Writer, researcher, music lover, cancer survivor with CMMRD ("double" Lynch syndrome)
I’ve been neglecting my blog/poetry a little this week as I have been working on a flash fiction piece for a competition. I spent all week on this one story I didn’t like very much, and today when the deadline came along, I wrote something that I think is a lot better in less than two hours. Go figure!
Normal service will resume next week!
This is the new normal.
Take it and run with it because it’s all there is.
So what, we have to go to therapists now
just to have someone who will listen?
Just to have someone who understands
or at least listens for long enough to realise
there’s something there yearning
to be understood?
Someone to shine a light in the fog:
I’m starting to realise that’s all I’ve ever
really wanted from anyone.
My door has always been wide open,
now flung off the hinges as I sit
muttering to myself: “This is the new normal.”
I am still adamant that I’ve never cared
what anyone else thinks about me. I just care about
how I’m treated. That’s not the same thing.
I’ll be myself even if it kills me.
At the very least, I’ll try to understand me.
I have never been more honest in my poetry than I am these days, and I have never loved writing more.
If I’m the person
other people think I am
I can’t take it.
There’s nothing wrong with the scars on our hands,
we’re all just trying to understand.
It seems I’m still learning the art of knowing when to finish a poem.
You know, instead of trying to cram every idea that pops into my head into that one poem I’m currently working on. Because sometimes I have ideas that sort-of-but-don’t-really fit into one neat piece, and if I try to mash them together they become something that’s not neat at all. I know I don’t edit my poems much, but I do try to give them some kind of finesse. Also someone, somewhere from inside my memory, said something like “If a poem only has three good lines, it should only be three lines long.”
English Clouds
Trying not to think about it
is far too much like hard work.
Believe me, I have been trying
to kerb my thoughts, to retrain
myself, but I don’t have the
discipline, and it is exhausting.
It is very much like trying
to tell the English clouds
not to cry about it.
I have missed
the complexity of this
Five hours before dawn
we hunt for our clothes in the
dim blue light of phones
If physical pain were punctuation,
it would be a question mark
searching for reasons and explanations.
Or it would be an interrobang –
frenzied alarm and insinuations.
If doubt were punctuation,
it would be an ellipses.
There is more to follow
and it may not be what you expected.
If fear were punctuation,
it would be a comma –
a run-on sentence, trying to flee
from itself and the trauma.
If peace of mind were punctuation,
it would be an apostrophe –
only noticed when it is missing,
appreciated by someone like me.
as a human
I think I’ve gotten both better and worse
I have improved
and fucked up
my flaws have multiplied
and dissipated
I don’t know anything anymore
the size of my ego
once huge
is now s k ew e d
and I don’t know how to go
one way or another.
I don’t want to stay here
midway between nothing
and nothing else.
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