Poem written using strange associationss

The pavement and sky are cold, and my hands like birds.
Morning songs are more like the groan of a garbage truck.
Wheeling, wheeling, it all may be a rat race.
I never won a race. I never won anything.
Running breathlessly towards something old or new
And ripping holes through time and space
I realise I need it- my own time, my own space.
Nothing really belongs to me and I don’t belong to anyone
Or anything else. Possessions are sentiment incarnate.
Sentiment can bring me to my knees with tears.
There are bruises on my legs turning blue and purple.
Once in a blue moon, I’ll share the secret.
There's a dark side to everything. And a sea of tranquility.

A playlist of beautiul murmurs

The Act of Murmuring from daisy christabel on 8tracks Radio.

What I have....

I have a name.
I have a home.
I have a past.
I have hope.
I have been loved.
I have been resented.
I have been held.
I have been hurt.
I have believed.
I have belief still.

I have known those who do bad things.
I have known those who do good things.
I have been to boarding school.
I have cried in the shower to make it less painful.
I have seen the twin towers pierced by planes.
I have enjoyed examinations to keep my mind still.
I have never been resilient.
I have never been aggressive.
I have never spoken up for those I should have.

I have travelled to many faraway places.
I have taken a lot - too much- for granted.
I have cried at my mother’s wedding for joy.
I have cried at my mother’s words for shame.


I have spent months in hospitals, my families on holiday.
I have spent years recovering from what put me there.
I have scars that most likely will not ever fade on my wrists.
I have not have done that if I’d known the mess I’d make.
I have most likely done it anyway as I wanted to bleed.

I had someone who thought like me, who inspired me.
I have seen this person in a casket and read out a poem.
I have been refused the allowance to go anywhere alone to cry.
I have been beaten up by my larger yet younger sister.
I have also been slapped by her on that day.
I have wondered why grief could lead to violence.

I have grieved until my mind fell apart.
I have made assumptions, assumptions, etcetera.
I have fabricated a persona for myself.
I have torn that patchwork apart.
I have seen how little I know who I am.
I have questioned who I am, and if I am at all.
I have heard and seen non-existent enemies.
I have battled that which nobody can see exists.

I have won trophies before yet having won meant the world.
I have helped others until pieces of sanity were reassembled.
I said the wrong thing to the ‘right’ people.
I have said the perfect thing to the ‘wrong’ people.

I have shaken and stirred.
I have mended and made.
I have apologised countless times.
I have no idea whether I’ll truly be welcome.
I have a feeling that I am just like extra luggage.

I have no dissolution that this is not anyone’s fault but my own.

Innovation/Courage?

This poem ended up in a completely different place than I thought it would, but I like it like that, to just go with the proverbial/prosaic/poetic flow.

Thought: This is going to hurt me at the end but
I’m going to do it anyway- and so I could stop looking 

outside to place blame. With a rock in each hand,

I began beating them together repeatedly, saying- 

“This is how they discovered fire. This is how the world
really began as a place for us to thrive and develop all the

cultures, incredible scientific and technological advances,

the great movements within the circles of art and literature,

and music, and  the stock market, and the world we know."

It fascinates me.  The place that Something so suddenly 

exists where previouslythere  was Nothing. All as the result

of friction. I like how when you take two things that aren't

meant to fit together is the only way it works. 

Now, let’s smash our hearts together,  or grab onto the other's 

hand, but with vehemence, thinking of that rock, to see

if we, too, have the inspiration and spirit to change the tide-

o there is never a cessation of creativity or innovation,

be it scientific pr medical, linguistic and literate, 

mathematical or technological, and perhaps, even cultural.

So much has yet to be discovered and all I’ll never learn it.

I often wonder whether I will have the chance to witness

advances made by their innovators in years to come, and

that people in the years to come will also take for granted

finite and eventually arcane ways of doing things, because

after all ,we spend most of our lives working in the same way.

Maybe from this distance, it appears that what those people

in future generations will discover and innovate will seem 

small compared to what you once have done. It’s not. 

They are the same hard workers, within different parameters.

Self-destruction is easy and it is boring eventually. 

You could easily kill yourself right now, or you could

do it sitting right in this one place. 

I dare you to bite down on your own heart and look brave.

Repeat- I’m weak, I’m weak, I’m weak- whilst quietly

Feeling surer that you are strong and courageous enough

to chew up your heart and choke yourself. I mean, 

It’s not like it’s anything the world doesn’t do to us anyway,

Whatever- I might get some semblance of a poem out of this.

Cut up and amended Plath poem

Even the silence was silent, and it was you,
all up inside my head; I couldn’t quite make it out
that spring that came with a roar beyond and above
these figs, all looking so rusty, so ugly, the way
they plopped to the ground. some people getting less
and some more. I must not have always been like this.
There is something so demoralising about watching
the habits, gestures and behaviour of others;
I’d never once thought about it before.

But life is loneliness and one can never outrun it.
I am simply my own silence. I close my eyes
and hear the world in constant motion outside me,
happy, I have been inadequate all along.
I am my own silence. All I heard was the bray
of my heart- this is the song of a mad girl.

I need to fabricate an outgoing nature so
that I might gather the guts to want something.
There is so very much I want to learn, and
I came dangerously close to wanting nothing,
So from here and now, all that despair, the feeble parts,
every hellfire of every nightmare and each time
the blackness gallops in at night- I intend to live it,
feel it, and somehow find a happy home far from fire.

All the world I must have taken for granted,
viewing it through small cramped eyes, always so
introspectively passive and melancholy.
Now I’ve learnt more of it, I am not so easily fooled
by false faces dressed up and painted blue and red.

There is a way out and it’s not a constant, I know this.
From that despair and woe you can come ricocheting
towards a sense of fulfilment, laughter, and even hope.
The trouble is that we always boomerang back- but it’s
just a matter of time- for a time I believed in mermaids.

When you kissed me I felt my lungs fill like trees with
something beautiful but certainly annihilating.
Dying is arbitrary, Anyone can do it but why want to
even if there’s no meaning to be found and even if
madness itself takes you out on a moonlit waltz.

 A fellow student asked- who are you? I am. I am. I am.
A girl with horrible limitations, too many neuroses
and a desire for companionship, other than an illusory
feathered thing that sits on me nightly. She replied-
I don’t know who I am either, but why drives you?
I do it because it feels like hell, because it feels real.
Committing suicide is not creative expression, she replied,
and it’s not a statement, and you have a life to live, so why?
The words were released, held in since ten years old
when I first tried it; the words that I couldn’t explain.-

I guess you could say I’ve a call, I said. One moment
and she put her hand on mine, and lowered her voice
to a murmur, said, cut the telephone off at the root
so the voices won’t get through. I shut my eyes and
wondered if I had really made her up inside my head.

Not without trouble

Imagine: star-crossed, eyes crossed out.
That was the first time a thought came to me,
but so very short across my eyelids and while
you laugh backwards I only want to move forwards;
the poem will come but not without trouble.
I am always in trouble, Their favourite topic: my trouble.

Nightfall headfirst, wings rustling in the breeze,
feathers dripping fragrant in my hands; I begin to write.
Clipped wings, shining heroism; I continue to write.

Imagine: a girl leaving church and clicking her tongue
enticingly, telling me- bring yourself to speak and
take off on mountain climbs, feel the highest place
from where inevitably I will fall and scatter my heart,
my brain matter, having to piece matters back together.
A girl who didn’t easily take to being told what to do
by her own voice inside her head nobody else heard,
and it is asking: Why me? and Who are you?

Then, as soon as a glance, I’m a child on your knee,
freckles scattered out from underneath the floorboards,
tears dripping in ink onto the pages; I keep writing.

What I do want? A clear mind, a mighty pen, approval.
I do not want your castles unless there are flowers there
and I did not see a single petal, I had no sparkling drink
so wrote and watched the joy bubbling from your lips 
to the polished sound of a champagne flute.
What do I not want? To need as I need, to be as I am.
To know too little, to live too long. No, I don’t.

then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience

For you only know a heap of broken images

'Popularity Contest' is the name of the exercise

I have this book called Smash Poetry and it's got some very quirky exercises in it but because I've been a bit shaken up lately my attempts to be write from my scrambled mind have been futile, so this particular task attracted me. I don't need to explain what it is- you'll figure it out.

I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.
You're barking up the wrong tree.
Take a sad song and make it better.
He's got a chip on his shoulder.
Live and let live.
The play's the thing to catch the conscience of the king.
Dying is an art, like everything else.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond-
The flowers you planted, mama, in the backyard, all died when you went away.
This the stuff that dreams are are made on.
Two heads are better than one.
I think I made you up inside my head.
An eye for an eye and the world goes blind.
The lights are on and no one's home.
So the women come and go, talking of Michael Angelo.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed my madness.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
If I should die, think only this of me-
Catch 22.
Curiosity killed the cat.
I took the road less travelled.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
I carry your heart in my heart.

Home

The daisies on the heath are growing tall.
I walked through the grass, a thistle made me fall.

Maybe this is just how it goes.
The back and forth that life throws.
And maybe that's why I know
That I'm just starting to grow,
Just starting to learn to throw,
Until at long last I can show-

That I'm coming home.
I didn't think I would dare.
Didn't think I'd ever go home.
Thought I was already there.
With open eyes, I wasn't there.
With open eyes, too much, I care.

The love in your words makes my world warm.
When I wake up at six I think of you at dawn.

And you're not just my mother
And I've been such a bother.
I wouldn't debate what you say
If you wanted me to go away.
You're stronger than you portray
And I just hope that someday-

When I am truly home.
You will teach me how to cope.
You welcomed me back home.
I thought that I'd lost your hope.
I look at you and I'm there.
I look at you and I'm not scared.
I look at you and I'm cared.

When you came, wrapped me up and I felt your tears
I didn't expect you to forgive those unspoken years.

I do still need to heal and maybe it's not real.
But forgiveness is absolute
And that's saved me more than truth.
Now I'm welcome back home,
I don't foresee more hungry cold
Just a warmth and smile and glow-
So chaos, give me a throw.

I'm landing back home.
I've been away too long.
I feel the warmth at home.
Like an Otis Redding Song.
This is where I grew strong.
This is where I belong

I look at you and you care.
You look at me and I care.

I Need A Phone Call

Not poetry really, just something I just had to get off my chest before I go to bed.
Thank you, you know who you are.

There is that concept that they name 'stranger danger'
and of course, thunder can clap and the unfamiliar
can hurt you. Detectives examining bruises,
police stations in general; I'm blessed to have someone
there to hold me while I fell into a broken leaf.
But danger doesn't always come from storms
or from strangers. Sometimes it comes at the hands
of the familiar, of those who you thought loved you.
It's been a long time since the first stranger.
Even longer since the familiar.
People are good. They are basically good.
People are good. They are basically good.

A phone conversation today meant the world to me.
Reminded me of what happened, what I came out of.
Felt my heart breaking a little- the voice that spoke to me.
It's been over a decade since we knew each other,
and yet I want to hang on to every word,
and I want to speak of things I have so long buried.
Friendship works that way, I am sure of it.
People are good. They are basically good.

i'll never give up on that.

Haik-true

The fear I'll become
who I am most afraid of
keeps me up at night.

Free writing

The hours strike apart like broken plates because
my hands are familiar with the anxieities.
the best intentions of mine get tangled up
and I wonder if cutting myself open would help just to show
what’s true about what I really mean, underneath, inside.

The terror bleeds through without a sound or word.
It’s just a simple unravelling. But this is nothing
compared to the world, the television and sweet sweepers
and being bitten by memories of nightmares with eyes open.
Thousands upon thousands of circles, futility and reflection:
unchangeable. I wonder why he wrote that it’s April
that is he cruellest month when any of them, any month
or cycle of the moon, can be cruel and can be kind or both?

Will we see parts of the universe through a telescope?
Transcend, transport, escape? We can see patterns all over.
We’ll look for stars, even the dead ones staying on to carry time.

I have been betrayed before. Sometimes I ought to be wary of hoping.
At least I remember to breathe and look up at the city blocks
scraping the sky, instead of at my shoes  Reason clouds the heart,
or the other way around. At night it’s fragile evocations,
a mixing of memories and hallucinations of winter dawn.

Will it bloom this year? The broken gate from where words flow
without resoution? No answers. No reason, that only there with emotion.
There are answers but all answers are followed by doubts
and different answers to the same questions.

Eventually I will write about the history of fire escapes,
the mysteries of the two hemispheres together and apart
and how they lateralise when the words and visions overtake us.
And the forever-land of forgiveness I'll find without forgetting the path.
The delusion of freedom, and wanting to believe- I couldn’t count
all the things I’d like to believe. Then there’s. wondering what is real.
He says it’s nothing and everything is a hologram.
I don’t know much but I know I’m not hollow, and whether or not
I’m real or any of this is, I’m glad to see what I see as I see it.

In Berlin

In Berlin I hear the art on the brick walls is better
than you might find in a gallery, and everybody recycles
and they even dispense clean needles for the local junkies.
I’d like to go someday. Maybe I’d learn something.

At least it might be worth the weight, carrying names,
toting around the hundreds of faces I’ll never forget
and having to hold on to the ones that failed me,
or the ones that I failed.

Two- A Message; Not Today (both using the Gyrin/Burroughs cut up method to some extent, taking the new formations/juxtapositions/images not for the purpose of 'beating the machine' but to express newest felt truths by means of 'cutting up' the past)

I heard you were married and then
left behind and you were afflicted
and I never got to say I’m sorry-
never got to tell you about
the black echo, then floods of light
that all calls to the heart.
Never got to tell you the message
I should have when I did not answer
and pretended to be unafflicted:
you don’t dust it all off like cat hair-
it is the door you leave through.


Eventually, dusting off, the emptiness of eyes,
the time gathering in between the pages of books-
where had they gone, those mornings of smoke
and flower petals and fool’s gold? Why is it now
just choking and tiny wounds, turning white?
I can’t see them. I should be able to, I’ve known enough.
The door is broken. The alarm is ringing.
The wound from the old loneliness is one black hole
pooling my introverted silence into the floor,
a collection of stupid words and jumbled reveries.
Suddenly I’m on an edge and I can’t breathe.
Fear like that burns and folds into the clouds
until the even sky looks wrong. But still, I can’t do it-
I can’t bury every day as though somehow
my hands have become portals to places where
I was another me and I never had nightmares,
and to places where time to today didn’t happen,
not as I saw it through eyes wide and a halo of gold
sometimes, then sometimes through the shadows
carried by the hauntings. I started over once,
when my mind fell apart and when I pulled back the veil,
saw for the first time that I did not exist without it.
I started over but I do hold the memories in my luggage,
making my weak backbone buckle, but hauled up
on genuine shoulders. The kind you can cry and laugh on.
I can breathe now. Something as simple as speaking
has made me brave, and I am not broken, not today.

Six words, a la Hemingway

Things are very hard these days.

Pull pint, double shot, no time.

Twenty minutes to finally breathe again.

Can't make plans so don't look.

A relationship between personality and poetry?

I do prefer poetry to people.

(Really, pretty much to anything else.)

Gonna miss you when you're gone.

A field mouse disturbs the grass.

Climbing over the gap-toothed style.

There are never any happy endings.

There are always some happy endings.

Where did all the poetry go?

Regulars

There are a few things I like when it comes to my work. Overall, it's exhausting and mind-numbing but in some ways it's beneficial to be ground down and anaesthetised. But what I like the most is recognising people who visit regularly and remembering their drink orders.
There's a guy with white hair who looks like a cartoon character and drinks London Pride and works just upstairs from the Foyles where I once worked, and says that he hates it due to a culture of nepotism and 'cronyism' and talked with me about the power of social influence on one slow evening.
There's a wine connoseur who drinks ESB ale in a tankard and tells me about his visits to wine tastings and port tastings and whiskey tastings and God knows what else, and who fiddles with his phone and eventually falls asleep, without fail, over his dish of pork scratchings, but not before inviting me to accompany him to one of his many beverage tastings and I am too busy.
There's a guy who pops in early afternoon and always has the exact change for a pint of Guinness, who then disappears and reimerges with another order, who grabbed me to the backdrop of Save The Last Dance For Me and we danced together while my boss clapped, inebriated as she usually is.
There's an incredibly effeminate customer whose name is David and comes in every day, who drinks chardonnay with three ice cubes and stays for many hours, way past closing time, applying his make up while looking at himself in the mirrored wall.
There's an attractive man with a beard who wears pressed shirts and drinks lager, standing outside with friends or strangers to smoke, and who I would like very much to kiss, and when I let slip to my manager that I thought he was good-looking he made fun of me and told me my boyfriend would be jealous.
There's a woman who has a bespoke drink devised of vodka and a very small amount of orange juice with ice and a straw, who was there the other day at midday and again in the evening until midnight, but who won my affection despite her lingering after the last bell because she gave compliments about me to my boss.
There are two men in creased suits during after-work hours, one of whom looks a lot like an ex-boyfriend of mine and drinks Seafarer's Ale, who always rack up an expensive tab and want receipts so I wonder who is paying.
There is another man in a suit who always attends with a group of other men in suits and who showed me his phone, saying, 'Look who I had lunch with!', to which I replied, 'Nigel Farage!' and went into a brief soliloquy about his politics before kicking myself because I realised that they were actually friends.
There is another man in a suit who used to do what most people would gauge as flirting but has since given up and orders Guinness and asks for huge amount of cashback but mostly stays outside with Heineken Top, who is named after his drink order and because he's so tall he's always at the top, and always asks for a lager with a top, and during my first week I stupidly put soda water in the lager instead of lemonade.
There is a man who always sits in the same spot at the bar and slowly drinks his lager and occasionally asks me for help with the Evening Standard crossword.
There is another man whose voice gives me nightmares and who stands at the entrance to the bar so I keep having to squeeze past him and each time he says, 'Hi Daisy!' in a very strange squeaking voice, which I used to think was a joke but now realise is his real voice.
There is an Italian guy called Marco who had a birthday party the other day and gave me a slice of cake and many hugs and made my heart warm.
There is a couple- a long-haired blonde and man in a blazer- who come in and stay for hours until they are both more than tipsy and they are kissing and cuddling, and she drinks wine and he drinks lager, who had a conversation about becoming boyfriend and girlfriend on official terms, which I picked up from eavesdropping, but which worried me because I could have sworn I saw her with someone else a few weeks ago and when my manager and I were gossiping about them and I mentioned this, he said, 'I like her style.'
There is an attractive close-shaven man who drinks Amstel and sits alone, scribbling in a notebook, and when I asked him what he was focused on told me that he's drawing jellyfish because he is making illustrations for his friend's writing, so I have decided that I would like to be his friend.

May Hill

I’m with you on May Hill where bedsheets smell like tea and milk
I’m with you on May Hill where time stands still as if in a snow globe.
I’m with you on May Hill where I learnt the names of flowers.
I’m with you on May Hill where I waited for the morning birds.
I’m with you on May Hill where I am sorry I lost my mind.
I’m with you on May Hill where my grandfather died in his bed.
I’m with you on May Hill where all the stories began.
I’m with you on May Hill where quiet is heavier than sound but slower.
I’m with you on May Hill where what is thrown away burns in the garden.
I’m with you on May Hill where Christmas is redder and greener.
I’m with you on May Hill where green grow the rushes, oh.
I’m with you on May Hill where I first heard a lullaby.
I’m with you on May Hill where my grandmother broke a leg.
I’m with you on May Hill where I learnt to sing.
I’m with you on May Hill where we go out walking to Ella and back again.

Time

Time is an elastic band.
Time is a flat circle.
Time is precious, but truth more precious than time.
Time is item reorganised.
Time is too slow for those who wait.
Time is a human construct.
Time is too swift for those who fear.
Time is a frame for the masterpiece of experience.
Time is too long for those who grieve.
Time is a medicine.
Time is too short for those who rejoice.
Time is not on my side.
Time is the most precious element of human existence.
Time is our afternoons measured out in coffee spoons.
Time is more valuable than money.
Time is the sound of new leaves turning over.
Time is the most undefinable and yet paradoxical of things.
Time is a tapestry that weaves itself again and again.
Time is trying to put a limit on infinity.
Time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
Time is unkind.
Time is an illusion.
Time is all we have.
Time is the longest distance between two places.
Time is a game played beautifully by children.
Time is all your yesterdays and all your tomorrows.
Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.
Time is all it takes.
Time is taking it all.
Time is catching up to you.
Time is whether you want it to be or not.
Time is treasured, wasted, spent and bought.
Time is a greedy thing.
Time is stolen by punctuality.
Time is a slippery thing.
Time is mostly spent being dead.
Time is there to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
Time is not mine to take.
Time is not mine to give.
Time is in the tide.
Time is just a point of reference.
Time is not going to explain.
Time is clinging to me like cat hair.
Time is without meaning.
Time is the meaning.
Time is mine and it’s worthless.
Time is never on my side.
Time is nothing.
Time is all.

How many?

How many years before the fire? How many years still looking up at the sky at night and seeing nothing but black? How many years of imagining a mirror up there above you, something to gaze into all wide-eyed to see something that looks just like you staring back, to see creatures who have spent all the days in their lives looking up wondering whether someone else is out there? How many minutes spent hoping that maybe we aren't alone at all? How many hours did we dedicate to dreaming up these people, dressing them up in bodies like ours and lives like ours and words like ours, in names that fit comfortably around our tongues and then giving them our hands to shake? How many days did we wait for them to give a reply? How many times did we send out exploratory ships and crews on voyages into the big endless blue, navigating between the stars using a tape measure, looking for some small hint that there are others out there too? How many times will we come back, shaking our heads in disappointment but our eyes glimmering with resolve because we are not giving up yet? How many seconds will we waste away, raking through the galaxies, only to prove that we are not alone out there? Surely we are not alone out there.

Unfinished jigsaw

I am trying to learn over again lessons in love,
to teach myself how to be alone, without being
lost but I have never known how to be beautiful--

and I do not live anywhere but the room where
I sleep is so crammed with empty boxes and
all those empty corners I could build a nest in.

If I had the flesh for it and the energy for it
I could grow wings to pull myself up and then
fight a war with gravity and someday I'd win.

I could grow up if it weren't for a gap in the bed
that I am too small for and the gaps in memory
I am too big for, and for the emptiness of space.

Alone is a state of mind, in and out and between
and it's a place, a strange place I am and I'm not
and I've been here before but back then I didn't

notice the cold.