Archive for April, 2016

At Sea

 

“My father’s house has many rooms…”

Well, mine has few, but they all echo with him,

In an endless cycle of lost expectation.

Everything here is soaked in it;

Every scent, every sound, every speck of dust.

And I, still listening in the dark

for the distant ebb and flow of his breathing,

Lie shipwrecked by the wash of the waves,

Caught in the tides called by the gravity of his loss,

The massive pull of the place where he used to be,

Endlessly empty, endlessly filled with his absence.

Everywhere here is full of him.

Everywhere here is where he used to be.

Everywhere echoes with the lost whispers

Of one last story, before I sleep.

Love Song

The rhythm of this pleases me more than you can know. This took a long time to write, and I had no idea where it was going at any point, until it was done. Once I had the repeat of ‘shadow’, it fell into place with a very satisfying sound.

 

 

Rock and bone, blood and stone,
Ancient eyes have always known
The darkest depths still to be shown,
Hiding in the shadows.

Shiny bright and sharp the blade
That this forge has freshly made.
For who would want these scars to fade
When they mark us out as heroes?

We who wander other ways,
Who look with an unflinching gaze
Into the dark heart of the maze,
Are not afraid of shadows.

Death, despair and foul disease.
These are the truths on which we seize,
For tho they bring us to our knees
We’re not yet at the gallows.

While I know that I may find
The strongest ties with which to bind
The joy that is a true like mind
Then I shall be your shadow.

Autumn

I wrote this, sat in the back of the car driving down the A55 on the way into Wales. It’s a lovely journey, often alongside great vistas of land and sea, and it will always make me happy.

I suppose this is a prose poem, or a freeform poem, or something… I find things often dictate their own form, sometimes against my designs or better judgement. I think it indicates that they are whole and complete and ready to be let out into the world, when I realise they are nothing like what I set out to write.

 

 

 

 

I love the Autumn, and the all day dusk it brings; the cold, silver light making every lit window spill liquid gold, gently wistful yet softly warm, welcoming you home again. The velvet depths of mauve and violet shadows, so much softer now than the technicolour bright, bold brilliance of Summer.

I love the smell of ice on the air, the wind that bites, the subtly encroaching closeness of blanket-clouded grey skies. I love the shattered cracks of bare branches on the horizon, the blown and blustered birds, even that vague melancholic ennui that permeates everything and settles gently across the expanse of your soul like a dusting of frost, like a cool hand on your forehead.

But most of all, I love the sea in Autumn. Its colours, its smells, its moods. The unspoken threat of a bitter cold so deep, so powerful as to be beyond mere human reason and rationale. The whispered promise of a swift, smooth, all-engulfing peace, ready to enfold you and cradle you in a dark so profound it has become much more than the absence of light. Waiting, as it always has been, beckoning, reaching, calling to you in the soft susurration of the waves’ caressing touch across the shore. Sweeping your mind clear and clean. Soothing, slowing, gently stilling your thoughts until your bones become connected to the bones of the land that lie beneath the sand, beneath your feet; bones no longer articulated but calcified, sinews run through with seams of ancient quartz, blood become viscous as the sea now seems, and surely, you have always been here, in this place, in this moment?

The lights fades and flows and slowly slips away, draining from the darkening sky until there is only you, wrapped in twilight, still as stone, lost in one long, limnal note that stretches out before you like eternity, washing over you from the horizon and back again to the ephemeral edge of the waves. Beckoning, reaching then retreating, calling with the wicked beauty of a siren’s song. A beauty so sharp you swear it could cut like a razor, honed by millennia of tides.

And behind it all, waiting with an ageless, ancient, infinite patience, the whisper of Winter on the wind.

Writing Won’t Let Go

I was in an interesting place for most of last summer. Aftet my father died, I spent a lot of time at my mother’s house on Anglesey, and the fact I was already off work was something of a godsend. To be honest, there were just lots of days, one after another, with me and my mum just getting on with living, watching tv, cooking food, idly chatting about something and nothing.

There was something of a distraction in the middle, with our wedding – which would never have happened if not for some of the best friends a person could ever wish for – but I was very much a bystander in my own life for quite a while.

But the world, ignorant bastard that it is, keeps on turning. Shit keeps happening. People live and die without so much as a by your leave. The pictures of the two little brothers washed up on a Turkish beach did send a spark of reality into my wooly haze. The reactions of the press and social media actually impacted on my thinking, and I started talking to people about it, especially on facebook. I undertstood the effectiveness of shocking images in creating a real public outcry, but that didn’t mean that all and sundry should share those pictures in their statuses like random clickbait. We couldn’t do much for those children, I couldn’t do much, but I could ask people sharing the pictures why they were, and if they would consider using another image, because maybe the one thing we could do was try to give them some dignity in death.

I had some really interesting, thoughtful discussions with people I hadn’t spoken to for a long time, and actually felt like I was starting to think again, in some small way. I lay in bed, still thinking over what had happened, and how people were responding to it, and also, the awful, horrible reality of what had happened to that family. I had an odd, recurrent image of an illustration from Charles Kingley’s book, The Waterbabies, of a small, cherubic child sinking down through the depths of the sea, and it wouldn’t leave me. More than the image, the words, ‘Oh my babies, my poor waterbabies…’ kept running through my head, and it took me a little while to recognise the process; I was writing. Writing like I used to. Writing a poem, by repeating and repeating word and rhythms until it would take shape. Part of me was watching myself do this, fascinated, as it had been so long since I wrote anything like poetry.

So, I wrote a few lines, slept a while, dropped them onto facebook for want of anywhere else to put them, and that was that.

I had some really nice responses and a few shares over the next few days, which was lovely. But much more importantly, I felt like I had something of myself back that I had been missing. Times have been up and down since then, but that part of me that wants to craft words into a shape and share them with other people is still there. I’ve written a few things since then, and I’ll share them here with a little bit of context around each one, as suits.

But here is that first one. It’s not perfect, and I think the rhythm isn’t ideal, but it’s the one that my mind wanted, and so it’s the one it has.

 

 

 

I was once told a story about Waterbabies,
And how they were lost, unloved and alone.
Til at last they found sanctuary under the waters
And were taught of the kindness from which love is grown.

But oh my babies, my new Waterbabies,
You were loved so much more than comfort and home.
But you have learned nothing but ruthless exclusion,
And how crocodile tears swell the morning tide’s foam.

Catch Up

There’s been a small gap in my bloggery.

Ok, a fucking huge, yawning abyss of a gap, and, by Christ, this one did stare right back at me.

First, I was busy. Then I was tired. Then, I was ill.

Labyrinthitis is a very odd condition, and more common than you might assume. Turns out I know a few who’ve had it, and several who’ve had it since. Every single experience varies, in pretty much every way. It leaves you feeling sick, dizzy and uncoordinated, and even shifting position in bed can be like a rollercoaster ride – and not in the good way.

Luckily, my experience only lasted around three months, during which I saw two different consultants, had an MRI, hearing checks, physio… God bless the NHS. But as those symptoms faded, I acquired a whole new set to replace them. At first, it seemed that they might be just the result withdrawing too fast from the prochlorperazine that had been so helpful. Sometimes, coming off it makes people anxious. But I got worse and worse, and ended up with a whole new diagnosis of anxiety and depression, the severity of which might have at last started to decrease, nearly 18 months later.

This all in the year that not only did we get married at last, but also my father died.

In amongst all this, work went from being unexpectedly supportive, to less so, to unsupportive, to firing me.

I’m sure I may get some further mileage out of several aspects of this, in time to come. I’ve moved slowly back towards writing over the last year, and feel more and more able to do so. I will start by making a few posts out of the things I’ve written in the interim, and then get back to posting properly, I hope.

There are plenty of things to post about, after all.

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