Entries tagged with poetry:mine

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poetry:mine

[poem] fragment: echo

What if? -- the stick
beats time (too late) from railings--
ribs that chime my choices (if if if if if)--
keep other-whens held close, contained, confined.

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some good things make a post

The NEW WHEELS have arrived. I don't get to mount them yet because I've had to order new torque receivers -- the ones that came with were for a rigid chair, rather than a folding one -- but I've done that, for the princely sum of about thirty quid, and they should be with me Soon. (In that I paid on Tuesday morning and it's 5-10 working days until they're due to show up with my dealership and then they'll need to be posted out to me, but sooooooon and for much less money than I was expecting.)
I made it to the supermarket this evening late enough on in proceedings that there were British raspberries marked down to 45p a punnet. I was very restrained and bought only three, but have been gradually eating some over the course of the afternoon. (Also acquired at bargain prices: leeks and celeriac, to go with the tiny carrots and the pre-existing potatoes. Tomorrow dinner will be mash & veg sausages & veg, I think.)
Every now and again I think "wait, I wrote a poem about this", and go back through my poetry tag, and go "huh, I... really like this??? I really like this" about a lot of stuff. There are fragments of poem in cometary orbits, over the last year, that might yet coalesce, that've condensed mostly between the hours of midnight and one o'clock. (Scared. Scarred. This line/that draws me out/or hems me round/defines me...; a word that means at once too much and not enough -- to be superfluous; Put pen to page and --/go. An arrow from a bow/or light across the wave; Perspective narrows to a point./A knife. You are the lens through which/I magnify my life.)
YOGHURT. Most successful yoghurt yet, I think! Not entirely sure what I did differently but "much fresher milk" probably helped. (I've been ruminating -- thank you -- about The Environmental Impact Of Dairy, and had been wondering how much "British dairy consumed in Britain" had in common with The General US-centric Discourse About How Bad Dairy Is, and then highlyeccentric linked to a BVA blog post about net zero carbon emissions that I still need to read in detail. I'm still thinking about it! It's interesting data to have.)
On which topic, Waitrose No.1 cave-aged goats' cheese is a Hard Yes from here, or at least, is as far as treats and when-reduced go.
I am mildly gratified that every time so far I've gone looking up reference pictures of the plants I'm colouring in, they've been rather closer to the brighter shades I'm getting than the darker ones in the example illustrations.
Today's Primary Job was dragging myself down to the pharmacy, to say "um, you appear to have only given me half the meds I was prescribed, I don't have an IOU, what... gives...?" a fortnight on from picking up the first half, and it was actually trivially sortable, and now I have an extra carrier bag of medication, and it is Good.
I've signed up to volunteer with Labour, locally, between now and the general. I am properly pleased that their sign-up form is doing the obvious sensible thing of "here's the primary things we need volunteers for, here's a long list of subsidiary things, select all that apply to you" with reasonable breakdowns, go them.
Adventures in composting: the filament used with the 3d printer A has access to is PLA, polylactic acid, which is biodegradable. I've been putting filament ends and failed prints into the bin, and have now completed enough of a cycle to establish that single filament sections and even some fairly chunky failed prints will disappear entirely in a single cycle; larger failed prints that I didn't manage to break down manually in advance remain recognisable but are rendered sufficiently fragile that it's trivial to break them into small pieces and chuck them back in at the top. This is very cheering.
A miscellany: feeling okay about letting go of some broken things I'd been hanging on to out of a sense of guilt and a fear that they might come in useful; lots of social plans for this weekend; poking around shops this evening and thereby acquiring some small gifts for friends and some high-percentage-cotton socks for me; bread prepped to be baked for breakfast; A brought me a traditional post-therapy roti gift; grocery deliveries are amazing; horn practice; plants.

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I think one makes belief as one makes love:
think drystone walls of balanced masonry--
think of the hand that fits and shapes the glove--
think every stone cradled by gravity
secured in place by virtue of its weight
and no two are alike, but each is key.
I find I shy away from all the freight
attached to "anchor" as a term of praise--
but still each kindness settles into place:
a piecemeal ballast for my listing days,
or bearings set toward a kind of grace--
something to trust when cast adrift in haze.
So: tell me who I am, as seen by you.
Tell me a story; I will make it true.

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Sonnet IV: Meditation

(Slightly gory.)

( Read more... )

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[poem] Sonnet III: To make the dawn

-- two ways to break a world.
The first: an end by force; to grind to dust
and scatter to the heedless brilliant stars.
The second: love, and warmth, and gentleness.
This time an egg: the smooth horizon's curve
that shelters and thereby defines your dreams
will unchecked choke: a softer, smaller death.
Instead: take heart and hope; so startling bare
your fresh-cut teeth, and stretch across the shards
of every fear that held you small and close.
Bewildered, daring, raise your face anew
to unimagined unexpected skies.
If this is breaking -- oh, then let me break
and, having broken, break, and break again.

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[poem, sort of, I suppose]

So much is circumstance and happenstance. I'm stuck on trying to convey my sense of wonder at the fact we've made a ritual of that phrase, when what we are boils down to stellar waste suspended temporarily in an astonishing coherency of water (or, smaller still, of space). And yet: we pay a flippant formulaic lip service to chaos; we take comfort from our small familiarity with mundane chance, from our ability to render down the world to form a habit. But that requires practice lest we twist and catch and tear, like clothing on an unexpected nail: so poetry's a habit, and so's love, in that I'll wear them both and through neglect forget how not to stumble on their edges, how not to trip on my own flighty cleverness, how to respect the work required to wholehearted and carelessly believe that I'm alive, in just the way that I forget to breathe and yet keep breathing. Still, it seems that when I slip I stop or stall into this strange intensely awkward vulnerable hope I'd not at all intended to display; yet here I am, and here perhaps I'll learn to find my balance and, having found it, find that I can't stay.

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[poem] mirror//distortion

The chambers of my heart are lined with mirrors
that repeat and multiply beyond perception
each and every scrap of poison gifted me.
Fuck self-reflection. If I were an oyster
I could coat this grit with self-recrimination,
employ it as a scaffold to support some greater truth,
some greater beauty, smooth the lines
of pain, the whispering self-loathing.
Even stone will, with sufficient patience, wear away.
And in the darkness of the empty cavern
drips echo as they filter in through cracks
beyond perception. Nonetheless they leave their trace:
these grim uncompromising monuments,
these fragile archaeologies of guilt and hate.
Or, from some lofty self-assured perspective,
an entirely different metaphor's presented:
cruelty exposed--diminished in its endless repetition, neutralised
through being bathed in light; and stalagmites
are evidence that love, like water, can create
not just destroy, in furious flood;
can fertilise; can bring new shape and life.
Nevertheless. From here it seems
that stalagmites and pearls and hearts alike
are simply evidence of our belligerent last-gasp defence--
the hopeless scars left by our dying dreams.

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[poem] Directions for care

It's all too easy to dismiss, diminish
your sharp-edged individual brilliance
as untidiness, as more work than
you're worth. Try this:

Needs direct sun with good support,
for preference, south-facing walls;
and well-drained soil and fleece in frosts
and water when the weather's hot.
Slow to flower, rarely fruits;
give the thing at least five years.
Mind the thorns, the strangling vines;
mind the poison the sap bears.

Grant me leave instead to make this promise:
yes, you're brash and loud and take up space;
perhaps you're snide, opinionated, lacking grace;
but darling, what you don't quite seem to grasp
is that your weaponry can be defence
and ornament at once; can, in point of fact,
be precisely why it is that you're beloved.

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Sonnet II: F/light

Words are the piecemeal sacrifice I make
upon the altar of humanity:
I'm half-convinced that if I merely take
sufficient care in choosing them, there'll be
some minor miracle. I'll burst awake
from dreaming myself lost and, lossless, free.
This could be all. What else is there to say?
Well, everything, of course -- unless I mean
to halt. A truth: I've learned the only way
to changelessness is death; to be unseen,
ignored, unmade. Fear craves silent decay
of self. Of hope. Of all we might have been.
So we'll know loneliness; we will know grief.
Now: here begins the hard work of belief.

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[poem] Sonnet I: for a dormouse on a doorstep

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hahahahahaha terrible trite sonnets to get me used to the form you do not want to know how many times I had to rewrite this so that it managed to actually contain quatrains INSTEAD OF ENDLESS ENJAMBEMENT

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poetry:mine

[poem] Customs

Anything to declare? Yes: one heart,
a little worse for wear, well-loved,
or maybe better; careful owners, some
dog-ears, sparse annotations. Or: everything,
particularly interest (passion? politics?--
beloved, take your pick). You asked. That is
enough. Please. Claim whatever fits.

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[poem] An Anatomy of Sleeplessness

painsomnia, noun, inability to sleep
arising from somatic symptoms.
insomnianger, noun, inability to sleep
because of rage.
insomnia, noun, inability to sleep
for reasons unclear, or perhaps uninteresting.
Deferential diagnosis is required.
Morpheus' border guards delight
in lengthy - endless - questioning.
O innocents, ye need not be afraid.
It is the rest for whom these gates are barred.
& so beware, be wary: caprice
is the only arbiter of guilt.

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#23 Reflections on a year in poetry

Per the tag, this year (after

jjhunter) I aimed to write fifty poems, one a week with two off. The tag currently stands at 53, which is a slight underestimate (posts that contain multiple comment-poems only add one to the total).

Poetry is a thing I come back and back to. I fell in love with it, properly, during my GCSEs: Keats, who showed me how to write a certain quality of light; Carol Ann Duffy, whose poetry pointed out to me that I'm an abuse survivor; Stephen Dunn and Simon Armitage and Monica Ali and on and on; close analysis didn't kill the poems for me, it made them more alive. It taught me to look at the world differently. It taught me the value of saying & meaning two things on their own, and both at once. It made me more okay.

And then I picked up a copy of Staying Alive, and that was... more-or-less that. In it I found - among many, many others - Machines, which is significant enough to me that I'm going to get the final couplet as a tattoo; I met Mary Oliver's Wild Geese for the first time. The reason I am so drawn to "beloved" as a term of endearment is in large part due to Late Fragment.

We were encouraged to write poems during GCSEs, and I wrote a few. And then I... stopped, pretty much until the year I took off from university: I was scared of failing, to the point of shying away from making the attempt - but poetry (like so much else) can only be committed by those

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

( Read more... )

The greatest gift of all, though, is this: how often it is, these days, that I find myself reaching for a poem to express my thoughts and emotions (because by using poetry instead of my own prosaic present I get to call on the layers and the nuance and the intertextuality, and the meanings that flourish in the distance between author and readers) I realise that the poem I want is one that I have written.

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#20 [a poem]

Alright, let's make-believe that I'm a tree.
So dream: what storms have broken me?
What fruits adorn? What loving scars
graffitied in my skin, how warped
or changed with time? Do I give shade and,
later, warmth? And most of all:
please say I'm safe. Please dream me sound.

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[poem] In Earnest

I love you means
that I would have nothing of you that
is not freely given; that
you have no obligations, are
not beholden unto me, that
you owe me
nothing.

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[poem] Making Love

We practise with building bricks and breccias.
Just so--a castle. Just so--in my embrace
if only I hold fast enough, you'll be transformed--
your fragments grown into a plated armoured whole--
your red unblinking eyes your sturdy heart.
As with all complex structures, engineering is required
on every scale from child's play to mountain range;
chance and happenstance tend tenderly toward decay.
With these hands I thee knit together
or a sweater or a scarf; with these hands I thee play
music, best I can; I write for thee solemnities
in careful lines. I create for thee this waxing
waning love, albeit it small, or great--
and at close of day we'll sweep
the sawdust from the floor, we'll bank the fire,
we'll knead the bread--from these quiet domesticities
is all love made.

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[poem] &

What joy, this, to learn what others find in you:
to watch people I love adore anew, to take reciprocal
delight as you illuminate each others' facets
too often hidden from my view by busy-fingered fates
and orbital mechanics. Yes: this too
expands the borders & horizons of
my familiar faithful heart. I'm astounded
by how much I can encompass; by how large
I grow. I learn from you.

Without: the patchwork of the comforting dark,
the sheets of rain, stitched firm
with nets of light we've wrapped round trees
as reminder, to help us find our path.
Bubbles, catching street lamps, float like stars.
Look up. You blaze. You, too, are a landmark.

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[poem] Afterwards, Low Tide

            In relief's ebb
the shifting sands of selfhood un/
cover rocks of hope/lessness.
You once said we were magnets:
does that hold?
               I've learned, I think,
why some comfort's called cold:
because it burns. Keep it
in your mind's-eye's heart for just a beat too long:
you'll find it shan't depart without
its layer of skin. It leaves you raw.
Salt stings; Weltschmerz. Stretched thin,
stretched to translucency, I've no idea
at all how I might best begin to say:
Please.

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[poem] All Souls' Day

They say, I think, that moments
can hang preserved in drops of amber
suffused with bone-deep memories
of setting autumn suns.
In Mass I see the elderly &
think of my Grossmutti, who
placed sacrificial flowers on
the altar, very nearly til she died
& in so doing offered up
her blood, her knees, her strength;
I think of Papa, who still heaves
his way through grassy lanes
to kneel, to genuflect, to offer peace.
And in Mass I hear the children
as they whisper to their parents
having not yet realised just how well
the church carries their voice
(nor yet been taught: above all else is silence);
in them, and in the fretful babies
this strange unwieldy future
reflects me backwards to myself.
That imperfection is inevitable
is without doubt its greatest grace:
the same is true of love.
Take heart. Take strength. Take space.

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[poem] Craftwork

For all of you; and specifically for jelazakazone, a bit.

I am living a borrowed life on
borrowed time, in that
the theft thereof has not been noticed yet--
my other selves are paper-thin;
they echo in the corners of my eyes,
their futures circumscribed by our own hand
and thereby written out of history.
Egal: perhaps they would be better, but
it's me who's living this, who's
strong or weak enough to hold on tight.
I will make a patchwork of my fractured nights,
my scraps of grace: as ever bound together
with the brilliant shining thread that you,
unknowing, trace.