Building an anthology

I am gathering together a collection of poems for an anthology of my own written works; I have been considering this for a few months now and I think I am ready to start one.

Because I want my anthology to be traditionally published, I realise I can’t use any of the poems that have been published here on my blog, they simply won’t allow that.

So I am using newer fresher poems to do that, which may mean that poetry may start to slow down here on my blog for a few weeks or however long it takes for me to complete an anthology.  Sorry about that.

I will still post daily, but I can’t guarantee poetry daily for now.

Thanks for reading!

I’m sorry for the worry

Ugh, I have poetry pushed back for months that I forget about and if I don’t check my prescheduled posts more than three times a week, sometimes the bad stuff gets out there without me noticing and that is what happened in my previous post.

I have bouts of depression where I write things like that and at the time I wrote them, they are genuine emotions at that time for me; but because I want to be more focused on happier things and healing myself I wanted to do away with those poems for times when I am feeling down again – if I ever do and no doubt I will someday.

Today’s poem “When” was written in January approximately, there are twelve other poems written around the same time that are prescheduled in the future, but I push them back so not to upset my readers unless I am actually having those emotions currently.

I’ve been slow and ill in the last three days and I forgot to keep watch of the gloomy stuff.

Please be assured, I am 50/50 right now, neither depressed or happy, just miserably suffering from a thousand sneezes an hour, a scratchy throat, hearing loss, ear infection, chest infection and a cold virus all rolled into one!

I’m physically suffering to the extent I have no time to think about how I emotionally feel right now, lol.

It can kind of be a blessing in disguise, though saying that, if I am ill too long – that can bring dark thoughts back again, because illness lasts too long at times that it makes me just feel like I was just born to suffer!

I did say earlier in the year I’d date the prescheduled poems, but I forgot on several because I have the memory span of a goldfish.

So please don’t go panicking over me, I am in a MEH kind of state right now.

Though if you want to give me any kind of “positive” attention, please do, I am feeling quite needy and sorry for myself right now – rolling around in bed like I’ve got man flu reciting the lyrics of Alice Cooper’s “Nobody likes me”.

Yes, I can be an attention seeker sometimes, I’ll admit it.

If anyone cares enough to donate extra soft tissues and honey and lemons I’d be more than grateful, lol!

When life gives me lemons I make cough syrup!

When life gives me a lottery win when I am sick like this, I buy hot Indian food to burn the MF out! 

I did actually win the lottery this week – £3.40, just £3.40… suppose it’s better than nothing, but it’s not enough for a celebratory Indian take away!

So yeah, thanks for caring, I appreciate it!

Thanks for reading!

When

When I’m in the danger zone

I want a way out

I want things to be done

I want to be done

I yearn for blackness to overtake me

Because it has nightly raped me

Of all my spirit, heart and soul

Things get darker, it becomes so dull

I can’t keep being blinded by gloom

I sometimes wish that I would die soon

Health update & dystopian dinner

I have a bad chest infection again, so it’s back to bed life again until it blows over – oh such fun, you realise of course that was sarcasm?

Another one to three week delay in getting my body into shape, at this rate I won’t be my goal weight until October, it’s more than a little annoying!

What’s frustrating is I was throwing myself into reading and research to try and get me motivated to write again, so that’s been delayed too!

Because when I am sick like this, I can’t read a book and remember what I’ve read, the memory of what I’ve read gets coughed out of me!

The amount of poems I’ve started between Wednesday and today but didn’t finish, because a coughing fit or a sneezing fit literally blew me out of my zone, I tell you it was numerous!

My chest hurts so much, this chest infection actually feels worse than last Easters Covid which is weird, and it’s not Covid though.  I am scared to go to the doctor for two reasons, in recent years when I’ve had chest infections the doctor believes its viral and won’t give me antibiotics unless I literally get so bad it turns into pneumonia or pleurisy and I am in A&E with breathing difficulties – or I will get Covid whilst there on top of it.

I can’t afford to spend £10 taxi fares to see a doctor and get no help, what’ more, if a taxi drive sees me having coughing fits, of course he isn’t going to be happy to take me to the doctor – not after Covid issues in the world! 

Paul is in agreement with me, it’s one of the worst infections I’ve had in nearly 2yrs, he is saving money the best he can, because we’ve been down this road before – it’s likely in a week or two if it carries on, I will be going to hospital in Coventry which is more than just £10 transport fees then!

What’s more is, Paul will have to leave me there in Coventry hospital alone until I need to come home again, because Paul can’t afford to come and visit me every day and no one else will! 

Typing is slower, but it’s getting done.

I need to try and keep to a normal routine, even if my work is my crappiest at this time! 

If I make no sense in this post, you can at least appreciate and understand why?

I have 7 library books to read in just 3 weeks, with this illness, there’s no chance in getting them read in time!

I rarely have more than 4 books out from the library these days; this is how serious I was last week about reading and researching to get my work done!

A massive poetry book; a poetry exercise book, a screenwriting book, a book about the senses, a book against procrastination (lol, the irony), atomic habits and eating to extinction.  Eating to extinction is both environmental research and personal interest combined with contemplating ideas for Project AD.

Project AD has a beginning, middle and end planned now, but I am not happy with it and it needs to be fleshed out and needs to be more interesting.  The novel has not been written, but there are several scenes for a graphic novel done, there are in depth bullet points for 40 different scenes, but there is no actual structure yet.  It’s not properly done in my opinion, yet – no dialogue, just action scenes.

I can’t help but have this nagging feeling it needs more.

I know it does need more, I mean, that there should be a sub plot along with it, but I am struggling with this decision.

I tell you how much it’s bothering me, having this chest infection making me slower… I had a dream last night about post-apocalyptic characters from all my favourite movies, especially Mad Max and Tank Girl, I was slow and coughing and serving dinner for people worrying about things as I always do and the biggest Mad Max villain gave me a hug and told me to stop worrying about it all, things will get done in their own time and maybe it’s a sign I should slow down.

There’s those two words I hate again, “slow down”. 

Actually it’s quite common to dream about Mad Max villains, they inspire a lot of my stories – usually stories from their perspective.

Because I’ve learned in my life, those psychopaths in society, those who people cross the road to avoid, the social out casts that scare people because they are dressed like goth with “I love Satan” t-shirts or who are Hells Angel Harley Davidson types, in my experience, they have the highest morals and the biggest hearts and are hugely misunderstood!

Some are mean and twisted purely because it was their survival mechanism to be that way.  But in reality, they can be very protective and generous people by nature.

I am not suggesting that Mad Max villains are lovely people, but I often wondered what made them that way… how horrible was their lives before the world fell down as it were?

This is not something I am putting into Project AD by the way, this is another project – an adult dystopian – Project AD is a child’s dystopian and is a lot cleaner than my other idea.

As I mentioned in other posts in the past, one of the biggest tropes I love writing are the “descent into madness” tropes.

So yeah, last night in dream time, I was cooking dinner for Tank Girl, Cundalini, Toe Cutter, Gabriel Byrne’s Satan and Lola from Run Lola Run, amongst several others I forgot who!

Oh the throes of a writers mind!

Thanks for reading! 

The King’s faith

The sword gleams in his hand

On the battlefield is where he stands

Waiting for the enemy to approach

Only a few feet till they encroach on territory that is not theirs

Time to sort out these bad affairs!

Not long now until they come

The King is determined to strike them dumb

One by one their lives will end

For trespassing here, he will suspend them

Send them back to their lands

Dead and beaten by his hands

A victory will be made today

The King is sure for he did pray

The bliss that once was

Have you forgotten how to laugh?

How words fell out of mouths to bring joy not discontent

For the want of a light hearted time and prosperity

To throw away the darkness of a day and just forget

When did we lose our sense of humour?

When once we frivolously bantered in the want of fun

And nobody took it seriously, the words, mere words spoken by a jester because of sardonic irony

Never any real malice was its intent

And the sun shone bright back then, for we people forgave the attempt to alleviate

When did we all deviate from the light of the world?

When did our blood run cold to jocund distractions and bent ourselves up in anger and bitterness?

When will time show us what we have lost in pleasure?

Cautious to laugh as sacred joy has become a sin

It’s no use now, use it or lose it and we are nearly lost

Lost in the darkness, fearful to inject blithe reflections of the human state

Swamped in the sensitive depressions of those who have strayed from their souls too long

And together we will all stand in the shadows of our former selves

Unthinking, unfeeling and silent

Soon to forget the bliss that once was

I am carrying on

I am London, Yorkshire and Crewe

I am British, Italian, and Jew

I am Catholic, Irish and Dutch

I am this and that, I am much

I am born from survivors and skivers

I was bred from majorettes and taxi drivers

I am sugar, bread and tea

I am all these things you see

I am bleach, smoke and dirt

I am cosy words and hurt

I am rock, rap and pop

I am everything and I won’t stop!

I am velvet, coir and leather

I am lavender, hollyhock and heather

I am heavy but my heart is light

I am everything in sight

I am a library, a kitchen, a spa

I am going places, far!

I am sunshine and the rain

I am humour though inane

I am dreaming and I am real

I am carrying on until…

I come from

I come from the smoky rooms of former North London cottages

A place where, as time goes by becomes more urbanised and exotic as does its people

A close peaceful community nudged out by hordes of shoppers, losing your family in the chaotic crowds as the familiar becomes ever increasingly strange

The cosy smells of fish and chips, apples, fruit and wool, overtaken by spice and petrol as new buildings pop up like toadstools in the night

The meadows I played on with dogs and cousins too polluted now, the solution?  More pollution of course, another hundred toadstools pop up to house more strangers, till the village is devoured by the ever starving beast called London

I come from the gossiping nurses and the nagging sheet metal workers, sitting around smoking their money and complaining that making it is too hard!

The smell of bleach stuns your senses and makes your eyes bleed but at least it’s clean

Helicopters sing you lullabies as you fall asleep and police sirens wake you up the next day

I come from neighbours leaning over your fence, giving you gardening advice and cake and eventually curry!

Stray dogs chasing loose cats and getting run over by milk carts

Pigeons swamping the garden pecking at stale bread and the last lizard I’ll ever see gets taken by a fat crow, falling down roof tiles and into a gutter unceremoniously

I come from two sides of a road that society says shouldn’t be crossed

But here I am and I am me and both sides are equally mine

I come from sugar, fat and bread, fizzy drinks and tea

Pure white walls broken by ivory and chrome

Vacuums replaced yearly due to overuse and the bigger the telly the more kudos to you!

I come from a large garden, a sanctuary and au pair

I come from fashion critics, jealousy and violence

In books I hid myself in multiple worlds so that it could never touch me

So I would be free to be me and not them

Finding my own way to a new place

A place that is more like me

It is lost forever now, that place, where I come from.

Curious lost lines

Brain hurricane season is still present; I have had more ideas in the past few days than I knew what to do with.

This appears to be a long one and I blame it all down to the “Bluewater technique” I spoke about in a previous post.

I really did try to force myself to write something every day whether it’s going to be published or not, whether it’s more than a sentence or not and I got thinking about some very wacky things!

You’ll see them as posts such as “If I were a fairy” or “life of a mermaid” though the latter is due in the first week of June, so you won’t see that just yet.

Somethings I consider unpublishable or are unfinished poems or plays.

I don’t like to leave poems unfinished but it is a habit I am trying to get out of because a book I’ve been reading called “How to grow your own poem” by Kate Clanchy says, it is easy to lose a good line, never delete the line when you don’t know where its taking you, store them in a folder called “lost lines” and come back to them later, a poem doesn’t need to be rushed.

So I’ve done that and have accumulated approximately twenty unfinished and would be deleted poems in just a week!

They don’t even have to be poems actually; they could be good prose lines for a short story or a novel.

Who knows where those lost lines will lead us?

There is a whole paragraph which seems exciting, but I don’t know why yet.  But it’s very intriguing and it’s called “The Masters of Dream”.

I haven’t been able to add more to it yet, because in all honesty I was busy with other things today and working on those things with a raging head and ear ache.

But I could not ignore that paragraph, which started like that.

I hope I have time tomorrow to think about it and see what this is!

Thanks for reading!

Easy Beezy

One of the best short horror stories I’ve read in a long time!

DysFictional

“When the honeybees go, they’re taking us with them,” someone said to me once. As always, humans try to outwit nature and sidestep the consequences of their actions. In this case, consequences only multiply… (*CONTENT WARNING: Suicide. This story takes a dark turn at the end.)

We were too busy looking for outside threats to notice disaster on our own doorstep. After World War II, we had the threat of nuclear war to worry about. When that didn’t materialize, the doomsayers warned us about Y2K, and then that Mayan calendar fiasco. We survived the COVID-19 pandemic, but something new always lurked around the corner; some potential disaster to keep us distracted from the core issue, which was the damage we were doing to our planet. Our oceans were dying, our forests decimated and our climate was changing. Yet even with all of those odds against us, we could have repaired…

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