What More Could You Ask?

Context elevates bad experiences,
An enthusiastic homage to… let’s call it eternity,
Mouth moving both ways,
Semicolons inserted for emphasis,
A magical pass.

Stacking words in the way of wisdom,
Kissing a path to memory, curiously lusterless;
Neuralgic nostalgia is a thorny back road,
Unbright, dusty, unPlankian,
And we could tread the purple road bright ahead.

Lock steps into wifery, objecting to
Reflecting one state of womanhood,
Harmonising adroitly into stillness,
Spilling meaning into the gaps between
Have and not.

Begging for scraps of song
Should not be our lot,
Pixelated into endlessly editable scripts,
Charged and charging
Into marked-up pages, endless and ephemeral.

We are leaking nightmares,
Plumbed into history, toxic with possibilities.
We can seize the waters, balancing futures,
Listening to the flood, forgetting pressures,
Stressing old-school remedies. Day after day.

We break down the meaning of names,
Settle liquid scores,
Talk of ambition’s blizzard and
Swing hips in glossy flossing,
Consider pianaoke.

Time to pitch, toned up creatures
Singing myths in the liminal, lurking in
The dark, harking back to when hunting
Meant something other than chasing
Grades and pay checks.

Resentment is a film through which we
Filter memory, waiving the right to our spot,
Clotted with the scents of home and pain.
Do you want the core of the artist, the
Consciousness, unconscionable; bitter and burglarised?

We earn art in the reconstruction,
Cupped in the moment, you, you, U,
Sneezed size breathing salt,
Slapped with sensations, tipped, tripping,
Tricked, cut down to size, a light touch.

We dream of legacies, embedded in larceny,
Rewarding failure, chronicling the
Chronically ironic, chasing the sugar,
Shifting market forces, contorting
Culture into a twist of dough.

We dream of adorning the menu of memory.


Another live-writing exercise, this time celebrating the open mic for Cambridge University's ICE Creative Writing course and their residential module on writing for performance. The same terrifying level of quality as last time I attended this, and another dazzling array of inspirations to draw from. As ever, the temptation to edit (there's some inelegant variation in there!) is high but resisted…

Inside Out

So, because I was in the frame of Say Yes to More Things, I am doing #28sonnetslater. Since, up until now, this has been the sum total of my sonnet-writing, I thought I’d better get some practice in, so as not to shame my fellow sonneteers (it's a word now, shh). I asked my partner for a prompt, and got the film we’d just watched…

My mind’s a well-oiled engine, so they say;
There’s no good giving in to wanton ire,
For all the voices clamouring are fey,
Their one true prize to find my life’s desire.

This movie I’ve not seen in four long years
Can always find its way into my heart.
It shows me truth, all hemmed about with fears
That I have given up my rainbow cart.

One cannot live in truth on only joy,
For it’s true madness to be only glad,
And even treasured memories can cloy,
If they’re not leavened by a touch of sad.

And though I may be weeping by the end,
I’ll aim to leave this life my own good friend.

I know it’s flawed, as far as strict form is concerned, and there’s an abominable pun to boot, but it’s a start. Look out for the next one on the proper blog. Unless I get the desire to do more practice (and share it).

(Yes I’m nervous. Shh.)