*rises from pit of nothingness* I LIVE! I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m actually still here. You know. I’m afraid that May favourites are probably going to be a little delayed this time round due to exams and all that, but they should be up by next weekend. (But that might have to allow for some wiggle room.)

I haven’t posted any poetry in a while, and since I have a few odds and ends collecting dust in the depths of my computer I decided to dig one of those out for you today. And look! Line breaks! Impressive, right? 😉 No, seriously. I usually struggle a lot with line breaks (sometimes just omitting them) so I’m rather pleased with that. I can’t for the life of me fix the middle section, but SOMEDAY. SOMEDAY. *nods head vigorously*

Also I’m awful with titles and this didn’t turn out how I meant it to so it’s not so relevant BLEURGHH plus I reused all my old lines

Persephone

your ring is polished from
nights of skin and guilt you’re
trying to erase her but the
vanish isn’t working

on your body
either: you insist that
you’re fine but your fingernails tell a
different story, one of caffeine and corpses and
lipstick accusations in the
mirror
still there. (the

fridge light watches, dispassionate, your
ungodly tears. see, you’ve twisted the
game too much:

the hell you made for her haunts
you instead.)

After having enormous fun writing my last prose poetry/numbered poem, I then went on a spree and wrote several more. (Not all of which I’m going to share, because a) during that kind of writing process I tend to reuse all my best lines and b) THEY ARE COMPLETELY ATROCIOUS AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE.)

Weirdly, I went through my music phase before orchestra. This one was kind of inspired by someone I know who found their old transcription of Enya’s Watermark. I had to play a with lot with the weird formatting in order to make it work with WordPress *glares*.

I don’t like it as much as my last one. I feel like it’s maybe missing something, but I’ve been editing it for way too long now to tell exactly what. I think I just need to take a break. As ever, comments and critique are much appreciated. 🙂 (Though just a warning: If you’re sensitive to language, then maybe pass over this one.)

Funeral March in F
i. you play in F sharp major from our out of tune piano. the keys cut your skin to a bloody mess, but you brush me away: it’s nothing, you say as you transcribe with dripping fingers. it makes no difference. (but you still stained the photo.)
ii. I don’t want a fucking gift, you seethe as we leave the concert hall. you tell me to the trundles of the bus that a gift is nothing but the whim of a god, that you’d rather build from your own blood and bone than cut someone else. (but don’t they say that the knife always knows its master?)
iii. you live in the fridge light from three in the morning, when the kitchen is cast in empty fifths. the piano is your midnight company, your dance partner across dark keys: I try to mimic your skeleton chords, but you refuse my touch with durezza.
iv. you’re spinning to fast, too far. you confide in me with shaking vocals how you cry in the bedroom, the bathroom, the shower. I know your theory is gone when you go on to preach of stars and spontaneous combustion and things you never used to believe in, about how the universe will make an exception for you just this once. (I should have seen the madness in your eyes. I should have known what would come.)
iv. you’re standing, and it’s wrong wrong wrong –
you were supposed to –
no –
nonononononoNO –
NO –
no
v. I used to think that the world was full of too much beauty, but not anymore. remember, I watched your body fall like a broken bird. I watched you as you stood poised to fly, soaring, until your bones fell heavy with heartaches and you crumpled to the floor. I remember, and I do not forgive.
vii. their sighs merge into an endless stream of sorrysorrysorry that comes in and out with the days like the tide. my steps are slow, syncopated; grave, they’d say in italy. (but have no fear, darling: I’m not quite ready to give up this metronome yet.)
viii. I remember how you played F sharp major, the keys cutting your fingers to a bloody mess. I look down at my own perfect palms and at last, with your silver-scarred hands folded across your corpse in prayer, I cry.

So, this is my first go at prose poetry…? (If that’s what it actually is. I fail at definitions of poetry form.) I took some inspiration from the Merlin/Nimue myth, but I think that this did evolve from that into its own story. I’m happy with some parts, I think. though not all. I feel like I’m getting a little better at this editing lark. A little. Maybe.

As ever, comments & critique are much appreciated! I also have some exciting bookish things happening at the moment, but I’m sadly not allowed to talk about them yet. (I promise, I’m not just giving annoying cliffhangers. *glares at Pierce Brown* Though that wouldn’t be too far a stretch of the imagination. But I’m not, I swear! 😉 )

Lady of the Lake
i. she is volatile, mercurial. she likes to bait the sleeping bear just for the fun of it, but you look away because she’s a wild thing, too.
ii. your skin is stained with her consonants and coffee breath rhythms. her eyeliner is as much a drug as her cigarettes and all of it is addictive.
iii. when you asked for a wizard and received a witch, you didn’t realise how different they were. her contradictions are your cure, but they tell you they’re a curse. you don’t listen. you tell her everything, anyway.
iv. you sign away your heart at the altar whilst she kisses another behind the church walls. she is a fickle being, but you love her, anyway.
v. you don’t know how to calculate theorems anymore, unless it’s from the geometry of her face. her mind is filled with star birth and supernovae against your own worn torchlight.
vi. she is a broken thing, but isn’t that the way geniuses always are? she falls apart from the fault lines on her skin and you can’t seem to unravel the strings between you.
vii. you know that she is your death and your drowning, but as you surrender yourself to her lips you start to think that maybe it no longer matters.

You thought that my obsessions had come to an end at books and movies and comics and TV shows? Well, I hate to say it, but apparently not. I have since discovered the wonderful resource of Tumblr to feed my poetry addiction, and I think it’s fair to say that I now have more quotes written in my school calendar than ever before. So, yeah, I wrote a poem about how I’m obsessed with poetry.

I feel like I’m getting a tiny bit better at this writing lark in relation to decent stand-alone lines, but I still find it hard to make a cohesive piece of work. I have about a gazillion half-finished poems on my computer and in the backs on notebooks. As ever, though, comments are completely welcome; I apologise that you have to see this somewhat cringe-inducing writing, but hey! *self-motivational mode activates* This is the only way I’m going to improve, right?

I Fall Asleep With the Pain of Poetry Staining my Fingers

What they don’t tell you is that this gift is really a curse,
a chemical equation set to carbon that will
stab at your nerve endings
until you don’t know who you are except for the pain.

What they don’t tell you is how before long you’ll be addicted to this ink;
how before long you’ll be begging it to carve into your skin
its truths that aren’t really truths at all.
(Because I don’t know what the truth is, darling,
but I don’t think it tastes of starlight.)

Well I’m sorry if you were looking for
the heroine that preached a different lexis, but I only tell the story how it is:
me, smoking poem after poem into the fading evening light.

My great-uncle sets crosswords. I’ve personally never set (or solved) a crossword in my life, but I like to think that it’s not all that different from how I write poetry.

The pretty-language part of poetry is, for me, all about hiding your meaning in your words. (Scrap all that creative inspiration stuff.) It’s like playing the Association Game: you’ve got to find something that’s related, but at the same time as different as you can get it, and by the end you can see no relation to what you started with at all; you’ve chosen your path so well that you can’t quite remember your way back through the maze. Logic tells you that is related, and you know it’s true, but it also feels a little bit like cheating.

So, despite the fact that I can’t solve a crossword to save my life, I hold a glimmer of hope that I’ve inherited some of my great-uncle’s crossword-setting skills. I’m now off to use them in an excellent manner by reading Pierce Brown’s Golden Son – which is to say, not using them at all!

Merry Christmas! My house is finally my own again, as is the computer (mostly). I have tons of poems on my desktop just waiting to be revised, but I’m not sure if I want to publish them. I think I should stop writing such personal poems…

Anyway, I only realised after I wrote this that it kind of turned into Ten Things I Hate About You, but hey, I like that movie. I spent a good deal of time whilst I was writing this trying to find synonyms for the adverb ‘even’, but it’s still not the same as before. Any critique is very welcome – I’m only just starting out, so I’m looking to improve.

I’ll be reviewing the year and setting some goals for the next one in an upcoming post, so do look out for that!  Also: I got the Spirited Away soundtrack for Christmas, and I am completely in love with The Dragon Boy. Because Haku. And brass.

Bittersweet Fall

well I hate that you can still
make me smile, even though I
say that I’m over you; even though
my eyes never meet yours, you can
still find my hand under the table.

(I say that but you know I don’t mean it –
I never do.)

well I hate that I was drawn to you
like a moth to a lampshade, irrepressibly.
I was never deserving of your love,
I have realised; you were not
looking for these dust-ridden wings of
mine, you were looking for a butterfly to
run away with you to paradise.

(and I am sorry I could not take you there.)

well I hate that I was so taken in
by your dazzling jewels and trinkets;
I, who opposed everything you stood for,
had further to fall than all the rest.

(and my, I did.)

well I hate that you still rule
the day and I am confined to this darkness;
I suppose it is beautiful in its own way
but that just reminds me of how
you described me like I was something good,
something special. I guess
you know now I’m not the moon, or the stars.
I’m nothing.

(how I ache for your light, your warmth.)

well I hate how they look at me with pity,
though they have stooped lower than I.
what makes me worthy of this crime?
I think it was the way that you were too good
even for them: you were invincible –
no one dared touch your golden skin save for me,
and my fingers are still singed.

(I opened this box of evil upon myself;
it was I that did this.)

well I hate that I am still brooding
over your face; however much I
tell myself to stop you just don’t seem
to go away.

ARGH. This poem has been such a wily little thing – first, distracting me during school so that I couldn’t do the homework, then dragging me away from NaNo, and all the while being such a pest and urging me to rewrite about a billion times. And, to make things worse, I have tons of other drafted/mentally drafted posts that I really want to get posted. *grinds teeth in frustration*

To sum things up with a quote, I feel like a reverse black hole of words:

“Do you ever feel,” Cath asked Nick Tuesday night, “like you’re a black hole – a reverse black hole…”
“Something that blows instead of sucks?
“Something that sucks out,” she tried to explain. “A reverse black hole of words.”
“So the world is sucking you dry,” he said, “of language.”
“Not dry. Not yet. But the words are flying out of me so fast, I don’t know where they’re coming from.”
“And maybe you’ve run through your surplus,” he said gravely, “and now they’re made of bone and blood.”
“Now they’re made of breath,” she said.

 – Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

Anyway. I’ve recently inspired to write poetry again by the wonderful Topaz Winters – please, please, go and read some of her stuff – and I have four or so half-finished poems sitting unloved in my documents. Hopefully you’ll be seeing some of them soon, but maybe not until December.

Writer
If poetry is the truth,
then the truth is nothing but feathers scattered to the wind;
each word binds my fingers further into falsehood.
Yet I remain as I am with my weapons at the ready:
I will write.

I will write, and you will read, and we will wield our pens
like swords, in spite of
everything.

I will draw the words from the stone as Arthur drew his blade,
as no one has done before,
and if I cannot then I will still try.
I will search for the wings that will allow me to fly,
up,
off,
and
into
the sky.