I Do Not Accept Drinks From Disapproving Men (A Hymn)

You got me when I was not looking, charged along the track without a warning

With unintended force you crashed into my calm

Pushed me to the very edge, I know you meant no harm

And I trust your well-meaning, your kindness-filled desire

To oil the machinations of us, to lift us ever higher

To clarify and reinstate our stations, yet I fell at every word you mentioned.

His words hit like a bowling ball - a strike for him, nothing for me at all

Knocked down with a clean fast sweep, tangled mess, feelings in a heap.

Winded, empty, helpless, confused, his meagre message left me bruised

Faux kindness ripped my soul to shreds, insides exposed, aching, raw and red

And no-one wants to see that - who wants to see that?

The entrails of despair and pain, pieces of gut chewed over and again

Till only sad acrid bile remains, semi-liquid, half-baked frame

Unfulfilled body collapses in again, spark kicked out; fuse blown again.

The force of each blow radiates through brittle bone

Teased, torn and tingled, every sinew, muscle, tendon

Tender parts provoked to rage, tissue flutters in wild daze

With saddened shudder veins vibrate, each artery impaled with desperate ache

Sorrowful shivers sent to every atom, naked cells quake suspiciously

This deadly sense of poisoned void trips me, tips me, closer to insanity. 

You disapprove because you feel that I have taken your love for granted

But this is not true, I value you and the trust we both have planted.

He disapproves because, well, I don’t know, but the disapproval itself is clear

Amidst these howling winds it’s bitter taste is all I hear.

Your words made me feel I was a failure; his words make me feel I’m a fool

Either way I am undone and on this unworthy cold spring night

I know that loneliness has won.

All signs of renewal have been suppressed like the hyacinth, forget-me-nots and starflower

She picked from the garden to comfort me with stems cut too short for water

Slow sacrifice to the drowning maid, instead, with attentive care we laid

White here, yellow, blue and purple there, petals pressed firm on to the page

Faces peer up as pages come down - crushed the life out of their colourful ways

Pushed and pressed to preserve past beauty, to keep them safe, these sorry souvenirs

Of what once was. Forget me not, but I know you will. And he will too I fear

(and would it have been worth it after all?)

Beneath love’s dark waves I am slipping, slipping, falling, drowning gasp of ocean air

Fills tired lungs, ache from crying, soothed by grave waters, suffocating

With death’s silent scream narrating.

All this love and no hope of salvation; all this love and no air to breathe

Not in these slow murky whirling depths, slowly strangled by malicious weeds.

All this love and no arms to cling to; all this love and no lips to kiss

No fingers to caress each moment, soothe with undulating bliss.

No heart to accept love and reciprocate feelings, to embrace and hold and welcome it home

Drowning with all these other lovers in all this love, yet I am here, alone.

We’re all alone with our unique obsessions, each lonely soul in its private passion

All this love and not a drop to drink; all this love our poor hearts to sink.

I want to scream ‘fuck off!’ at you, to push you away, away, away

Because the distance I already feel is more than I can bear today.

I want you gone because I need you here and I cannot have it my way

To have you here, it is forbidden, and what would our neighbours say?

I need to delete your omnipresence, unsubscribe from your daily views

Unfollow your voice on my video feed, block every last trace of you

Because you can do nothing for me now.. (it’s just me and the pain, again)..

His voice shakes. Is he laughing or crying? I can no longer tell, perhaps I never could

Perhaps all I knew were guesses at best - mere approximations of hopefulness

My heart harboured for him, from him, to you, to him, of you, of him

For you, from you and him, and you..

Can I only live this life if I erase him? How can I possibly live without you?

There is air on the surface, that much I know.

But for now, on this loneliest of nights

I will sink to the bottom and forget how to breathe.

The Room, Part 1

I felt haunted by the maddening fever of Charlotte Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper from the moment I was handed the paperback book in sixth form English class. I can still remember the dusky faded lemon cover that seemed to emit dust and sorrow from every papery pore. The smell of sadness, hopeless entrapment, filled my school-girl nostrils and nothing ever felt or smelt quite the same after that moment. Perhaps, not so deep down, a part of me knew that one day I’d find myself in a room of my own – not expansive and freeing like the space advocated for so earnestly by Virginia Woolf, but restrictive and binding, as slowly suffocating as Gilman’s lonesome character’s room.

I am not trapped here by any supercilious, arrogant, self-righteous, ignorant or fearful man, or indeed by a patriarchal society that wishes me to remain silent and insignificant as all good women should do. Patriarchal suppression may be highly analogous of my situation, but it is not that, at least not directly that, which keeps me here.

On the screen-that-is-often-nearby, I watch Ben Whishaw play Ben Coulter, the unfortunate boy incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, or at least, we and he are fairly certain he did not do the murderous deed, but perhaps he simply cannot or will not remember what actually took place.

I find myself in similar situ, imprisoned for some deed or thought that I do not recall, and am most probably quite innocent of, and would remain so if it were not for the infernal, distinctly chiding voice that crows louder with each new dawn.

‘It’s all your fault

You are to blame

So, suck up your punishment

Accept your shame’

If there is always a cause for each effect as the tech-heads in Alex Garland’s DEVS proclaim, then perhaps somewhere along the pitiful line of my younger life something I did or failed to do, something I said or did not say, even perhaps a thought that entered my mind may have led to this particular set of circumstances. Perhaps a series of actions and inaction, or conversations had and silences kept, or thought processes that did or didn’t take place, allowed a portal between two (or more) multiverses to open up and one feed into another enabling this sorry state to begin to manifest itself, slowly but surely, painfully creating this extraordinary mess I find myself in.

Perhaps it was always meant to be this way, was decreed by the gods, ordained by the stars that I would one day find myself here. Perhaps it was always going to be thus, regardless of anything I said or did or didn’t say or didn’t do. Perhaps my wilful, desperate, pleading, bleeding thoughts had nothing to do with it – with this chaos. Perhaps I have no control whatsoever over this reality. 

The idea of a kind of fate or destiny offers a morsel of relief and acceptance at times of depletion. Mostly, however, I find it difficult to accept this as a valid, pre-ordained fate – a particular set of circumstances chosen by the universe or multiverse or by a divine being or even by my own pre-human-self to live through. And endure. If it didn’t kill me first.

I’ve always loathed the story of Job – his endless suffering on top of suffering seems so futile and wasteful. What is or was the point of all that pain? The physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual breaking of a human life? To what end? And for what purpose?

I feel the weight of sorrows – not all my own, lying heavily upon these bony shoulders. A weight far heavier than one human, one woman ought to bear. But we do, don’t we? Women have bourne the world’s weight on our shoulders, heads, and broken backs for time immemorial just as surely as we have born the next generation and the next and the next within our cruelly despised, scorned, and suppressed bodies.

Is it any wonder I found myself on the 5 mile trudge to school at the tumultuous and torturous age of 15 or 16, crawling along the pavement, dragging grazed knees after each all consuming push forward of an elbow, first one, then the other and hope that the legs will follow along behind..

I recall reading with shock and fascination about Clara from the Heidi stories who cried so much her tears eventually dried up. Or was it Helen Keller? I’m not sure now. But I do remember the tears. The flooded years of almost constant crying. Wretched, unbidden flows. Sorrow's salty sting covering my face, falling into my lap, saturating sleeves, exercise books, pillows and endless nights. The acres and acres of heart-breaking grief. The pull and pull of gut-wrenching emotions – confused, liberally churned out, more liberally stuffed and packed deeply inside – layer upon layer of sadnesses forming an unpalatable sky-high dessert of melancholy or an impossibly tall pile of mattresses all trying unsuccessfully to protect me from the pain of that one solitary, bright-green pea. The lentil sprouting in the darkness, taking root and multiplying itself like bacterium, sending spores out through the sleeping strata. As quickly as I discovered or imagined a new layer of duplicitousness to protect me from my self, the pea spores would pick their way through each make-believe layer, each over-thought barrier designed to cushion the blow but failing badly every time, consequently trapping me with their wily wicked ways. I was stuck, like Sandra Bullock, in the web. A matrix of numbers, indecipherable digits and figures closing in on my wild nature, suppressing any semblance of free-will, tearing down any illusions of freedom and choice.

Was it always this way? Have I always been nothing more than a single digit in an endless equation? A piece of code that I will never be able to fathom? I cannot believe that, not wholeheartedly anyway. And yet, here I am. A single being, maybe only a half-being, flashing away in analogue mode, thinking that I must be making a difference, effecting some form of positive change, when all the while, the truth is that I mean nothing more than a single grain of desert sand, one miniscule drop in an ocean more vast than I could ever imagine…

Dark Moon Rising

Dark Moon Rising - Part I

The time has come
The end is nigh
Come sweet magic
Fly away, fly..

All the eggs are leaving their basket
Carry me away in a wicker casket
Float me gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, this is no dream

The death of fertility comes with a sigh
No more twinkles in their fathers' eyes
And I who once was so forgiving
Bid adieu to the Queendom of Living

My grandmother's eggs and her mothers' too
Carried my patterns in prints of deep blue
She was no sucker, would take no nonsense
And yet, and yet .. the stories she told us...

In the womb the children come and go
We searched for them high and sought them low
Knew all the while that the schedule was restricted
Only those in the know, knew how to read it.
We looked to the stars and prayed for a reason
Cried for the moon, her bindings to loosen.
We hoped for a miracle, paid cash for a glimmer
Should we turn up the heat or just let it simmer?

In the womb the children come and go
We seek them high, we feel so low
My children's voices, our children's songs
Reverberate and echo through constellations.
Fiery lights that once burned bright
Can no longer hope to draw the night
And yet, I still hear their distant voice
Our cosmic ties leave me with no choice.

Now Luna turns her face from me
And I'm falling, dragged down to my knees
Pleading for another chance, just one
Before this bloody moon is gone.
An ache ripples dread around my heart
Pulls at the strings, rips soul apart
Is there any way I can have just a little more time?
Can the dream of three ever truly be mine?

My body pushes away from the spine
Pulls at the tendons and bindings divine
Tears flesh as tears fall in silent refrain
How will I ever feel whole again?
Red heat abounds, makes a deafening roar
Knows that the future can be no more
What we imagined and hoped it to be
Three and four magpies have flown from the tree.

A Harmless Lullaby

I can’t get out of bed she says,
I’m scared of Mannequin.

Mannequin sighs from ‘neath red wool hat
which Daddy placed on top
to hide the two neck bolts
that sometimes look like eyes.

At night-time whilst she sleeps soft
Mannequin comes to life
her fixed form glows
under moon enchanted,
bends and dips,
her one leg glides
‘cross bedroom floor,
bags sway like arms
in time to starry chorus
a constellation of notes work fire on dark skies
as Mannequin’s song sings soft -


‘Sleep soundly little one
There is no need to fear me
When this night is done dear one
Those night dreams will prove only
Flights of pure fancy little one
An imaginative journey
And when the moon is gone dear one
You’ll think nothing of me
A tall, silent mannequin
Single leg and no real arms
But I will watch over you little one
And keep you safe from harm.’

#VSS365 #VSSPoem 7thFeb2020

A Farewell To Arms

Spinning around the liminal spaces
pushed towards an edge
she finds herself outside herself

watching
listening intently
as her lips - her own lips transferred onto this other -
open
in slow
distorted
motion -

See
you
soon

The words tumble out precariously
as the world holds collective breath ..

And it feels as though these words
might never before have been uttered 
never before in this world ..

A silver-spangled brand-new phrase -
this collection of letters and sounds
flown in by cosmic forces
at this precise moment
to be extracted for the very first time
from human lung and throat
uttered for the very first time
by human mouth
this delicate triptych, for the very first time 
is heard by human ear
laid gently, insistently, for the very first time
upon human mind and heart

The tone sounds familiar and nostalgic
recollections spin like dancing plates
hurled at break-neck speed
down the staircase, across the hall

But each word is a novel occurrence
tied together with silver string
gilded with stardust
as though they alighted here from some distant galaxy
sending soothing signals
out into the great unknown

An utterance of such simultaneous profundity
sits alongside an air of nonchalance
perfectly juxtaposed for higher definition audio

Three words

They fall upon us both
shroud my mouth
cloak your ears
in hopeful, strange delight
sprinkled with a smatter of tense anticipation

You drink in the surprising nectar
swill each syllable inside your heart
before cautiously allowing the echo
reverberating inside your chest
to spin upwards to your throat
as your mouth on autopilot
repeats
the same
three
words

See
you
soon

A slow
drawn out
poignant yet forgettable disengagement
of bodies first
then arms, wrists,
hands, until finally
just two fingers remain intact
clutching tightly

ramparts guarding resolutely against the passing of time

But time will not be stopped

Let go Let go

Just for now
until we meet again..

Edge Of The World

I sit at the edge of the world

waiting for the end

will it come fast or slow?

if she's here, will she know

what to do if I drop

and won't wake up?

I sit at the edge

wait for the end (of the world)

this bed provides comfort

but it's not my friend.

outside grows greyer

I screen it away

blindness protects

from the harshness of day..

I sit at the edge of the world

wait for the end

will I choke on the blood

or the vomit or bile?

will it be instantaneous

or go on for a while?

will it hurt or feel dreamy?

will my last cries be heard?

I sit at the edge

wait for the end of the word

I had it here somewhere

the perfect reprise

a shimmering spirit

who giddies the skies..

I sit at the end

and wait for the courage (to take me..)

I suppose I ought to add a little something about this pieces's provenance just in case anyone is concerned: 

Dealing with chronic pain and more than one defined ongoing illness can often, for me at least, bring up a sense of something that could be insensitively described as a vivid dose of hypochondria or, more sympathetically, as an acute awareness of death's ever reaching fingers drawing close - making it's presence felt through an increased intensity of usual symptoms with additional new strains of discomfort - a seemingly random pulsing vein here, an occasional eye twitch there and/or some unusual stomach spasms for example. Perhaps at night there is also a feverish heat emanating from the neck rising to the lower skull..

All these happenings can easily conspire to make one think about the inevitability of leaving this life and act as a reminder that the departure board can change it's details of time, destination, even mode of transport, any time it pleases. There are no guarantees and (as was made abundantly clear in the small print) any deposits made are unlikely to be refunded.

Whilst it is seldom enjoyable to ponder these things for any extended period of time, I feel sure that acknowledging the existence and inevitability of death is a healthier way to live than denial and pretence.. Perhaps.. 

Maybe this is all subjective. Besides, my intention was to explain that Edge Of The World is a poem that comes from this kind of pondering rather than any desire to deliberately accelerate the process or indeed charter one's own private train to Elsewhere. I hear cancellations and delays are forecast anyway..

Until next time, may your days be filled with love & kindnesses :) xx

And To Make An End...

...For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning...
T.S. Eliot

For those of us who tend to over-think almost everything, have an inbuilt obsession with attaining an unattainable perfection, and seem hell-bent on criticising every aspect of our tortured selves on a regular basis, the end of a year can feel like an impossibly difficult time. 

The expectation that everything will and should change for the better, is difficult to avoid. The predilection for ruminating on the past year's 'failures' and less than successful projects and relationships is rife and often overwhelming. As Charlotte Carpenter so succinctly puts it in her beautiful song Another Year - "...this trip around the sun, it ain't easy..."



I watch myself going through all these fears, disappointments and anxieties year after year and only seem to add to the chaotic mix of chemical imbalances by attempting to stop feeling the feelings that cause such pain but ultimately cannot be undone by undoing.

Having, by no small miracle, begun to put into practice the probably life-long lesson of allowing feelings - whether they feel helpful or less so - to flow through unhindered throughout this past year, I imagined that this year end would be less painful than the previous. Yet despite putting mental, emotional and situational safety barriers in place, I've found the crossover from 2019 to 2020 just as exhausting and full of disappointment with myself, one or two unfortunate others and with life itself.

Putting the past behind us as Eliot suggests in the wonderful quote above (and elsewhere in his Four Quartets piece), is no easy task and takes huge amounts of courage and trust in the eternal process of change. 

The idea of calling an end to one way of being and thereby allowing a new way to come forth, however, is very appealing and resonates loudly in my soul. Thus, I have allowed myself the miserable luxury of spending the day (and much of the previous night) immersed in all the sadness that came skulking out of the new year woodwork, ruminating over unhelpful thoughts and disappointments whilst simultaneously attempting to employ the art of observing feelings without too much judgement. 

It's been a long day but I feel ready to make an end and let the beginning roll in. I hope you do too.. x


P.S. The following extract from Burnt Norton, Part 1 of Eliot's Four Quartets (perhaps not intentionally) sums up the feelings of fear and anxiety that, perhaps necessarily, hang over this time of year poignantly. I also like how it (definitely unintentionally) evokes the Twittersphere quite beautifully.

...Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world...

Coming Home From Paris...

The constrictions of Twitter have so far proved a wonderful challenge for my usually verbose impulses and I appreciate the regular opportunity to restrain the avalanche of words that tends to pour out when I sit down to write, or, at least, to hone that avalanche into a snowball without losing too much potency. 

Coming Home From Paris On The Eurostar is one of three micropoems I wrote for a submission in September. The constraints here were a limit of 11 lines (excluding title) - more substantial than Twitter's 280 character perimeter but still far shorter than most of my work. 

Thanks to Twitter I've learned that poetic boundaries can be fun though I'm not sure I'll be attempting a haiku anytime soon!

Coming home from Paris on the Eurostar
She sleeps, lips softly pouted,
cheeks ablaze with solar kisses
finest raven feathered lashes pour from lids
heavy with travel and late summer nights.
Golden mocha skin, loose untroubled arms crossed
fingers rest quietly, sated as freshly weaned bairns.
Her father’s hands wide, roomy, safe home-making arms
hold tight her dreams against his beating chest.
Drowsy warm aroma floats across charcoal slate -
her and him entwined, sprawling nonchalance disguising
complex root combinations, no beginning, no end.

The Radio Edit

In the radio edit
we’ll make sure to leave a gap,
a poignant edge-of-the-moment
full-of-potential stop-go trap
between the chorus and the bridge,
the knowing and the liminal.
We’ll harmonise speculatively
on the incoming vertical
and wait
just enough
for one
breath.. taking.. gasp
to take us to the climax
hit us like a sudden gust
sweep us up over the waters
to the blue sky we can trust.


In the radio edit
we’ll repeat the chorus here
‘til it chimes with all our heartbeats,
becomes one with collective ear
and just when they’re feeling comfortable
singing along to the melody
we’ll cut the vocal, play just the tune
bear the weight of expectancy
as the audience falters unsure,
words slipping off their tongues
through the open lips of surprise -
will they stay or will they run?
Do you sing the words regardless
drawn towards the spot of light,
make your own mark on the record
stand tall, prepared to fight?
Or do you stop there on the spot
afraid to sing alone
the only voice resounding
mantra under desert sun?

Too late! The strings are soaring
drums beat loud, vocals return,
accustomed order is resumed -
our song will now play on.


In the radio edit
we’ll focus on the expected frame
of chorus following verse and chorus
following verse and same again
all the way up to the bridge
where keys change unsubtly,
usher them into a room beyond
ever so gently.
‘Take the step, it’s just one note’
Noting the rise in splendour,
letting them know ‘oh yes, it was good,
but now it’s even better.
Come up, up, up where the air is clear,
sweeter, breathe deep, let it in,
raise your hands if you want to go faster -
here comes the chorus again!’


In the radio edit
we’ll keep it short and sweet,
focus on the melody
highlight the lyrical beat.
We’ll give them what they expect to hear
with a little extra flourish,
a flouncing twist of pleasure -
you’ve been here before, you know this -
and they’ll return time after time
to listen to our song
but this cropped and censored version
can’t hold you for too long.


There will be no lengthy intro -
a gradual build of sounds
layering cozily over each other
in which the listener will lounge,
deep piles of sirens singing
harmonies we can’t deny;
there will be no vocal mosaic,
divided, reapportioned, reapplied.
Brightly coloured tiles
bearing glorious luscious notes,
expanding and contracting
in a universal flow.
There will be no vast extensions –
a stretching out of time,
basking in melodic rays,
float on a sea divine.
No waves to lift our heart and mind
into glorious ecstasy
where music is the food of love -
each note a chance to breathe.


The radio edit will be a joy
but it will never feel this free.
This original extended version
plays just for you and me.

Entanglement Theory

Long, long, long ago,
Beyond the scope of time,
Your shiny, spinning rock star
Collided into mine.
Left a meteoric scar
Across my cosmic heart –
A crater lying aeons deep
A lifetime’s width apart.

Far, far, far away.
Bonds that can’t be severed,
Bound my lonely heart to yours
Our orbits changed forever.
In a cold, dark, empty space
Our bodies out of time,
Knew we’d be together, love
Further down the line.

If the numbers all add up
And the cosmic maths is right,
The physics that is drawing us
Won’t give up the fight.
A million miles of galaxy
Can’t keep us apart –
We bleed the same blue star dust;
Same plasma in our hearts.

A promise made so long ago
Sends us spinning through the skies
In opposite directions –
You turn left and I spin right.
Yet we are still together,
Connections running deep -
The stories and the songs we share
Will bring you back to me.

Nothing can tear our hearts apart
Without forcing a hole
In the holy matter of time and space,
In the fabric of our souls.
And so our planets circle
Around the same bright star
In spirals of galactic love
That keep us near and far.

Interstellar longing,
A message from above:
Find your inner compass -
A universal Love.

The Papered Cracks

What is this pounding in my chest?
This hollowed out container, emptied
scoop by scoop; no vanilla tones here

only bitter spices, aniseed rising,
cinnamon smothering the airways,
coating sugar with lime.

Plates and bowls crashing heavily,
cupboard doors slammed shut too tight -
tightness in my chest implodes as

kitchen noise reverberates through the skull,
landmines collapse the heart’s will to live -
undermined, undernourished, underfed.

A repetition of epic proportions -
no portion too large to share.
Colour drains from all our faces.

Time stood still whilst pain kept falling,
washing away all sense of truth
leaving nothing but fear, catastrophised

upon the table, wooden boards laid
plank to plate - a guest house where
no-one wants to stay. Alone

in corners facing inwards, the child,
unhappy seeks redemption from the walls.
The papered cracks scream for attention

and a kindness that seems so obscure,
so impossible to reach, but I can see
it disappearing around each bend

and I follow, hopeful, scared but hope
will always be my friend even when
I can no longer feel his bones, fragile

pieces of him and me and him and them
ground down by the pressure cooker
releasing steam in erratic rhythms,

puffing and screeching her requirements,
her disappointments and regrets. Still
heaping overcooked piles of veg, steaming

hot as fire to burn your tongue -
stop the words from forming, throwing
us off our game. Whose turn is it now?

Biting down on bloody lips, whispered
words of attempted comfort evaporating
in the frosty air. Knives cutting

every string of emotion, all connections
severed at the nub, just below the bud -
there will be no flowering this year again,

no seasoning on this scorched flesh, dry
almost tasteless on the tongue and
who’s got yours now? So quiet,

tiptoeing over broken milk and spilled shells,
crunching precariously between the highs
and the oh, so low lows of teatime.

Places of Poetry - Honing Time

Here is my first poem for the wonderful Places of Poetry project where you can read, rate and pin your own poems about places in England & Wales.

This piece - Honing Time was conceived just outside the St Peter & St Paul church at Honing, North Walsham in Norfolk.

Sat in the car, warm
artificial coziness embracing
life worn bones, lovelorn tones
cossetting weak flesh in sleepy summer aroma.

Outside, mini helicopters whirr,
dragonflies zipping back and forth amongst
fields of wheat, ferociously engaged
in a busy ballet, a network of greetings.

Transported through millennia
in the blink of an uncertain eye
by the rogue time machine
that is this Norfolk countryside.

Searching for clues of who I might be –
notice the field, its hand has revealed –
the five of spades caught up in the shape,
the fiery beacon of glimmering trees

alight in the shimmering heat of just gone noon
on this pleasantly barmy august day.
Green olive branches sway gracefully,
long swathes of ecstatic leaves reach

out in all directions, beckoning me
towards their haze fuelled dream.
An aura of whispered secrets glows
translucent, spectrums sing

a multicoloured halo of time
traversing tales, long ago stories
of what might have been, what was
and what may be on its way.

Hypnotised mind fills with memories,
dreams and long forgotten hopes.
In a trance, I am thinking the thoughts of another;
Do I see what she sees too?

How many others have sat in this spot;
how many others have stood in this place;
observed the same view transformed
by the passing years? How long have these trees

watched us, overheard our sighs and
wondrous gasps? How long have they danced
their magic entrancing her and him and I
through glowing portals to other times?

Ask the dragonflies, what have they seen?
They will laugh at our notion, ridiculous
of individual lifetimes. Prehistoric creatures
have seen more than we could ever hope to be.

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet

I’ve taken some time to consider and deliberate the pros and cons of re-entering the dangerous world of ‘social media’ after a deliciously long hiatus and the blessed relief of being back on the sturdy ground of communication by email, SMS, good old-fashioned letter writing and even some, dare I say it, face-to-face (*gasp*) interaction! 

After too many years contributing to what I’ve found to be essentially an unfettered distraction from real life, a time-wasting, self-absorbed system, with serious detrimental effects on our mental health and wellbeing, I developed a grim disdain for Facebook’s blatant manipulation of our innate need for connection and the wilful distortion of our perceptions of self and others. Having also endured a painful battle to break free from the endless scrolling addiction which seems to dominate and tarnish this so-called sophisticated and civilised era in human evolution, I was not keen to enter the circus ring again. 

In the end however, after a gloriously productive year or more of concentrating on writing without social media distraction, I have decided that the benefits of the system - being able to share my slowly expanding body of work with others, gain relevant feedback and gather inspiration from available sources - is a vital part of my creative process. Whether or not I can use the system without falling prey to its hollow side remains to be seen. 

It seems as though Twitter (which I’ve not used before mainly because short posts are not my forte - long meandering paths of words and stretches of ideas with a liberal splattering of parenthesis contained asides are much more my field, as you, dear reader, may have noticed!), linked to this blog on which I etch heartfelt words and multi-layered dreamscapes, could be the best medium to enable the necessary creative functions without too much collateral damage. So, here I am. Hello! *gulp* ...