Turquoise Monster

Dear friend, I love you
But I am only free to say so
As you are gone forever
And I am married
So finally
I say
I love you

I should have told you
But held my council
And then things where never in the right places
To say
And I could not
For fear of rejection
For fear of friendship lost

I should have told you
That first day
I should have screamed it
To the clouds
Then you would have laughed
And kindly turned me down
And our class would have laughed with scorn
And I would have drifted away free
And friendship would have been awkward
Then severed
And I would not be here
With a breaking heart
I wouldn’t be feeling this pain

Wouldn’t have to tell my husband
The way I feel
As he holds me close and treats me gently
I love him more
But was that only circumstance?

Either way I can say it now

I love you

Saturday ie tomorrow I will be doing a quick poetry reading in the Waterstones in Cheltenham with some fantastic other poets (it’s a quick one as I’m running away to a family wedding!). This event is organised by the Cheltenham Poetry Festival who have been putting on some fantastic events through out the year. The readings in the Waterstones are going to be the first Saturday of each month 11-2pm.

Another event that they are running is Poetree in the Park – the last one got in the news paper along with a cute picture of Jean holding up a poetry dragon 🙂

I’m going to be running an number of workshops and courses mainly for kids for the Festival and the new Center Arts in Cheltenham on top of the craft workshops I do for festivals anyway 🙂 They are also holding an Exhibition in Braille in September which I hope to have a textural art piece in (made of papier mache of course!).

On top of that I hope to have the poetry book sorted soon and also take the Monster Writing Game to the next level. I do however need more outlets for my art work – I may get an exhibition soon but I need to be in shops and stuff more than doing craft fairs each Sunday. The trouble with that I’ve been finding is that you have to spend money out in the first place to buy shelf space very few places do it on commission. I would also love as I think I mentioned about three years ago now :/ to become a member of the Gloucester Guild of Craftsmen but again it takes money and I am still only braking even as I am still building up my equipement and stocks at the moment.

I will confess to having gotten carried away with making educational games and designing crafts to help the kids engage in writing workshops but I finially feel I am heading in the right direction here 🙂

Oh and also some of my local kids poetry is going to be on display at the village Flower Festival this weekend which is well just lovely 🙂

A sound
A colour
A sensation
Golden dust
Iridescence
Candescance
Shimmer

Beer in these places
Bronze stags
Burnished metal
Chain link as fat as yer arm
Wood chunky
Pragmatic
Blackened and scared with age

Beer in glass barrels
Indented in windows
Handle reassuring and thick
Mine has a big head
Yours does not
You laugh and say it’s cider

They say they have hearts of stone
Or they are as hard as rock
But watch the chalk powder
Soft and obliterated
It is stone, It is rock
In water, soft as butter

Clay is rock
Rock that is malleable
You can form it to any shape
These people so impenetrable
Are vulnerable just like us

Even heavy basalt
Dark and heavy
May fracture
with the easiest of blows
Hard but brittle

Strength in some axes
Not in all

They say they have
Mountains of strength
Or that they are immovable
But watch the slate quarry
Welsh Mountains
Split and eroded
By the smallest creatures
Making nests
Split and eroded by the miner
Split and eroded by curious children

Every Mountain will wash to the sea
It is only a question of time
Look for the signs, the cracks
And be kind
We are all
Hard as rock

Beautiful rainbow
Garden of the sea
Looped around itself
Flowers bloom
Purple-blue
Intricacies of colour
Entwined
White sands
Azure-Turquoise
Clear and pure
The above world
A mirror
Clouded with reflected colour
Shimmer and ripple

Creakings of the mind
Send shivers down my spine
In this place
In this place
Rainbow colour shard
Memories will not be marred
In this place
In this place

I blush
And sip
Mine’s not even beer
tangy citrus malt
Shandy for me
And cider for you

Beer in the others hands
Bitter for him
Lager for her
Ale, Stout
And many exotic liquids
And the biggest of them all?
A mixer with a mixer
in a thimble glass
We laugh
We joke

Little transparencies hide
Ghosts amongst the anemones
Hiding in tentacles
That massacre

Predator in the Coral Jungle
Abundant, hungry
Always hungry
Prey in the Coral Jungle
Scared, in fear
Always in fear
A paradise of perpetual hell
An edge world
Finely balanced
Between the starving
And the eaten

Make it paradise true
Shift the paradigm
Remove the predator
Remove the hunger
Remove the fear
Remove the edge
The prey rejoice
No longer scared
No longer hunted
Rainbow flashes
Flitting everywhere
And killing
They kill
This Uneasy Eden

Bleached to the bone
Rainbow seas
White skeletons
Ghosts of what was before
No hunger
No fear
No lie
In this Uneasy Eden