crawling out from under the weather

Lines scribbled on the twentieth of two days later -

It’s only when things go wrong that you notice your body. The rest of the time you are unconscious of your component parts and how they work.

But now my ribcage feels like a cage. A rusty one. With bars that brown and flake and threaten to crack. That bend and bow and moan as I lean against them trying to escape my monster cellmate.

And my lungs feel like dry bellows. Riddled with holes and drying glue and useless. A collapsed accordion in the hands of a tone deaf musician. I whistle the introduction and he wheezes his way through a lament to lost days.

haiga #13

punch drunk promises

I don't often speak to prompts but sometimes they speak to me. Letting them roost in the margin helps - I'm a firm believer in peripheral vision. And so Monday shakes hands with Thursday to give you...

[click to view detail]

wake to watch and blink away

Without a sound. That was how it happened. How it arrived. Like pieces of clouds fallen down. Like crowds of snowflakes clinging together for warmth.

quiet morning -
blood-speck confetti
in the flowerbeds

Fur that looked like feathers or feathers that looked like fur. White among the green. Macabre blooms on a thursday. White among the grey. A bad start to the day. Remains of skin and absence of life. All shape and sense stripped clean away.

fox kill
white fur scattered
in the sun

Blinding white collected and consigned to black plastic burial. Bloodless. Nameless. Movement reduced to prey.

give me your blue rain

I got two new notebooks for Christmas. I decided to try something different - to let the notebook dictate the nature of the writing within. One of the books is the beautiful Colors Journal. The matt black covers bind a wild and wonderful paper rainbow - with each day offering a word ripe for prompting. I dip into this pot as and when, and these are a few of the recent results.

[click to view detail]

sweet dreams

She used to make me sleep with teeth under my pillow. And not just my own. Not just the milk ones that fell out of their own accord. She would find them, collect them, borrow them or buy them. Dog teeth, sheep teeth - bartered from the butcher. The teeth of other children that she saw fall during rough games at the playground. Fairy teeth that she plucked while they lay sleeping soundly in the sun-drowned flower beds.

A sprinkle of enamel every night. Sometimes a double dose beneath two pillows - plumped and stuffed full of feathers I laid down. But I still felt them nibbling and nipping. Sometimes I would wake with ragged earlobes and a bloody nose. Sometimes there were holes in my dreams big enough to poke your head through.

On my birthday one year she gave me a tooth of her own. She snapped it off with her sharpened tongue and spat it right into my palm. She told me to suck it. Ordered me to enjoy. I told her it tasted like violets, but her eyes looked like thunderclouds.

the history of love

[a list inspired by the title of a novel by Nicole Krauss]

is rotting in an unmarked grave

is chequered never polka dots

is a pillaged shipwreck

is second-hand

is a riddle on the tongue of the dumb

is growing paler by the day

is 17 syllables scribbled onto a folded playing card

is largely written in invisible ink

is a rhymers paradise

is a hurricane in a feather factory

is cause to carry an umbrella

is a unnamed god in an unlabelled bottle

is a secret splinter

is a ruptured aorta

is unpunctuated

is borrowed from a travelling library

is littered with broken lightbulbs

is stuck together with fairy glue

collected cobwebs

[a few dusty relics that need to be aired]

If I lived in an abandoned lighthouse I’d use it as a personal sundial. I’d watch the giant finger of shade swing through three hundred and sixty degrees. Catching all the little creatures in their sunny stride. Throwing autumn back to the trees. Spotting the difference between those who told the truth and those who lied.

- - - - -

There were veins in the flowers they gave her - red running lightly through yellow. There were veins running through the people she loved too - knotted and bottled and sometimes blue. There were dark threads between her days - tying morning to evening, night to day. She knew if she lost her pocket scissors she lost her way.

- - - - -

It wasn’t the book that smelled musty like the face of the woman on the cover. It was memory, waiting in the afternoon air for someone to catch it. The smell of seventeen and those paper cups with the orange powder within. The vending machine drinks he claimed he was addicted to. The way they stacked together, each fitted into the next like a paper spinal column. Infinity came easily those days. Bitter and sweet at the same time.

- - - - -

He uses a trolley on wheels. Tilts it back to move them about. Fridges and freezers and washing machines. All sealed within plastic sheeting with polystyrene corners. He shifts them about to a pattern only he knows. White blocks of differing dimensions. Perhaps he wants to build an igloo - one that will only grow cold when he plugs it in.

haiga #11 & #12

digitally enhanced

[random thoughts about fingers and toes]

Everybody’s talking about sock puppets. But they unnerve me. Such knitted snakery and lack of limbs. Buttoned eyes that never blink. They make you think you are the one in control, the one working them - but they have already devoured half your arm. And now they are quietly conspiring with your lower limbs. Dropping stitches like secret hints. They plan to have your feet for tea.

- - - - -

Crossing my fingers doesn’t amount to much. But it’s better than nothing. Better than closing my eyes. Better than a sentence that starts with a full stop. Better than a year of absent thinking and a French introduction. A tidy riddle and a dirty exclamation.

- - - - -

They count to ten. Over and over. Everyday. Just to say they are doing something. Making progress on fingers and toes. Forty between them, but they never get beyond ten. Always holding hands. Always walking backwards.

sitting pretty

(not exactly a short story but a short something)

(inspired by a post on Sarah’s Writing Journal)

It’s hard to find the perfect bench. One that fits, that suits mood and persuasion. One that encourages the right words onto your page.

Some benches are always in the sun and some prefer the shade. Words written here may bristle with goose-bumps, or burn with rage. There are benches that face the sea, that make you sway and spin stories about drowned gods and fish that dream they can fly. Some face the swings and the slide, and make for playful verses filled with colour and rhythm and rhyme. Some benches have names, dedications to the deceased. Beware of these loud benches, over-owned and all too keen to whisper ghost secrets into your ear.

Sometimes it’s safer to sit alongside, X-legged and lower down. Cross cut by striped shadows of arm and back. A friend of a bench.

It’s always raining these days, and I can’t remember the last time I visited my benches. I need to do a tour, to check they are all still there. Weathering this winter. Peeling and patient.

one by one

There is something I can’t resist about those cut and paste death threats and murder confessions. Words in different fonts and colours stuck in lines onto a blank page and all the rage in cheap thrillers and the 1970’s. So much more artful than just trying to disguise your handwriting.

I always wanted to have cause to create one - and I know a friend who indulges from time to time. It’s something we could all benefit from - carrying a small satchel stuffed full of words clipped and culled along the way. Ripe to be sprinkled, literate confetti on a windy day. We should all carry little silver scissors - ready to snip at each others conversations and tear holes in our confessions - stealing the parts we like and rearranging them our own way.

But there’s more to it than that. It’s something about spelling out anything that carefully - as if the process forces a stronger focus on each individual word or letter, making you think more about what you are saying, making you more connected to the essential way that language is built within the human mind.

And I just got myself a post Christmas treat - a letter printing set, a grown up version of one I had as a kid. I remember the little rubber letters, lining them up in the holder. And I’m still thrilled at picking the letters out one by one, slowly watching my words form, and remembering to write everything backwards. Perhaps that is the ultimate key - that anything you say is stronger if it makes sense both ways round.

over the hills

two moons, one me

[inspired by the latest prompt at one deep breath]

A slightly different take on the theme this week as I have chosen to focus my attention on moons captured by pen and paper.

Two haiku - the first inspired by a piece of art that has hung in my bedroom for many years, the second by a friend who has hung around for nearly as long.

The Weary Moon by Edward Robert Hughes

at the foot
of my bed - a moon
that never fades

she sent a postcard
of the moon - promising
to visit soon

a new complaint

Plus one on the calendar and its out with the old, in with the new. A Christmas treasure given to me by you. A dragon scale, a petal from a petrified flower. A mantra repeated hour after hour.

A lack of space - something has to go. A heart shaped box - kept beside my bed, for thirteen years or thereabouts, since the days when those three words still meant something. And hidden within - a lighter, free with tokens on cigarette packets, from when I had nothing better to do than smoke. Two herbal throat sweets and one white pill. Three buttons - two black, one white (ownership unknown). One tarnished silver earring (ownership known). A little white crystal, quite possibly of magic origin. And a perfume sample that she says smells like rosemary while I disagree.

And something secret - something treasured that now needs to be set free, thrown away or returned to the sea.

so far so good

7 days under my ever-changing sky

today the sky is usual blue, from left to right but cut in two by a plane line. straight down the middle, north to south, then slowly dissipating, growing woozy as it slips westwards

today the sky is contradictory - it has fallen out with itself. shattered lines drag on from others, some dark, some bright, some fluffy with delight, some blooming with desire to ruin your day

today the sky is flat and lower than it should be - I have to stoop as it swoops down and knocks the top off my head - I should have stayed in bed

today the sky is hazy, not as hot as yesterday but reconciled to its rightful place. no clouds, no breaks in the colour, no pace, no space - in short a lot like me

today my eyes watch the sky - two rings of a colour no-one can quite describe - mostly blue but now and then a curl of white wing slides into view - silent and true

today the sky is a grey betrayal - a let down after a long held promise of something better - an echo of all we leave behind and a warning of what waits behind the door at the end of the hall

today the sky is a pedestal we try to climb, safe holding onto the lifeline of her hair. the sky is a secret only making sense within the half-light of my dreams, an eternity that welcomes screams

forty winks

For the boy who collects shadows. Who traps them in a net he weaved from seaweed he caught himself. Who hangs them out to dry on a washing line on a day where the sun won’t shine. Who presses them flat beneath a pile of books filled with heavy words. Who seals them in blue glass jars and shakes them daily to see if they still hum. Who folds them into little balls and hides them beneath his tongue, and never speaks with a mouth full. Who sews them into the soles of his socks and tries to squash them when he runs.

raindrops on roses

I’ve been reading Three Beautiful Things for a while now and I’m regularly surprised at how much beauty Clare finds in her everyday life. I think my eyes were calibrated differently, set to a lower frequency, tending to the grey.

I encounter things I find striking, bizarre, shocking, bemusing and sometimes even mildly pleasing - but rarely beautiful. Nevertheless, I pick up these pieces and make them into something new. As my old friend Elliot would say - ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’.

Last week I offered up a blast from the past, this week a few fragments from the last week -

Many people say that putting up their Christmas tree is an annual occasion for frowns, frayed nerves, bitten lips and crossed words. But not here, not today. And I wonder why? are we so different? so much fitter happier more productive? or perhaps we just have greater perspective, about ourselves and our tree. Its a little pyramid of lights in the corner of one room. That’s all. Its not a test of perfection, of evenly spaced reflections. Not an indicator of how well our Christmas will go or how much we care about it or each other. Its just a few extra glimmers in another night together.

...

As she opens the door to leave a ghost of the cold morning enters to take her place.

...

Twinkles reflect in the windows, multiplying all by themselves until tree-light stars form new constellations.

...

As he tells me how he took a few days away, changed his number, changed his locks - I think how much harder it is to change your mind, admit you’re wrong and leave the past behind.

...

A knock on wood, a bump in the night - tart ripeness flung from green - a yellow present on the window sill - the ongoing revelations of my lemon tree.

dusted thoughts

I’ve kept a notebook for at least ten years. Most days I lower something onto its pages - but I rarely look back through them. Today I thought I would. I pulled one at random from the shelf. A blue bound 2003. It seemed that on that 9^th December I didn’t have much of interest to share - just something about wanting to ‘wear my wooden wings’ and mountains and rivers and French kissing.

But 9 days later I tried to write a poets review of the year. These are the edited highlights -

January - round the bend, take me with you, call me when you get there and tomorrow we’ll cut your hair. February - and we can’t be truly human till we wake with water lilies on a breakfast tray. March - finds thoughts of love and death and god and the sea and sky and familiarity. April - leaves miracles and tricks of the mind, stick a pin through anything you find. May - we’re out-running clouds but the pictures on my wall never move for me. June - you drove us to the town of Do Something, but there was no-one home. July - you live on tip-toes, you changed all the light bulbs and barely had to stretch. August - let’s leave the bored games at home this time. September - honesty is the hardest stone to carry hidden in your palm. October - then comes the sorry, I’m shit, the is it too late? do you hate me? bit. November - we stayed up till 4am and you wore you hair down for the first time this year. December - a pale imitation of a worthwhile week, excuses run through the grass, wet and sleek.

That doesn’t make much sense to me now, I wonder if it did then? Perhaps this confusion is why its important to live in the present tense. Time to come back to the future. Home to now.

the spice of life

I am ginger. A kiss to keep you warm, or a promise to settle your stomach on a long bus journey. Just like a lie I can burn if you hold me under your tongue for too long. I’m content to be right but happy to be wrong.

I can dress in a spicy suit or recline in sweet robed luxury. You can boil me hard as candy or drown me in dark chocolate pools of wisdom. I can be ground to powder brown, or sucked straight from the stem, splinters and all. I will take your message but won’t return your call.

I am ginger. Or so she said yesterday, but perhaps today she would disagree. Perhaps today I am Darjeeling eyes lost in the land of black pepper trees.