A raw WoPo poem:
Simplicity grows ever more complex
Until it spreads butterfly wings
Flying away to strange waters
Mathermatical Certainty
Order breaking down and beyond is Chaos
A new regime of ermergance
As if the system is reset
Using new, exotic tools
A raw WoPo poem:
Around and around, each time changed
By the minute, not enough to see
Shifting beneath, unsteady feet
Scratching the surface, uncertainty
Bursting with multitudes of worlds
Linked together, by the passage of time
Changing the small and tipping Chaos onto the scene
Sewing the threads of differences, barely noticed
Epochs show the march in lives and deaths
Leave scars, within and without
A raw WoPo poem:
The city lay dormant
Chill are in pre-drawn
Stretched grey
The road damp
And then…
A truck
Just one
Slow chug
Strang electric whine
Depositing milk
Now people erupt
Onto the scene
One here, two there
Emergence
Slow and lethargic
Heading to bus stops
Car engines stall
Pedestrians plod along
Blearily the moment arrives
An ant hill of civilisation
Frantic
Shifting tides
Workers
Bosses
Scurrying and carrying
The day has begun
A raw WoPo poem:
Stark
Sharp clear
No place to hide
Softness gone
Into lines
Edges
A raw WoPo Poem
Serenity of mind, stilling limbs that flailed
Marks of tension, deep furrows etched,
eased with a flowing outwards
The pain trapped within lanced like a wound
There is Freedom at the core of being
A raw WoPo poem
Ability – to do what?
Anything or nothing
I used to climb
Do archery
Fix things
Then it hit like a hammer
So some days
Bed is all there is
Some days the pain is all there is
Months of learning to walk again
And again and again
Hands that can sometimes
Draw, paint, mould and create
Reduced to rubber
Ineffectual
Can’t even feed my baby
Me…
The mother invalid
No ability
Swiped and lost
Relient on help
Once so proud to do it all
All I can do
Is sing when I can
Sing lullabies to children so small
And when I lay there unable to do
When pain is all there is
I weave words in my head
A creative tapestry
Worlds I create
For wide eyed tots
A new ability born
Such things had no place
In the life I had before
The energy and drive of the younger self
Never had time
I have a new richness
Born from the sorrow
An imagining of what I would be doing
If I were her once more
Stories and tellings and pictures and…
Abilities change
Do what you can
With what you’ve got
It is the trying
That must never stop
I have been chugging away at the poetry and have in fact surpassed the total number but the poems are raw and in need of some desperate editing. A lot of them are also concepts that have been flying around my head for months. Add in the fact that I wrote in the Arts Cafe and have attended a workshop and the total count is not surprising.
However it has not been plan sailing – I have been rather ill again with blood problems making me pass out if I am not careful – this again has made me more likely to sit and write poetry for hours on end but the quality is not my normal standard as to be quiet honest I am a bit thick at the moment!
Having said that I am going to continue plodding onwards with writing poetry and maybe even editing some this month and I should improve soonly. Also I have decided to submit a poetry collection to publishers and see how I go with that.
Last night I finally managed to make it along to a Cheltenham Poetry Society meeting, having gotten lost on a previous attempt!
The group was small but full of poetic-ness. The night opened with a writing exercise which covered Chinese style poetry and four part poems plus a bit about language. I wrote about 8 drafts some a lot rougher than others, some heavily rhyming and some short and sweet.
Also I have kept the sheet of ideas which I was working through and shall continue to work my way through them.
This has bought me up to nearly 20 poems already done for my WoPoWriMo challenge so I think it is a good job I am going for the hour a day spent on poetry rather than just the poem drafts themselves.
Then we moved onto a critic cycle where each of us would read a poem and others would comment on it. This was extremely useful as it it showed me that something Iw as trying to adapt to a page poem from a visual poem would perhaps be bettre suited to performance. Of course not everybody liked it and the absence of punctuation made people twitch.
I heard some fantastic poems and it is good to socialise with other writers other wise I find I get mired with feeling so one my own with writing
A raw Wopo poem:
My Friend
You are loud
Talking incessantly
Just calm down please
Words cascade over me
Your happy, your sad
In love, oh no mad?
On and On…
Words
Tripping over tongue
As the story is spun out
I missed which of the love interests
We are discussing today
Around you I am quiet
Or at least appear so
It is a contrast
When you are gone
Others moan I am so loud
Or that I babble so
My friend
I can only take you an hour
At a time
But this is fine
We are friends
With memories made
So coffee tomorrow?
The usual place?
I love writing poetry in note books rather than straight onto the computer – I do sometimes type them straight out but not normally as I write poetry when and were the idea strikes and this often means that I am out or in bed or some such. I always carry a note book with me, my laptop sits mostly on my desk.
Though I do use reporter note books with the throw away flimsy card covers, this tend to only be if I am working on something like The Little Books and know I am just going to fill them up quickly with mostly dross that will be thrown away or have been caught at a hospital with out a note book. What I favour is the more expensive notebooks, sometimes very expensive and sometimes from the pound shop. I have moods so they vary in style from beautiful embossed metallic purple butterflies to black and white photos to sparkly dragons, velvet micky mouses, abstract designs, dali and of course spider man.
These books double as a diary and note book with me working from each end to meet in the middle. One issue I am coming across is that the cheaper note books do note keep ink as nicely due to the acid in the paper – I wish I’d known this sooner but I didn’t. I do now.
I tend to write in biro – I used to write in fountain pen but stopped as it tended to mean I could use only one side of the paper and it slowed my writing speed (a lot).
Note books are not the only thing I crave to create – I need visual and audio stimuli. Not necessarily whilst writing, but within a couple of weeks and preferably just before sitting down though some of it does need to sink in for later works.
Now for the last ingredient – I am obsessed with hot drinks.
It doesn’t really matter if it is herbal tea, normal tea, posh tea, coffee, latte, hot choc or mulled wine. For writing challenges I like to pick a specific mug – this year for WoPo I have chosen the new cupcake mug I was given for my birthday. The icing lid helps to keep the tea warm if I get carried away with the writing too!