Archive for December 2010

Things I wrote some time ago that I wish I had a place for now

Some penetrated memory, causing sleeplessness
And long periods spent staring
Into
Middle
Distance
While I worked out where I was
And that I prefered your friends anyway.

–

I only snatched a book and stole a pen.
Lying out on the bedroom floor
As if I own the English Language
And You don’t deserve it.

–

‘Snow’, by Carol Ann Duffy

Image via Wikipedia

Snow

Then all the dead opened their cold palms
and released the snow; slow, slant, silent,
a huge unsaying, it fell, torn language; settled,
the world to be locked, local; unseen,
fervent earthbound bees around a queen.
The river grimaced and was ice.

Go nowhere-
thought the dead, using the snow-
but where you are, offering the flower of your breath
to the white garden, or seeds to birds
from your living hand. You cannot leave.
Tighter and tighter, the beautiful snow
holds the land in its fierce embrace.
It is like death, but it is not death; lovelier.
Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now
with the gift of your left life?

—

Still beautiful language. Haven’t managed to read enough of it yet to have an opinion, but I’m pretty sure from the first line that it’ll be good. She is always so individual, which is how I aim to be when I write. I don’t ever want to use a cliche, I want to talk about how it really feels.

Some prose?

Not entirely sure if this was prose or not, to be honest. An attempt at something descriptive. The first since I graduated. So dates this around the middle of October.

Sleepy – eyelids heavy and pupils tight.
Wrapped up in someone else’s sheets it is still cold.
Steady rush of rain outside, the trickle of water over-running the gutter and the occasional tap-splatter of droplets against the glass.

The trickle is cool and irregular, I imagine water plummeting from roof top to paved garden, little bubbles which spin and twist in the air before ending.

I am hiding. Reading a book which changes the way I act, drifting into sleep. Unsure of the time and if anyone else knows I am here, I try not to drift for too long. However, it has been too long for me to reveal myself now.

The dresser is wedged open by the pulled-out fourth drawer and within it wicker boxes of small items lie in careless disarray. On the bookshelf three condoms sit conspicuous silver, beside a keyring with no keys and an old packet of chewing gum. For me, who is not the owner, these things are just relics. Not belongings, not possessions, ‘his’ with meaning attached.

There is nothing now to stop me from casting them into the rain outside.

A poem

Image via Wikipedia

So, I really ought to learn to update this thing. It’s there, in my head, and so are some sentences, but getting them down is another matter.

According to my moleskine I wrote this on 24/10. I remember doing it, and I’m not sure if saying where it was written will spoil or add to the context but hey. I’ve context for it anyway. It’s the first full poem I wrote since my degree. So that only took five months to get back into it. I do hope that my degree wasn’t a waste of time and it’s just the new life pressures and sudden release from deadlines which has killed my desire to put pen to paper. (Try telling that to Thursa, but then the situation is very different.)
Written on the South East coast, in freezing cold wind, on my own on a bench.

October. It is cold
but the waves still sound the same.
Sporting sunglasses and winter coats
We, the local legions, march along the wall.

I am an interloper, an autumn tourist,
but to remain unseen I keep to the uniform.
Today it is bright.
The sun sparkles on the smooth sea,
a panel of light moving and rippling on the water like broken glass.
Rocks shudder under the waves’ power – scuttling and clattering over the land.

Last July we came here,
lay about all day in a kind of sunny limbo.
I still have the train tickets in my pocket at home,
and the memory of pretending we weren’t anywhere at all.

Then the still-chilled water cooled
our scorched and sunburnt skin.
Bodies huddled, perched on the sea wall like birds on a branch
– for comfort rather than for warmth.

I will come here twice a month,
For a mini beach holiday,
kisses under moonlight,
And always the sea will sound
(the same).