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!

Triggers of grief

Grief comes in waves

A trigger of a memory

A word or two heard in passing

Thoughts of them come to you

Trespassing your mind

You can’t help it, you find

You love those memories, but they make you sad

Bittersweet, you feel bad

Guilty that you don’t want the memories, guilty you think of them

Moving on is difficult because it hurts again and again

Any little trigger will make you think of those

Who are in the heavens, those whose death caused you woes

But you know that you love them and happy memories you did share

But why does it have to hurt so much? 

When they are no longer there?

Currently reading May 2023

I am currently reading quite a few book according to my Goodreads.com list, but I would say I am only really active in four of them for the past week now, despite there actually being 22 books on the list, a handful have been slowly slogged through for the past year!

But never mind – it’s just the result of an ever increasing chaotic and information starved mind!

The four I am currently reading are from the library so I have to whip myself to read them before the 21 days is up!

They are;

The High Five Habit by Mel Robbins

Grow your own poem by Kate Clanchy

A nature poem for every day of the year Edited by Jane McMorland Hunter

Eating to extinction by Dan Saladino

“The high five habit” by Mel Robbins is being read the fastest because I am trying to get my act together basically!  I finished a free Mel Robbins course a couple of weeks back and I wanted to learn more about this “high five habit” I’ve heard about and although I have been doing it for a few days now I have forgot on two days, so it’s not ingrained to do that yet for me. 

But I have noticed a difference with me approaching mirrors nonetheless, I have a faint smile these days, which is something – because I was a pretty miserable person whenever I look in mirrors before this thing.

I’m really trying to motivate myself to fight for a life and I tell you it is hard, it is a battle and I have virtually no support in doing this – I am on my own!

So I have to haul my own ass to change, as Mel Robbins says time and time again “nobody is going to save you, only you can save you”.

So that’s what I am trying to do.  Save myself.

“Grow your own poem” by Kate Clanchy has been borrowed and reordered to borrow from the library with small breaks in between since November!  Why?  Because there are a lot of small tasks in them and I would like to do them spread out, so I could learn better that way – it will stick better.  If I read the whole book then go back to do the essay one after the other I am more likely to forget what I am learning.

So I am doing it my way and it works!

I have noticed an improvement in the quality of my work and so has Paul and I thank this book for it!

“Eating to extinction” by Dan Saladino, is a gripping read about how humanities social progress and diet is actually going to eventually starve out humanity because it is unsustainable and not very diverse; monocultures and picky farmers are literally making extinct thousands of alternate food sources around the world yearly, in order to condense our diets down to a few of our favourites.

Which by and large is not healthy for us and not a wise thing to do in the long run because of climate change, but also our microbiota is starving which is causing all kinds of auto-immunity problems and other health risks.

And if you know me, from reading things about me in the dim and distant past, not only am I a huge advocate for sustainability and paleo thinking, but I am also incredibly geeky about microbiomes!

“A nature poem for every day of the year” by Jane McMorland Hunter – again I am reading this to kind of study poetry but also because of Ray Bradbury’s idea of reading a poem, an essay and a short story every day. 

I read a lot of non-fiction daily anyway, it’s a habit I’ve always had, I don’t read much fiction to be honest but when I do I tend to like picking up short story anthologies and I virtually never read poetry until recently, so I felt like a kindred spirit of Ray Bradbury when I read this quote the other week!

I used to read fiction a lot when I was younger but I got out of the habit of it because I started to panic that my ideas were like this and that and this too!  So it made me worry constantly about plagiarism.

Again, if you know me, you’d know by now I am an incessant worry wart!

So to ensure I don’t give up my current words in progress (WIP) I got out of the habit of reading too much fiction.

Which is kind of stupid, but there you go.

Thanks for reading!

Sleeping Eden

My garden is my Eden

My own paradise, I made

Filled with borage and buttercups

A grand floral parade

Dog rose and hornbeam, fig, pear and sweet pea

Hawthorn, ash and bramble, there will be treats for me

Bumblebees love their honey

They made from this land here

Golden delicious syrup, they make it every year

Hedgehog, pigeon, frog and toad, make their homes right here

As robins, chickadees and crows eat without a fear

My lovely little haven, I toiled hard to keep

But it has been abandoned and now it’s put to sleep

Maybe someday I’ll make another

Maybe someday near or far

I will grow another Eden and writes its memoir

Flying bubbles don’t play with knives

I’m a skeleton of my former self

That person don’t exist no more

Dead and gone and wasted

Life’s negativity has bored

A hole into my soul and mind

You can look for the old me

But you won’t find

I am gone and I am someone new

When you see me, you’ll say who are you?

You can’t be who you say you are…

What has happened? 

Where’s the scars?

There are none, because I’m not bothered by you

I have healed them through and through

I am no longer touched by you

You can’t hurt me I’ve come through

I am stronger on the other side

I different your access denied

I am me, in my truest form

And I don’t care if you quip or scorn

Your words are water off my back

You can’t keep me from my track

I will sing my song loud and clear

Till my angels shout and cheer

For you will not like it so

Because you can’t cause me pain and woe

But never mind, I’m sure you’ll live

Meanwhile, I will forgive

But I won’t have you back in my life

Because flying bubbles don’t play with knives

Mind games

Remember the song?

You’re so vain?

Don’t be so touchy it’s not always about you

Though guilt and shame must haunt you

If you contest that it’s not true

I can’t be responsible for how you think and feel

If you think I’m writing about you, maybe you are ill?

Oh sorry, I thought you were playing

Another mind game with me

I thought I’d join in and play with you, like you tried to play with me!

It isn’t fun is it, when the trick is played on you?

Life isn’t fair is it?

Oh poor old you!