Turquoise Monster

It is that time of year again – I will be attempting to not only write a poem a day through out February but to spend an hour each day working on poetry stuff. I have book cases full of note books with stuff to type up, only a fraction of it is poetry but that is still a lot poems just sitting there, awaiting editing and reading etc…

I’ve had a fantastic time with the Month of Poetry Challenge in January and now it’s time to really knuckle down in Feb with World Poetry Writing Month. 🙂

Also I am once again in charge of the WoPo site, so you might want to go and check out the fabulous writing exercises and guest authors I have lined up for you all 😉

Having said all of this I had better actually get started and do some writing or typing or both!.

Silent World

Portal, out staring

Concrete cubes

Stretch to the sky

Brown on Brown

Line sinuous

Cracked

Golden dawn

Violet dusk

Stretched into beauty

Spindly tree

Flutters – Life

Maroon leaves

Twitch

Their reflection

Tangerine clouds

Scud

Seagulls soar

Life beyond Glass

This poem first appeared on my family blog here.

Well I have created the roughs and now have to make them good! I’m still working on the typing up and stuff each day but the main premise of the writing challenge is done! This is one of the reasons I love writing challenges, as they really help me get all that poetry out of my head! They work as writing drives for me though I have friends who hate them 🙂

Anyway I am going to be gearing up for the writing challenge that I run each year in February called WoPoWriMo. There will be lots of tutorials and things on the site and guest authors!

So I suppose I had better be getting on with that!

It was milky and the drooly babe
That did wail and wiggle in the cott
All smiley was her little face
And her gums all smooth and pink

Beware the gummy mouth my friend
The jaws that gum, the tongue that sucks
Beware the nappy; and the milky stool; and shun
The fumourous terdy leak

Take the babies feet in hand
Long time the nappy cream we sort
So cleaning we; dirty bum-bum see
As she flails her legs alot

And as in ponderous thought she looks
The squelching noise which smells of egg
Came bubbling through the terry cloth
Reeking as it came

One two, one two and throw and throw
The milky stool has leak; pah hew!
She pukes a lot and if she can
She aims it right at you

And has thall changed the baby?
Give to my arms my beamish babe
Oh squiggly wig! Bubblig! Girgley!
She giggles in her joy

It was milky and the drooly babe
That did wail and wiggle in the cott
All smiley was her little face
And her gums all smooth and pink

It is the beginning of 2015 and a time to start a fresh and plan my writing and poetry year!

And this is ever more complicated as I am now having to keep a two year diary for bookings!

Anyway, one of the keys is to be able to keep writing, I sometimes get far too busy and that is not good nor sustainable as I need to produce new stuff!

So as always I am planning on taking part in the writing challenges such as Month of Poetry, National Poetry Writing Month and the one I help co-ordinate World Poetry Writing Month. These writing challenges allow me to carve out a specific time to write. What is happening at the moment is that my brain is full of ideas that mull and brew and then when the challenge time comes I can just sit and spew them all onto the page or screen!

Other things that need sorting is what I do and don’t have published – I’ve had to pull my ebooks at the moment due to the VAT issues so will probably end up on Amazon after all 🙁

I want to get out their more and promote the books I have but not entirely sure how that is going to fit in with everything yet!

This blog is a bit tatty as well with blogs missing that were written and then not sent live and so on, so I shall be having a bit of a sort out and hopefully work out exactly how many poems I have written.

I may even start sending them off again. I tend not to do this, or I mean to and forget and so on, somehow I still get a couple of poems published a year but it’s hit and miss as I don’t send anything off :/

Basically I have a lot of admin to do, it would also be nice to get back to some of the local events that I am not involved in somehow!

I have a beautiful note book to start the year with which will inspire me – I’d better actually go and do some writing 🙂

Another year closes and I look at the note books I have filled and ponder on how long it takes me to getting round to typing stuff up and I think on typing straight onto the computer… then I find the zillions of random “poetry” files and think to myself I really need to sort all of those out and frown.

Looks like I have a lot of work to do to make the work I’ve already done useful!

Well that will be what next year is for – well at least that’s the plan 🙂

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The city-scape
A sociatel creature
Circulator system of roads
Transporting food, energy and waste
Thrumming with a pulse
Flashing with electric-light
The nervous system
Computers talking day and night
People the cells
Differentiated into roles
Society a city-shaped creature

The queen of the fairy godmothers visited the climbing centre today and told off a very naughty elf who would not share the Chocs and spoke to Father Christmas about all the good children and told stories about a little mouse and enjoyed the crafts very very much.

Also my mum phoned me up to tell me I look like my great out Sylvie, this made me smile – the skirt is made out of head scarves and wraps some of which are my nan and great aunts scarves 🙂

I did discover that cutting out the poetry at the beginning is actually the wrong thing to do as it get the children settled, it was a fab day 🙂

A treasure
Pink irridescant
Kept in a ring box
With transparent lid
A rainbowed hologram
Hiding the magic
Little legs and little tail
Head on long neck
A shell with segmants
Geometric and fine
Such a bueatiful thing
I owned
A small plastic tortoise
My nan gave it to me
Said I could take it home

Tonight (21 st Nov 2014) I am going to be taking part in a Quiet Compare event at The Strand in Cheltenham. It is medical themed poetry so I am taking along a poem I have only ever performed twice before and never to a live audience that is sitting there just for poetry.

The poem is The Warrior Butterfly and chronicles the issues I had around the pregnancy and birth of Jean, I could write a lot on the imagery and what the poem means to me but I shall not. The two previous performances were: 1) Cheltenham Community Radio for one of their shows and 2) for the On Form Sculpture exhibition in Oxford a few years ago where I stood on an Earth work (made for the garden not an ancient burial site) that was covered in flowers and called it to the sky and the arty loving people who happened to be wandering about at the time.

It is a long and in many ways personally indulgent poem for me, not my normal but as such it is often not the right sort of thing to read at events and the actual reading of it is hard for me.

I hope local peeps might like to come out tonight to listen – it isn’t just me performing a 4 and a half minute poem, there are lots of others performing too, some of whom you might even have heard of!

Anyway I’d better give it the read through a couple of times before tonight.

Here’s the event details for those of you not on Facebook it is 7:30 at The Strand in Cheltenham with a £1/£2 suggested donation on the door.