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... to my new blog!

www.just-somestuff.blogspot.com

I've decided to ditch the year-by-year format, and just try and commit to something more steadfast. Please join me! I'll stop messing you all around then, I promise!

Thanks xx

Proof. And an incurable knitting fever.

I have been being creative, though it hasn't involved much poetry. Maybe I am exploring knitting as a sort of poetry with objects. Very long, thin and flexible objects.

One in a month

is an unacceptable situation to have gotten myself into. Shucks.

I have learned to knit. I have been poorly. I miss swimming. My lungs still hurt if I cycle uphill in the chill nearly-winter wind.

A new poem, unrelated:



Spurn Head

The whip of dune grasses and cuts on the soles of my feet.
It alters, chances the river that feeds it. I race
to the tops and bottoms of dunes that no longer exist.

It is downwards that haunts me, giant slow-beat strides
in the shifting sand. My legs are salt-numbed and hefty; load-bearing
and practical, covered to the knee with every step.

I don’t remember the disappointment, the slowing down,
but lose myself in the towering impermanence
risen from the shining dark. Salt in my hair, cool sand between my toes.

I will return with you to this end of the end of the road
and lie myself down, my hair in my mouth and then your mouth there
with the wind whipping dune grass on us from the folding sands.

I will not tell you that there is permanence in its alteration,
that this is all I have dreamed of whether you are here or not:
that you could be anyone with sour-breath kisses in the dark.

Something new! Callooh! Callay!

Job’s worth

Occasional birds flash across the sterile white-out sky
and snap my eyes across the high-set windows.
This room is monotony too: rows of labelled content
and blank goggles reflecting strip-light white.
A clatter, and some sudden words—nothing we can look back on
from outside time. My memories are like the distant windows:
so far above the day-to-day that they seem experimental, avant-garde.
I remember days like these flayed bodies in exacting standards of sterility.
I am stripped back to colour and unapologetic.
I had thought perhaps I wanted the change of discovery,
but find myself missing the comfort of endless scrutiny.
There are no right-angles I can lean on now,
only dreams of white-walled rooms and so many little pieces
of thought, gathered in a bleak and chemical silence.

Another one I found that I'd forgotten..

The Inherited

Generations have died before they've had a chance
to tell me how I'll go. One sudden death after another.
How do I prepare? Perhaps they are themselves
the indication and I'll just go like they did: in the morning
unable to sit up for fear of pooling blood; in hospital,
a pink swab mopping saliva from sunken parts of face;
eight weeks from diagnosis.

I could carry round whole heaps of hows to stop it, but slings
and plasters are no prevention. Every pain I have could be
where things will loosen first, every limp and yawn
a last hurrah, a sign of things to come.

I am not calm, but my oblivious heart is tapping out the truth
on my love-torn ribs: b-bum, b-bum, b-bum—
I think hear correctly: all is well yet, all is well.

I just found this on my computer at work.

The blue and yellow roller-boots handed down to me from the 70s

I was in mid-air when I noticed the blackbird nest:
I soon felt the snap of flightlessness in my coccyx.

The cats would wait here at the bottom every summer,
tasting imaginary bones, re-enacting the catch

while the parents bred and fed like crazy
their fat, stranded children.

It's been a little while.

And in that time I have been on holiday. Also, a moth came to visit me that was as big as my palm. I'm not sure where it's gone now, but hopefully out and toward the real moon, wherever that leads, as my big broken paper lantern (as it just learned) is not the same thing and leads only to trouble. And a headache.

And so for a photo, first, and then maybe a poem later.