On being woken up by cows

My first week at university has been rather interesting. I was worried before because when I came here on the open day, the part of the building I’m living in that we looked at had very tiny, dark bedrooms, and though I can deal with small, I really hate dark rooms. They’re suffocating. But it turns out, I actually have a really nice room that’s bigger than I thought, and has a wonderful view, which I have posted below. Yes, cows. There are cows outside my room, and actually, they’re everywhere. My university has a farm, I think. The fields all around campus are full of cows. They come right up to the fences around the campus. In spring, they are replaced by sheep.

The view from my bedroom window :)

My flatmates are great. I don’t know all of them very well (there are nine of us) but there are four I get on really well with, and for the first week they kind of watched out for me. I should mention the first night, when we all went out together to the Student Union bar, I got lost and went home by myself because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t go out every night after, but on the nights we did go out after that, they looked out for me which was nice as I’m really not the going-out type and noise and crowds scare me, especially both together. So that makes going clubbing an interesting experience.

Most of the people in my block, as well as the building, seem to be doing performing arts. I didn’t realise before how creative my university is before I came. My flatmates (it’s not really a felt, but it’s hard to explain otherwise) are all very flamboyant and interesting, and I’m glad of that. I do feel rather boring in comparison though. But it’s great and everyone’s friendly and, so far, I think I’m doing well at making friends and not being antisocial.

In my last post I said I didn’t want to leave home. I still don’t really, and I miss home a lot, especially my family and my best friend, but I’m so busy that I don’t get to think about it much, and that helps. My mum and aunt have called me several times since I got here and they told me that my grandma, who’s been in hospital since May, is coming home next week, which is great. And I think it will help everyone because my family need something good right now. I wish I was at home too, but I think that after a while I’ll really love it here, and it’ll feel more like home. I love the city and the uni, and the people are nice, but I do really miss home.

I haven’t written anything since I got here unfortunately, but I’m determined to get back into it. Been reading lots, though, which is something I haven’t had the chance to do for a long time. I mean like reading books that are my own choice, not for school like the last couple years. My new story’s still bubbling away and stewing nicely. :)

Next week I might post some prose here and start something about my holidays. We got an assignment today to write a page-long story inspired by one of the book titles on our reading list. I’m not good with limits, but I think it’s an interesting first assignment anyway.

So umm, yeah. My first week at university.  I can’t really think what else to write.

Update on the Life of Me

Ha. Blog got forgotten. Oopsie.

Anyway, this is only a small update. I’ve actually been back from my adventuring for over a month now, but life since then has been a rather hectic mix of packing for university, cataloguing books, trips to hospital, funerals, and a new story.

I’ll write a longer post on my holiday, including some pictures, once this week’s over and I’m settled at university, because I need to go through the journal I wrote while I was away (ha, and actually find it) and sort out something that won’t be a terrible day-to-day monologue of all the amazing stuffs I was determined to never forget. It was amazing. And I know I meant to blog while I was away/when I got back, but eh. Better late than never? And besides, I only know of three people who actually read this blog and you guys will forgive me.

Anyway, on Saturday I go to university. Yayyyyyy . . . kinda. Every time I start to feel excited, I become that six-year-old who didn’t want to go camping because mum wouldn’t be there to make me a hot chocolate (‘milkies’) before bed.  It’s big and there’s still so much to do and I suck at making friends and my bike’s still broken and I’ve not found a church (not that I have a way of getting to one because of the bike) and I hate that almost all my books are going to be left at home in boxes. Right now, I feel I need to be at home. Not just because of being scared of leaving home, but because it's just a bad time to leave, I think. We need to be together, and I also don't want to be alone so far from home at the moment. It might not be the other side of the country or the world, but it's still far enough.

But anyway. I’m a wimp so this is probably all just stupid panicking and over-emotional-ness. It’s been a very bad week.

On a more happier front, it was my birthday a couple days ago. I got some cool orange headphones, a tin of rice pudding, £50 of book vouchers, a pretty notebook and a CD, and my aunt took me out for a pub meal. And my dad sent me a card, a facebook message, and an email, which is pleasantly surprising. :)

I also started a new story recently. In the first week I spent an hour brainstorming the spark of idea, and the rest writing, like non-stop. I reached the 12,000 word mark. That’s more than what I write during a NaNoWriMo week, so it kind of blew me away with excitement. I’ve never had an idea that got me writing so much and so fast. That was about three weeks ago, and since then I’ve slowed down a bit (verging on 20,000 now) to brainstorm more, so I don’t get stuck and burn out.

When I first started out, all I had was a scene and two characters. Now there’s a circus troupe, a brother, a pet elephant, a bratty fairy, and a host of magical items I’m having serious fun making up, as well as a half-worked plot that’s unravelling as I explore more characters. So all’s going well, and it feels amazing to be writing a children’s story again. I was afraid I couldn’t write them anymore after so many attempts at ‘grown-up’ stories that are still floating in the periphery of ‘to research/planandbrainstorm/actuallywrite’.

Poetry, as seems to always be the case whenever I get back into prose, has taken a liking to the cupboard of my mind to play shadow-butterflies on the door with a torch. It may be there a while if this story keeps going as well as it started, so this place (now I’ve remembered it) will probably be full of ramblings and holiday photos rather than the usual poetry-dumping.

Anyhoo, I’m done. Be back next week sometime to tell you about my first week in university and Berlin.

Gone Adventuring

Today I will be going on holiday with my best friend. I have bought a cool new travel notebook just for this holiday, and in it I will be doing what the cool kids do and writing about everything I see and do and hear and eat and all that kind of fun stuff. Also drawing and maybe painting, though I have proper paper for that.

 I intend to find internet access at various points and post edited versions (my notes won’t make much sense without de-nonsense editing) of my adventures in Berlin, Athens and Rhodes, here. I will be gone a month.

There will also probably be pictures of obscure or pretty things, me and my friend, my scribblings, and maybe some drawings, if my camera behaves itself.  So really, this blog’s transforming into a travel-blog until mid august when I come back and once again saturate this place with poetry, probably inspired by my travels.

But anyway, this is short because I forgot to do it earlier and am due to leave the house for the airport in an hour. Devon is sunny and warm today, and hopefully it’ll be the same in Berlin.

Anyhoo, turrah for now! :)

After the Poems

I have immersed myself in poetry for hours,
and now my head wanders like a traveller
with a broken compass, through loves
and lives and the things people collect
to make themselves happy.

Every word is a picture of someone –

the electricity between thoughts and colour

– and every ending is a breath of cloud

plucked from the place dreams sneak out from

like naughty children. They are loosely tied

together and rarely double-knotted.

I wonder what happens to them once

they are done and forgotten,

whether part of the magic is that mystery

of forgotten things and the words

we write with our fingertips in their dust.

We can touch someone else’s scribbles in a margin

but like a mirage, we waste the play

of imagining who they were by stepping so close

that we see the sand falling between the pages.

At school we analyse and deconstruct

these glimpses into the swirl of another’s iris,

forgetting they are more than captions

beneath photographs, clinging to context.

We pull them apart like the same old

Lego bricks, and restack them again and again

in different shapes. Sometimes we create

windows. Done, miss.

But after the poems I see an ocean tossing

up the colours of a hundred choirs,

the light of a mid-afternoon fracturing them

like stained glass projections throughout a room.

I’m dizzy. Read me again, they say,

and look through a different moment,

in a different time, and see the reflections

of a thousand voices and shadows in a rainfall

which once filled my poet’s mind.

*

More of a musing than a poem, but whatever. I've been reading lots, writing less, and have spoken to some inspiring people about poetry and all the strings people tie it with. Found a love of graffiti poetry - I love the idea of writing on walls.

Also, Tumblr is to blame for the neglect of this blog. :3

And hello to my Russian readers - you're now the greenest place on my readership map, congrats. :)

Expression?

Today's been a rather dull day. It’s funny, I only noticed today that I’ve never actually posted anything personal, about me, on this blog, whatsoever. Sure, my drafts are full of musings I’ve begun about Life or Specific Crisis or the occasional Unfairness Rant, or just Rants in general. None have been posted longer than four minutes before I’ve deleted them, most never even got posted in the first place.

So here I am, with something personal, sort of. My mum said something today about expression. She wanted to know why I write poetry about things that don’t matter to me, or are about me. I told her that my poems are all, in a way about me. They come from my mind, so I guess they must be, anyway. She didn’t press for a further explanation, even though I don’t think she thought my reply actually answered her question, but it got me wondering about my expression of myself.

I personally, don’t think much of myself. The world is bigger than I am. Muchmuchmuch bigger and people who think the world is small always seem to end up bitter about their life, or disappointed that they didn’t live enough. Nobody can live in a space that’s too small or live enough in a space that’s too big. Look at the stars, look to the horizon – the edge of sight is flat, the curve of the earth so subtle in its extent that we cannot see we are on a sphere until we no longer stand with our feet on the ground – remember how small you are, explore the vapour you’re apart of before the wind blows, and be happy. It's as simple as that to me.

People, however, seem to think a lot of me, which I can never really get my head around. I find compliments hard to deal with. My friends say I’m smart. I’m not. I absorb things that interest me, bits of stories, ideas, quotes, poetry, history. But I struggle every day with lessons and understanding. Odd that I find I can understand people far better than I can understand what they say. I don’t like speaking out loud and I don’t like it when people think more of me than I am, it means I’ll always end up disappointing them.

Expression, though, is not something I’ve thought much about before. Art, in itself is expression. I paint, write, isn’t that expression? But if I’m expressing myself in these mediums, then what is it I am expressing about myself? My mum thinks it’s nothing. Just meaningless, hollow poems about things and stuff and nothing. Yet there must be something of me going into them -- I spend hours writing just one, and while I’m writing, I do find myself thinking about things that do matter to me. The people in my life, the past, my childhood, worries, regrets, the usual ‘stuff’ I suppose. How much does content reflect the writer, though? I’m pretty sure that Stephen King, though he writes about murder and horrific-nesses, isn’t actually a murderer. He’s probably a really nice guy. So what does his writing show about him?

I’m studying William Blake at college at the moment (I’ve had readings of his poems on a loop for the past four hours . . .) and Blake, is one of those people who always seemed to write about things that really mattered to him. If anyone’s read his work, a lot of it is about how children were treated in his time, the corruption in the church, poverty and other such issues that not many people in the upper classes at the time gave much thought for. His opinions on these issues are very strong and apparent in his work, which shows a lot about the kind of person he was and, supposedly, that he was a caring person who thought a lot about people below the poverty line.

One theme in my work a couple people have mentioned to me is fathers. Several people who’ve read my work have told me I must have a good relationship with my father because I write about good relationships with fathers or have some kind of nostalgia thing going on. The irony is, I haven’t seen my father for well over a year and I really don’t think much of him at all. Fathers aren’t important to me. So, how true is it that Blake really thought much of the issues he wrote about? Did he perhaps just think they were good subjects to write about in a similar way I think father-child relationships are? Or maybe it was a kind of absent thing? Or perhaps he really did just write about what meant a lot to him and this is a bad example. Who knows.

At this point I’m aware there has probably been some big Blake-inspiration research-y thing and comparing my vague inspirations to a famous poet's who was part of a movement, probably is a seriously bad idea . . . Also, I don't believe Blake’s writing came of absent ‘what shall I write today’ musings like most of my stuff does. So yeah, bad example.

Anyway, my point was simply that, how do we know what we read in poetry is actually important to the writer? How much of ‘you’ do you express in your work, and how?

In prose, I think it’s maybe easier to express yourself. What kind of person you are might depend on how well you treat your characters, the kind of relationships they have, how morals are presented, the way people communicate and how actions are used to illustrate stuff, what angles and biases you may purposefully or absently use to make something seem good/bad, etc, etc. But then again, these might also not be expressing ‘you’ (such as horror writers), especially as everything that is written – prose, poetry, whatever – can be interpreted differently by whoever is reading. So what do we express about ourselves when we write?

Ha, rambling is fun.

Ekphrasis

Chaos-6 ~ by Narcisse-Shrapnel (Deviantart)

A child, with arms wide, paddles

in the slosh of a shallow brook after rain,

humming, humming,

and wondering

how far waves can roll upstream from the sea.

Everything is grey.

        

Her hat is too big – it covers her ears

and makes her tune hollow

and far away.

The forest doesn’t listen anymore.

When she was smaller, her father hung

yoghurt pots in the branches

to amplify her voice. On a shingle beach,

crashes of waves

e c h o a n d e c h o ,

trembling through plastic, roots and bone.

        

Now the trees close themselves

around her and shake their rusted leaves,

trying to shed

their ashes.

        

She carries a bucket of red paint;

one hand bleeds the bank-side bushes

with a sable-hair brush, like rapping

a stick along schoolyard railings.

                                        

Marching now, she imagines the city

with waters running through its streets

and the beaded amber streetlights paddling

in a shimmer

of sliding reflections.

                        

Fallen from her pocket, dried apricot pieces

float by, half-coloured red

like flowers timid for summer.

                        

In noisy places,

it is hard to remember a half-forgotten tune,

though it might murmur with the patter of rainfall

and whisper like a boat along threads.

She would paint fish and musical notes

on the skyscraper roofs

where the telephone wires knot like dead lighting,

 if she could reach,

so that God might see  

her talent            and give her more colours

to paint all

that she

half-forgets

and all the rain washes

a    w       a          y

on a greyer

yesterday.

Finding your Perfect Writing Forum

Lists of ‘good’ writing forums on the internet always seem to have the big bustly websites listed first like a popularity contest. As the list goes down, the size of the forums listed usually gets smaller, most of the forum-world gems being lost, save to those expert Googlers or those who chance across the whispers floating around the interweb grapevines.

As an amateur writer myself, and a forum-er of four years, I've found smaller forums  with closer critique values work much better for writers, especially ones just starting out or who are interested in actually getting better (believe it or not, there are a surprising amount of writers who don’t seem to want to get better at all). Absolute Write's 35,000 members may be seriously daunting to someone inexperienced with forum life, and unless you're already a freaking awesome writer and have a flashing sparkly avatar or something, you are not going to get noticed among the crowds.

If you’ve never been a member of a forum before, regardless of how long you’ve been writing, you may find it a rather different experience than you may have initially thought. Some forums can be nice happy places full of friendly people and others can be a cut-throat world of surviving out the older members. Some can be writerly havens and others can be abysmal lairs of ego-stroked pre-teens waiting for you to tell them their Twilight fanfic is fantastic literature . . . it happens. Telling the difference is easy, though, so no worries, but the main concern is what you want to get from a forum.

I joined my first forum when I was fifteen, knowing nothing about them, and I know that I certainly wouldn't be the writer I am today without that forum and the others I joined. I dread to think of where I'd be now if my first stop-off had been the Young Writers Society (YWS) which, unfortunately falls under the category of a far from constructive forum. So getting the right one for you, is crucial. If you're a young writer in your early teens, concerned with meeting writery friends, then YWS might work for you, but keep in mind the doors - if you want to be a writer you need to always be learning. There is no such things as the perfect writer and if you’re serious, you’re going to have to convince more than just your parents and friends you’re good.

If you're perhaps a bit older (should I say mature?) and more serious about being critiqued by people who seriously know what they're talking about (and not afraid of receiving constructive criticism) then Critique Circle are fabulous. However, I wouldn't recommend CC to a newbie writer - these guys mean serious business. You’ll need a backbone and decent amount of knowledge in the craft to return the favour to whomever critiques your work. Critiques for critiques, fair game, right? You don’t get something for nothing.

Also, as I’ve jumped in the deep-end with the ‘best’ sites (in my opinion) I’ve had the experience to nosey around, this one’s for poetry-peoples:  Tin Roof Alley Poets, which, though has a few downfalls in some members being utterly awful human beings, is great for receiving genuine, honest and very detailed critiques (have a backbone, though or you’ll probably find your poetry crippled at the knees rather than manning up) and will certainly help you improve your work and educate you in poetry-ness.

Another thing I always find with lists of writing forums is that they never seem to include are forums for younger writers, which, as I’ve been a member of about twelve different forums, possibly even more, and witnessing the births and deaths of some, I think I can comment on a few.

Young Writers Online and Teenage Writers are both excellent forums (Dear any possible readers hailing from either forum: I LOVE YOU BOTH SO NO ARGUING *coughs*) for young people. Though very different from one another, in both atmosphere and community, they both offer a great community of mixed ability writers focused on helping others improve through critique. The latter also has camps where more experienced members teach others about the different crafts, and the former has many competitions and events throughout the year. There are no better forums for young writers (age 12-25) on the interwebs. Trust me, I’ve been on almost all of them. I should note that these two are *coughs* rivals, though that may be an understatement.

When it comes to forums, as I think I’ve said before, the best thing you can do it ask yourself what you want to gain from joining them. If it's just to make friends with like-wise minded people then smaller less critique and more discussion-focused sites will work better for you as you won't get lost in the struggle to be noticed, as in bigger forums. People on those forums are generally friendlier and for lack of a better word, spammy, so it’s usually very easy to fit in to these kinds of places.

Some examples:

Poet's Graves Workshop (all ages)
Legendfire (mostly younger writers, but appears to welcome all(?))
Fictionpost (all ages)
Hortorian (mostly younger writers, but appears to welcome all(?))
Kids' Writing Club (young writers, only)

Also, if you’re already a member of a critique-heavy forum, sometimes it’s just nice to pop by places like these for a little breather. A slower pace, new faces to talk to, teach, and learn from. There are many kinds of writers and you should always be looking to learn from others. I personally, like a balance, but that might be just me. I’m a member of both critique-heavy forums and more lax ones, and I find that this works for me. The thing is to find out what works for you.

If what you want is to get better at writing, learn something and be critiqued, then you need to look carefully before joining a forum. Many forums may boast awesome critique prowess, but rarely do they deliver *sigh*. A swift glance through some of a site's fiction and poetry forums is usually enough to confirm whether or not they are worth your time. Questions to ask yourself: are the 'critiques' mostly/all one-line comments or a couple sentences, do they say anything constructive or just stuff like 'zomg I love your work, post more!', or even worse . . . do they tolerate chatspeak? If so, these are the places to avoid posting your work, for you will not improve, and the people there are probably not overly interested in improving or already think they’re the best thing since Marshamallow Fluff. So it will be a waste of time joining. Look for places that more often, or even always, give good, detailed and honest critiques. By ‘honest’ I also mean, harsh where necessary.

I have little experience with bigger adult forums such as Absolute Write, so I don't feel I can accurately describe their services. I know YWS is lost in its own size, which, though is nowhere near as big as AW, comes under the description of a site filled with prospect, but saturated with no learning, no effort, ego-stroked members, and generally awful critiques, meaning that their prospect is mostly sadly wasted (can you tell I'm biased? :3). I guessed this could be the case with super-sized forums such as AW, but after joining and having a poke around I found the critiques were mostly helpful, and most work did actually get looked at, though navigating that place was interesting. It wouldn't be my cup of tea, but I suppose it depends on who you are. Size shouldn't be a deciding vote one where you join though.

Look around before joining somewhere that will get you nowhere despite years of posting, unless you want to join a forum more for the friends and discussion than for betterment and helping others. On that note, I must say, most of the places I've linked will require you to do your fair share of work to receive critiques in return, even the less critique-focused places require you to comment on others work - but critiquing, especially detailed critiquing will help you grow as a writer, too, so that shouldn't be a problem, should it? :)

Anyhoo, this is getting rather long and rambly. Feel free to contribute your opinions or any info you have on sites mentioned, or any others.

EDIT 12/12/12 (ha): Someone asked me for the link to this today, and reading it back, I'd like to just unreccomend teenagewriters.com (TW). Unfortunately last summer the place was taken over by a businessman who kicked all the staff and older members off, killing the site. There's still a lot of useful stuff in the archives I recommend looking for, if you want to learn about writing, but the site is no longer active and has nobody moderating it.

Waking up in Venice

Haven't posted in a while, gave up on Nano (usual excuses), here's a new poem I wrote at lunchtime on Thursday, when I should have been revising. Usual meh-ness.

We woke up in Venice, once.

Spent lanterns hung from threads in the doorways

like failed nightlights, doused by arteries

we traced on a map, noting where they split

from the body and became sewn in with the fabrics

against our skin. You always liked simple linen

because of the heat.

Straw hat and sunglasses, such the tourist.

Our breakfast in bed was disturbed

by an early-riser, singing from a boat below to the lady

in the room above us.

She closed her window,

and told us later she preferred the voiceless Einaudi,

direct to the soul, you know?

That morning, some of the neighbours hung

bunting between the houses, window-to-window

like little Chinese washing lines,

tying the fourth storeys.

I sent a postcard home (hello, Albion, miss me yet?)

and bought some olive bread

you said tasted like the smell of cut grass.

I remember the bar: a pokey little place

beside a bridge grown green in the centuries,

and like everything, barely floating.

Two glasses of flat wine each. Risotto, just because

it’s what’s done.

Outside the wind tore at the colours

flapping in their zig-zags and pulled them from the windows

so they streamed in ribbons down the streets.

Poetry for the rejected lover in his boat.

We fed the birds with baicoli crumbs,

watched the canals grow dark,

and counted the fireflies burning holes in Venice’s

new curtains. We fell asleep and woke up

in someplace old

where aeroplanes flew overhead,

and the jet streams faded

like the memory of dreaming.

4. Silverskin

tiny white flowers grow in the gash

of a silver birch, tendons split between the reaching

of roots which traverse upwards over old scars,

towards a branch shadowed with grey

and flaking skin.

leaves fall from origami twists

into the lap of a prince who, as an old man,

sits beneath this tree to confess his years into the quiet

of summer: loves, lives, losses

and a lingering thought

that his name means nothing.

in mornings passed, the prince would climb trees

and wade through the froth of sky, searching

for a fortune stories told him he’d find in the heights

of life. he’s a man with eyes

as old as the tree he sits beneath,

only he doesn’t look,

he breathes.

but this tree misses youth, too, and if it had eyes

it would gaze at each new shoot – green as eve

– with wonder. silver skin peels like the scales of armour

or notes on battle for excited archaeologists.

but beneath it all are the wounds

of old men, old crowns, and old hearts,

and a thousand rings of silver dust.

3. Painted Caves

There’s something about painting caves

people don’t seem to remember

nowadays. Secrets in the dark press history through stone,

absorbing moments, loves, cultures — feeding

them back to us with the seep of minerals

in a trickle of ancient water about our feet,

and back into a world that has moved on.

The red walls have a strange glow

when you think of the hands that crushed each berry,

moulded the paste, the paint, with fingers and bones,

and carved an image in the gloom.

Firelight, flickering.

A deer might fly inside a cave,

a hunter might throw his spear and watch it sail

for a millennia (or longer), a woman washes and cooks,

waiting for love, birds are grounded

like shadows tangled to their makers,

and even the sun can set in the north, frozen

there, as if to prove it can.

Rocks furred with moss clench at the tide

that tangles itself between the caverns

like drenches of dark hair. Fish and tiny things weave

and pass by the paintings, minds unbent

around their meanings as they’re warbled

with refraction. Slant

figures stoop

and become old,

mirrored alongside younger selves and more

honest smiles, like hoping too hard

dissolves simply being.

2. The Pineapple Trees

In autumn, pineapples fall in the woods

with soft thuds where the dying leaves lay among the needles,

dressed in red and gold to hide their bare bones.

I used to run home at dusk with one in each hand,

grasping at crocodile leaves that had shrunk and changed

by the time I held them before my mother.

My sister is taller than me and sometimes she picks them

too early, and their petal lips flake and fall away;

we take down the summer bunting and spit bitter flesh

(wooden instead of yellow) into the grass, a quarter

-ring is hidden inside for a shortened season.

She’d try to explain how pinecones are different

by putting their corpses near the fire, so they’d open up

and allow their souls to fill with the rain

that patters down our chimney.

Pineapples don’t grow on trees, she told me.

In the October quiet, the leaves fall slower,

revealing their transparency as they melt

into each other: blood and tanned skin,

hanging (barely) in the treetops, a memory of songs

blistering on the threshing floors.

I sit beneath a wintering tree and watch the pineapples

falldecayanddisappear, nature recycling in a second.

My summer dress is stained and sticky with juice

and an empty shell rests in my lap.
Could be a skull or a mask,

in time. Through the branches I see scales falling

in place of leaves, like fruit dragons

shedding their skins.

NaPoWriMo (the proper one this time) and Glass Alchemy

Sooooo, my pre-NaPo failed, as you'll notice if you look back through my posts. I think I got seven out of twenty-eight or something embarrassingly awful like that . . . but this is a new month, a new start, and I'm hoping to achieve more this time round that in February.

My first NaPo was last year, when I was rather bullied into it by a newbie who'd joined about a month earlier and poetry-ised the whole site. I hadn't really done much poetry beforehand, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a go anyway. We shared a thread on one of the writing sites I'm on, and his awesomness made me strive to work harder so I didn't look so . . . rubbishy. :3 But I finished with thirty poems, and that made me happy. :)

This year, I also intend to finish. *crosses fingers*

Also, I'm hoping to post up a couple of reviews (for a TV series and a film) in the next few weeks, too, which is something new. They're probably going to be more discussions though, but heh, technicalities blow.

Anyway, without further ado, my first poem of April:

Glass Alchemy

When I was small and believed in magic,

my father showed me how to make little glass coins

from the white beaches collected in my wellies.

In the mornings, I watched him gather light bulbs

of glowing honey onto a dipper, and shape them

into harvest moons, small as my raincoat buttons.

On the walls he kept a hundred jam jars,

each half-filled with coloured powders, while rings

of wire about their necks fused them to the wallpaper

and stone, like captured palms, ever-holding on.

When he added the colours, they moved

in tiny eddies, like spices trapped inside a marble,

squashed flat. My task was to stamp them

and give them all names and faces.

My mother’s name was Laurel;

I do not remember her face.

In the evenings we’d search for seashells,

insert a coloured coin, and write our names

on their lips, might they sing her voice back to us,

instead of crushing waves.

Our footprints once waded out to sea, searching,

but now I’m older, wiser, no longer believe in whispers,

so I tip the glass coins back into the waves,

returning them to sand and old magics.

I sell back my father’s secret:

that beautiful things smash like bones,

and elixirs make the past grow older,

always unchanged.

Welcome to my new pad!

Well, this is rather deceiving, isn't it? I look like I've been here for aaaages with all these months of posts, and yet, this is my first proper post on Blogger and this nice new shiny blog. Still working on the look of it, but fontssss, yes I do, I do love fonts. See how easy this is to read? *grins happily*

Anyway, the conversion to Blogger wasn't made lightly. I didn't know you could convert and was initially intending on just leaving Wordpress and starting over, but that prospect was rather scary given my track record of not finishing things, and this blog being something I'd actually kept going with (shock&horror). So I made another blog here, set it up and then closed it so nobody but me can see it because I discovered I could convert everything over, and all would be good in my blogging world. The other blog will be used for something else when I can think of something.

So, looking forward to new things and fonts and experimenting with themes (so if the background keeps changing, don't worry about it, I'm just rather indecisive) and saturating this place with more yukky poetry. I apologise in advance. Oh, also a writing update on novels/novella coming soon. Figured I should actually write something about writing for once.

Also, previous posts may be a bit odd in formatting, or alignment issues or in posts with pictures, have some bits of script randomly. This is just from the conversion and at some point I'll go back through my old posts and try and fix some of the problems. Mostly they're quite small, and the poetry posts all seem fine from when I checked through everything, so yeah, I'll get to the others in due time. :)

Tootles for now~
Lykaios

Hide

Where sand dunes beneath the sea
move like duvet folds, slowly and creasing
as age does over faces,
little fishes slide through the silence
of sheets and blow bubbles through fibres.
Or perhaps they hear in colour
and match the shades of milky oceans
to their own dances, practised at night
while Iapetus closes his doors and wraps
a yellow sheet about himself.

Some sailors think porpoises speak
in tongues. Prophets for the pools, they pay
my toll fee in pearls and tell me I am
drowning.
Loose skin peels back like lace.
Do you see my bones yet?
I could lie here and sleep through
fairytales until you do.

Last chance to breathe the corals,
to study the sand for lost war helmets
and old tridents made of shells.
They shatter when you touch them;
bare skin’s an acid.
If fish could paint,
drowned cliffs would tell of gods
and clowns, and how the blue above shakes
leaves through open windows. Evergreen
in the real world, they’ll say,
everblue if you keep breathing.

#7) Untitled III

Sometimes I stand on a haystack and imagine
the prickles are coals on a dark jungle floor,
and I’m walking barefoot, testing my skin.
They say that the mind controls the body,
and that an absent mind is more than a dream
with fairies, but a cave where water drips
in the air; every sense feels far away
until one lands on you, cold, like a fever.
I think the sheep watch me and wonder
what it’s like to be higher than the fence.
I would tell them I don’t feel the hay anymore
and that the wind gives me pins-and-needles
in my hands when night rises and I still
haven’t caught a cloud. The jungles grow
around me and they become blank eyes
staring from the undergrowth. I meet
them all and stare back until they turn away,
the coals flickering in the grass, growing cold.

 

(One day left, only . . . twenty-two poems to go . . . :S )

More old toys and much more nostalgia

So my mum and I decided our loft was a disgusting pigsty and needed to be sorted out, and seeing as none of us have felt like doing much outside the house this week, we decided we’d have a crack at it and waste some time. Needless to say, we got rather dirty.

Our loft is rather . . . ancient in decoration, in the sense that the cobwebs are probably as old as the house, the spiders on their 561st generation or something, there are chinks of daylight coming from above . . . which is worrying . . . and the once-upon-a-time insulation has been turned fairytale-style into dust, though hopefully not by some wizard or ghoul-thing, hiding in the dark. O.o

Huzzah, but out expedition into the depths of the loft-space held surprises as well as cobwebs and othersuch . . . lovelies. So I’m doing another Old Toys and Nostalgia post, just because.

We found my old Lucy Locket Dream Cottage, which I swear we sold at a bootsale years and years ago (I always thought dolls were kind of freaky), but wallah, there it was was, boxed and everything.

Next was some more of my old Teeny Weeny Families collection. The Brown’s Mini Market was bought a lot more recently than the others, at a stage where I wasn’t really into playing with plastic playsets and was into the whole tomboy-moodiness and treehouse-building thing, so it never really got played with, sadly. It is one of my favourites though – got to love tiny fridges. xD

I also found some of my mini storybook Teeny Weenies which made me very happy as I thought I’d lost them years back. They are each only 6cm tall, so you can do the maths for the size of the lollypops . . . xD I used to love playing with these – the dad from the toy shop and the mum from the flower shop always had a thing for each other, I thought, and he’d by flowers from her shop and then give them to her (he wasn’t good at surprises), and then they’d go to the restaurant in the Grand Hotel set together while their kids played with the mouse twins. 

I also had another two sets – a duplicate of the flower shop where it was a father and son, instead (bought from a bootsale) and they had little pitchforks and yellow flowers instead of red ones.

Also, there was an ice cream parlour which I never really liked because the ice creams were blue and blue ice cream just didn’t make sense. The little kid in that one was cute though and was friends with the little rabbit in the sweet shop. xD

There was also Waddle’s Boutique, which is a rather poor state as it was in a rotting box beneath one of the worrying chinks of daylight that really shouldn’t be there. The stickers are peeling on the inside and it’s very dirty. For some reason the bits for it have been living safely in the Grand Hotel from my last toys&nostalgia post, so as least they’re not wrecked. The little bobbin from the top is also with them. I didn’t find my teapot, though, which was my ultimate favourite, even before the Grand Hotel, and was my first Teeny Weeny set. I also have the bits for that one in the Grand Hotel though, so I guess it must still be somewhere in the loft. *sadface* EBAY will save me! :D

These next ones were *technically* my brother’s toys, as if I remember correctly, they were a fifth birthday present. However, he never liked them because he said they were too much like Polly Pocket and they were a girl’s toy. I my terrible sixes and sevens, my tomboy-ness was getting the better of me, so I decided I liked them and they were not a girl’s toy, so that was okay.

They are pretty cool sets though – the blue ones has this whole ‘rocks on the railway line’ thing which I always thought was cooler to play it out that the rocks actually fell on Thomas instead of in front of him so the little orange digger could quickly get them out of the way, so Thomas died a lot and the little orange digger lost his job. The other one wasn’t so cool, though it had the helicopter (I forget his name) which would usually crash or end up rescuing Pollies from the WRATH OF JAMES.

The next one isn’t technically a toy, but it’s something I absolutely loved, and I can probably relate it in some way or another to my love of stories and books and writing, later on in my life. If anyone remembers Tot’s TV, these tapes were a kind of magazine-collecting thing that was made to boost ratings before the show was sadly culled. :’( I have no idea what happened to the magazines – they basically just had the story from that week’s tape in them with illustrations. These magazines and tapes were how I taught myself to read before I went to pre-school at about two and a half years old. Writing didn’t catch up until I was about seven or eight though.

Anyway, I used to listen to these tapes all the time with this toy tape player (which is in the shed at the bottom of the garden) that was multicoloured and had a little yellow microphone and everything. I have all the tapes but two, but I do remember one got brutally butchered by my dad’s old tape-player and the other might possibly still be in my tape player in the shed at the bottom of the garden.

This next one is possibly older than me as it belonged to my late stepdad when he was younger. It was one of the first game consoles or something, I’m not really sure – but it still works and it has the most addictively awesome theme tune ever. Last I knew it had 100-200 games on it, we never really found out how many exactly, or what they all were, though I’m guessing Google would find out all this in an instant nowadays *sigh*. Space invaders, pac-man, frog-crossing, Othello and this awesome tank-tunnel game were my favourites, though. :)

When I was a kid I used to ADORE Disney, like most kids do. Lady and the Tramp was one of my all-time favourites along with Winnie the Pooh, and every time my mum or my uncle Tony went up to Norfolk or came to visit from Norfolk, they’d bring me and my brother back a stuffed Disney toy. We had the whole collection of Winnie the Pooh ones, and I swear I never got rid of mine, so I have no idea where the others went. *sadface*

On the expedition to the loft, I found Lady and Eeyore. I remember Tigger being my favourite, though, so I was very sad not to find him.

When I was about five or six, we went to visit one of my mum’s friends and their kids who lived in Bodmin, near the prison. I was absolutely terrified of Bodmin at the time, having been told in advance by my wonderfully lovely peers at school about the murders lurking in the moorlands the bodies under the grass and even more murders and evil men (Rasputin was mentioned by name) locked up in the prison. So Tigger came with me for moral support.

My mum’s friend had two sons, one a bit older than me and the other about three or four, so roughly the same age as my brother. The older boy was nasty. I didn’t like him as all. But when he saw my Tigger he decided he wanted him, and that I had no choice in the matter. All day we shot daggers at each other behind our mum’s backs. In the end, I lost the battle and my poor Tigger ended up having his tail ripped off.

Lady also has a story, as she’s technically Lady the Second, but it’s not as entertaing as Tigger’s story, and this is getting rather long . . .

*
Almost last up is yet more of my Polly Pockets, which are all complete with the original bits (I was a weirdly careful child about keeping things together) and . . . aren’t all that interesting, so I won’t say much about them. The Polly Pocket animals are seriously freaky, though, don’t you think? Like fluffy lumps . . .

And some Disney ones (Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Lion King) which have a few missing bits as I let some kids play with them as school once. *sadface*

Also, I found some of my Micromachines this time. :) I used to have a lot more, but I don't know where they drove off to.  Some of them are newer than others – the green/yellow Chevy, the pink Cadillac and the orange Vee-dub are recent Ebay purchases. :3

Anyway, this is really long, so I’ll save my old Harry Potter stuffs for their own post sometime, oh and I’ll do a Pokemon post, at some point, too, but because my brother has most of our old Pokemon stuff, I need to bribe him to let me borrow them. >.>

#6) Shoelace

One dancing shoe hangs
from the washing line by a pink ribbon
lace, and sways to the blown
-away music or sometimes, the quiet
humming of bees when they come close.
The garden is overgrown
and pegs divide the line
like paled toy birds, fasting
for a daybreak that keeps coming,
but never remains.

This house is old.
The garden became separate long ago
and the faces that sometimes glance
from the windows, are shadows,
or video-tape rewinds, dusted with age
and tracking lines.
Rewind again—
see how that shoe swings
and hangs lower when it rains.

The sound distorts
and you know your voice has changed.
Yet there is something nostalgic
or lonely about it now—
the voices of ghosts laugh
as you press play.

Dew glistens on the pink satin,
moulding.

Returning home you find fences folded
into each other, broken for easy passage.
The grass grows through the wire
squares, hiding it like a trap,
but that shoe still hangs there, tied
to the line like a margin for the constellations.
Cassiopeia watches the pirouette
of one tiny shoe
as the grass sways, gone to seed
in a garden of sentiment.

The house is empty now.
One little pink shoe twists in the wind
on its ribbon safety rope,
and then unwinds,
drooping.

#5) Invisibility

Sometimes I feel like a ghost
when I wander around my house.
I think the walls are too thin
and the eyes that stare from photographs,
too false,
like the days we lived then
were fairytales etched on a shoreline,
then folded away into the sand
where only the clouds that blur
with the horizon’s millimetre of clarity
can get a close enough look
to see the fractures,
to see the age on the Tru-prints.

Rings on the coffee-table,
game-shows on telly, buzzing through the ceiling,
plates stacked in the sink, and the constant
banging
of the front door
remind me that people still live
here. Sometimes
I make some noise
when nobody’s home.
I sing out-loud, out-of-tune,
and I am louder than I remember.

I’m a ghost in my house,
seeing the misconnections where loops
carried through a chapter,
skipping lines.
I sometimes watch the rain,
and sometimes I repeat days, over and over
and over
again.

On a Tuesday I change the photographs
to dustier versions of memories
and allow the sunlight to bleach the colours,
so that like me,
we all become ghosts,
background noise that nobody hears.


/yukIsuck

What happens when I'm out of muse . . .

So my pre-NaPo is going rather badly. I have excuses, but I won't bore you with them. I currently have a total of five poems out of the twelve I'm supposed to have . . . w00t!

However . . . Number Four needs some explaining, I think, lest you (all five of you) shoot me for my disgusting abuse of the English language.

Recently I've rediscovered children's verse. So, stupidly thinking they were easy to do and that all I'd need is a rhyming dictionary (which I totally blame for my rhyming-fail), I set about writing my own. It was fun until the end of the first stanza.

The idea of bears in cupboards is from a novella I'm working on alongside my novel, about a little boy called Alfred and his rather imaginative outlook on the world. It's a scene I've been thinking of for a long time, but actually got around to writing on Monday night/Tuesday lunchtime.

I'm happy with the prose, but as I was out of other ideas, I recycled the idea, added some fairies and ice-cream, and came out with this heap-of-junk poem. *sigh*

Anyway, I apologise in advance for the awful rhyming and all-round yukkiness:

#4) The Bears in the Cupboards

When I was a child, the carpet was an ocean,
deeper than the sky flipped up-side-down,
there were grizzly bears in all of the cupboards,
watching me with eyes in their hundreds,
and all the fairies who lived in the garden
would sing in the rain, and call me to their fairy-ring.

But I stood in the window, safe behind the glass,
drawing myself as I breathed close, a misted mask.
And I told them all about the great grizzly bears
who hid behind the books and dust and other such things
my father used to hide away with his old inks.
They told me, “Child, see the pouring rain
and tell me what bears love again?”

But I thought and thought, and I couldn’t think,
so I ate my tea,
counted my A-B-Cs,
said thank-you to mummy,
and then played soldiers in the nursery.

Then just before morning, while the birds still slept
and the milkman only halfway up the street,
it came to me – the solution – and up I leapt!
It’s deadly top- secret, you see,
that bears go mad for ice-cream!
Love it, they do – gobsmackingly adore it!

So with Jennie’s ice-cream, around the house I dashed,
the big ones and the small ones, each loping and lumbering
— they swum the oceans and shook out the loose threads,
then ran out into the garden and through all the flower beds,
all after me and the vanilla ice-cream.

“Come quickly!” called the fairies, glinting in the trees
as I dropped the pot of Jennie’s ice-cream in the fairies’ bright ring.
One-by-one the bears, they came, and snuffled and squeezed,
just to get a tiny lick of that delicious ice-cream.

Then the fairies worked their magic in twos and threes,
filling the air with frost and brown autumn leaves.
The bears growled and roared — a great sound it was!
then disappeared in a flurry of smoke and sparkling dust!
So now you know, when you spy those bears, hiding away
in the backs of cupboards, wardrobes or stairs, you’ll trust
that with a little ice-cream, and a fairy ring –
that beating bears is simply child’s play.