7 - Advance

#NaPoWriMo Day 7 and today I’ve been writing a sonnet inspired by the prompt “JD Vance Learns in Real Time Trump Left Him Out of Iran Attack Plans”. This one will also get sent to the weekly Rattle: Poets Respond challenge, because hope springs eternal, and why not get another twofer in there? (And if you fancy learning how to write your own sonnet, why not come to one of my workshops on exactly how to do that?)

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the six preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/advance-155057788

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Exposed, you send a memo to yourself,
as, in full view, you’re ridiculed, alone.
They ask why you’ve been left up on the shelf –
it’s something you can’t see; you must be shown.

You’re never more than one nudge from the drop;
when elevated, check your footing’s fast,
or else you’ll end up head-deep in the slop
that’s everywhere – how long can this thing last?

A while ago, you chanced upon a show
that demonstrated toxic benthic vents,
and even though it poisoned all below,
the best-adapted worms thrived on the scents

of threats to normal ways of backboned life.
Your mission? Stay afloat on hot-aired strife.

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The Yeti crab (Kiwa hirsuta), discovered at a depth of 2,300 meters on a hydrothermal vent of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge; photo by Alexis Fifis, via Wikipedia

Because that’s how these things go, subsequent to writing this, I got lost in a maze of trying to find pictures of hydrothermal vents (and/ or their creatures) and now I know a bit more than I bargained for…

6 - Douché

#NaPoWriMo Day 6 and today I’ve been writing a piece of free verse inspired by the “official” prompt yesterday to write about things we dislike, “… particularly something utterly innocuous, like clover. Be over the top! Be a bit silly and overdramatic.” Challenge accepted!

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the five preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/douche-154960772 (and it has sound effects!)

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I hate taking showers,
growling at the necessity
for nakedness and standing,
and my skin sheds anyway,
take the grime with it!
Stupid, itchy, blithering,
witless skin. Shut up!

I’m in now, glowering at
flat, white surfaces, shivering
in the chill of an unplugged
updraft from somewhere,
staring at familiar objects,
objecting all the while,
grinding my teeth.

UGH! The water hits my
griping feet, sleet-cold,
growing violently hot,
scotch bonnet sensation
grating, turning skin from
blue to red, and I hop and
test and flex and grimace.

I sweep the grudgingly correct
temperature up my shuddering
frame, blame society’s weird
propriety and turn to get drenched,
wrenching a comb through
tangled locks and cursing,
nursing each strand free.

I go through the soaping
motions, swaying in the heat
beating against scalp and
shoulders, moulding my
mouldering bits by ancient ritual
into a different me, free of
crust, chemically sweet.

Then my timer chimes, the
real world flits in, reminding
me of outside responsibilities,
a grief of gravity claiming
this blameless mer-wraith,
making me desist, persistent
in its insistent linearity.

I hate quitting showers!

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Portrait of the Poet as a Wet Little Guy

I went searching for a Creative Commons picture which responded to “grumpy shower”. What I got was a swamp of GenAI nonsense so, on the grounds that doing it yourself badly is better than using GenAi, behold, an original!

5 - Inflexible Meritocracy

#NaPoWriMo Day 5 and it is Sunday, so I’m taking advantage of the bibliomancy prompt I gave the Allographic Write-In to make what turned out to be a somewhat fatalistic rant against the symptoms of autocracy, on a variety of scales, via a quote from a book about astronomy, that I happened to have nearby because I wanted to check about Rhiannon’s place in Welsh astrography for yesterday’s piece. I bounced via Perseus and Medusa to misogyny and marginalisation, and thereby pattern-matching and prophesy. So, you know, nothing too major… The title speaks to the etymology of the names of the Greek Fates, especially Atropos.

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the four preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/inflexible-154851101

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Where the arm of Perseus curves around to hold his shield, there are several interesting star clusters worth observing.

Dark Land, Dark Skies (The Mabinogion in the Night Skies)
Martin Griffiths, 2017

Where his arm curves, something glimmers,
a shimmer in the half-light, a collection of
burning elements that may protect him.
Some say it had a woman’s face, once;
something to possess, cursed for its
rarity, high market value, hanging in the
balance of men’s regard – something
only the divine could stand against.

And yet. How fearsome to be someone
used and rejected, ejected from humanity,
disappearing into myth and yet made
to go on serving after being cleaved from
the weft. We are a warped warning;
for daring to have ungovernable hair we’re
a sinful admonishment to freeze, petrified by
whispers that those the gods favour
can be cast lower than a snake’s belly,
and jealousy is bitterest when it
echoes from the mouths of power.

This stanza should be a volta, a turn from
the established narrative, a way to make
this story happier, the powerless rise up,
abusers affronted at being confronted,
but I haven’t found the solution, hope
only we’re not doomed to repetition, and
that lessons learned from classics can
be steps; foundations, not predictions.

Fate’s a tricky thing, and eavesdroppers
on the future never prosper by it,
locked in an agony of wanting to stop the
jackboot, halt the tide, and craving the
grim frisson of being right. Tucked far enough
into the margin, you get a better view of
the larger pattern, and, hampered by the need
to see it complete, we compete with curiosity
to grasp the shears, delineate what’s next.

And maybe this time…
Maybe. Please.

Image is of a Medusa cameo ring from the Altes Museum via Wikipedia

4 - Yr Eos

Day 4 of NaPoWriMo and I made a spreadsheet to give me random prompts of form and topic. While testing it out the other night, it gave me “Blank Verse” and “Rhiannon”, who happens to be one of my favourite mythological figures. (I was once cast as her in an audiodrama and I nearly expired of excitement – the title for this came about because the sound designer used nightingale birdsong behind my voice.) She has no connection to inspiration/ the awen that I know of, being a shrewd stateswoman and strong woman associated with horses and sovereignty (and sarcasm), but her advice to go slow and her association with (healing) birdsong turned into an exploration of patience in association with creativity. And I thoroughly ignored the notion of blank verse and used a series of chained clogyrnachau instead…

If you’re subscribed to my Patreon, you can hear an exclusive recording of this (and other things) read aloud. The recording is here.

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She is still with us, don’t you know?
She tells us: “Take your time, be slow…
“The trees are heavy
“with birds, so merry.
“Listen, let the words flow.

“Child, the muse exacts no levy,
“the fruit comes in its time, very
“generous and true,
“because it is you,
“and creation’s messy!

“Cariad, take the longer view:
“the words will come out when they’re due.
“If shy, you must coax,
“not lash them to yokes.
“Trust in patient virtue.”

Her voice lingers beyond the oaks,
I close my eyes, let it invoke
magic, sweet and slow
(she’s still here, you know).
Let her guide my penstrokes.

Image from the Lady Charlotte Guest translation of The Mabinogion, by S. Williams, via Wikipedia

If you’d like to try out a clogyrnach or two, why not use my Repeating and Concrete Forms spreadsheet, which also has some syllable-counting forms like this, to help you?

3 - Truncated

Confession: I slept through Friday (3-Apr) and so I’m invoking my personal Emergency Short Form Protocol (i.e. I’m allowed two emergency short forms – haiku/ senryū, limerick, clogyrnach, or tanka in the course of the month – if I chain them to make a longer poem, that doesn’t count as an ESF) already. Someone on Threads said that we should all Google Pink Fairy Armadillos, if we were unaccountably unaware of their existence already, and I took that as a sign…

(Don’t forget that you can access recordings of these poems on my Patreon!)

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You shouldn’t exist.
Your design is too tricky,
and yet you persist…
Pretty burrower won’t you
share your stubbornness with us?

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If you fancy writing a tanka for yourself, you can use my Repeating and Concrete Poetry Forms spreadsheet, which has a number of syllable-counting forms in there too…

Picture of taxidermied specimen courtesy of Daderot via Wikipedia

You can access the recording of this poem via Patreon.

2 - Impure

NaPoWriMo Day 2, and I’m combining this one with my weekly forays into writing something for the Rattle Poets Respond challenge. Rattle have a very civilised (in my view) approach where poems submitted to them can be self-published online (blog, Patreon, social media, etc.), as long as they haven’t been curated elsewhere (defined as when someone else has picked them out and highlighted them for publication).

Reminder, however, that, if you’re a paying Patreon of mine, you’ll see all of my NaPo poems (and only Patrons – paying or free – get the recordings of me reading them). If not, you’ll only see the ones I have no intention of saving for third party publication (where they’re more strict in their definition of “previously published”).

This piece was inspired by this horrifying news story, so carries warnings for death, dereliction of duty, mourning, and a lot of grimness. It also talks reasonably openly about an aspect of the OCD I inherited from my mother – the so-called “Pure O” element of the condition that can be very troubling.

(Shout out to Lou Sutcliffe, whose extensive infodumping earlier this evening about Chilean geology and geography – which research rabbit hole they plunged into after listening to Tlacuache Theatre’s episode on the myth of El Caluche – informed the fifth stanza, which turned up when I was typing this up from handwritten notes.)

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Link to Patreon post with recording: https://www.patreon.com/posts/nightlights-154561064

It’s interesting how quickly I slip
into obscenities – not the obvious curses,
the worse words learned obverse to disaster,
casting this bark as tempestuous, cross,
oblivious to social constructs, mores
more important than scoring my rage…

No, I’m talking about the images that
glimmer on my inner eye,
wild flashes of nastiness, beset with
the grimness others have gifted
reality, humanity abandoned for
Mammon. That’s the real curse.

Verses buck under me, cleaving
these fleering demons fleeing
responsibilities to their victims,
living and dead. I cannot comprehend,
yet am doomed to see their sins
seared onto my occiput, rendered forever.

It’s not new to me – inheritance from
unoccupied pockets of ancestral
mentation, wretched wraiths etched into
inner vision, pricking with the gift of
what-if risk analysis, painfully vivid,
ultimately none of our business.

And yet. We are not islands, this
shit isn’t isolated; we are peninsular,
isthmuses, archipelagos of the
volcanic – product of pressures from
the obvious and not-so, above and
below, summoned from our molten core.

And still this vision lingers – the bodies
bodged, boxed wrongly, blocked
from the arms and hearts of those left
bereft, mendacities becoming more deft as
the dead stack, backlogged in
backrooms, abandoned on slabs.

My brain may visualise it effortlessly,
executive dysfunction can somewhat
sympathise, but my heart can’t
comprehend how they could end this way,
weighing dismay and coming up with
nothing – not even a stab at apology.

And so obscenity devolves to mystery,
glimpses of waste parading naked to my
inner eye, defilement surrendering
nothing but shame, and new
fuel for nightmares, wondering where
else bears this banal banishment of
basic decency that shan’t be laid to rest.

image of Paris catacombs courtesy of “Mustang Joe” on Flickr (found originally unattributed via picryl)

1 - Nightlights

NaPoWriMo has struck again, and this year I’m determined to finish. 2023 was the last time I tried, and I got precisely four poems out of it. 2024 I was moving house, and 2025 I was receiving, then recovering from surgery. This seems like a decent year to start again…

If you’re a paying Patreon of mine, you’ll see all of them (and only Patrons – paying or free – get to hear recordings of me reading them). If not, you’ll only see the ones I have no intention of saving for third party publication.

This was not one of the ones I’m keen to cling to, but then, so far I’ve not exactly produced any immortal bangers on the first day of the challenge (yes, I just checked back through all of them, shhh). I looked for an image to do some ekphrasis with and the first lines that came to mind felt like they belonged in an end-rhyming, common metre poem. Often enough, style informs substance, so this is not the poem I started out to write, but it is the poem I finished, which is, after all, the point…

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image courtesy of picryl

Down here the cracks are crevices,
and all the streetlights stars.
These details where the Devil lives
are written in the scars.

Marred tarmac, paint, and metal struts
are sutured by the stains
of diesel, gum, discarded butts,
the residue of rain.

Every puddle is a lake,
each divot is a dale;
arrivals conjure earthquakes,
departures summon gales.

But here black has a thousand shades,
up close, grit scintillates;
this patch of moss a pleasant glade,
a single breadcrumb sates.

The miniscule holds treasures
if you’re prepared to look,
and what you thought half-measures
might just contain a book…

link to Patreon post, complete with recording, here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/nightlights-154561064