2017.30 - Conflagration

I ask you what to write about
You ponder, eyes crinkling;
“Write about a fire,” you say,
I smile, but do not ask: what type?

There have been so many:
The sparks whirling in the dark
Pinprick kisses hinting
The caress of greater heat…

The open, clay-cupped crackle
Of night-time conversations,
The unfurling barbecue scent
Of easy summer chatter…

The turfed-in glow of trust,
Banked to last for ages,
The open-throated roar
Of wildfire, raging, consuming…

The thin, flickering reconciliation
Of candlelight, breaths held,
The steady, everyday production
Of the forge’s rhythm…

And, central to our orbit,
The song and slumber of the hearth,
Breathing the miracle of home,
The warmth we’ve built together.


And that’s it, folks - the final poem of this year’s NaPoWriMo/ GloPoWriMo. Thanks for following along, hope you’ve had a good month, and I’ll see you next time!

2017.29 - The Beginning Is Always Today

We are greeted by the voices of women
And the visions of women
We step into a forest of arms held wide
And fists held high.

We enter a riot of colours
All the shades of defiance
All the textures of acceptance
All the shapes of love.

We are told to be bold
We are granted permission
We listen and we are heard
We watch and we are seen.

Here are the dreamers of worlds
And the builders of dreams
Here are the wall-shakers
Here are the bringers of light

We have encoded resistance
Into an insistence to be heard
And we have changed the shape of conversations
In the realisation of worth.

And by one man’s metric,
We are nasty. A degeneration of
Our one true station of servility;
Civilisation’s demise in four syllables.

Sad.

Listen: if the tower must be dismantled,
Brick by brick, to be rebuilt as kilns
And hospitals, and libraries,
And bridges, so be it.

If the walls must be torn down,
Again, we’ll lift our busy fingers
And strong hearts to the task,
Talking all the while.

And we will break silence with song,
And fear with laughter,
And dark grey fences with pinks and browns,
With violets, whites, and greens.

And we will plant flowers on your
Place of rest, and remember.
And we will walk on,
Dancing into the dawn.


We’re very near the end of the month, which is exciting (and, if I’m honest, somewhat relieving, and also sort of sad: I’ll have to make up my own excuses to write poems…). The last Sunday of every month is usually Allographic’s open mic, but this month we’re teaming up with Nasty Women Cambridge to help them celebrate the end of their exhibition in aid of Corona House (housing single, homeless women with a Cambridge connection), Cambridge Women’s Aid (providing dedicated and specialist services to women and children affected by domestic abuse), and Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre (offering support to women and girls who have experienced rape, childhood sexual abuse or any other form of sexual violence).

What’s that got to do with this poem? Well, glad you asked. I went to see their exhibition on text art resistance, and came away with my brain buzzing and my heart dancing, as I was pretty sure I would. I wanted to write something for the exhibition. And that’s definitely how the poem starts, but it becomes more about the general Nasty Women movement and I am so looking forward to performing this to a bunch of other footstomping, outspoken, resistant, Nasty People of all genders on Sunday evening. The title comes from one of the pieces which, in turn, is a quote from one of my literary heroes, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Boom.

2017.28 - Flight

She’s rapt in jungle far away
Bright colours beg her: one more day
Water seems to sigh
Begs to know quite why
She’d quit its gentle sway

They’re wrapped in jumpers far away
While grey clouds blanket every day
April’s face a lie,
Changeable and sly
And driech seems here to stay

The time is spent; she’s on her way
Due North and East in half a day
Touch the shifting sky
Land to be shown why
Warmth blossoms here, dear stray.


A soppy, personal one, for once. My partner is currently 5,425 miles away. Every so often we get texts about snakes and monkeys and sloths and white water rafting at peculiar times of the day and night. She’s back in a few days’ time. Aww. Anyway, this is a clogyrnach; a Welsh poetry form.

2017.27 - Meet Me In Marigolds

The post-it note has a smiley face
And it’s a race between emotions -
Notionally: pleasure, beckoned by
The sight of your handwriting,
The way you fail to dot your every i
“There’s nothing else it could be!”
My smile stretches, sly and sweet.

Next: anticipation, a wave of adrenalin
Spiking through the morning fugue
With images of rising to the challenge,
Followed swiftly by the warm reward.

And then: contention bells in my head
Dread lurching to the fore:
For all the sweetness of imagination
There’s more, broadening the view of
Victory to see us… where?

Are we in a field of fleshy flowers,
A barely-veiled metaphor dotting us
With pollen?
Hardly.
You’re not hardy or hearty,
Usually eschewing outdoor pursuits,
Pressing your suit in more… suitable locations

Okay. Maybe we meet wreathed in blossoms,
Top-heavy under some local post,
In-joke harking back to spy movies
And classified ads and brown paper-wrapped
Nasty habits in seaside retreats…?
Better.
But still not there yet.
Betting on landmarks seems foolhardy
In a city thronging with history.

This is a brutal test of my affections.

Next I consider: who am I missing?
Is this the name of one of your many associates?
Am I to approach a list of barely-retained
Strangers to say “hey, is my… um… there today?”
Stumbling and mumbling over names and titles
Bright with embarrassment and everything
We’ve never said?
You’re off your head, babe,
Hey, maybe we should call it a day?
This pressure’s getting heavy.

And then it hits me and I
Dip my head, grin, slip to the sink,
Rummage in its undercarriage and
Come up golden.

Snap.

This is going to be one dirty weekend.


Six-and-a-half years ago, a poet named Tim Clare upped the ante on his annual poem-writing challenge, and set the stage to write 101 poems in a day. He asked for suggestions, and I ventured the title of this piece. He did it proud! I’m now the kind of person who runs poetry workshops, it turns out, and, when I’m faced with people who’ve done my standard prompt for a poem (“Lemons”, if you’re interested), I tell them: “Pick a book off the shelf and open it at a random page. That or you could try ’Meet Me in Marigolds’.” They never take me up on that, sadly. I thought it was time I put my stanzas where my stylus is. Or something. Anyway, this is what happens when I’m being fussy about other people’s prompts - random story poems.

2017.26 - Degrees

“There’s always seasonal work…” you say
Gazing through the window to the world beneath
“The year’s come round like a big circle thing.”
It’s hard to bite your lip and smile

Gazing through the window to the world beneath
I wonder what to say to you
It’s hard to bite your lip and smile
The window mostly gives me back myself

I wonder what to say to you
Waiting for the connection to resolve
The window mostly gives me back myself
I ask you what you’re doing now

Waiting for the connection to resolve
(The year’s come round like a big circle thing.)
I ask you what you’re doing now
“There’s always seasonal work…” you say.


Trying out a pantoum for the first time, yet again spending longer on untangling the explanations (and making a spreadsheet to do some of the heavy lifting for me) than on writing the poem. In case you’re wondering: the quotes in the first (and, therefore, final) stanza are genuine things a recruitment agent said to me while looking out of the fifth floor window after I was made redundant from a teaching post. It’s made a pleasing refrain and repeated (not always entirely sweet) in-joke in the intervening years, and seemed to suit the form.

2017.25 - Living

Sofa
Sits foresquare
Against the radiator,
Sagging, ragged, lightly stained.
Memorial.

Person
Taps syncopatedly
On the sofa
Staring at life sideways.
Poet.


The NaPoWriMo challenge of a few days ago was to write a double elevenie. It feels very much like it took me longer to untangle the description of the form on the site than write this. I feel insufficiently challenged. However, I have written a new poem in a new form so… there you go.

2017.24 - Birthday Clerihew

Malcolm IV of Scotland
Feared to get a shot hand
He spent half his life in chain mail
Which made his later love life a bit of a fail.

Afonso II of Portugal
Said: “haven’t I ever taught you, gal?
“Make sure you’ve got the best hand…”
His daughter sighed and replied: “Yes dad, that advice is grand.”

John de Vere
Employed a kind of seer;
Not to tell the future,
But as a sort of gambling tutor.

George of Poděbrady
Loved a stubborn countess sadly.
Said she could never wed him
Until he’d taught her entire court how to swim.

Joan of France
Liked to underwater dance
Said there was nothing like it
Although her local facilities were frankly a bit of a pit.

Robert Fayrfax
Invented the chair tax
Those levied, on the whole,
Tended to club together to temporarily hide them in a massive hole.

Julius Caesar Scaliger
Was not your average scavenger:
He was a great collector of unconsidered trifles,
Which people considered a far safer hobby than his previous one of collecting prototype rifles

Alexander Ales
Was mortally afraid of gales
He wouldn’t go out in them in case someone might
Sneak up on him unheard in the bluster and put him in their sights.

Johann Stumpf
Wrote an awful lot of gumpf
Would insist on taking it to parties
Where he’d regale people with hot air in a voice considered almost offensively hearty.

Georg Fabricius
Liked a lot of birthday fuss
He’d celebrate for a whole week
Which, some people muttered, was frankly a bit of a cheek

William Shakespeare
Was caught up writing King Lear
He didn’t notice it was his birthday
Until people interrupted him with hip-hip-hooray!


I’ve just realised that this is the part where it becomes particularly clear that I’m writing one day ahead; all these historical figures have their birthday on 23rd April, according to Wikipedia, and it was a case of write a poem about one of the seemingly endless series of battles that took place on this day (a notion that may make its way into a poem by itself at some point), or write some daft Clerihews (there are other kinds?!) about as many of those listed until I lost the will to string any more words together. I made it to Shakespeare without feeling sick on gorged ridiculosity. Done. :)

2017.23 - Text

She writes
A titration of dipthongs
And longing,
Belonging nowhere but
Cupped in the liminal
Giving up normalcy
To eke out impressions of
The ineffable.

It is a bargain she struck
To summon fortune from necessity,
A tincture of grace
To face down the inevitable,
Ebbing energy
While she dances in the dark
Harking back to all the promise made:
A lady of enviable potential
Eddying now.

Tell me how this is better!
She howls on the bad days,
The aching nights,
Bites back tears and
Fears of the Reaper:
The cheapness she will show
Blown like dust,
Unremembered.
Unremarkable.

She is dizzy
In the grip of herself and,
Absolutely at the plummet’s nadir,
Hears herself say gently:
“Remember the connections made,
The way they breed more,
Warming the world with fractal acts
Of passion,
Hands held, however briefly,
Leaching us of loneliness?

“Remember.

“Remember generosity’s
Tender reach.

“Remember the greyness,
The taste of a battened-down life.

“Remember the incomparable colours
Of love with all senses stretched.

“Remember.”

She does.
She dusts down darkness,
Sparks flying
From drying eyes.

It’s time to write.

2017.22 - A Sofa Called Despair

I think I’ve come under a spell -
I’m not writing poems so well;
My brain’s had enough,
It’s been filled with dry stuff,
And my eyeballs are starting to swell.

It’s not that I don’t love to write,
But I’m coupling words every night.
#amwriting (Whatever!
I’ve jettisoned clever,
And am scribbling any old shite.)

But I can’t quit while I’m still ahead
Even though my Muse fucked off to bed.
If you cannot do better
Just get bloody meta
And write about writing instead.


Turns out that doing poetry admin is antithetical to writing poetry. I knew this, but I can’t just stop for April. Either that or all the late nights are draining my creativity. Or it’s just one of those days. Anyway. Limerick. Still on target. Bah. {twitches}

2017.21 - Button

Today they showed me your picture.
It was the best kind of surprise;
I smiled, unbidden, thinking:
Yes, this is someone I want to know.

I will never know you.
You will only remember me.
We meet today across photons,
Tricks of algorithm,
A best guess of time
Sprinkled across the bones
That show.

My scars will deepen
But they will also soften
As laughter arcs
From point to point
And lurking sparks burst forth.

In this new face I see my dearest blood
Summoned up in some
Beloved nest of twinkles,
And I finally make sense of my
Genetic destiny,
Seeing it laid out by a game;
A shame I’ll have to wait so long
To see your face again.


A friend of mine showed off a four-by-four square of images on Facebook today. It was him, transmuted by the alchemy of something called “FaceApp” from himself into an ageing version of himself, a youthful version of himself, and a female version of himself. He is three days younger than me. I gave it a go, somewhat braced, and was amazed at what happened. (Of course, what also happened was a poem…)

2016.20 - Minim

We shout brightness,
pirouette and scream,
streamers arcing into
lances, boiling blood
summoning the
heat, the heat, the heat.

We lap and eddy,
gentle strokes evoking,
an envelopment of
blending and abetting
letting the tide rock;
each other’s cradle.

We breathe,
high and low,
a symphony of
untouching
subtle and vital
through and around and

We hold, over and beyond,
cog tick bass and base
and blameless,
the frame for forever,
fortress, reflective,
immovable.

We are a duet of dust,
ash prism, spinning in infinity,
glittering in the light
of long-dead stars,
the fragment of forever
dropping to the bottom
of the brand new sea.


Looking over my virtual notepad, I found some “pages” of fragmentary ideas and suggestions for past NaPoWriMos. So I wove a poem around one of them. Not convinced this poem’s finished, but hey... :)

2017.19 - Unobserved

The things I did while no-one was looking
Like peeking inside the old man’s chest
Were only ever so slightly shocking

No-one, unobserved, is quite at their best
In my shoes you might well have done the same
Like peeking inside the old man’s chest

I’ve checked, and I don’t feel the slightest shame
It would never do: to be thought boring
In my shoes you might well have done the same

And no-one with me will be caught snoring
I’m certain of that: I feel quite clear
It would never do: to be thought boring

It’s only alone you can bring yourself cheer
I know that nobody else need know
I’m certain of that: I feel quite clear

Without judgement we all would be much freer
The things I did while no-one was looking
(I know what nobody else need know)
Were only ever so slightly shocking


It’s another of my NaPoWriMo traditions - a terzanelle. Slightly freaking myself out that I’m now starting to find form easier if I’m stuck for a topic, but I’m sure that’ll pass. The first line is a corruption of a line I saw in an image I found when I was looking for something else entirely.

G. K. Jourdane - Things I Did When No One Was Watching

2017.18 - Balloonist

Trust me, you said,
Tying a bright red ribbon
At the halfway point.

Around us seagulls,
The soar of day,
Full-throated clouds.

I worry about weights,
About being too close
About the lack of tension

The sky is not quite blue
The earth not quite green
And we are not quite...

Trust me, and I,
Clasping the length
Of my courage, watched.


I do not play table-top games, but my partners do. When I, sleeplessness hungover from driving one of them to the airport at 2:30am, asked the other one (similarly hungover) for a prompt, I was shown the vision cards from Mysterium. Some shuffling later, and here we are. (We may well see another one of these before the month is out!)

2017.17 - Elements of Sleep

Easy, like sheep
Layers of family,
And colours keeping
Things neat, and memorable
The castle, towers rising

Start small. H.

Hydrogen, Helium, Argon
Boats strain with the
current-fighting surge of
shoulders carrying obsession
like a curse

Potassium, Magnesium
A flash of light older
than living memory
they're all done, a
full-stop of generations

Carbon, Silicon, Oxygen
Clasping hands in waltzing pairs
but only one hand each
maybe a gavotte
or pavanne, fixed smiles

Boron, Neon, Xenon
Strange, so strange,
bright and inert
taking up space
and saying nothing

Nitrogen, Iron
The core of it all
beginning and end
cleaving and failing
and falling, molten again

Gallium, Plutonium
Waiting, tall and dark-voiced,
his half-lit wife
looking away,
straining to the birdsong

Everything else is fading
Or a clasp of complicity,
compounding interest
and splintering,
and Lithium

Sodium, Selenium
Star-metal
the Thunderer's plunder
understand the tears
splashing on a dry chest

Alumnium, Tin, Zinc
Ageing windows
opening into
oxidation blossoms
garrotting, gavotting
What?

Mercury, Gold, Copper
Hope for the future
is a liquid ring
on an empty finger
lingering

Rise.
Google is cheating
Rise
Warm milk
A new beginning
Rise
Read yourself a story
Cassette clatter
sing yourself to sleep
Rise.
And fall.
And fall.

Merino, Suffolk, Cheviot, Southdown, Romney, Shropshire, Polypay…

Marion Leeper, current Bard of Cambridge, suggested (among other things) listing elements of the Periodic Table - you never know, she said, something might come up. Behold, a gift of insomnia.

2017.16 - Ghazal

I walk differently with women,
Sing a different key with women.

My vigilance leans, eyes shutter;
Something else to see with women.

Voices like the sea, throats awash -
Laugh, or disagree, with women.

Arms wide as a tree, wind-dancing,
Sway safe in the lea, with women.

Not just them, but we, a bonding;
Have faith, and be free, with women.


I’ve secretly wanted to give this form a go for a couple of years. The last time I looked at the rules, I felt the same pain I do when considering certain types of quadratic equations. I fled from the explanation, and decided that Ghazal was not for me. And then this year I thought: nope, this is NaPoWriMo, and you push those pain boundaries. If you can do sonnets, Roberts, you can do this. I put a call up for topics/ prompts on that social media, and came away with a hill of helpings. I chose Lara’s “The company of women” and decided that today was the day for my first ghazal. And finally found an explanation/ description that made sense to me.

I suspect I’ve not done the form (or myself) much justice here, but then my first sonnet sucked badly, so onwards and upwards, eh? ☺

Tomorrow I may well give myself a break from counting syllables (four forms in a row… pfff…!) and do something like a clerihew or some stream-of-consciousness free verse.

2017.15 - Abracadabra

It makes no difference, the distance, when we meet 

Ten minutes or ten years - it's all the same 

Sword-pull in the gut, cut quite in two 

And a choking tug of bunting. 

Knuckle down to mundane work,

Imitating normal;

No more glittering,

Dove-chest flutter…

Oh my love,

Forget

Me

Yet again, the prompt for this came from the prompt that was given to Paper Planes for their show tonight. I'm prepared to be proved wrong, but I think this is a new poetry form called The Abracadabra. I've combined that with some concrete poetry for good (?) measure.

2017.14 - Generation

Uppity.
He’s never called that –
Cocky, bold,
Decisive,
Maverick and rule-breaker;
Never uppity.

My brass neck
Sets off shrill alarms,
My mettle
Detected;
Unnatural, they call it –
Brazen, unholy.

I’m a steed
Of a different stripe,
Stand hidden
In plain sight;
Pierrot makeup, broad back,
Prized for my fine skin.

You should know:
Underneath it all
I’m angry,
With reason;
I won’t smile for the telling,
See, I’ve learned too much.

I won’t kneel,
So don’t hold your breath;
No trophy,
Owned or sold,
Obeisance be buggered –
I’ll walk my own path.


Elaborate set-up: using a different random word generator, I generated five words (uppity, brass, zebra, known, obeisant), then plugged them into Google image search. Scrolling through some weird and wonderful results, and jumping some links, I came across:

Since I’d also come across 

 and 

along the way, the scene was set for the theme. I then trawled Wikipedia for poetry forms, and found a Shadorma. My only regret is that I can’t seem to find out who the ladies in the first image are, so, if anyone can enlighten me, I’d be very grateful!

2017.13 - Amber

You take my flesh in hand and start to score
You press with gentle force to mark a seam
You know the path, you’ve traced its route before
This armour guards a softness, lush as dreams.

This task takes patience, time, and outright skill
First layer gone and now the harder part
A thin, tight membrane keeps you from your fill,
So lift the bitter, taste my sweeter heart.

The air sings, tart-sweet, beckoning your tongue;
And busy fingers blush, juice running free,
Impediments are done, the feast’s begun,
My core surrendered, you devouring me.

The fresh scent lingers, memories kept real;
Ripe flesh is worth the challenge of the peel.


It’s NaPoWriMo, which means sonnet-time. And I asked my partner for a prompt, and got “orange peel” - so we can blame whoever gave my partner’s group that for an improv prompt.

2017.12 - Neon

In the dark, the cut ones
Dance with black light,
Caressing galaxies.

They summon the
Impossible creatures,
Singing themselves to flight.

And stars bear witness,
Grit-cling to the singers
Bring new life, heavy and wise.

And I scribble enigmas,
Sleep-starved, sitting
Propped against nature,
Breaking it thread by thread

Watching the flowers die.

A friend posted this link recently, and it was clearly percolating away in my mind. I rejected all prompts, much to my body’s annoyance, until I remembered this one. Did I mention that I’m quite tired at the moment?

2017.11 - Spaces between dreaming

And blackbird calls dawn;
Echoes fragment gently,
Hinting:
It’s just kindling
Light, maybe,
Never opining,
Probably quirky.
Rationalise softly;
Time undulates vertically,
Winding xanthic, yearning zephyrs


I figure you have to get this kind of stuff out of your system during NaPoWriMo. Another one to blame on Lies, Dreaming.