Turquoise Monster

Rain beat and beat and beat
Until roads ran as rivers
Fields pooled as lakes
Wind ripped the roof tiles
And the sea swarmed the land
But still the rain
Beat and Beat and Beat

I am so so happy that the writer Becket responded to my tweet saying that my Haiku was perfect, he loves this particular poetry form, so it means a lot 🙂 Not to mention the excitement of being noticed by an author you like 🙂

I am also going to be reading The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry at Sticky Stories in Bristol on the 26th of Feb (2014). I will also be performing the first Cuddly Science story, this is not poetry but I am still excited about it 🙂

I will have copies of The Little Book of Festive and Spoogy Poetry, and audio collections including The Little Book of Easter and Spoogy Poetry with me for sale.

I am rocking the poetry writing now – I am well a head of schedule and beginning to think about how I am going to spend the rest of my poetry allocated time 🙂

I have a lot of poems to type up, with last months efforts too I now have almost a reporters note book full of material, this needs to be typed up and edited and some of it submitted.

I’ve written about five specifically for submission – I found it very useful to go and find places looking for poems and writing things for them. These are the poems I am most worried about though, which is daft.

After a slow start I am now back up to speed so am very happy 🙂

I’ve never written a haiku but there was a competition to win a signed book by a man called Becket who I came across via Anne Rice. So I wrote the below poem, I didn’t win but everyone seemed to like the Haiku – it is not the traditional form but does count as a modern haiku.

Hibernating books cluster,
dusty shelves forgotten,
dreams and dangers within.

There’s a lovely little pusskin
A hungry little cat
Who is waking from a cosy,
snuggled little nap

The lovely little pusskin
Likes a little pat
But here comes the biscuits
It’s time for her snack!

Melting the slipstream
You and me
So we can start again

My Reality Tunnel is blocked
The light at the end obscured
Escape was inevitable
Now it is all but deniable
An inversion has occurred
A Reality Funnel
Sucking me down
To the half truths
And questions of perceptions

Dark twisted loam
Lain in ribbons upon the landscape
River clogging, chocked the plane
Drenched in the bones
Of peoples that made it
Toxic leachate spumes forth
Nothing but their corroded skin
Killing the life left

I got the bones of a general story introduction poem and the start of Cinderella written last night (after midnight), they are going to take a lot of tweaking to make story and poetry work.

My general aim is to work through the fairy tales and legends, I already have a few rhyming stories like this.

The insanity of me is that now I want to produce a book with 100 of them in :/ Of course illustrated.

We shall see. Rhyming couplets also seem to be the thing that sits well with these stories at the moment but an entire book of that would drive you mad! So I do want to play with structure a bit.

I’m taking part in the WoPo challenge to write a poem a day in February, though I’ll be doing my standard of changing it slightly so that I am spending 30 hrs on poetry stuff instead. I know there are only 28 days in Feb but the 30 hrs suits me really well 🙂

I’m thinking of doing something slightly different with it anyway – I like rhyming stories so was thinking I could try and do 30 rhyming or verse stories this month. It is kind of an insane idea as they will tend to be longer than my normal poems are but I think it is doable (weather it’s doable around the homework is another thing!).

Anyway wish me luck!

(and yes I will probably up at midnight writing 😉 )