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

---

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

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?

2022.10 Free & Divine

I headlined at Here Comes Everyone Magazine’s Fire&Dust Online gig tonight, and did that thing where I write a piece referencing everyone else’s piece and random stuff around the gig. So, here’s what I wrote for them. Hope it makes sense!

Sparkling lines of vibrating texture guide us,
alchemising the negative into something magical,
renewing knowledge of youth and warmth,
mystery threading landscapes through our heart,
time travelling to wave-rides and the braw froth of
the sweet visions weaved by a wain’s imagination.

We are comorbid, mounting in spirals, woven into
subterranean caves, listening to the tink-tink-tink of
reasonable hammers. And even with the difficulty
of narrow bandwidths we can lever prophetic flight from
rocky starts, starlight rhythmic as tsunami.
Early morning prayers sing us home, familiar as
hugs, shameless as true love, tugging at our roots.

We can duck awkwardness, dodging the bottles of
what-if, glancing over our shoulders, moving to
turns, wild and free, unfettered by strings.
Chanting trips into a bridge-tight hair-trigger,
summoning up dissolution, letters to internal
editors, and apologies are bottomless. We have a way,
negotiating meanings, slaloming through salvation
and the layers of elucidation.

We light time, primal as water, anger, sanctuary
peeking through the failure, hand to hand, candle
to candle, ascending amiably through consonants
that my family lost in too many moves, leaving behind
the texture of drumlins, exchanging them for valleys.
Tá brón orm. Mae ddrwg gen i. And you are our poem
and we are your poem, homecoming and hiraeth in
one package, arms wrapped around each other,
the redemption of pain and healing.

We map the details, plotting efficiency, signalling the
wilderness, hinting at mysteries, a beautiful shield against
selfishness. We are the best type of pretentious, overwhelmed,
yet intent on honouring the gorgeousness of divergence,
inventive in the face of indifference, hitching names to
faces, taking pieces of peace, breathing free of sickly-sweetness
clawing at new embarrassments, coursing through our veins.
Messy twenties a lesson for all of us, a course of penalties.
Or psychedelics, it’s difficult to say.

We point upwards to the ones before us, catching the web of
silk-strong love, raising beauty from the barren, astronomical,
hotter than fire, injudicious. Boiling rage floats masterfully,
navigating straight-edged friendships in the best ways, waves
of nostalgia buoying a connection that stretches across divides.
Cheek by jowl the intersections bless us, one world and another,
one word and another, a chain of absences, better than never
having met.

We have touched, minds and voices, seeking exit points, biting
wits switch-hitting themes, unhinging spectres, triggers content
in honesty. Abortive starts stutter into sympathetic syncope,
wide open and broken, boiling tears into hilarity, opening
the next phase, phrasing lovely lists into inferences of quality.
And we flower into flame, taking our place in loving dust,
waiting for the next breath to bring to the light.

From “Protecting the Plant from Catastrophic Combustible Dust Explosions” by Doan Pendleton

I don’t know if the piece will mean much to anyone who wasn’t there, but I really enjoyed creating it.

Thanks for the inspiration. ❤️

fayroberts · Free & Divine

2020.1 Luxury

We are searching for candles
Drawers are rifled and rejected,
Corners inspected,
Best guesses anyone’s for the making.
Maybe this is not the time
But shining is important, so we dig quicker.

We are searching for candles,
For the first of two birthdays
Ticked off in swift succession,
Successfully silent, cardless
Except for, in each instance,
A different, solitary, stubborn gifter.

We are searching for candles
Tiny, delicate, beckoning heavy breaths,
A gesture against this… situation,
The one we stopped naming –
Another small wall against the sign
On every site, the flash panels dimmed.

We are searching for candles
And I neglect to mention the job lot
Bought before anyone else could get them,
Seeing in myself the excesses rendered
By a different childhood, remembering
Water shortages and powercuts the others dodged.

We are searching for candles
And the big ones – tucked into a corner
Of my tiny study, sturdy, quarantine
Against panic and not yet welcome,
A bet placed against ever needing them –
Weigh, plain and ponderous on my drifting mind.

We are searching for candles
We don’t have forty-five
(If we have any
(We must have some – I’ve met me))
And, even if we did, there would be
More wax than cake, more flame than flavour.

We are searching for candles
Three people who want to sing forth brightness,
Post positivity,
Eager to confirm that this is unique,
Frantic for fripperies,
Scintillating colours to cover reality.

We find the candles
Stuffed among the cloth napkins,
A full drawer that no-one ever moves,
Choosing to eschew using something
That smacks of pretension,
Trousseau to impossible parenthood.

We light the candles,
Nine in total,
Sing, hold breaths,
And wish,
And wish,
And wish…

2019.10 Clerihewn

Explanation at the beginning again, as you may need to brace yourself for the ridiculousness. I was a little desperate after the last one, so requested help from social media: give me some names, and I’ll give you clerihews to match. Probably. The result is a mixture of friends, friends of friends, famous (if occasionally obscure) people, and legends such as Washing Machine Trev...


Somhairle Kelly
Is obscenely fond of jelly.
Ask what their favourite flavour is
And they’ll tell you surprisingly sternly that it’s none of your biz.

Katherine Burr Blodgett
Had a most peculiar pet.
She’d explain that she’d simply made it invisible,
But the other physicists took pains to let her know that they considered this risible.

Kasha-Faye Pascoe
Is inordinately fond of eating snow.
When queried on the source of this compulsion
She informs her interlocutor that it’s the thing that fires her extraordinary propulsion

Elly Merry Hadaway
Likes to swim like a manta ray.
They owe this remarkable aquatic prowess
At least in part to their skilled fashioning of a fetching, neoprene, wingèd dress.

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant
Kept an enormous army ant
She liked to decorate it with feather boas and glitter,
But never trusted it with cash as she suspected that was something it would fritter.

Keir Thomas-Bryant
Is rather amazingly pliant
His displays of this quality sometimes cause the neighbours consternation
But they say nothing to the effect because he’s very generous with his libation.

Paul Darrow
Is the owner of a silver-plated harrow.
He says he doesn’t mind that it’s a tad impractical,
As it’s surprisingly helpful in matters parallactical.

Washing Machine Trev
Prices all his business transactions purely on the lev.
While this would be perfectly acceptable in Bulgaria,
It makes the prospect of his ongoing prosperity in south-east England that much hairier.

Alan Rickman
Would always end his handwritten notes with a stickman.
When asked why he would even do this at home he
Would generally mutter something about the venerable clan called Nakatomi

Toby Dylan
Is a master of the brass-cast quillon.
When queried about his choice of profession
He expounds upon his love of cross-guards with a remarkable quantity of self-possession.

Jorge Luis Borges
Liked to talk at parties about his latest fork case
It was said that if he ever started to wax lyrical on the subject of the spoon
That would be a sign that the Apocalypse was due soon.

Lee Nelson
He’s a man you’ll never quell, son.
You may think you’ve got some lustre, kids,
But when you go against him, you go against his fiercely loyal gang of mustelids.

2019.9 Imparted

Putting the explanation at the beginning this time as this one made me cry and might make you cry too. For trigger warnings, check the labels at the end, below the text (I should hopefully have set this up so you can’t see the end of the poem if you click on the link, but you may need to scroll down slightly for the tags).


There’s a hole in her heart,
Or maybe just her torso,
A phantom organ that
Squeezes and kicks,
Dances in frustration in the
Soft places between.
She apologises, sometimes,
Knowing it will never see the light.

She hopes it’ll shrink,
As time and hope slope by;
She knows it can’t be filled with
Other things, and busy-ness,
But maybe they can
Crowd it down,
Wear at its hard edges,
Muffle it somewhat.

It wriggles, digs in sharp fingertips,
It has a trigger for every season –
Presents unbought, traditions unshared,
Snowballs unthrown, slopes unsledded.
There is blossom not to fondle, soft and sweet and small,
Birdsong unidentified, wingflight not pointed.
There are beaches not to run on,
Shells not to clatter in sandy, seaweed pockets.
There are conkers uncollected, fireworks uncooed,
Sharp scents of brown leaf missed, and bonfires unlit.

She knows she could only be
Even more tired, even more broke.
She knows photos and friends and
Values and poems and families-of-choice
Can be legacy, can write her love
Into eternity.

She also knows that knowing
Does not soothe the kick and squirm,
Can’t sing it the lullaby she’ll never write,
Won’t rock it, rocks herself instead,
Sweet and bitter and utterly alone.
Just for a moment. A long, long moment.
While near, small voices pipe and skirl, contented,
Through the first warm sunset of the year.






































Top

Trigger warnings: childlessness and regret

2019.4 Ghost Tour

“Will you cover for me?” I’m helpless, delving into a set of well-worn expressions, shunning the stutter he beckons, projecting: Yeah, I reckon. “Listen,” he says, “I owe you one.” At this point, more like twenty, a reckoning that’s chasing propriety into an early grave. A new voice: “Step lively,” says Greg, head a conspiracy tilt past the fire hatch and we scurry, him stubbing, me shrugging, Greg’s gaze a spinning speculation I nudge from him. “Madame’s on the march,” he confides. I sigh. “No closer to the prize?” My turn to roll my eyes, grab regulation headgear, unprop the door while trawling for witticisms. Zilch. “There’s always next time.” “Sure, love. Sure.” We watch as he darts ahead.

Tip-toeing upstage,
We are mismatched murderers
Longing for a break.


Over to our old friend the random line generator for inspiration for this not-very-strict haibun, Words generated were: cover, march, listen, tip, upstage, point, chase, ghosts.

2019.3 Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows

She’s been told, over and over:
It’s easier to regret something you have done
Than something you haven’t.
She’s thinking, in particular, today,
Of the near misses.

The declarations of affection a breath away,
The errant gust tucked behind her teeth.
Likewise the cutting insult,
The coup de grâce to a parasitic union,
Forever spiralling on staircases.

She thinks of the last-minute turns
Not taken.
Country lanes still ravelled.
The road that’s more than familiar,
The route engrained in synapses,
Waking and sleeping, unrested,
Until all she can do is visit and
Revisit – shopping list of the
Undone accompanying the miles.

The house unbought, the home unmade,
Its neighbourhood now a maze of gentrification and
Soaring investment potential.
The hand untaken, the
Toe-tucked farewell,
Breaths pluming, backlit for all time in
Green, amber, red, beep, beep, beep…

She is thinking of the monuments unvisited
Today. She should be thinking of
Everything else. Everyone else.
She is thinking, instead, of skin untouched,
Lips untasted, breath unshared,
Knows how Too Late feels in the
Monthly crossing-off, the floodplain tedium.

She is thinking about the
“Actually”s unsung, clutched in her gullet:
Actually, don’t touch that
Actually, that’s not his name
Actually, that’s racist
Actually, she wants you to leave her alone
Actually, I want you to leave me alone
Actually, I want you to leave
Actually, I want you

She is thinking how close
Habit is to fear,
How she inhabits a groove laid out
By so many – too many –
Before her.
Whether or not this is her path,
She’s knee deep in other people’s
Straight and narrow.
It will take a miracle.
It will take a more than careless conflagration.

She finds herself hoping, for once,
The words spilling fresh from her lips,
Hearing them for the first time in years
Of repetition, no longer smooth.
Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Mundus tecum.
Benedicta tua. Benedicta tua.
Benedicta tua.


Fragments of this haunted me all evening. It’s been a funny sort of day.

2018.18 Three Card Draw

IV The Emperor



Every element is carefully selected, from the rams’ heads to the shades and shapes of his draperies. He is bulked and bulwarked, encased in ridged, rigid materials from crown to spurs. Everything is gorgeous, from gorge view to gorget, and preparation is everything; thin-lipped, narrow-eyed, he is unfond of surprises.

He waits, gripped in dread
Battles the creep of ageing
Less feared than fearing.


6 of Wands, reversed



Dread Emperor I have…
Dread…
(Dread)

So, my liege, a funny thing happened
On the way to the battle
And.

No.

Bravely caparisoned and thronged we strode
High were our hearts and strong our voices
Many who cheered us along our road
Blue were the skies with a myriad choices.

Cut to the chase. I think he’d…
He needs to.
I’ll.

Fear now follows fear
A new day beckons the land
The wall has fallen.


8 of pentacles 



No matter what occurs, the sky never actually falls. It calls: blue, grey, white, star-sparkling, or rain-blessing. The sky knows its own business; a kind of competence that only the masterful possess. Gaze focused, intent on craft, this one spins out protection, carves calmly the shape that turns back indignities into equality, perfectly balanced.

Empires creak and fall
Wisdom rises to artful
And work still goes on.

2018.16 Pilgrimage

It is maybe the third time,
Limned in sticky sunlight,
Wild with sleep deprivation,
And wrapped in last night’s stop-out clothes,
I stride to the place,
Still unmarked save in memory.

You hated this time of year.
I wonder if that’s why you checked out then;
I find it hard to credit any of this
As under your control.
I find it hard to see you here;
I have no memories of it but this.

We’re supposed to congregate,
Take our time to murmur to you,
Deep in earth and sunlight.
I’m remembering the time
I staggered to your bedside dressed like this
And you whispered, mischievous:
“Are those leather trousers?!”

Yes, they are. I am Saturday night dance-sweat sticky,
Sick with longing a year on,
Humbled by Sunday’s brightness.
I hope you don’t mind:
I brought no flowers,
Just this overwrought body and half a brain.

The earth is dry and sickly
I sympathise, braced and baking in heathen pigskin,
Whispering, miserable: I miss you
Wishing I could sing you to sleep again.
My brother stomps here most weeks,
Mine will be a different type of guilt.

I will seek you elsewhere:
Seeing you in tulips, these unruly tresses;
Hearing you in the way my voice curls Hibernian, Caledonian;
Feeling you in sea breezes, freezing and freeing;
Tasting you in bolognese, scenting you in heather.
I know you in these bones you gave me.

It’s taken me 6482 days to write this poem;
I had a lot of things to learn without you,
And yet every step was braced,
Threaded through with your essence.
I still sing, still dance, your legacy
More than conscientious memory.

June Roberts: February 1946 - July 1999 

2018.14 Crossing the Water

I knew she was dark, but not like this,
Didn’t see the stark silhouettes
That leered, card-sharp;
The theatre of her mind
All cameos and tragedies.

I never credited her fascination
For the gravity that dragged at her;
The open maw beckoning with
Sweet, dark songs;
The temptation that thronged in every shade.

I should have listened longer,
Combed through notes,
Read the echoes of her wine-dreg codex
In the way she dodged the mirror’s glare
To gaze on emptiness instead.


Inspired by this.

2018.7 Still Life

Peel back the surface
Catch the message glimmering beneath;
There is a wealth of invention
To be gleaned.

I wonder if he got bored - or merely frustrated with the way that only the shells resisted change.

The blue is its own definition;
Symbol of a life
Lived in leisure,
Of time to take pleasure in colour.

After all, insects rarely stay put, wings splayed just so - invention would have been a great temptation.

Here are layer upon layer
Of fragile strength,
Delicate curves of
Complimentary intransigence. Pinned.

After all - who would know? Van Kessel dares to evolve - patiently scraping forth unicorns in plain sight.

The detail is fresh,
The depicted flesh solid enough
To cast shadows,
Mirrors itself in perfect grace.

He has perpetrated an in-joke of 350 years or more, maybe, or was commissioned to blend fantasy with reality.

The wonder of nature is preserved,
The correct delicacies observed,
The perfect compliment to
Anyone’s collection.

Or perhaps he was simply on a deadline and copied someone else’s badly-executed lines.

2018.2 Cycle

It all crowds my head. Your heat flickers inside me
And there’s no release, no means to breach this
I am lost in the white noise crackle, dappled in the harmful,
Gullet full of other people’s bile.
And I want to help. I really, really want to help
Help me. Help me stop this. Help.

Stop.

Step away, but that’s not far enough
Say it clearly, cite the parallels they’ve learned to adapt to -
Kitchen utensils as a measurement of capacity.
Acknowledgement
Affirmation
Just one more thing.
No more.
No more things
No more citations, no more debate,
No more inference that my interferent noise is not great enough
To break the signal.
No more, please - I’m not a debate, my existence
My existence isn’t theoretical, charity, a lack of clarity
I AM NOT A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE.
Google terminology
Google visibility
Google why jokes are important, actually
Google “kicking down”
Google cultural signifiers
Google privilege
Google check your fucking privilege
Google those who’ve been able to say more clearly: this is not a joke
Google the statistics
Google the death statistics
Google the deaths
Google why me opposing your entitled bullshit here is as important as opposing state-sanctioned bullshit in [pick a country where human rights are a big issue and insert here]
Google why my existence doesn’t invalidate yours
Google why words are important
Google the fuck out of why I’m calling you out.
Google us. Read the fucking names.

Breathe.
Just fucking breathe.

Mount the bike,
Take the time,
Spend the excess adrenalin,
Make physical pain the coin of distance, of deliverance, of perspective.
Make.
Make cloud patterns
Make nods at joggers and dogs and kids on scooters
Make a third personal best on that curve north
Make good headway against return headwind
Make faces at other cyclists, and returning geese, and cows, and

Is that a hide or a bomb shelter?
Is that a war memorial or an abandoned pump?
Is that

This is broad lungfuls
This is the body’s heat, whispering into entropy
This is glissades of temporary
This is

You are.

Breathe.
Signal.
Manoeuvre.
Return.
Breathe.
Be.

Now, what were you saying?

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!

2017.27 - 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.

2017.21 - 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…)

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.