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.