2021.15 Mainline

It’s not exactly the best idea –
ambling along while they all run.
Maybe you thought it helped:
resting, assuming you could ski
uphill, floating on momentum.
Never mind the discipline won,
never mind the camaraderie too:
intimacy forged by common fight.
Not for you the questing bonds,
glued to the notion that you?
Better off aloof, hiding the bitter
equations of effort spent on those
hampering your flow… somehow.
It’s not even as though
nobody notices, you lovely
dolt; count the actual thanks and crack on…

Catching up, catching up…!

This result from searching for The Tortoise and the Hare turns up all over Google but I can't find the origin, so can't credit the creator, sadly. Mine came from, of all places, Craft Brews and Running Shoes

2021.14 Rank and File

Image by @DianaVanDamme from @artstationhq

I do not want to write a love poem.
My walls crumbled twelve months ago,
desert winds blowing a blast of superheated
malice to strip me to my core.
They had always been there,
circling, twisting, piling drifts to
Trickle into my foundations through every
crack; they were the reason for the walls,
after all.

(I wonder about my foundations.
About who cracked them in the first place.
Whether they were built crooked,
or whether it was only nature taking its course.)

I do not want to write a love poem.
I want to soothe my bleeding, sand-burned
surface, submerge in cool waters,
trust my weight to kindly, liquid fingers.
But I was not made to float,
must fight to the clinging surface, gasping,
too stubborn to drown, too unwieldy to glide,
ill-equipped to strike for mist-thick shore.

(I wonder about the weight of sand,
the stone in my bones,
the fire that will not let itself go out,
for fear of never reigniting.)

I do not want to write a love poem.
I do not want to wade through every element
in search of some meaning,
patterns neat and replicable,
inscribing something mirroring truth,
reversing my fortunes in the name of normalcy.
I will seek hope, bright in the margins,
because the only thing that seems clear to me
is what I can never have.

I’ve been trying to follow my own prompts. And you know what? I managed to snooker myself with #14. Turns out I did not want to write a love poem. So, in the end, I followed the advice I often give other writers, which has worked for me in prose before: I lampshaded it. Sort of. I can’t tell if this is finished, and, in a way, it doesn’t really matter. Not this month.

Okay, look, it’s basically like this: I went looking for “misty lake” images, but Google thought I was still looking for TV Tropes, and before you know it, The Lady of the Lake turned up, and she was so angry and gnarly, and unlike any image I’ve ever seen of Nimuë that I thought: Yeah, okay!

Image by @DianaVanDamme and downloaded from @ArtStationHQ.

2021.13 Cross

“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I look ahead, pick my subsequent words with care
“That must be quite rare.”
“Yes.”
“What happens if…?”
“What do you think?”

I sink into recollection:
My mother tiptoeing for fear of tiny squeaks
My brother freaking at distant rumbling
My cousin clenched tight at the sight of feathers,
Everyone weathering their own storm.

“Normal’s overrated,” I say, airily,
“I dare you to find anyone with nothing
“slumbering in their unconscious.”
“Precisely,” she says, quietly,
leaving me to guess at the
practicalities, how long it takes
for exclusion to be second nature,
wince for this mistake.

The @allographica prompt for Day 13 was to pick some inspiration from the random phobias finder and honestly? Did nothing for me. So, having established that there are individual names for irrational fears of any letter of the alphabet, I did this weird, almost certainly unfinished, deliberately broken lipogram, using the Repeating Forms Tool, on the grounds that the challenge is about writing something, not something perfect, especially when you’re running behind!

Image from Medical News Today

2021.12 Count Your Blessings

1. Night-quiet, everything distant (save ancient heating).


2. The pervading fragrance of clean laundry, new paper, pencils.


3. Food safe from contamination or theft (though not forgetfulness).


4. My hand on the volume.


5. My books on the shelves.


6. My laugh, as late or loud as I need it to be.


7. A throat full of song to lay on quivering air.


8. Space in which to be fatigued. (Sleep, sleep, sleep!)


9. Space in which to be energised. (Dance, dance, dance!)


10. A farewell to jealousy.


11. A farewell to lies.


12. Knowing my worth, my priority.

My response to the @allographica Day 12 prompt (create a 12 step guide to happiness/ unhappiness) became so incredibly convoluted that I had to abandon two separate versions until I said: keep it simple, love, and so I did.

I found this image in a LOT of places, with no indication where it originated!

2021.11 Box

Over an hour later, I’m waist-deep in Google when you come in.

And you’re immediately excited: You know what that is?!
you sign. I sigh, resigned, try gesturing to my
many open tabs but you’re entranced: Beautiful.

I knock the table, sagging a sarcastic Heavy! your way
baiting inevitable rolled eyes, while you run entranced fingers over
dusty textures that this heathen sees as merely mechanical,
absolutely prepped now to receive a lecture.

Your colour’s high as we fumble for common concepts,
collecting better understanding as your enthusiasm
absolutely tests my resistance. Before I know it, your itchy digits
have collected instruments and I’m witnessing disembowelment.

You hand me the isoprop. Why me? I immediately frown.
You clown a smirk, and I gather from the resultant smug flicks
of intelligence that you’d hate to deprive me of such a unique
experience (git) before twisting the dials’ backsides my way.

And, damnit, you’re right. Nothing in my life is quite this concrete,
the discrete clunks of the hunks of Bakelite and metal
melding with the stink of alcohol, the smooth, shining movements
freed from imperfection loosing something else in me.

Our eyes meet, and you grin a gotcha, which I acknowledge
on my own roll of eyes and you smile, sign that we can reconnect
this elegant bit of history to itself and present tense,
because next you’re going to demonstrate how well it holds its place.

The thing hums its untempered ohms in somewhat smug digits
of undiminished calibration and I nod proper humility
to it and you, shining in the dimness of my tiny office,
wonder how to catalogue and categorise, and if it’s too late.

This was from the Day 11 prompt to write something inspired by the results of the Science Museum random object search and what came up was this little beauty. Subsequent wading through enthusiasts and this curiously entrancing teardown and testing video gave us this poem, for some reason!

A Muirhead Decade Resistance Box, named for the dials marked 1-10 moving in tens, hundreds, and 1000s of ohms

2021.10 Weaver

In youth you roamed the earth as honoured guest,
The blood of gods and giants in your veins;
Whatever traps you sprung were loosed in jest,
The first and last to be adorned with chains.

Where laws and strictures fail, there’s always you –
A name to summon cunning, loose the tongue.
When plans come spinning, quite out of the blue,
Yes: you’re the one whose praise is rightly sung.

But jokers cannot always court guffaws;
Ambition’s bitter, given second place.
Your children held to ransom, framed as flaws,
Will rip the cords that grip your smile in place.

You knotted threads that bound the gods to Fate;
When twilight falls, your flames will liberate.

Following the @allographica prompt for 10th April (write a sonnet about your favourite god/ saint/ superhero), I ended up doing a swift bit of research/ reminding myself about Loki, Norse god of cunning, chaos, plots, tricks, and schemes. I hope I've done said deity justice with this somewhat twisted net of multiple meanings.

Gorgeously ambiguous image, "Laufeyr-sonr" (Laufey's son) by @sceit_a, found unattributed elsewhere and tracked down to Deviantart (let me know if I should remove it!)

Detailed image description in alt-text

2021.9 Impington

This is where I stopped before,
left leg trembling, hip socket whingeing.
“I, er, just need to sit for a bit.”
No need to tell him this was the furthest
I’d walked in months,
running the gauntlet of fears
known and unknown,
just to leave my house.

And now, solo, I’m crouched on this
misshapen heap of concrete,
luminous with several types of safety
(and the vasodilatation of the seriously unfit),
having spent the last 15 minutes
waiting for the 20 minute timer
to signal my retreat,
too fast for my own good,
It seems.

Birdsong twines with cut grass,
conversation courts a
cutting engine of some kind,
the Busway hisses with tires
large and small,
and some offshoot of the A14
grumbles with an unaccustomed
rush hour.

Normalcy sidles closer.
I am gross with inactivity,
this venture exceptional
where it used to be my daily
(later check reveals it’s half as far),
waiting for my cycling muscles
to grudgingly unwind
where they used to fly me,
prompted to this pass
as an excuse for poetry,
too conscientious for my own good.

Before I opened these notes
a dog trotted by,
good boy,
vest emblazoned with Best Friend,
tended by a man carrying his
every possession,
sleeping bag a flag
as he moved a well-worn groove
to semi-rural safety, off-track.
I no longer carry cash.
He never asked.
We nodded.

Soft drops dance on this screen
As the manual saw picks up
Its master’s cough
And I remind myself I’ve always liked
the glottal taste of rain,
trained myself to enjoy its
caress as a blessing through
many years spent second-guessing
Welsh weather,
too stubborn for my own good,
too good at making virtue of necessity.

But it’s time to go home:
to boxes
and still air
and silence.
I won’t mind it
this time, creaking to my feet.
Besides: I’ve always worn a mask
For this.

The prompt for today was to take a walk and write about it. I cheated and cycled.

The Busway, Impington. Bicycle poet’s own.

2021.8 Chariot

The Allographic prompt today was to go to Wikipedia’s entry for 8-Apr and pick something to write about. I chose the life of Constantina, which turned out to be quite the ride.

My only worth: a bride-price for a king;
A civilising influence to boot.
(It seems my latter legend holds a sting.)

Depending on your source, I made a suit,
Or else was sent where I could cause less harm
(A civilising influence to boot.)

It seems that older wives can have their charms
For this Augusta made his blood run hot.
(Or else was spent where it could cause less harm.)

But now I’m dead I could be all I’m not,
Some scribe who never met me penning verse
(For this Augusta made his blood run hot.)

And fever stole my breath – it could be worse
My reputation’s made another shift:
Some scribes who never met me penning verse.

From harridan to saint I’ve armed a gift
My former worth: a bride-price for a king;
My reputation’s made another shift –
It seems my latter legend holds a sting.

This is a terzanelle, created using the Repeating Forms tool.

From Wikipedia, arm reliquaire of Saint Constantina, Santa Maria della Scala in Siena,
by © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0

(Image description in alt-text.)

2021.7 Torpor

I plan to go out for a ride
My weather app has sage advice
High winds may cause resolve to slide
I planned to go out for a ride
It turns out that it’s warm inside
“Backsliding” isn’t very nice!
I’d planned to go out for a ride
My weather app had sage advice

Nice and simple, this is from the Day 7 prompt – to write a triolet about today’s weather – for which I used the Repeating Forms tool, and then fiddled with tenses.

2021.6 Web

It’s the precision.
Moonlight stepping strand to strand
delicate as	her hands deft on the keys
dark glitters on the edge
the edge of	hands gather notes like a
	“Charmed to meet you.”
	“Where did they dig you up?”
exhaustion saws at the edges of him	Smiles
He is soft-ragged, a breath
Moonlight like a sarabande
Strands echoing in
Where?
It’s dark and there’s only his breath
but there’s a tune somewhere beckoning
why?	“They should have left you there”
This isn’t my story	tell your own
kind	“I’m not kind. I’ve never been
	heartbeat dropping heavy through his ribcage into his guts	“What did she say?”
Nothing.		There’s nothing here.
It’s been days.	How long has it been?
Time is snatches of breath between
Sleep doesn’t		“I’m sorry.”
	“I won’t give up. I
Can’t see anything but	you.
There’s dust now.	“You know what they say about dust”
Dusk was her time
Shifting between states
But it’s night now.
The precision mocks him again, all straight edges in unfiltered light	“Say it again! Say those words!”
	Face screwed up like.
	“Face it, I’m no-one’s idea of
Heaven
His laugh caws from him, splatters down among the straight lines	Destination unknown.	“Dehydration, in the end. Simple. Well, not simple.”
		“Why didn’t he say anything?”
It’s funny, really.	“Now, there’s a word with a lot of meanings.”
Always.
He tries to cough. There’s nothing but himself.
Pain is a distant thing. He Drifting.		“Nothing to be done.”
Caught.	Diminuendo.	“I’m sorry.”
	You said that already.
DC al Fine

This came from the Day 6 prompt, but that’s all I can tell you, as I pretty much just wrote the images as they turned up while listening to the playlist, then arranged them like this.

Image from Smart News; I've not been able to find an attributed source.

2015.5 Dawn

This is not my first all-nighter, 
and it won’t be my last by 
any stretch of the imagination, 
consciousness grating on 
flayed nerves, 
bursts of radio static 
in unconsidered colours, 
twenty-seven and already 
deeply familiar with severed realities.

It is, however, my first
by National Express
(though not my last)
as I’m passed from pillar to post,
mostly through the ghost towns
of the ancient coach stops
dotted across the bleary landscape
I am starting to call… not home,
not yet, but a beacon to
my bruised heart,
choosing this quest to sain me.
Sain Us.

I am trying to stay awake in
the grey, migraine strip-lit
flicker that is Luton airport,
20… 20… 2002? 2003?
resting, restless, on slippery surfaces
designed for anything but
relaxation, consuming sugar
against the drooping eyelids
that might see me miss
my destination.

I am reading a book, slim-yet-dense,
never guessing its part in
consuming obsession ahead of me,
and yet the Now-Me can’t remember
if it was Volume I or II.
I’m convinced it was I, yet the
crackling synapses of that dreamtime
bridge the distance, flip the pages of
the man solo save for a stray boy
straight into the beached doorways
drifting between times
five years later.

And, let’s face it, I made that
cash-saving escapade more times
since than I can easily reckon,
the beckoning of Milton Keynes
summoning me from the safety
of Wales, a controlled skid into
a different way of existing,
resisting silent pleas for
the belief that I could be more,
twice four-score miles
from childhood seasons,
bilingualism, hills, and sea.

We’ll never know –
I walked through the door willingly,
fleeing pain and… me,
and found a different verse,
some words worse, but others new,
knew myself for poet,
preacher, teacher, larger, kinder,
reaching different peaks,
but losing song, and, dragons fading,
I strode on, alone, into the Wastelands.

So, this comes from the Day 5 prompt and, as some folk have also reported, I never followed through on the actual prompt, but got sucked into the image that accompanied it, which reminded me of a book some of you might have recognised from the fleeting description – The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King. Except that the memory it summoned up in me was of a crazed all-nighter when I was reading the altogether different first book, The Gunslinger, so you get to experience a shred of my mildly synaesthetic, sleep deprived confusion.

I mean, to be fair, I did find this image on the Google Image search originally!

2021.4 Bristle

She waves in zir peripheral vision, and ze lifts zir head with a hum, frantically palmed down into bemused silence, finger to her lips. Ze frowns. She smiles, a twinkle which ze always finds undeniable, if mildly confusing right now. And ze’s casting for a way to make the query silent, when the answer comes at the end of a pointing finger, as her torso leans unbidden warmth towards zirs, and a fleering, familiar, fleet fear flutters over zir and is gone. They watch, breaths matched in shallow, humble hush as their guest wanders lopsided, hip-hopping, a bobbing blessing about new territory, sniffs, shakes itself, and hobbles off before they can draw phones from pockets for the shot, forever to be dismissed as tricksters in anecdotal earnestness.

Two hearts stuttering

A symphony of near miss

A glimpse of the wild.

From the Day 4 prompt, whereupon I got the creature I’d been hoping for: the Wild Haggis, the subject of many a childhood holiday in Scotland (though I regret I never came as close as these two to seeing a live one). The form is a haibun.

A left-legged haggis, as captured by Margaret via Flickr at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow.

2021.3 Eoster

It isn’t quite a year yet, though the day shouts,
unheeding joy bellowing in colours
picturebook bright, obscenely clamorous;
the careless yellow, purple, bronze,
and green, green, green of it all.
Birdsong beckons, clouds dance;
the wind and sunlight
gently caress
the chasm
between
us.

This is a form known as the Abracadabra, which was Day 4's prompt and I promptly went all emo on it. The form does suit emo, though. And I'm going to blame it on being ill. So there. And I used the Repeating Poetry Form tool to keep me in line.

Image of lilacs from FTD.com

2021.2 Garrafad

The Day 2 prompt was: go to page 37 of the nearest non-poetry book and write something inspired by it. With most of my books still boxed, I pounced on my copy of “Discovering Skye” by Jonathan MacDonald, bought in Spring 2002, from memory. Page 37 reveals the relatively modern, very polite legend of Garrafad (*see below), and why the Kilmartin cemetery was not built there… I went with a pantoum, for some reason, though messed with the format a bit.

I don’t mind; I rarely mind
to hold these stones is all I ask.
I’m not the growling, hurting kind,
but most don’t see beneath my mask

To hold these stones is all I ask –
rain and wind and sky and fish –
but most can’t see beneath my mask…
some quiet – that’s my only wish.

Rain and wind and sky and fish…
I’d frankly rather sleep alone;
some quiet – that’s my only wish!
Downstream is better for your stone.

I’d frankly rather sleep alone;
I’m not the growling, hurting kind
downstream is better for their stones;
I rarely mind; tonight I mind.

2021.1 Home Made

What with one thing and another, I'm making a slow start to NaPoWriMo this year. Howbeit, I thought I'd follow my own prompts, at least to start, so here's the first, from the Lemons prompt:

It starts slowly;
dawn over a pitted landscape,
a drape drawing into
puckered lines,
nothing Puckish, just a rough
reflex, gene-deep.

“Too much?”
“Er…”
“Spit it out…” Too close.

Coaster sought, you set the glass down,
frown flickering between
Polite and
Concerned and
Uncomfortable and
English (so English).

“It’s very… refreshing…”
you venture.
A sigh.
“Fine, I’ll add more sugar…”
“Um, thank you…”
“Next time just say!”

A long spoon, the
accusation of condensation
trickling onto twitching fingers,
the drifting clumps of
grumpy addition,
all clatter against convention,
conversation’s gape glittering
in the pause.

“So. Lovely weather.”
“Yes. Lovely.”