15 - Safekeeping

#NaPoWriMo Day 15 and tonight I’ve been writing a sestina inspired by love and connection, after attending the gorgeous Fen Speak open mic (which I wasn’t going to, and then wonderful things happened, so I stayed).

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the fourteen preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/safekeeping-155744689

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Tonight we are treated to treatises on love
and acceptance, cozied in glorious metaphor.
Tonight we dance under moonlight,
drifting in snow-powdered warmth,
daring to name family in new ways,
old ways, loud and soft together, clasping hands.

How wonderful, to span distances with hands
separated by miles and water, seeking love.
Battered by battling life, we find ways,
even now – especially now – for
bringing brilliance, by-product of warmth
to those in search of light.

It is nice to be reminded, to take flight,
lifted and steadied by multiple hands,
securely precipitous, glorying in the warmth
of spirits who, time and again, choose love,
doubling-down on every indicator
that shared humanity is more important, always.

I am tired, in too many ways,
but my veins fizz with light.
I am unclenching from a score
of near-misses, feeling returning to hands
that long to show my love
in more ways than words, to share warmth.

There are many types of fire building this warmth,
and it occurs to me that ‘nice’ can’t encompass the ways
we feel, the fights we are fuelled by, knowing that love
is summoned through filters across a spectrum of light,
and that this infinite diversity is perfect – ANDs
glittering in this coruscance of connections, the beauty of ORs.

And isn’t that what our perfectly illogical logic is for?
Logs given to the hearth around which we gather, warmth
a gift, shared, multiplying between many hands.
And we are careful to acknowledge all the ways
that flames this large cast long shadows, a twilight
in which we dismantle all the grim things to which we clove.

Take each other’s hands in the dance – it’s what they’re for –
step with purpose and wild abandonment, love and warmth
the inspiration for more ways to light the path, to say We’re Here.

Drawing by me, shamelessly reusing one of the sets of hands from Spectral, flame reference from Wikipedia

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Did I add a Star Trek reference in there? Why yes; yes, I did. Zero regrets. (See also the couple of cheat words I used that a sestina purist would probably scorn.) Am I satisfied with the drawing? Not yet, but, in the spirit of NaPoWriMo, I’m posting it anyway.

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

14 - Count Down

#NaPoWriMo Day 14 and today I’ve written an Abracadabra inspired by the Random Line Generator. The words I was given were clean, taunt, inspect, secret, guard, thick, brush, and vapour, and it’s quite the challenge to fit them into such an already curtailed form. Judge for yourself how you think I did!

Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the thirteen preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/count-down-155651088

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“Is it clean yet?” the old man taunts. “Come on, boy!
“He wants to see your face in it, come night.”
The young lad shakes his head and brushes
thick detritus of an age free.
Intent to pass inspection,
he fails to keep his guard.
The secret hour strikes;
he sees nothing
as vapours
claim his
life

Original mirror image obtained from Wikipedia, then thoroughly messed with by me

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

13 - 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

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“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.

TV room poet’s own

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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

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…).

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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

Poster of the event because why not?

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

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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

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

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

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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

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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!

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