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

New York Swamp Park

I had a dream last night where I was on a hill looking down at white rooftops of a town all around me, I felt like I was in Scandinavia somewhere, the style of the houses were like that.

Three women were looking at me, because it was snowy and I was dressed in something as thin and flimsy as a slip out in the street, in the snow, on a hill, looking about me – they laughed.

They tried to communicate with me but I was awkward and I turned into a gold and white swirly ball of light and flew around them once and up into the air and far away.

I realised I was flying fast all the way over the ocean, everything blurry and the wind dampening my clothes as I zoomed through the air.

Once again I found myself heading towards New York.

When I landed in New York, I landed outside a building that may or may not be a museum that had black statues inside of alcoves of the outside walls.  When I landed I looked younger than I am now, not much younger, but I had the figure I am working towards.  I was wearing pale jeans, pink trainers/sneakers with cartoon characters on and I was wearing a My Little Pony themed T-shirt and cross body bag.

I saw newspapers all over the floor of the street and the streets seemed quiet to me, there were people around, but not as many as I would expect in New York.

I knew that a long way away somebody I wanted to meet was there, but I didn’t know how to get to them. 

I decided to walk to what I thought was a park over a little brook. 

When I got there the path became narrow and had wooden sheets here and there along the path and I realised that either side of the path there was lots of water and big gnarly trees and the water was shallow and had big and I mean massive goldfish, some so big they swam so slowly because of their size.

What was confusing was this park looked too much like what you would find in Florida, as the water was shallow, swirling with grey misty like substance in the water, the whole park covered in moss and gnarly trees, reeds in the water and small crocodiles.

One of the crocodile was attempting to eat one of the huge goldfish but the goldfish was actually winning the fight and I was confused by that and told an old man about what I was seeing and all he said was “yeah, they give as good as they get here”!

I continued down the path and things were getting darker and more mossy and slippery and there were more wooden sheets along the path that made the path really rocky and I kept on for some time until there were small gaps in the path which meant I had to jump over to the other side or fall into the water which was scary as there were crocodiles around and then continued for a little way and then I abruptly came to a dark red door. 

I opened the door and there was a scruffy large old man balancing on a tall stool in the corner of the room but in a section of the room that was in the water and there was a small crocodile in that water.

In the other corner by him, the old man who spoke to me about the fish pushed passed to sit in the other stool only he wasn’t balancing so good on his stool and I was afraid for him.

I saw there was a larger stool in the middle for me which was lower down near the water by about 6 inches and I had to hop from this platform, covered in brown newspapers and wooden sheets to get to my much larger stool – the stool was so large in fact, three adults could stand on it with elbow room.

I stood there and felt confused why I was there and there was a little murky window covered in algae and grey substance around the edges of it I was peering out of – the men was like – no point looking out there, you won’t find anything.

I was looking once again in the direction at a different point of where I felt I needed to go to see this person I wanted to see.

I turned around when I heard a noise behind me and a guy in his 40s entered the room with sheets of paper on a binder all messy and falling apart – he looked like a stereotypical rock fan, in a rock of the 90s T-shirt in burgundy colours and he had thick black curly hair to his shoulders.

He spoke like a proper dude and was about to introduce himself, when I hopped off my stool to be back on the first platform with him – he said to me, aren’t you staying to let me read you your past so you can determine your future and see what’s there because of your past?

I said, um no thanks, I don’t want you to pry into that as its personal and there are a lot of people in my past I don’t want you to read as its confidential for them and wouldn’t be fair to them!

He said, but you haven’t decided to live yet – let me read something to help you decide.

I said, no thanks, I will be fine; I need to go over there and find someone.

He looked through the window confused and looked at me and said, he isn’t so sure I should and he was upset he couldn’t read to me.

So I ignored him and went out of the room, jumped over the gaps in the wooden sheets and literally ran as fast as I could all through the whole narrow park and there were people on the path moaning at me and saying I could knock people into the water or fall in myself and it would be my own fault! 

I ran till I got to the edge of the park and at the park gates, where there seemed to be a very posh looking man in a suit with white gloves and I had to wait to leave whilst he checked a crystal – when he checked the crystal he opened a black box and held a red book in his arms and looked inside – he said well done, you may leave and he gestured I could go.

I walked to the left rather than the middle path he was expecting me to take and I walked down the street till I came to a market stall and I was looking at stickers – when the person I wanted to meet found me looking at things at the stall with a friend of theirs and they came over to me astonished I went to find them.

They hugged me from behind and were talking excitedly to their friend about who I was.

I pointed and I said I was going to come looking for you over there, I pointed to the far left of the city and they said, but I live over there, pointing to the far right!

I literally woke up right the realisation.

Top of the wheel

I’m not setting goals anymore in regards to novel writing, they get done when they get done but I haven’t given up; Yes I’ve had a respite since September 2022 and that is a long time, unreasonably long, but I had to have it due to mental health healing.  I had a hard time, there were lots of things happening in my life I had to think about – think a lot.

Lots of things in fact, lots of different problems to solve and many of them just needed me to try and calm myself enough to allow myself to think, then once I had managed to do that, I needed to calm myself again and stop thinking in order to heal from it all.

There was grief, death of a relative, a revelation I wasn’t sure was a trick or not, an announcement, an opportunity, a break up, a diagnosis and so many things all rolled into one major thing for me – that I could not cope.

Ultimately my entire life has been turned upside down and I am still in the situation of not really knowing if it is a good or bad thing just yet, I am still teetering on the edge of trying to determine which – it could be either!

It’s a strange situation to be in.

I feel at the moment I am standing on top of a wheel and if I fall backwards I will land in shark filled waters and if I fall forwards I will fall safe into someone’s arms.

At present I am still on top of the wheel.

It’s like sitting on a bomb really.

My mind has been so preoccupied with all these things that I haven’t been able to keep to my reading goals, my writing or practising of my art.  I haven’t even been able to hold a conversation without my mind wandering off, worrying about things.

It’s only been this past week I have manage to slowly and surely restart my habits.  I have started to write a little again, I have started to read a little again and I have even done some art.

Not as much as I would normally do in a day, in fact, I am doing less than ten paragraphs every couple of days towards anything, my one poem a day has become three or four again; my art practises are happening every couple of days.  It’s more than what has happened between September 2022 to March 2023 in any case and I am proud it’s coming back together again.

The frustrating thing is this – my typing speed has got extremely slow and I can’t seem to speed it up again.  I used to write 90 to 120 words per minute and now I struggle to get above 40.

I am making a lot of spelling mistakes and errors, cognitively I am suffering a lot and I don’t know what to make of it.

My Easter Project and Project AD has hopes to be finished before Midsummer, but I am not going to force myself, it’s still early days for me, I still haven’t fully healed.

In reality, I need a holiday – get out of this environment, get out into nature and remember how to laugh and play again – playfully scream – wash my hair with the rays of the sun – chase faeries – hug trees – and try to learn how to feel happy again.  Because happiness is a distant memory, one I am not sure I can remember how it feels anymore.  Strange as that sounds…

I also need to learn to trust again.

Trust in the process, trust to love again, trust that I have self-worth, that I am someone deserving and someone who can be free to laugh without someone complaining about the noise or worrying I am going to get over excited and hurt myself.

Because a couple of years ago I was bedbound sick and laughing really did hurt me, because it would cause a coughing fit and my spleen was swollen and so it genuinely was rather painful to laugh – but those things are behind me now.  But still, out of habit I have people trying to calm me down, because they’ve forgotten how much I have healed.

I need to lose myself in feelings that are opposite to negative ones – I need to, because I don’t feel very human anymore.

There are times I have sat back and realised all the negativity around me, all the bitterness, envy, jealousy, contempt and discomfort and I wonder what am I becoming exactly?  Am I becoming a demon?  Because the only things I can feel are variations of darkness…

It’s a scary place to be – see, there – fear – another negative emotion… but you see, I try to remember something a motivational speaker called Mel Robbins once said – that fear is the exact same chemical in the brain to excitement and that you have to change your perspective and realise when you fear something that you might actually need to try and tell yourself it’s exciting, rather than something to fear.

Odd… but I am trying this trick.

I am on the cusp of something amazing which is about to happen in my life and all I can think about is how scary it is – I know there are wonderful things coming with it, especially a lot of love and tenderness and protection – but I still can’t help but focus on that one major problem.  I have like 30 pros and only around five cons to this chance, yet it’s the cons that are taking up brain space!

When you see it like that, you realise there is something seriously wrong with how you are wired!

Wired might not be correct actually… trained is perhaps the best way to describe it.   Because I used to be such a Positive Pollyanna and it has only really been in the past decade that the Pollyanna in me has started to die.

I need to do what happened in the book Pollyanna – I need to find my tribe to help resuscitate me, bring me back to the light.

Although saying that, I think I don’t need to, I think – if I am reading things correctly, my tribe has come to find me and all I need to do is wait a little while longer, then reach out my hand fearlessly and say to myself – I am excited to be a part of your life!

Thanks for reading!

I’ll Try

I’ll throw caution to the wind

I’ll try discomfort although it’s queer

I will stand shoulder to shoulder with love

No matter how much I fear

Though these words make me shy

I am blushing as they are written

But I have to say one thing – with you I’m truly smitten

I can’t turn away from this

I’ll regret it more than you can know

I think I’m safe within your arms

Together we will grow!

I can’t promise I won’t waver

I can’t promise I will cope

But I will try my best just for you

Well, let’s just see and hope!

Diary of a damned rat

My post “Damned Rat” is a diary entry.

That’s how my day went yesterday.

We’ve got a damned rat, in fact everyone in our terrace block has; it’s a new thing – we never had rats before.  They came to live with us because our neighbour at the bottom of the block has chickens in their garden and they store hay, flour and grains in their attic.

It wouldn’t be so bad, but considering four out of ten rooms of our house is pack rats haven its murder trying to find the rat – or rather it is difficult to find the rat to murder it.

The rat situation has kept me up until 7am because I can sense Paul’s fear in the other room. 

I managed to sleep, only for an hour later to be woken up with a panicking shouting Paul about how the rat has eaten its way through our main water pipe and there is a flood in our kitchen and how this could potentially put us in debt by £500 again.  Thankfully it was a false alarm, the rat didn’t do it – it was innocent, or as innocent as a rat can be that is.

I was like a zombie, I tried to go back to sleep when Paul took Henry to town to buy guillotine traps as an act of vengeance for the succulent plants I had, which the rat destroyed in its attempt of a feast.

I nurtured them from cuttings for years.

Cyril is our lemon tree, which will be next no doubt, it’s the only vegetation in the house that the rat could eat next, we can’t move it, and he is in a 50 litre pot and is around 4ft tall.

I don’t think we will laugh about this tomorrow, personally.

So yes, that prose was more or less biographical.

Thanks for reading.

The lamb can’t fight

The lamb can’t fight the lion

The lion he’s too strong

He is here to save his people

Who have been wronged

Lead astray by shepherds

Lead astray by fear

The lion has come to correct this

His time is getting near

Many people have been burdened

By millennia with the lies

The lamb will soon be destroyed

And his corpse is food for flies

Written 6:24am 22nd February 2023

I can sense your every movement

You have come so far, I am proud of you

All the things you’ve done, all the things you do

Your heart is dedicated and kind

You are beautiful inside and outside your mind

I cherish all you’ve done for me

In your attempt to make me happy and be free

Though it’s been a while now

I know the time is near

And I can sense you through your joy

You no longer have fear

I appreciate what you’ve done for me

Though you probably cannot tell

I can sense your every movement, like I’m under a spell

Written 4:54pm 22nd February.

Bleak to positive

I’m trying my best to try and think of more positive things lately, it is actually harder than I thought it would be and that is a huge contrast to the person that I used to be; I was often considered a bit of a Pollyanna – if you don’t know who Pollyanna is, Pollyanna is a little girl who always found something good about things that happened until one day she had an accident and couldn’t walk anymore and she found it hard to find anything good to say and the people she shone her light on – all came in mass to remind her of her old way of thinking when she was in her darkest hour.

For the past nine years I’ve suffered from very bad depression bought upon initially by illness and then extreme poverty, around 2015 I had my first true thoughts about suicide and have been struggling with them ever since.

I am trying to find the old me again as it is very clear in the near future, I will be moving out of this home and into a new one and hopefully things will be a little better for me emotionally.

I still have no date for that yet, but I know it will be coming before the end of the year at least, Paul is determined and Henry has resided himself to the fact that he wants to stay with his father and not follow me, because he doesn’t want to make new friends in a new school.

Wherever I go, they have to tolerate a house rabbit, because Ray is coming with me too – because I am the only person who gives him any attention and he would literally pine to death without me!

He is 5yrs old and a dark grey Dutch, so dark in fact you’d mistake him for black, he has dark blue eyes and loves reggae, gardening shows, rugby and Peter Rabbit – seriously he has his favourite types of music and TV shows, he is a house rabbit after all. 

I can’t eat a banana without sharing it with him; he gets grumpy and throws his food bowl at me!  He can be quite violent when affronted!

He needs neutering because he stinks.

Well anyway, there are still dark days to get over and when I have those days I tend to write dark and morbid poetry – but I am trying to break it up and space it out, so sometimes when the poems are being published, I may not actually be having a bad day at all, it may have been days or weeks ago.

I haven’t had a major depression bout for over a week now, but I am slowly slipping into it again as tonight I have been feeling on the verge of tears and being quiet and sleepy, but I am not sure what bought it on.  But at least I am not suicidal tonight.  I am just a bit dozy and I suppose sulky due to loneliness.

I am writing these words at 2:30am on the 19^th February 2023, this will be published in the afternoon – again, to space things out a bit.

Sometimes when I get writing specifically for my blog, I tend to write three to five poems all at once and about two or three diary updates and it would really annoy my readers if they got all of this one day and then just one tiny poem for a few days after.

So I space things out.

I am trying really hard to think about things that are not bleak – anything really so not to focus on the dark thoughts, because I am trying hard to push my old life away for a brand new one, that I believe is very close to coming to me and it’s going to be amazing but terrifying!

Seriously terrifying – but you know what?  I heard Mel Robbins a motivational speaker say once, that psychologists have proven than fear and excitement are formed from the same chemicals in the brain, they are in fact the same thing and you can trick yourself into believing your fear is excitement quite easily, so you don’t panic so much!

So when you are frightened, just think to yourself – it’s all so very exciting – I am excited – let’s do this!

So yes, I am terrified but it’s exciting…

Do you think I am ready for the nut house yet?

Thanks for reading!

The elevator dream

I had a dream last night, it was very strange.

I dreamt I was in an elevator that kept going up and down, but when it was up I was in a hospital like place, which also kind of felt like a hotel – I felt I lived there and I did art and crafts and things whilst there.

But then I knew I had a husband who was on a lower level, so I went into the elevator to go and see him a lot.

When I was with my husband in his lower levels, it was like gothic luxury – red and black furniture, high quality, living in a space that was almost like a luxury penthouse or something – not like a hospital at all.

Each time I went to visit him; he was getting further and further away, to lower and lower levels.

Until eventually at full speed, the elevator took ten minutes and nearly a thousand levels or more to get to him.

Also with every visit he was getting more and more affectionate and excited to see me and I knew I was becoming addicted to my visits, because I would stay in my own levels for shorter periods of time! 

On the last trip, the elevator spoke to me and said that “my husband feels that our relationship is strained”. 

What is weird is that, the man I kept visiting wasn’t anyone I am currently in a relationship with (I am not in a relationship right now… to my knowledge lol) and each time I visited him he was in fancy dress – so kept changing!

In the elevator hearing that he felt our relationship was strained, I became distraught and frightened instantly and started to panic, but the elevator never got to him, and it was going faster and faster and falling lower and lower into thousands upon thousands of levels – I woke up just as real tears were starting in my eyes.

Weird.

Thanks for reading!

Now I’ve done it

I am scared too

Because of who you are my star

Let us throw fear away

Let us learn from each other and play

If we let fear rule us how will we know

Which road was really meant for us to go?

In an instant I reached out to you

Will you reply?

I have no clue

But now I’ve done it

For good or bad

Let’s hope the result won’t be sad