can take ironic, Skins-esque pictures and look oh-so-cool. But be warned. Despite the best of intentions, someone WILL turn the taps on, whether accidentally or on purpose. Then you have to spend the rest of pre-drinks awkwardly shuffling around trying to disguise the fact it really, really looks like you’ve wet yourself.

7. Walking is a ridiculous concept.

Something that has been a no-brainer for you since toddlerhood suddenly becomes the most difficult thing in the world. Suddenly, you find yourself swaying around like a newborn giraffe, crashing into whatever gets in your way and falling into people’s laps. Check to see who you’ve fallen on and pray that if they’re cute, “drunken mess” is their type. Just don’t be sick on them. 

8. You LOVE anyone with a camera.

Pouting like a duck and pulling “hilarious” faces never fails to entertain at the time (I should know), but pictures of you gurning splashed all over Facebook never helped a hangover. 

9. You can’t see any more.

If the room spins so much you have no way of knowing which way is up or down, put the drink away. Slowly. 

10. You think you work in the kebab shop.

Standing behind the counter wearing the hat and your arms around the guys that work there doesn’t make you look cool, it just annoys everyone waiting for food. Don’t try and vault the counter with no warning either, they’re very likely to push you back off. 
 

But there are other issues at stake here. The French aggressively protect their language from outside influences, mandating the use of “French” forms over loan words. They’re preserving the language, they say. They’re defending their heritage.

I have several problems with the Académie‘s proposition itself. It seems as though little consideration has been given to the function of the word or its semantic meaning, and it’s inaccurate, strictly speaking – a hashtag can be composed of more than one word, such as the ill-advised “#susanalbumparty” or an abbreviation as with “#xl8″, for “translate”, or even an acronym, like Drake’s “#YOLO”. There is perhaps an argument here that, for example, un petit mot, is not necessarily just one word, but it still seems like an unnecessary ambiguity. Regardless, considered in the context below, these points seem moot.

Language is a living thing. It is a tool we use to share ideas. It was designed for no other purpose than communication. Where we need a word to describe something to someone else, we make it up, as with the recent entry to the Oxford English Dictionary omnishambles, which no English word up until it was coined was able to express as succinctly. Alternatively, as the English know better than anyone, we borrow it.

There’s a funny video that I’ve used when teaching to introduce the concept of small talk. Although the video is about small talk, I think I can use it to illustrate my point here as well. Although no-one can actually say for certain, it’s a fair bet that language developed organically. This is important to this post: nobody sat down and wrote a complete prescriptivist grammar of the caveman language before people started communicating – language evolved from nothing.

Therefore, the attempt to post-facto impose restrictions on a language’s use is not at all in keeping with the original principles of language. Loanwords exist for a number of reasons, but most commonly due to lacunas in the language that is adopting the word. This is certainly the case with le hashtag. There simply was no word in French that fulfilled the same purpose.

In fact, it may even be fair to say that the Académie is stifling innovation and adaptation in the language, rather than protecting it. How can twitter users discuss their interactions without the language to do so, unless they create their own words and vocabulary to deal with it? It’s a tough question to answer.

As it is not practical to set out as the Académie to create French-sounding equivalents of any potential word the French might need in the next ten years, say, surely their efforts would be better directed at preserving features of French that are dying out – features embedded in the French language already, such as the imperfect subjunctive. Indeed, many French speakers struggle with writing already, as verb endings often sound the same (contrast the infinitive ending in -er, the past participle ending in -é, and the first person singular imperfect ending in -ais). I once received a letter of recommendation written entirely using infinitives where past participles of -er verbs were required. Perhaps it would be more sensible to establish a stronger education system that allows people to use the present day French language correctly, rather than trying to guide the future of the language.

Speaking of which, while they’re at it, why not try and eliminate the words un camping, un parking, and un smoking altogether – especially that last one, which bears so little resemblance to the current state of the English language as to be positively confusing? While efforts have been made, the words persist, and are perhaps the most concrete proof that the Académie‘s work in this respect is futile.

There is, fortunately, a plus side to all of this, which is that in day-to-day speech, the French generally ignore the protestations of the Académie, and use whatever word they feel appropriate. Somehow, I feel that le hashtag is here to stay. The dichotomy between “proper” French as prescribed by the Académie, and “real” French as spoken by Francophones the world over will persist, and rather than protecting the French language, ironically the Académie are tearing it in two, creating confusion and making it even easier for foreign words to infiltrate and take hold.

[Featured image courtesy of opensourceway]

Filth

When Divine died in 1988, Waters’ filmmaking was already beginning to take a turn. Hairspray, which would become the last Waters’ film Divine starred in, marked a much more subdued and narrative driven in its thematic content, less overtly shocking than previous Waters features such as the iconic Pink Flamingoes. Hairspray tackled historical narratives driven by politics and race rather than glorious reflections on the effects of sexual appetite and recreational drug use. With this film, it seems that Filth was by this point becoming mainstream.

In the earlier productions however Divine was always the star; the cast surrounding him made up of a close collection of acid casualties Waters knew as friends. The rawness and blank exposure of Divine’s character roles betrayed an intimacy bound up within the drug haze, a closeness Waters obviously felt acutely. Divine’s willingness to enact whatever was asked of him, most famously eating genuine dog excrement, only emphasises the element of trust contained in their actor-director relationship. Divine himself was almost perfectly typecast in these roles. His size was always something utilized and revelled in to coerce the notion of filth. His exaggerated makeup and outlandish wigs only emphasise this garishness, a revelry in everything putrid. Divine was not however solely a Waters creation but also a star in his own right. In addition to his film credits he also produced a number of pop records, including ‘I’m So Beautiful’ and ‘Shake it Up’, and had a total of four albums.

The ad line for Pink Flamingoes reads ‘An Exercise in Poor Taste’, and for many people who see it that would be the polite version of their description. But isn’t taste essentially subjective? Personally, what I love about John Waters is his complete openness. His films are a reflection of an individual personality, a rejection of the normal and a drive for change- qualities that Divine personifies. Divine always insisted that he was not a female impersonator or transvestite but an actor first and foremost. And as the 40^th anniversary of this cult classic passes almost unnoticed by many, what I as a fan notice is that after this time it loses none of it’s shock factor. It still represents what could be termed a “Divine ‘act’ of pure filth”. Glorious.

We took views, likes and editorial opinion into account when making our decision and thus the results are:

Winner: Chantal Swainston with her hilarious ‘Student’s Grumpy Guide to Christmas’ which has been keeping us all laughing throughout the less thrilling aspects of going home for Christmas. Chantal will win a Spilt inc. T-shirt, as pictured here.

Runners Up:  

Emily Dring: New Year, New Home

Ben Lawrence: For the Last Ten Seconds of 2012

Have a read of Emily’s thought provoking piece below.

Where is your home? Is it the village you grew up in, or the town you escaped to in your late teens? Perhaps it’s the region your family hails from, the city you landed your first job in, or the place where you met your best friend or partner. Maybe it moves around as you do. You could have more than one. You might not have even found it yet.

Chances are that for some people the answer is a simple one. They feel it strongly, and it doesn’t change. For others, like me, it’s a little more complicated.

“I can’t wait to get home for Christmas!”, I text my sister as the holidays draw near, anticipating the rustic comfort of North Yorkshire and our festive family traditions. A week later, I catch myself reminding my flatmate that “I’ll be home just after New Year”, by which I mean I’ll be returning to our apartment in Southern France. Today, however, I imagine with a smile the feeling of moving to Oxford next Autumn to continue my degree – a feeling of reconciliation, of getting back to where I belong. Yet, for the first eighteen years of my life (which, thankfully, is still a very large proportion indeed) I lived neither in Oxford nor in North Yorkshire, and had only been to France on school trips and holidays. It’s fair to say that my roots, if they haven’t yet shrivelled up, are no longer fixed in the soil of my youth. They’re flailing around a bit, really. Where should I plant them next? Do I have to decide now?

We are surrounded by stories and images of ‘home’, from Dorothy’s saccharine assertion that there’s “no place like” it, to magazine articles spouting advice on how to make a house ‘feel like’ it. Look closely and you’ll see the theme crop up time and time again; even on Facebook and Twitter, no matter how far we have travelled (i.e. how long we’ve spent scrolling through an obscure celebrity’s daily updates or cooing over photographs of our ex best friend’s ex boyfriend’s new kitten), we always have the option to click a button and go back ‘home’ – back to the space where everything we know, want or have come to expect is at our fingertips.

In culture and the media, the term ‘home’ is more often than not linked to familiarity, stability, childhood, family and comfort. The problem is that, for many people, these ideas don’t always overlap. We’re left trying to work out how to define ‘home’ in our own minds without excluding the people, places, emotions and experiences that, despite having had a huge impact on us, are confined to just one section of the timeline or map of our lives. Yet if we step back from the picture and try to avoid the debate altogether, we’re left floating without an anchor, which poses its very own problems. After all, it’s better to belong somewhere than nowhere at all, isn’t it?

Sometimes it even seems like we’re not the ones who decide where our ‘home’ is. While someone might consider themselves a fully-fledged Londoner (having worked and frequented the pubs there for years), their Hackney-born colleague or Geordie school friend might snort and insist that, really, they’re a northerner, ‘born n bred’, and that’s what they’ll always be.

Then if we consider the jetsetters of our generation, it becomes even clearer how many challenges are faced as the centre of our emotional compass adapts and changes. Whether we like it or not, when our accent, language, physical features, beliefs and moral perspectives are the minority in the area or country we live in, we are less likely to be considered ‘one of the bunch’ and more likely to be discouraged from claiming an affinity with that environment.

Many people who have moved away from their school-day haunts will be familiar with the sense that they’re being branded as disloyal by one of two of those who have chosen to stay. And let’s not pretend we haven’t all heard an angry outburst of “go home!” spat by a self-professed ‘proud citizen’ who believes they have the authority on where that is. When our own inclination to define our ‘home’ meets with the influence of the people who wish to define it for us, the term becomes even hazier.

Sometimes language frees us, but sometimes it can cause us to jump into boxes. So if the above conundrum sounds familiar, here’s what I’d say to you: try to forget about it. Or at least, try to forget the established ideas about what you ought to call your ‘home’. Why should it be just one place, just the first place, or just the most frequented place? Why can’t it be flexible, or transferable, or ever-widening? Home could be somewhere that excites us, or a place of calm where we sleep off the excitement. An actress may feel at home on a stage in any country of the world, a fisherman at the edge of any river, and an explorer at the frontier of any new and undiscovered spot on Earth or beyond.

It was once said that “even in the familiar, there can be surprise and wonder”. For me, home is a place where I may find, repeatedly, a little of all three.

@EmilyDring

(Featured image courtesy of twm1340)

We took views, likes and editorial opinion into account when making our decision and thus the results are:

Winner: Chantal Swainston with her hilarious ‘Student’s Grumpy Guide to Christmas’ which has been keeping us all laughing throughout the less thrilling aspects of going home for Christmas. Chantal will win a Spilt inc. T-shirt, as pictured here.

Runners Up:  

Emily Dring: New Year, New Home

Ben Lawrence: For the Last Ten Seconds of 2012

Have another look at Ben’s captivating poem below.

For the last ten seconds of 2012.

ten somewhere there’s a vault alive with instagram memories: crow’s feet
nine and diamond tears grace our porcelain soft focus faces
eight scenes I’d relive at the apocalypse, because I
seven have never hurt as much as when
six we laughed, so let’s meet in
five the new year, I’ll bring
four the last branches of
three mistletoe, if you
two bring your
one smile.