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. :)