#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 )

#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.

#3) Fabian Kiss

His handprint across your face
blushed red, as the sunset lay murdered
on the horizon, its blood burning in a fireplace
laid by Orion in the skies. I often wondered
what made me think of pears and French grapes,
and why I didn’t choose Cristal over that rosé
wine, dusted with gold filigree shapes:
love-hearts that came free with your bouquet.
But on your breath they were ictarine sparks
pleating the savannah’s heat before my eyes,
as we leant in close like young monarchs
tired of unwoven sighs and bad wordplay.

Do you remember we watched hot air
balloons pedalling the sky over a watercolour savannah?
Caught in orbit, they seemed to remain there,
like fathers of the absent rain, watching our samba.
And later, when we said goodbye on the veranda,
you pretended our kiss was a childish dare
and walked away, avoiding the fanfare.


/ attempt at rhyming >.<

#2) Imbolc

Winter ends quietly.
Reflections of fairy lights gleam
on the frosted buds, the icicles beading towards
earth,
and I fish in the glass,
watching it ripple
into the edges of the sky you can only see
in dark windows.
I ask my reflection for a name
and it repeats my words without voice
like the frost froze familiarity
or perhaps
I was always an outsider
and the heavens always knew me.
I tell Cailleach it’s okay
to cry for the darkness,
and that though the drips echo in the forests,
nobody hears them.
I wait for Midas
to touch the boughs around me,
and for ghosts to craft ferns on windows,
and then I’ll hold my hands out
to catch the first snow.

#1) Little Neon Angel

Mist drenches the rooftops, painting a city
backdrop in smears of purple watercolour,
and it hangs the streets with air-force saris
too long to be part of the night. Sequins
twinkle like rain-blurred traffic lights
caught on the underbellies of swelling clouds;
they wait for release, for God’s thumb
to squeeze them out like wasted dishcloths,
and beneath it all, silence
waits in the alleys,
avoiding echoes.

She sees the city as more than harsh angles,
ups and downs, and windows, finger-marked to blindness,
(these nails are shaper than twenty-twenty)
and reflecting back eyes and stars. She sees
the drips sliding down the curbs and wonders
about gravity
and how the beaded rain magnifies
the city lights.

A ring of orange flickers
to the edges of a puddle, and she breaks the rim,
taking the cracked halo up in one hand.

In a backstreet bedsit a mother waits
for her angel to come home
from the neon darkness,
and a siren pricks the walls in red, bleeding
in parallel lines through the blinds.

Somewhere on the inter-city highway, her chalk lines fade
and turn into blurs of people and places –
the ones she was always too young to see
– and she tries to peel away the answers
from the histories the ground buries like bones
(but dust floats, too) as the sun rises,
allowing the city to find its colours again
while a mother’s hands fold a sequined scarf.


/wordvomityukkiness

Enter February

So, one day left of January. Or . . . less than a day, I should say.

Normally this would mean little to me, but because I'm crazy and seem to be asking for some kind of early life-crisis or mental breakdown, I've chosen to do NaPoWriMo (the poetry version of NaNoWriMo, where you have to write a poem every day for a month instead of the usual 50,000 words of prose in a month), while I have coursework deadlines up the ying-yang, a family member in hospital on the other side of the country, and various other time-consuming chaoticnesses going off like fireworks all around me . . .

This won't be an official NaPo thing, though -- it's more of a pact between a friend (whose blog is: HERE ) and I, as we both feel we've kind of run out of steam with poetry and need something to help us get back into it. Devasaurus would also like to win the Foyle Young Poets Award this year which would be epic, as we were both commended last year, and for her to win this year would be awesome, especially considering the amount of work she's going to. And I'm very happy to be like motivational support for her, or whatever the term is *readies poking stick*. Normally it's held in April (we'll probably be doing one then as well, but were eager beavers, and this is a slightly shorter month than normal, so . . . we'll call it like a practice round, in preparation for April. And as a warning: they'll all be various shades of awful, unedited drivel.

I'm looking forward to it, I must say. I think some of my more imaginative poetry came out of last years' (April) NaPo and the weeks afterwards. It was the first NaPo I'd ever done, as before that point I hadn't really been into poetry and only dabbled when the feeling struck and I didn't feel like writing something long. It started off a kind of poetry-revival on a forum where Devasaurus and I are both members and got lots of people who hadn't tried poetry before, really into it, so it'd be awesome for something like that to happen again. It'd also be good bonus to get out our lovely threadbox filled with some fresh work and revival-ness. I'm not expecting any good work to come out of it as I suck, but I do think I'll enjoy it nonetheless.

Eh, this post is rubbish, so I'm going to wind it up quickly. I ramble too much and yikes . . . run-on sentences and comma splices galore! Someone save me! D:

Anyhoo, as I've noticed the stupid 'page' thingies on here only allow you one 'post' in them and don't like update or show notifications like regular with posts, I'm going to add a thing on the end of a regular post every time I update in Snippets or Artynesses, because I'd rather have art and longer prose separate from the bloggy bit so I can easily find and edit/delete them if needs be. Currently there are two updates under Artynesses, jus' so you know. :3

So yeah, over and out!