Poets Corner - Blog Posts

The Poet's Corner Window at Westminster Abbey, designed by Graham Jones, with diamonds for Alexander Pope, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Marlowe, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Herrick, A.E. Housman, and Frances Burney (descending, left then right)

Studiekeuze

Daarvoor was ik uitgesneden

Het meesterwerk

Dat elke grens mijn zijn bevat

Talent vult de oppervlakte

Maar wat met de houtschilfers

Het genadeloze lemmet

De verdoemdde onbestaandheid

Uit welke grootse toekomts ben ik

Uit-

Weg-

Gesneden

Zelfs al zou realisatie mij wonderen

Materiaal blijft onveranderbaar

Bloed loopt tegendraads

En tegen zwaartekracht

Maar niet tegen de grens die het

lemmet schiep

Niet tegen het sneed

De oppervlakte

Het schild

Vastgebeiteld met mij

En al mijn "talent"

Can you hear this?

Raise your hand

Right

Left

Oh you can’t hear?

Take this for your

Right

Left

Can we test it again?

See if you lost

More

Less

This matches your hair

They'll see it

Less

More

I want the pink one

So they see it

On my right and on my left

Go back to your roots he said

Go back to the house and your bed

Go back to the char and the ash he said

Go lay in the dirt and be sad

Oh look at my roots, how they burnt I said

I cry and I stand over them

I wish they would grow so I water them

Water them with my tears, they don’t grow I said

Then take me away to a place, he said

And it could make us feel safe

A place yet it wasn’t our home I said,

But home wasn’t home, not to me I said

I yearn for a place to call home he said

For all of my roots to grow back

But if I go back to that house, he said

My roots will burn all along with them

My brothers roots are burning too I said

How do I handle those flames

I water and water and water them

The flames they hurt all that I love I said

Oh why would someone from above I said

He sat and he listened to me then said

Oh he has a plan with the ash he said

But why oh why did I have to be the ash I said

When others were allowed to be trees I said

Oh I was born with my roots burnt I said

Maybe, oh,

Maybe, that’s beautiful he said

But really it all just makes me mad I said

Mad that I can’t be a tree I said

Mad I can’t be evergreen I said

Well fine go ahead and be mad he said

But the world needs people like you who are ash

To help the trees grow, and be glad

Let's be honest.

Let's be truthful.

When you meet your own eyes in the mirror

Can you recognise or a least reconsider

The apathy

That you let cling to thee

It's carefully downing you

It feels a secure embrace

But you're afloat

You've lost the boat, to passion, to joy, to meaning

It's calling out

ahoy

Where did you go

I see your eyes meet mine in the mirror

I see what once was starting to flicker

Are you but a ghost

A lost dream turning thinner.

Anyone else physically recoil when thinking about how we are made of flesh and bone. I can even look at uncooked meat, if I've seen it raw I can't eat it cooked. And if it looks like a limb I'm not eating it at all. Then I think about how my body is uncooked meat and my bones possible tools and I shudder, I feel far too close to the tendons and the blood, I feel alive, so alive that the sound of my heart is a warning and a blessing, I feel so alive I'm afraid I'll die, I'm afraid of how gruesome it is.

I try to write something, anything, but the words are only clear when I feel them press against my heart and mind. They become muffled when hands reach for them, they loose their shape.

An incoming phone call you say

And I freeze like a deer in headlights

Have I been hit, I feel blooding rushing past my ear drums

My heart is beating quick

then quicker, a fast rapid flicker

it's trying to run away, but my body won't move

Instead my body stands shock still and I watch locked in, but so far removed

I'm dizzy spinning around and round in my amygdala, a ringing is pulsing against the outside walls of it

trying to get inside

I cannot hide

Then the ringing just stops

it's stops

Incoming call is dropped and rational thinking has lost.

Hollow eyes watching the crowd

it's mid day, It's busy

People rush to stores like beds of fish

Fish with magpie eyes looking for shiny things to take back to their home

The figure watching, Is ignored

To look at those hollow eyes would mean to look at their own magpies ones

To confront the misery and their lack of it

So instead they talk louder as they walk past, they drown out a defeated "excuse m–

Or they become silent, their steps quick and their eyes down as they click and swipe

As the figure with hollow eyes watches you pretend to type.

I know right now, with everything that's going on in the world, it feels like the night will last forever, it's darkness stretching out for years and years ahead. But I have to say that one day, the soft pull of life will tug at you. You'll find yourself sitting quietly in the summer months enjoying the warm rays and the birdsongs, maybe you plant some flowers or berrys. You'll laugh till your sides ache and your heart lightens. You'll make art and get paint on your clothes and on your carpet. You'll read books your friend recommend and gush over your favourite characters together, maybe you'll write your own. That's what's getting me through, that one day it will be summer, the days soft and I'll have my book finished in my hands and maybe someone will read it. Maybe they won't. But it's things like this, the soft things, that make everything worth it.

There's a girl with my name, we don't look the same but we both huddle under covers when it rains. There's a girl who is almost my age, yet we have the same moon sign and we always forget the time. There's a girl reading what I write who comments every night and I can only hope that life treats you kindly, this girl will one day be in the ground and so will I, but I hope as you age you'll shed those debilitating fears that hold you back and hopefully we'll have lived a life of joy and mostly happy tears.

When I think of you I think of red, the red of our kitchen walls, the red that you always chose to colour your lips with or wear with your clothes. I think of my red blood rushing past my ears, I think of the sound it made.

I worry

I stress

I am a pylon

I am tangled in cables

I am no longer connected to the grid

Energy is lost

It's falls through a sieve

And all I'm left with is dust and static lint

I barely rinse

I Repeat

the same defeat of sinking into my bed

I am animated meat

suspended over my own stupid once avoidable mess.