She doesn't talk to God!

Talking to God

She doesn’t talk to God anymore,

when she asked him for a kind loving man

he gave her a cruel one,

When she asked him for strength and patience

he gave her none.

And yet her heart still melts at the sight of the full glorious moon;

every time, the first time

the shadowy lantern that spun

playfully, arrogantly hid and revealed its faded smile

how it rose every night

be it full or a sharp crooked dagger

as if it had reason.

And God is in everything she was taught as a child

in the sound of angry rain falling on house roofs

in the graceful unfolding of a young green tea leaf .

She wants to love him again,

to strike a bargain with him

“God, if you grant me this, only this, I will try again”

but she knows in her heart of hearts

that God doesn’t work that way.

Pink Post-it Notes

Everywhere in her house

there are pink and orange post it notes

hanging on door, mirrors and walls

there’s even one on her bedroom ceiling that read

“pay your child’s dinner money!”

beside it, a badly drawn picture of a dry water tap;

a reminder to pay the water bill.

Everywhere, neon pink notes to help her tired brain function

and yet,

nothing distracts this overworked brain from the murmur of his voice.

The Wind

After e. e. cummings  

i have found what you are like

the rain

              (Who feathers frightened fields

with the superior dust of sleep.

The Wind

A storm woke this morning

an anger so resolute,  

it shook the wooden garden fence

unhooked washing lines

turned over bins

dropped hanging flower baskets

and made me hold on to a lamp pole

struggling to keep my coat on.

I have finally found what you are like;

the furious wind

your invisible hands

took me

shook me

and bereft me, a torn, brittle leaf.

your intolerable storm offers no pole

to brace.

His Hands

Gentle hurricane

The thought of you

is a gentle hurricane

of sinopia coloured tea

conquering the pure

boiling water of my

mind,

your slowly darkening

moods,

taste.

His Hands

‘I hope you are well’

he wrote blankly.

I pictured his calm hands

on the keyboard.

His hands,

they have a wisdom and a knowing,

the knowing of when and how.

Time

Time, you said I’d never hunger,

you said I’d never age.

Time, you are the ticking sound of taking

the insistent claw always aiming at my plate.

Time, you drowning of rainbows

the contracting of days.

Ah to be five again!

Five

for Jori

five years old

she cannot stand being still

after bouncing relentlessly

on her trampoline,

tirelessly following a lady bird

climbing and descending leaves,

threading daisies into necklaces,

immaculately licking icing and sprinkles

off cup cakes - without eating the cup cake!

she stood in front of the garden wall as the sun

began to set and played clapping rhymes with her own shadow.

Watching Lovers

I watch them on trains

using each others' bodies for comfort;

She,

lays her head on his shoulder and sleeps

He,

finds in the curve of her waist a place to

warm his hand

They,

wake slowly, lazily from a long kiss.

I watch them in restaurants longing

for each others' faces from behind their

tall menus.

I watch them in parks,

                          walking long paths,

                                           rhyming their footsteps,

                                                             winged with future.

I wish you

I wish you on this dull grey morning

as I winter my coffee with sugar

and cream.

I wish you on this cold lonely evening

as I stir the thickening soup

sending you a thousand unspent

embraces.

When his face rises

When his face rises

in your sleepless nights

like the self indulgent moon

glorious and full,

turn away from it.

The peak of longing can be

as steep and curiously tempting

as a leap off the highest mountain,

it makes no sense to throw away your

life like this

but your heart yearns to reach the grounds

of this fathomless emotion

to bring this falling to a halt

to reach a certainty no woman has ever known

to see, touch, taste the ashes of your burning for him

only then will his tides begin to recede,

and you, become a floating swan, gliding above

the surface of your once tireless affection

riding his vacillating waves so elegantly,

flowing, ripple like.

Death Watched

Death stood outside

and watched

as your surgeon

with his guessing knife 

opened you up again

the sound of your healing stitches

picked against your aging skin

must have been as loud and dry

as plastic rope hesitating under a blunt

razor.

Reciting a prayer

I set night’s long fingers

to touch you

the velvet black curtain

that will not draw.

The Mother who Writes

She writes

In between pink coughing medicine doses

the mother sits to write

sleep deprived, she steals moments from

her child’s illness

not focused her body signals for sleep

but the last spoon of Calpol is kicking inn

and she might not get another chance tonight

There’s always a mess to be tidied

around the house, or in her head

there’s always going to be a pile of clothes to be ironed

an overgrown back garden

a thousand courtesies she hasn’t met   

But for now, the rain is falling angrily on the cheap

fibreglass conservatory roof

she calls it inspiring

and she writes.

 

My meeting with Ian McMillan and other cool BBC people!

May 4th 2011


So today was the first meeting with the “BBC People” to start work on the Spoken Word Talent Development Project.

I met with Louisa Davies (Director at the MAC) on the train to London. Walking in London towards Arts Council England (ACE) we passed by West Minister Abbey and were horrified to see what seemed to be 5 maybe 6 hundred people queuing outside! Tourists waiting to get a glimpse inside the Church to see whether anything remains from the Royal Wedding!

Before we entered ACE we met with Bohdan Piasecki (who was also chosen for this project), and poets from regions other than the West Midlands there are two poets from the East: John Osborne and Deborah Stevenson and two poets from the North East: Degna Stone and Michael Edwards.

We all finally went inside ACE and met with Ian McMillan, Presenter of the BBC Radio show The Verb. Erin Riley, Producer of BBC Radio 3 and Mathew Dodd, Head of Speech Programming and Presentation at BBC3 Radio. They were all such interesting and inspiring people, I kind of fell in love with Ian McMillan who is funny and witty and has an incredibly sexy voice! We all talked about the project, how they all hope it’s not just going to be a perfectly cut radio show, but something that is young fresh and inspiring to listen to by the audience. For the project each poet was asked to choose a more established poet to work closely with, someone we personally admire and who can help us improve our writing skills, or our performance skills or both, which ever we felt we needed more help with. I chose to work with Aoife Mannix and I am looking forward to meeting her and finding out what we could come up with together, later when the piece is produced, I will perform it on Ian McMillan’s show The Verb, BBC Radio 3.

Ian wanted to see us perform, so each poet performed a short piece, he also wanted to learn a bit about each one of us, so we did a short recorded interview with him in another quiet room, all of these clips of our performed short poems and answering Ian’s questions about ourselves will be incorporated into the program for the final show, so that instead of a boring radio interview where it’s question and answer, it would be more like a magazine style show, bits and pieces, and different voices from the poets, and then the final “big” piece which was developed in conjunction with our mentor poet.

We all agreed that Spoken Word Talent Development Project was a mouth full so we decided to go with “Verb New Voices”.  

Our next meeting is on July 26^th at the MAC in Birmingham, until then I will meet Aiofe and will start writing my radio piece so that in our July meeting with Ian and the producers I (we) would have something of a progress.

Ice skating.

The stiffness of the skating boot was the first challenge

tightening the laces, they felt hard on her tiny soft foot.

I showed her how to spread one arm for balance

while I held her other hand

I took her slowly, cautiously

I pointed out to other children:

“look at that little boy over there, see how his feet slide? That’s what you should do”

But she didn’t believe spreading her free arm would  give her balance,

she didn’t want to imitate the little boy

she wanted to skate her own way,

she didn’t mind falling,

and she fell

many times.

As we staggered on the hard frozen surface, wobbly and ungraceful

we skated across previously etched tracks,

soon our tracks were one of the many.

Then something began to weigh;

she was shackled by my hard grip and my fear for her,

I was shackled by the belief that I mustn’t let her fall,

she finally demanded I let her hand go;

“Mummy! Let me go, but stay behind me, so you can grab me before I fall”

The Loves that Don't make it to "I Love you"

The loves that don’t make it to ‘I love you’ ;

The stillborns

The bastards

The weaklings

The easy to forget

The forever lingering "what if?".

half

i go about my day

half full

half pretty

half happy

i say: ‘hello it’s good to see you ’

words heavy

empty

dreary

i avoid windows on rainy days

when a reflection of you beside me

is most vivid.

the girl, the woman 

she says: “no, it’s all in the past, i’m happy now”

as she wraps her waist in the stiff fitted coat that uprights her

holding the girl the woman and the years

in the silent doing of a single button.