2019.8 Glitch

If your body is a miracle
Then your brain is the next step up.
Combined, they dance through time,
Glory in the stretch of senses,
Caressed by music, soothed by scents,
Blessed with the fine detail in
This palimpsest of... everything –
Picking up the fine Baroque flourishes
Where some only get the broad swish of
Primary colours.

And then there’s the other end
When things only you can discern
Are pinscratch discords across the
Chorus of creation, discolouration
Staining paradise,
A dissonant stink that threatens safety,
And all this a myth to the majority.

Even those who choose to believe you
Wince only with embarrassment’s syncope,
Where others take offence at your
Fist-clench, flinch, rock, tic, and mimicry.
They are only eating,
Only breathing,
Only crackling,
Only drinking,
Only being.

And you, guest attempting to rest on
Fathoms-deep mattresses,
Have no choice but to suffer,
Or dig out the pea,
Or leave, fleeing back into the tempest.
And yet the world will continue
To test you, never call you Princess,
And if only you could sleep,
The details of this ever-present soundscape
Could be a gift again.
Rich and rare as silence.


I’ve here written before about having synaesthesia. Among my other fun neurodiversities (neuroadversities?) are hyperacusis and associated misophonia. Another poet with misophonia reached out today on Facebook while I was deep in Write All The Poems mode, and this, rather unsurprisingly, turned up. I vividly remember my grandmother reading me the story of the Princess and the Pea. I hated it, yet kept coming back to it. It felt wrong on so many levels. We can certainly level a lot of feminist criticism at it, and betrayal of the ancient code of hosting strangers, but the deliberate torture of someone of a sensitive nature in order that she prove her assertion always seemed wrong to me, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time.

2017.10 - Timorous Beastie

“Taste this,” you say,
But first comes the cupped hand,
The swirl to summon earth,
And there are things I struggle to tell you

The label proclaims vanilla and “fructation”
But I’m trudging, snuffing happily
At woodsmoke and hedgerow,
The fading, hardening greens
Grumbling towards slumber.

The scent summons the promise of frost,
The heat of cheeks against crisp air,
The crunch underfoot,
The line of palest, sunset blue against the
Perforating prickle of hedgetop.

Outside, April has been beckoning shorts
And unexpected sweat
In accustomed layers,
My straight cordial laced with ice.

A taste is all my stomach can take
These days.
A half-palm patch large enough to
Cover me in late October

Undergrowth friths over my tongue
While jhenking spikes of corfth
Menkh me.
“Yes, it’s quite nutty.”

And all the while holly burns
In a brazier, the chthrak edges
Friable in the heat
Felt distantly, through gloves,
Safe and cothik.

“Quite a complex taste…”
And one of these days I’ll tell you
What happened the first time I
Tasted Laphraoig,
The bone-deep sensation of
The burning cornfield,
The terrible, flagging pant of the smokechase.

But not tonight.
Tonight we toast new sensations
And blend experimentation
With hugs and smiles.
Tonight is gheftig,
But I know you know what that means
Because I see its colour in your laughter.


If you know what you’re looking for, my synaesthesia is apparently present in a fair amount of my writing. I didn’t know this wasn’t normal for a couple of decades. It apparently affects the way I experience sound and scent. And texture. (And, reading Wikipedia just now, it turns out there are other aspects I also experience… okay…) I spend an amount of my time translating myself (as does, I expect, everyone), but when asked on Sunday night, after the Jazz Poetry Jam, to describe the sensations of a new whisky I’d never experienced before, I struggled to put it into English…