Turquoise Monster

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!

Yesterday I did not follow the writing exercises for WoPoWriMo instead I went into Cheltenham and meet up with some other fellow WoPos and gave out stickers and postcards. Then I went on to Centre Arts a local art gallery and workshop centre which I love. They hold an arts cafe every Saturday afternoon.

This was the first one I made it along to. I sat and chatted to artists and knitters and writers and looked at the paintings and drank tea and coffee and eat cookies and wrote poems.

I actually penned about 10 in the end which was amazing though I would say that I am experimenting with the shorter type of poem once again.

It was a very productive day and I recommend trying to find something similar in an area near you if you are a poet.

One raw Wopo poem

Creativity burns
Within
A fire
Inspiration lit
Skill built
Fuelled by ideas
Sending concepts
To the stars

This is the web-badge for WoPoWriMo and yes it is one of my drawings 🙂 I am still trying to write my poem so you may well be getting it tomorrow – I have decided to post something on here each day during the challenge but obviously this means the poems are going to be raw and not edited so sorry about that!

I am once again taking part in the February poetry writing challenge WoPoWriMo. After a successful MoP in January I am hopeful for this challenge but I am also running the site for them again this year so may find it a bit of a stretch!

Unlike MoP I am going to be sticking to the prompts which I haven’t done since the first year! This year is WoPo’s fifth birthday which seems nuts but there you go.

Wish me luck 🙂

I already have 48 poems – some very rough, others less so and all dark and twisted and fitting with the gothic theme so I am very happy 🙂

They will steadily be appearing on Black Monster.

Yet again this year I failed to actually sign up to the site :/ But as the poems were of a darker nature I felt that they wouldn’t have been appropriate for their area for posting poems anyway.

Later this year I hope to tie the poems in with a similar set of flash fictions and maybe a novelette.