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!

Mushrooms (Object Stimulus)

Louche pearls beading above the
blades, clinging to the
tiny
minarets above the grass.
Such myriads of bejeweled ghosts
reflected in their curving caps,
do beetles rest their weary shells upon these
turrets? Or metallic moths mope below the shade?

Twilight trickles in

and their trunks recede,
dissolving into umbrous
pools; disease running rife.
       His fingers upon my cheek,
pressure marks.
Grass tangled masses in my hair.
A disheveled foliage upon my scalp:
"You asked me to"
bitter pellets of malice on the tongue
as he leaves me in the undergrowth
with the despondent

corpses beside me.

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.

  

Lung Monsters

'Suspicious'. It was an ominous word, a word that; once it had slithered its way out of Dr. Turner's thin lips, had latched onto my chest and used it as a feeding source.
       Papa was worse today, perhaps the serpentine word was also devouring the remains of his consciousness. His hollowing cheek bones stood to attention when he faltered from sleep that dusky midday, somehow over night his skin had sallow-ed more;  his features now were pasted with the jaundiced hue of an old bruise.

"Has he phoned?" Papa spluttered, his voice spilling over with fatigue and a pinch of fear. I wearily shook my head. His eyes held such comfort, childhood laughs coloured his pupils; weekend picnics tinted his irises. A tangle of seemingly unimportant hours and bedtime stories that now I ached for.

Then the noise came.

The piercing shrill penetrated both of us and we shared a glance of unspoken bewilderment.

"Hello..." I muttered into the receiver reluctantly. The words that returned were heavy, they clumsily tripped over one another as I processed the facts. It's odd how specific words paint your day. That day was painted dim grey pastel by a battle ground of 'CAT scan', 'inoperable' and 'metastasised'. They tasted of dust when I regurgitated them to Papa's walking ghost.

So there we were, a zombie-man, a monster in his lungs and a frozen young son. We let the chilling minutes tick past as we pondered on the next weighted steps that were to come.