Zugzwang (Performance poem)

He lays his queen down,
unaware - a feared or scared - that he just lost his
crown.
Tea-tree wafts from shingles quaffed
as he lays his queen down.
The queen I took, yet I feel like a rook
being pulled and picked, a frown; stay down.
Cause I can only go forward.

My sweet Lord sings in hoards of 70's mists and
sociological twists when I took his queen up.
Fucked up.
The 5 stages skip, denial no - a drip in my arm; the human in harm,
try to be calm as the papers get scribbled signatures. Alarm!
He lays his queen down.
Kind is surrounded, drowning, confounded. But mum she went
bounding,
a needle in hand with one-man brass band.

I don't blame you

You laid it down because you had no choice
but I had no voice! No shoulder to scream to, no advice or mere coos.
Just a frozen waffle. The ice wasn't there, it was trapped in mum's hair. The both left me bare.
   So you go to her and she'll go to him,
no birds broken wings cause I fell from the nest with no pudgy-faced protest.

I'll pack the board away.

Unchanged Host (Rondeau) (Place stimulus)

Hues waltz in Buttercup Meadow,
both paws and boots alike leave sultry shadows
upon carved, oak benches which 'belong to
Edith'. Sweet repose of laburnum's coos,
pods struck through with gold, with cricket's bellows.

Jason, all taut skin and jutting elbows;
small sweet clutched in pudgy grasp, rough lego
brick cascades curdled with buttercup dew.
Hues waltz in Buttercup Meadow.

I see Jason no longer, no echoes
of his laugh, the drip leached to his arm. Ahead,
puppies sprint in blind bliss, a bomber crew.
But now grey speckles temples, last walk through.
The meadow sees all change of breath; lost/mellow.
Hues waltz in Buttercup Meadow.

New Hues (Sonnet)

Okay so the homework for my creative writing AS level was to write a sonnet. Hmm. Easy? No. Google the details of a sonnet if you don't believe me. But just to warn you, I do know that this doesn't exactly work as a sonnet; I am aware that some of the stresses are muddled. But it was my first attempt at a sonnet so here it goes...



We're lost in no identity parades,
deep wounds of little consequence, pistols
slumber under billows, day no erodes.
Clean and sew your wounds out - clear flesh crystals.
Yet she has broiling, coiling thought of who
she is, minute beetles under her moans
to knit each word, caress the dark: sooth, help,
sleep, no. Blue fists upon her brittle bones.
Fists, MINE, did burrow at the cheeks, her whites
blood-shot and leaking where the sun should rest.

At six we flew kites, dancing as fresh sprites;
the breeze stole gust, myriad dust abreast.
But at eight I saw the need in me to
sock these sprites out from her eyes, no clue!

Drink Me In, Sweeter Than Breaths... (Childhood stimulus)

Waves sleep in tepid murmurs,

planting a kiss of inconsequence on the shore.

With meek, spindly limbs I hobble

to the vast pool; ebb-tides gracefully claw,

idly gurgling their call to me. The sand straps

jesses onto my chubby calves

but still I go

tepid water grins, I grin back with innocent whims

through brumous skies.

See me bumble further into the spume; into

sultry,

serpentine

treacle.

But

the waves grow taller

behemoth

beasts squawking, intertwining with

the oozing sun -

Oxygen forgotten and salted reminders,

liquid as thin as air

yet no air is there.

My breaths dance into new, accipitrine

forms; shrieking and screaming in their

mini-revolution.

When my thoughts drip into nothing but

puddles

                     - arms find me -

Tug.

Iron-weights around my chest. Air scampers

down

my

scarred

throat.

Breath again

and life remains, with

my pudgy moon-pie cheeks

and half-lunar grin. Give

me reasons, please – So sad to say that the breadth of one day

saw my innards dissolve.

When I realised

the water

was sweeter than the shore

An Inferno Of Literature

Another Novel Idea so Please let me know what you think of this prologue: 

Lies are bitter things. Pellets of piercing, malign malice. As a child, lies were petty and insignificant; lies about a square of chocolate or a Crayola star on the magnolia walls. In the years betwixt ages I considered them just as inferior to other principles of life. In the hazy fun, the seemingly endless summers of young adolescence lies were as everything else was. Non-existent. That was until I was old enough to understand. Old enough to comprehend. I knew that things had happened as I grew up, but never why. Not until I understood lies. You see, lies are these interesting creatures; brimming with enmity and lust for sanity. You don’t see them at first, latching onto your shoulders or burrowing into the nerves; you only notice once they’ve finished macheting their way into your consciousness and have nested there. When they line your thoughts with ire and your limbs with led. They paint your thoughts with acid and feed you ricin. What would you do, honestly; if lies were the core of your existence, your family? Do you think you’d confront, hide. Kill?

When I was six, my mum built a room of books. A fortress of literature, coiled in there were the distant whispers of the greats; musings of Dickens and mutterings of Tolstoy. She hid away in there. To withdraw from the world. The problem was she took me with her in the reclusion. I was to be the witness to the demise. She was her own judge, jury and executioner and I was merely looking on, through the looking-glass. Utterly paralysed, as we all are in childhood; paralysed by ignorance. Each day was a concatenation of desolate events, each separate and isolated; only interconnected by their fractious pains. She would sit there, a sculptured bird; not the accipitrine creature she used to resemble, no longer a magnificent goshawk circling the skies; anthropomorphic. She was now a finch, desperately flapping her flailing wings in her self-induced twilight. To a six year old, this catatonia was utterly inexplicable. To any other human the misery would have been palpable, but to my immature eyes it was simply odd. A metallic tang at the end of each day, a frost in the air that practically sublimed oxygen to a foil of sea-fog. If nurture is the supposed key to a child’s mental development, perhaps that was the first clue. That growing within a cave of stale narcissism was the first seed to germinate inside me, the first drop of antipathy to flourish.

  

Through Children's Eyes

Was she breathing?

I couldn't be sure... Her chest was moving, I took that as a good thing. My fingers ached from prodding at her, they burned like acid was slowly ascending up my palms. Mama had told me that number, that number to phone when bad things happened... but what was it? My brain throbbed just trying to recall that fact. 

888?

199?

The searing in my eyes was now controlling me, transforming into a ravenous hysteria that spurted warm tears from deep within my unformed body. 

"Mama?... Wake up mama... please... what about the cinema tomorrow? We were going to see Lion King redigit...redigit...something...Oh mama wake up and tell me what that word was..." 

The words were exploding, crashing together and forming muddles. I sniffled and spluttered, still battling with myself about how to react. The searing that was controlling me felt the need to shut me down, put me on automatic. There was no response in me. No faith. No nothing. I was empty. 

"Mama..." 

Such a familiar word. But now said with such rattling desperation, it was meaningless. With no answers left, no more pleas; I reached to the phone and dialled anything. Any three numbers. My first five attempts were futile, the emotionless answer of the recording sent me shivering. Until finally - somewhere deep in the crevasses of my six-year old subconscious - came a dancing set of numbers. Three happy nines in a line, holding hope on a silver-plated tray. As I dialled I felt that, hope, that I wasn't crawling towards oblivion that I was climbing back up to the clouds. 

"999, what's your emergency?" A soft voice answered. My words suddenly fell from me with a clunk, they landed on the floor with iron weights dressing them. 

"I...uh... Mama...She fell." I choked on them, they weren't real. They were letters I couldn't gather up.

"Okay, I need you to calm down sweetheart and tell me if your mummy is still breathing?" The feather voice answered.

"I think so. Her chest moves." 

"You're being very brave darling, what's your name?" 

"Cassie..." 

"I'm going to send an ambulance right away okay? But I want you to keep talking to me for a while would that be okay Cassie?" The voice was so soft it stroked me as it sang on, I went to kneel beside mama again; keeping the phone clenched in my moist hand. 

"Okay..."

_______________________________________________________________________________

The first words mama spoke after she woke up were the most perfect formations of letters that had ever caressed my ears. Her voice was as gentle as always, her eyes are alert and full of love. That's what the doctors said happened, her love made her heart go funny. I sometimes think that maybe it was all the love she has for me coiled up in there... But now she keeps her love in a safer part of her heart, it won't make her fall asleep like that again.

The Planet In The Sky

Escape from here, the morose planet, the sonorous ball in the galaxy, the evocative land you can neither love nor control,
Escape to me where your imaginings are not merely a stream of childish thoughts to paint to others the depths of your soul,
Leave that place where happiness once danced, where life and spring sprang from dew,
Run to me where you can be soothed, we welcome you with glistening streams of new,
Be freed,  be you, be rid of the fear, conditions and labels have gone to the past,
You can lay here with the company amongst the stars, be free at last.
The effusion of rivers, of bird song in night, the midnight dreams of wonder and power engulf all possible fright,
Visions of creatures that dwell in the buds with wings that sparkle in light,
Your sight will graze their perfect forms and tears will flutter with the night,
Forget the thoughts of the world that’s of old, allow the boulders of fear to dissolve,
Forget the tint of shame that immersed your cells, leave it succinctly in the cold.
Because sleep here, sleep at peace. Summer in the star that gleams with a breeze,
Here in the sky, the florid world where at last you can be freed.

Sit On Your Feelings And Swallow Your Secrets

People are colours.
Smells.
Images.
If I had to describe dad, he would be camouflage green. He would wear the scent of tea-tree and transform spontaneously into Kermit the frog. It's fragments of people that cement the foundations of a life that we lay, the people that guide us step by step up the ladder rungs of childhood.
     It was whilst climbing such a ladder rung that I swallowed the perplexion of something i'd never had to stomach before. Secrets. A word that grins a cardboard smile and taints the relationships we build. I hadn't realised of course, but I was seconds away from being eaten alive by this concept. Devoured by ideals and adult morals that had never hit me until that Monday. It was a frozen day, the air was skulking up my eight-year old flesh and burrowing into my unformed bones. I was standing beside a doughnut stand with a school friend, my auburn curls in ironically-innocent pigtails; my torso so bulked in layers I could barely inhale. I was kicking sludgy-snow with my heel whilst deciding whether to punt for a custard or chocolate filling for my carbohydrate-disc of childlike wonderment. After asking in my best polite voice for a custard centre, I turned from the man who smelt of stale cigarettes and carried disappointment on his breath; anticipating the virginal nibble from my treat I glanced across the snow engulfed street, as if gazing through a snow-globe. My eyes caught a glimpse... but surely not?... he was at a work conference in Swindon... my father, buttoning his beige jacket, puffing wisps of billowing cigar smoke that ascended to the sky as if they were painted with oil paints. I was about to call out, to run across the tarmac and return to the safety of his grasp when a woman walked, no practically swayed, up to him. They exchanged words I couldn't decipher, he held a look in his eyes. A warm immersing glow that I had only seen him exude when staring down at me. In trepidation, I kept watching; awe-struck, unable to turn my mind to something of a different nature. To dismiss the simmering emotions and boiling concern that was rising and stamp it with a perfectly reasonable explanation. But there was no explanation, not reasonable anyway, his rosy head lowered and their lips intertwined. My stomach flipped, my breath became cluttered, I was frost-stricken.


________________________________________________________________________________

"Mum..." I began cautiously, my fingers picking anxiously at the quick of my nails.
"Did you know that they're building a tattoo parlour next door? I said to Maureen, I did, I said they'll turn us all into reckless Neanderthals if  they force all these drugs and ink-splattered bodies into our streets." She began, pacing up and down the kitchen; returning crockery to their snug wooden homes.
"Mum!" I barked, taking both her and myself off-guard.
"What?" She turned to me and levelled her serpentine pupils straight at me, they were so sharp and hot they seared you when you engaged in eye-contact.
"I saw daddy today..."
"Where? Of course you didn't silly, he's in Swindon. You monkey that's over a hundred miles away..." Her voice was so sure, so unstirred that it made me feel like the executioner.
"He was in town mum. With a lady...."
"Stop these disturbing lies young lady or you're grounded...."
"HE KISSED HER! On the lips... Like Leonardo and Kate...." My puerile knowledge of kissing, spat out at her like venom.
"In this family we do not tell lies, now you go sit up in that bedroom; you sit that bottom of yours on whatever you're feeling and you gulp down whatever lies you feel like telling next; you hear?" Her voice was a siren, piercing and shrilling until it sent me scurrying upwards.

_________________________________________________________________________________

It makes you wonder, how far some families will go to keep up appearances. Whether she hid from reality to protect my eight-year old queries or simply because she couldn't face the truth in the ring and fight. All I could tell in the haze of frozen clouds, was the brown-shirted man and the red-lipped woman were certainly happy with the truth; it was just a different version than mum and me had been a party to.