Turquoise Monster

This maybe a bizarre thing to do this close to the years end as we are in the dying quarter but I feel that so far 2020 has been the year that has not happened but I can’t let it remain that way and so I am starting over – this is my new year – this is my time to do the things I want to do and mainly I want to write and craft and go for walks – that last one is probably going to be the trickiest but none the less it shall be attempted!

So were does this leave me writing wise?

Well prepping for NaNoWriMo – NaNo is a novel writing challenge where the aim is to write a novel in the month of November or at least write 50, 000 words. You can set your own goals as well and I always find it a good way to get myself writing again. I suppose in truth for the last 10 yrs this time of year has always been the starting again and rebirth of the creativeness from the hectic event schedule of the summer months. But this is obviously long form and prose writing and not poetry so why is that even relevant?

It all has to do with the way I work – once I start writing I write loads – lots in all sorts of forms like the ideas for poems are there hiding and only feel confident enough to come out when I am doing other things. So I shall do other things and loop my writing and creating around in a tangle.

There are many such writing and drawing and making challenges as NaNoWriMo – I even run a few myself such as WoPoWriMo which is back in Feb and unsurprisingly was a bit of a flop this year though I did post stuff I wasn’t as pro active as I should have been because I was already pretty ill from seizures and things. But what I did do was still worth it and still resulted in people writing and getting poems published and I was fortunate I had scheduled stuff because that I could just share to keep them going. I myself did no to little writing and that is unheard of and has typified this year.

So what I have done is make a list of all the things I would normally do – all these creative challenges and I am steadily and hapazadly working my way through them because for the first time this year my mind is buzzing and needing to make again.

I am not even really prioritising joining in with the challenges others are currently doing though those are the ones I am sharing on social media.

Having gone through a lean period of no jobs for either of us I am afraid that as soon as my partner got their new job and before they got their first pay packet I was off buying note pads and books and refills. I mean I also had to get stationary for the school term as well as stuff that was provided by the schools now isn’t but still I spent in all honesty too much on new note books – don’t worry I plan to share their beauty with you all.

Once of the important things for me as well is roping others into these insane challenges, so my family is being subjected to gifts of writing materials and I am carving out specific writing times for us. This is a little double edged as the 9 yr old is a little jumpy around still and very loud and needs a lot of help with spelling and mostly still draws their stories but they are still joining in and creating and they normally only do about half an hour though sometimes they get carried away and just keep going. This time is also snack and drink time so works quiet well.

I have been placing caches of writing materials in the places I tend to hang out and using my portable tech a lot to take notes and do research. Mainly I will confess I have been making lists and drawing bubble web things with too many arrows and trying to order my brain and get myself back into the various writingscapes of my imagination. I am conflicted over my main prose project as it is a little too close to the bone with what is happening in the actual world and I am not sure how good it would be for me to write let alone for people to read at the moment but it is a large and complex universe and has other time periods and tales to tell so maybe I just need to shift sideways a bit or maybe as last yr was my 10th NaNo it is time to start a new project?

I don’t know.

From having a complete dearth of poetic writings I have in the last few weeks been composing again. It is slow going and I some of it is I realised just rewrites of stuff I have already written but the process is going again and the poetry train of thought is once again primed and eggar to be off down the tracks no doubt to derail itself on something minor but lets enjoy it whilst we can!

I suppose with all this babbling I should probably stop typing this and go and do some creating – oh and Happy New Creative Year <3

This year has not been what I thought it would be – that is often the case but this year more so than normal and this time not just for me. Global events have shaken all our lives to a greater or lesser extent. This upheaval has cost many their lives and upended others, I myself ended up very sick and having a nice trip to hospital in an Ambulance whilst wondering if I was ever going to see my family again.

The pandemic of covid-19 has stirred up feeling in society I had hoped were extinguished with the libration of the concentration camps at the end of the second world war but if I am honest I already know that the festering puss of eugenics was always in a shallow grave and just waiting to pop back to the surface. I am seeing the disabled and chronically ill being side lined and even told to just get on and die by those who are supposed to be our friends and protectors, authorities and work colleagues alike. I am also seeing people going out of their way to help regardless of their own hardships and that is something else – the flip side – an amazing.

Lock down has been hard on people especially mothers who have had their support networks basically made illegal whilst meeting and laughing in a pub by mostly men is absolutely fine. This stark contrasts and contradictions plus back peddling and muddled thinking define the crises here in the UK, especially as the year has drawn on and floods and storms have added to the stresses. Unemployment and employment shifts have abounded with backs fluctuating between being magnanimous and strike you whilst you are down.

Erosions of human rights especially LBGTQ+ community have begun with barely a whimper from anyone outside of the community thanks to the manufactured war between the different types of feminism and rainbows. It is a mess and a wedge driven too deep by those that once added balm to the cuts and bruises of the general bigotry of life. Allies now fight.

Many of us have lost our jobs, or in my case my entire industry – it is not a good time to work in events.

And in all of this pain and stress and confusion people were sharing memes about how Shakespeare and other such artistic heroes created and made master pieces whilst in quarantine so that’s obviously what we should have all been doing – and they meant it well and mainly it was them kicking themselves up the back side but others were seeing it as duty to create and record the goings on and were telling others off for not doing so. But people where (and are) dying and we couldn’t even attend the funerals except by weblink and it stank and hurt and was not… just not something that was conductive to creation for many.

I have written very little this year – I have started to loose count of the people I have lost, I keep forgetting people are now dead and that is horrendous. I missed a funeral because I couldn’t get zoom to work – it is laughable and I did laugh until I cried and then I laughed and then was in a weird sob-laugh state.

And that’s another thing – I was asked to perform and take part in the fantastic online array of performances and events but… I have little to no voice, I am horse – I can not sing or read out loud to the kids even so there is no performing for me – no live streams or recording my poetry for youtube. Nope – just lots of sipping various beverages and brews in the hope that they might in some way help. Add to that that I just did not have good enough tech until the middle of last month for the preferred ZOOM to work for me :/

The virus affects eyesight as well – as does the extra autoimmune system disease it has left me with so I have had to learn to adapt to even worse eye sight than I had previously – my glasses can no longer correct everything and I risk further damage before this is over. I have premature ageing of the eyes and a host of other issues. But my new glasses have made it so that I can sit at my computer again and work…. half a year into the illness.

And tentatively I have started to create again but I am not looking at producing more than normal…. oh no I keep having bouts of being poorly again or having to home school the kids due to them having a temperature and waiting for tests or isolations/lockdowns happening and I have my elderly mother to look after – no I am facing the fact that I missed a lot of the writing challenges – I started and aborted them and yet I feel I want to at least revisit those as they are normally important project drivers for me.

As such I have lists of things I can dip in and out of but I do not need to complete anything.

Fevers and Graves Disease have made my normally vivid dreamscape into living visions or hallucinations with beautiful landscapes and narratives that would make epic films. I have begun trying to record them but only have vague notes from the worst of it as I wasn’t entirely conscious when they were really bad. Also until this month I had written a few poems this year – as in under ten and generally composed on twitter or facebook as they had just started as comments on the political situation.

I have been tagging the art and poems with ArtFromMyCovidBed and yes I am still spending a lot of time there and I hate it, I want to be up and running but getting up the stairs leaves me panting and coughing and gasping for breath and it is ridiculous.

My mantra is this is a pandemic and the only thing you have to do in quarantine is SURVIVE.

Having said that I am now just beginning to create again and I have lots of ideas that have been brewing in the nightsweat insomnia that plagues me and there are now a number of political and pandemic based poems. These I hope to weave into a few related collections mixed in with some of the art and stories spun from the fever dreams. They may just be chapters of a larger work or collections in their own right. They are:

Pan Dumb Moan Am I

Pan Ick

Pan Damned It

These will be specifically themed on the pandemic and on going crisis, where as Art From My Covid Bed is just any art I have produced during this recovery period.

I like these titles as there are rings and knots of meaning to them – but that will have to wait for another post.

To the world in general – Health, Hope and Happiness <3

Excel,
well that’s swell,
fever’s lick feels like hell,
The fail of the trace and tell,
population fell,
monies funeral bell,
tolls with the lols of incompetence,
punches roll,
as population control =
morale at all time low,
stow the tins in rows,
you stole 4 day rice in a bowl.

National Poetry Day is a day of celebrating and taking part in all things poetry, this year it is on the 1st of October 2020 and there are lots and lots of virtual events taking place, readings, write-ins and so on.

This years National Poetry Day is a little different to previous years where I’ve trekked out to events or run online chat groups and so on. This year no one is going anywhere thanks to the virus and I am too ill to really take part in much at all even remotely and on line.

However this years theme is actually very relevant to me as since the fever in March I have been having hallucinations – visions if you like and vivid story like dreams which I have been attempting to capture in sketches and writings. I have also had server eye problems due to side effects of the covid and the resulting graves disease (an autoimmune system disease) which has affected my sight – my actual vision. This too is taking some adjustments but I think I am getting there.

Then of course we are looking at the much wider definition of vision – that of the future and the world – this is particularly pertinent at the moment thanks to the political situations in various large powers, our own political mess (and it is a mess what ever political leaning you are – it is a mess!) and the climate chaos that has descended upon us. This year the world has literally been on fire!

Other things I am personally going to be thinking about for the day are: ancient petitions and soothsaying, the visions of shaman and holy practitioners. Thanks to the Gloucester History Festival I have recently learned about an interesting Nun who’s visions look similar from her drawings to what I have been suffering with.

Poets like Shelly where obvious plagued with fever dreams and opium stupors.

And then there is just my own “vision” of the future and myself – what do I want? What wishes do I hope for?

On the day if I am well enough I will share some writing prompts and poems on various platforms:

@saffy

@TheMonsterBlogs

Insta WoPo

Writer and Artist Facebook

World Poetry Facebook

Pinterest WoPo

Ducks swimming in slivers
Green-pink spume as the sun is setting
Whistle shriek, a dog barks

Time
Time Ticks
Time Tick Tocks
Time Tick Tock Tricks
Time Tock Ticks
Time Tocks
Time

Inspired by a paining at the Wilson Gallery March 2017

The bridge was fragmented arches
Three of them, crossing the river
With grey stone feet
Growing slimy from the water
The spill and stuck around them

Remnants of a tower still rose
On one side, but not it’s twin
Nothing but decay
Little windows stared blank eyed
At clouds shattered by row boats

Wakes

People still lived here, in the shadows
Behind jagged triangles of wall
Make shift tents, hardly holding together
Moth eaten and thread bare

They never sort the shelter of the stones
Beyond the gate bridge stood the city
Devolved and reverting
The people knew the horror of it

A tower and a bridge
In ruins – guarding
The Hall of Ghosts
No one wanted the resurgence
Not of that evil

The boats carried seeds
Encouraging natures engulfment
A warm rain added deadly ripples
To the tranquil stream

Beautiful angel drinking red wine
I see her eyes on fire
And I know the blood is mine

Heavenly angel setting out bait
I know it’s a trap
But its also my fait

Shining bright angel walking the earth
I hear her singing
The songs of my birth

Beautiful angel lips ruby red
I feel the cold sky
As I join the dead

The forest is dark,
the trees –
their branches are heavy with leaves of dark maroon,
their trunks are stark white and smooth,
you walk here,
with warmth on your breath,
clouds bloom from you,
white and incandescent,
a veil pours from you,
drifting up that’s also down,
so dark though the sun is a silver ball of harsh fire in the sky.

The light is more sharp
more precise than it ever should be.
It’s a light that does not drive the darkness with its primordial fear away,
instead –
it focuses the shadows,
making them seem deeper, darker, abysses of the mind,
you look at them and they look back,
sucking, pulling at you,
wanting you and you wanting them.

But what of that dark and
the velvet veil beyond,
fear keeps you from it as surely as knowledge.

The trees stir in the icy breeze,
dark red swirls to the ground,
to lay in pools that blanket the feet of the bearer.

Silence would rain here but it may not,
as silence is something,
the trees with slender branches,
reach for the sky quelling any substance to the air,
you walk alone waiting,
trying to look to a sky that hurts the eyes,
that where never there.

I did not want to
I did not want to hate
I did all I could to love
But it stuck in my thought
Memories would not let me abide
And it wound around me
Gorrotting hope from the inside
Stumbling
I was a nugget not a pearl
Swerlling in the currents
Abbradded I lay
Growing smaller
Buffetted by things
I could not see
Sick to the core
Ground down
By the mutual body blows
Of others like me

Too bitter and twisted
Stuck in the stream
Tumbled in their back water
Rut
Again and again and again
Drowning in hate
I did not want
I did not want to
I did not want to hate
But I did.