Fay Roberts #NaPoWriMo

Tuesday, 14 April 2026

14 - Weathering

#NaPoWriMo Day 13 and tonight I’ve been writing a triolet inspired by loneliness (well… specifically missing someone).

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the twelve preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/weathering-155564589

“I miss you” seems repetitive and trite,
and yet, it is the only phrase that fits.
Alone, the world is dull, and with you, bright.
(“I miss you” seems repetitive and trite.)
See, when you’re in my arms, the world feels right,
and holding you will smooth my jagged bits.
“I miss you” seems repetitive and trite,
and still… it is the only phrase that fits.

A grainy mobile phone camera photo in low, warm light, of a living room with two empty chairs at slightly more than right-angles to each other, both a cozy red. The one on the left is narrow, with a high back, and is covered in a velvety throw, a throw cushion decorted with alternating bands of large, dark red and light circles sitting in it, along with a TV remote on the left arm. The other chair is broader, with a much lower back, and three velvety cushions - two red and one black somewhat haphazardly stuffed into one corner - and a segment of a round footrest just visible in the bottom right of the photo. Behind and between the chairs is a silver exercise ball, and beyond that, a pale wooden bookcase stuffed with books. There is a bay window beyond the larger chair, sporting white, venetian blinds, mostly pulled down except for one which is slightly contracted and pulled up at the bottom, and a creamy white curtain held back by a large, brass hook. There is a very dead-looking pot plant on the windowsill. Oops!

TV room poet’s own

If you’d like to write your own triolet, why not make use of my handy-dandy shareware spreadsheet that can help get you started? https://bit.ly/poemrep

Monday, 13 April 2026

12 - Prickling Tributes

#NaPoWriMo Day 12 and tonight I’ve been writing a piece of free verse inspired by Prickly Pears – a tribute poem to all the performers tonight.

Normally, I’d tell you to remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the eleven preceding it) there. HOWEVER, I promised a recording to the performers, so you get it here too (and I’ll just have to come up with an extra gift for the Patreon subscribers to make up for this not being exclusive…).

fayroberts · Prickling Tribute

We are safe, sound, and wonderfully colourful, loving the brilliant wisdom of glittering sensitivity, lifting each other, comfortable challenges, deft and considerate.	Intro
Do or die is not today, burning down expectations, searching out the dangers, mistaking the ways of working, turning lurking in perfection into freedom.	Kate
Sinners pay for the mistakes of making noises, canonically confetti-strewn, and construing duty as a reconstruction of a stumble.	Gareth Barsby
Clap out the chaos, refusing to inflict infantile isolation, reject rot, recognise the wild sanctity of humanity, games making fiction a breathlessly empty treachery.	Vayl
Let’s teach each other constructive alignment, pedagogically, paradoxically dodging OFSTED, bodging observations, repetitively dictating today’s duration, even though it feels endless.	Pip
Open a correspondence into a lifetime of idealism, downing a cocktail of positive experiences, reeling and rocking, mocking the inevitability with a grin.	Ash
Consumption of society’s norms can be filling, drilling into the bedrock of toxic assumptions, dumping constructions, rolling the stones over and over to the conclusion of inevitability.	Sandra
Unprompted preparation paves the way for a final trip, flipping memories over on the grill of reality, the musicality of island tides gifting something undefinable, measured in its loss, sweet as Paradise.	Phynne~Belle
Triple-time gifts us dancing experiments, bending shackled minds to wander and wonder under the bedrock echoes of the resounding repetition of loneliness, serendipity abandoned, surviving unforgiven.	Joycey
Fresh words flourish in fertile space, stretching restless frustration into a new cage, hemmed in, digging into resentment, then switching optimistically, gathering new meanings, leading to graceful patience.	Tamika
Paradoxically, we walk in contradiction, begging for attention, twitching in syncope, drifting in focus, opening minds to the ‘craziness’, not lazy, but blunted, shunted into a category that clatters at the periphery.	Ashley
Cued up, we examine bigotry under a magnification of narrative that serves only the kyriarchy, wicked and wilful monochrome, honing the agenda of apathy, the gift of those who spike the path mendaciously.	Phoenix
We’re a patchwork of fingerprints, beauty painting a palimpsest of history, gifting us a view that inevitability depends on compliance and forgetfulness, the weft of deft love and clear eyes against the warp of greed.	Suzy
We carpet bare memories with prettiness, mess swept under the fashionable patterns that distract from the demons inscribed into the grain, blame bobbing down the rivers of sweat buoying complicity.	Bethany
Colour flourishes up walls, adorning imaginations with grace and clipping, trimming situations with disappointment, impressing lines into blank pages, the ages connecting, washing up against our shored stories.	Lee
We have opened many windows into compassion dashing, sweet, spendthrift and multiplying, kindness a warm gift that benefits every member of our shared continuity.	Gareth Bartlett
Automated text tells a layered set of mixed messages getting tangled in parallel meanings, gleaning more than nonsense, the strangest guest of humanity, sentience being a lucky dip.	Clive
And finally, functions summoned by departed friends send us into a litter of plastic bagged eternity, wildness lined with polymer, bone-deep, changing our definitions, prinked colours murmurating across the canvas of the mind.	Beth

Thanks for the inspiration

Against a sky-blue background, a bearded, white, slender person with a helmet of dark, curling, shoulder-length hair, points upwards from behind a microphone with a yellow cover on it. They are wearing a black waistcoat over a red, short-sleeved top, and are clearly in the middle of saying something. Beside and behind them is a brightly sunlit, pale green cactus with bulbous, red protuberances, a little like prickly strawberries, sprouting off the top. All-caps, black words in an uneven font read PRICKLY PEAR OPEN MIC FEATURING FAY ROBERTS where the date, SUN 12TH APRIL 7PM BST, is written in red.

Poster of the event because why not?

Sunday, 12 April 2026

11 - Anvils

#NaPoWriMo Day 11 and tonight I’ve been writing a haibun inspired by a very real story that happened a few hours ago…

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the ten preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/anvils-155399668

I am searching for the perfect metaphor, all unknowing, a way to say: this is the situation, pay attention, I’m not joking, it’s serious business, not something to downplay, get ever-so-British about, not a sideways shuffle into clout, this thing I’m on about. I have been skirting closer to the truth while people nod, knowledgeable, exchange sympathies, euphemisms dripping with sincerity and wildly off the mark, while I slump, succumb, let them off the leash to bark up the wrong tree, watch them run, blissfully oblivious. Why spoil their fun? But now you’re here – caught in the dipped beams as my friend encourages us to creep from the car and crouch, coo cozening comments. You’re having none of it – big bright bastards battering you with blather, bugger off! So you scuttle into last summer’s dried grass at the foot of habitat whose name you carry, barrier to chatterers, and hide enough of your head to no longer see us, torso tense in prickly denial. And, while my friend’s snapping pictures, I’m thinking: That’s familiar. That’s a Mood. That’s… a simile so spot-on the gods, no longer dropping hints, have got it literally spotlit…

In hiding from debt,

I spy an apt analogue:

Hedgehog in headlights

A digital colour drawing, somewhat impressionistic (I'm being kind, shh), depicting an outdoor carpark at night. A red car, seen side-on, no higher than the bonnet, has its headlights on and the door open; there are white scuff marks where the paint has been scraped off; it's not entirely clean. It is shining a light on a scruffy hedge and a half-curled hedgehog, who is facing away from the car.

Depiction of the evening’s discovery made imperfectly by me (Krita & Huion)

Saturday, 11 April 2026

10 - Sweet Symphony

#NaPoWriMo Day 10 and tonight I’ve been writing a free verse inspired by the Random Song Generator giving me a track by RAYE, and autoplay taking me to another in the album, and suddenly I was hooked and looking up the lyrics and then bigger pictures of the cover art and what seems like no time later, here is a free-write stream-of-consciousness. Enjoy the album – I intend to!

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the nine preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sweet-symphony-155326024

Against a backdrop pf thunderclouds opening to a hint of sunshine beyond, a woman with creamy, tan skin in a skin-tight, low-cut, red satin dress stands om short grass, balanced on one bare foot, leaning her weight against the long rope wound around her upraised arm, face a blank kind of intent. The rope stretches into the sky to pull open a square hatch in the clouds where, in white capital letters, the message THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. is revealed against a summer-blue-sky background. The woman wears a red chiffon scarf draped to hang across her neck and dangle over her back. It, and her shin-length, mahogany hair, appear to be blowing in the wind. A pool of bright light surround the woman and her tug-o-war, and, at the edge of the pool, and directly under the hatch, a single red rose is sprouting from the ground. On closer inspection, the woman is wearing short, skintight, red gloves that match the dress. On even closer inspection, the thunderous sky has a straight indentation running along the whole lower edge, below which smallish, black wheels are visible, and the clouds reveal themselves to have been painted on, the rope casting a strong shadow from the spotlight against it.

Image first this time, since the poem is responding to it, sourced from the artist’s website, and I dearly hope I’m not going to get into trouble for this, as this piece is, essentially, a recommendation…

She flies a kite;
bright above the flat
land, she opens a door
to impossibility.
She has carved a blue-white
place beyond the tumult,
she is saying ‘This too will pass.
but ask yourself if there’s a way
to make it hurry up, come on.’

‘See me: I am red against the green, the
grey, I am day in night, and
night in day, bathing in contradiction,
strong arms straining against the
gravity of the situation, dazzling in
satin, not just waiting for it to
happen. I demand happiness, and
I will lean my whole weight into this.’

It is theatre, my dear – it is all
a show, and you should know that,
on closer inspection, the clouds are
a flat on wheels, the light too
bright and focused to be anything but
electrical. But the woman glimmers,
real as red against green against grey,
saying, ‘I stood on one foot for this,
I wrote my heart into the lyrics
underpinning it, everything is as palpable
as the feelings invoked by my voice,
my words, the soar and surge of chorus,
don’t ignore this, it can contain hope.’

And so this barely edited free write
takes flight, despite any misgivings,
singing home the lingering visions
inflicted on me, joyfully, carrying a
piece of blue dutifully with me.
The grass will rebound from under
the wheels, the bare feet; the satin
will lose its heat and uncrease, but
these feelings remain real, and
that’s a gift worth writing home about.

9 - Maximal Drama!

#NaPoWriMo Day 9 and, owing to ill health and another day of sleeping for what turned out to be 14 hours(!), I’m catching up a little frantically today, knowing how difficult it gets if you let it slip and keep saying “Oh, I can catch up – it’ll be fine! So, given an interesting combination to work with by my Prompt-o-matic Spreadsheetatron™, I’ve been writing a piece of alliterative verse inspired by Max Devrient. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of him either, and it took getting an automated translation of the German Wikipedia page, which is (unsurprisingly) packed far more with information, to find out enough to make this piece, where I decided that “alliterative” in this instance meant “all the words have to begin with either M or D”. (If you’re keen to find out more about this fascinating chap, this page is quite the treasure trove, including some delightful photos I wasn’t sure if I had the rights to use!)

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the eight preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/maximal-drama-155321764

My mother made me
delve deep, destiny’s
metric demonstrated.

Disappointments dog
men mirroring me.
Dented masks; dull drips.

Dynamic mastery
marries, denied divorce,
making do, multiplying.

Deflected, movies magnify
my dramatic definition,
monk making much money.

Deep down, darkness
deals death; daughters
dispense desperate doom.

Diverted, my midwinter
directs, monarchs match
my merits dutifully.

Döbling decorated,
my moniker delineates
driving. Magnificent!

An early photo in black and white shows a white, male actor with short, dark, straight hair peeking out from the hood of his chainmail armour. He is glaring at the camera, pouting slightly under a magnificent - and almost certainly false - moustache that curves up towards his hidden ears. His outfit is further enlivened with a dark, velvety-looking cloak, two sashes, and a massive sword, on the pommel of which he's resting his crossed hands.

Max Devrient as “Zawisch” in Grillparzer's “King Ottokar’s Fortune and End” at the Vienna Burgtheater, courtesy of Wikipedia

Thursday, 9 April 2026

8 - Erasing Eris

Things you need to know:

Eris is the unpleasant, bitter, Greek deity of Chaos and Discord.
This took me for-bloody-ever…

#NaPoWriMo Day 8 and yesterday I sculpted an erasure poem, inspired by a prompt of “Eridanus”, courtesy of my handy-dandy randomised prompts-and-topics spreadsheet. And, being me, I went a bit extra with it all (we’re all astonished, I know), and decided that the thing I would be erasing would be the entire bloody Wikipedia article, and then, in order for the audio version to match the spirit of the visual version, that I would record me reading the entire bloody Wikipedia article aloud and cut the concomitant bits out of the recording for authenticity.

I can certainly say I’ve learned some things, though what they might be, only time can tell… (The image description for this is going to be… special, for one…)

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the seven preceding it) there. And it is certainly an experience! The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/erasing-eris-155174189

Two halves of the redacted article side-by-side:

The top half of the Wikipedia article on the constellation Eridanus. Every line has one or more black redaction marks on it, including the three graphics. Some are blacked out altogether. The word Eridanus is repeatedly redacted to read Eris, and all the names on the graphics have been redacted. There's even a big, black rectangle entirely covering something - probably the quick facts table - on the right of the page. The three graphics, from top right downwards, are 1. A greyscale map that gives the appearance of being of the lower tip of a tapering landmass, even though constellations are dotted around it (with their names redacted); 2. A dark blue night sky with the writhing river of the Eridanus (redacted to Eris) drawn on in pale lines, above a flat piece of ground with trees on it. The caption has been entirely blacked out. 3. A digital rendering of a red and white ringed planet and its distant star in the background. The angle makes it look like someone wearing a jaunty hat. You can access the text in the recording on Patreon, and may the gods help you.

The lower half of the Wikipedia article on the constellation Eridanus. Every line has one or more black redaction marks on it, including the three graphics. Some are blacked out altogether. This page is less crowded, so the unredacted words stand out more clearly for being given room to breathe in. About halfway down the page, on the left-hand side, is a repulsive creature that looks like it was the subject of illegal genetic experimentation, and is cognisant enough to know its fleshy, fish-tailed, mole-pawed, hairless, beige body and green-scaly, orange-jowly face are going to leave it lonely forever. There are other, smaller figures around it that look a lot more geometrical and a lot less horrified pity-inducing. You can access the text in the recording on Patreon, and may the gods help you.

Or, if you’d like to see the whole darned thing in a oner:

A combined version of both the above and the original edit, if you must know. Not really much point in putting anything new in the alt-text, though! Scroll back up if you want the details; listen to the Patreon recording if you like torturing yourself. Thanks for popping by!

Fine, I’ll have pity on you – here’s the version rendered into plain words:

Eris stretches along the south.
It is a river. It remains one of the
real features of the blue-white years,
whose tradition means “the end”.

Peculiar observations indicate poles
spinning extremely rapidly.
The noteworthy Beta tradition called
a blue-white Earth. Its foot gives
indistinguishable amateurs primary
binary magnitude; visible, divisible:
a triple system consisting of an
orange main star,
a white dwarf,
and a red dwarf.

The maga is easily visible white.
The maga have a period of 50 years.
Artists impress, ran –
one extra orange-hued star,
one planet, a period of 7 years.

Supervoid cold spot is large
(devoid of gaies),
meter superseded only by
speculation that the void may be
due to quantum entanglement
between our universe and another.

Deep-sky visible in small amateurs
with large instruments
light the northeast. Eris is a faint reflection,
an ancient remnant illuminated by grand design.
barred gays center an unusual structure:
a grand design spiral that exists tightly wound.

The Nu Eris shower radiate cons every year;
the parent is unidentified.
Another peaks, dips his paws into Eris;
this mirror depicts a river,
flowing into the south.
According to one theory, the marsh is
held sacred to the domain of the Abyss:
a myth of the father, no strength to control
and so veers, scorching both Earth and heaven.
Zeus intervene and cast him to the burning river!

Eris cannot be seen from China.
The White Tiger of the West was
classified knowledge of western stars.
Citation needed.

Wednesday, 8 April 2026

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

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.

A brightly lit, pinkish, tear-shaped creature against a black background that looks something like a cross between a trilobite and a crab and a Muppet, sporting pale, golden-orange hairs like sparse prickles over the surface of its body, but sprouting in great protuberance over its crab-like legs, especially thickly over its long forearms, which end in blunt pincers. The head end sports two long, slender, flexible extensions, a little like antennae that emerge between the pincer arms.

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…