on travelling

There are things you miss, travelling
Absent things recalled
I miss having my own coffee up,
buying machined hot brown something
No anticipatory smell from opening the bag,
coffee scented with hazelnuts and familiarity

I look at a different menu most nights,
restaurants and hotels, I choose quickly
and eat alone, observing the company
Sometimes a colleague will join me, and rarer, a friend.
I miss cooking at home, or buying a pizza,
heating it up, adding toppings and calling that cooking

I see countries, cities, streets and villages,
Hills and mountains, enclosing forests, shores
Bridges spanning firths and estuaries, and clouds
from the plane. Skies and skies, and more skies and
driving in rain, spatters of red lights and headlights
And always the road, a grey thread sewing the routes

But I sometimes miss my roof terrace.
The decking is slowly rotting because of the rain
but when the sun shines it is a little oasis in my city
Overgrown tubs, grasses and herbs returning to wild
Sitting sipping coffee under contrails and hearing the traffic
knowing that I don’t have to be in it

I sleep easily, in four poster beds, under chintz
or in a modern family room, blandness acceptable
for a night or two. It’s rare to get a view, a horizon
I miss my bed too. For two nights a week, I sleep there
with nowhere to go when I wake
Yet still, I resist the rooting of routine

Inverted Yggdrasil

I reach my branches into the ether
  of zeroes and ones, a binary cloud
  organised and fractal
My twigs twitch and clutch
  the information overload
  taste the ebb and flow
Trolls don't hide under bridges
  but stomp in the open here,
  broken sludge in their wake
My buds are repelled
  the darkness frosts the edges
  turning them inward
Down I go, my roots
  reaching for earthiness
  away from illiteracy, politics
  blasting rhetoric
My toes quest like worms
  and push for warmth, goodness
The fires are raging above
  minds turned inside out
  thoughts splashed everywhere, corrosive
I become a stump
  and wait in the dark
  for the storm to pass

 Written in response to "The Almond Tree" by D H  Lawrence  at the Cardiff Bay Writing Group

Litany against fear

I was afraid of you
I knew you would upset my equilibrium
I knew you would
I knew we would make memories
  to hoard, a jewelled rosary for later years

I was afraid of you
I  knew you would open up my heart
I knew you would
I knew we would walk on, squeeze a blossom of baby's breath
  and twine fingers and thoughts through our lives

I was afraid I would not be good enough for you

Written in response to Sharon Old's "To our miscarried one, aged thirty now" for the Cardiff Bay Writing Group

Still me

Every life is a tangle of moments

running one to the next
Blinking
Slowing

The rope dancer turns
arching arms, sharp angled wrist
commands the lithe rope
a complicit cage
Blink

The sound has stilled
closed eyes
The next moment I am with her
the rope licking at my ankles
composing me
striking my old frame
into a pose, reaching
Blink

For another to photograph
print up and pass around
challenge others thoughts
of stillness
Sit and imagine my moments

Blink




The postcard is from Dave Daggers, and was a prompt from a Cardiff Bay Writing group meeting

Ophelia

The tree is bare
Ophelia
The streams are full
of leaves
The leaves are full
of holes
Ophelia
full of torment
atmospheric wrestling
sheared silhouettes
burnt Saharan light
Dust tipped waves,
the sea smells windy

A warm up exercise (from the tree is bare/ the tree smells bare/the tree smells windy/ the sea smells windy) written outside in the wind.

Walking around the bay

Written to a prompt of "write something about Cardiff in 5 minutes" at the Cardiff bay writing group meetup last night.

So narrow, the world, recently
Head travels only, thinking
overthinking maybe,
the steps to get to the water

The submerged grid of pebbles outside the flat, blind mans crossing
The herringbone brick pavement with its dips and slants, leading
around the corner, down the street

The bilingual sign posts many ways, mermaids and hamadryads here

Resting on red ironwork, hearing the snick-whoosh of cars
speeding up to the bridge

My leg anchoring me but mind travelling on
across to the Taff

Tomorrow, maybe, to walk that far
to watch the swans, white holes in the pewter glitter
bending their necks at the flightless bird.

Of Spiders & love

This piece was written at a Cardiff Bay writing group meeting, with the title being given by the last line of Angeline Harrison's poem "Good Gig"

You appear in the autumn
vibrant, enriching colours
brushing aside web drifts of fog

Leaf showers
abundant golds and rusts
The end, the decay was there
    if I had taken breath to notice

Water globes caught in patterns
laid out in the air

Parcelling up
  Smothering threads
    preserved inside
      until you consume me

dark river 015

Further experiments in erasure art/poetry:

Night Vision

The lower heat, the two combined
Nathan had been watched,
no sugar white vision
Short, gray, something severe

Guards lowered their eyes

He was inside one person
Outside the trees, making a human being















This is the first page of a  collaboration with Sandra Davies. We both have a copy of the same book (The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks) and are working through the pages, seeing what we make of each...
Here is Sandra's page 015; and you can see the images side by side at darkrivererasure.blogspot.co.uk
With lots of nods to Tom Philips, and inspired by a discussion of work by Adam Byatt at A Fullness in Brevity

erasure experiments continued

I've continued experimenting with the zentangle / erasure poetry project, beyond just creating the "output image". Because I like to "see the journey", I hit on the idea of a triptych, showing the original page, the found poem, and the found poem output image. So you get three shots at the same words, in different arrangements. And on paper, I can start to add further lines and words (to really make this feel like a Tom Phillips rip-off!).

Well, it feels like a long project, and I am enjoying myself, anyway :)

papersquare 012: girl in a red dress

Soft armour
Between carmine and fuschia
Broken up by flower patterns
To soften the edges, the challenge.
I am not as confident as I look
Fading back from woman to girl

Butterfly words in the heat,
Alight also, suicide, friendship
People knowingly nod at poems
But I talk of bluebells alone

~

Wind flirts the hem around my knees
on the street, a decision made
For a red dress should be seen.
Mingling through a crowd of judges,
Performing up to my red dress
A near-scarlet woman
Flighty and gone

papersquare 008: flower bee

we used to bring each other colours,
  you had the green of life connected,
  twined through you, rooted past
  and forward tendrils, touching.
I brought the buzzing of black wings,
  yellow striped for danger
  stealing your nectar and free to fly
  to some other flower.
my sting is drawn, withdrawn
  your bark thickened and blossom pale,
  air moves but nothing trembles
  and the bees are disappearing.

BluePrintReview book+lit blog: Magpie Days - Julia Davies

BluePrintReview book+lit blog: Magpie Days - Julia Davies: In July and August, the 100 Days Project gathered story writers, poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, and programmers together...

click above to see the BluePrintReview's blog review of my 100 Days project - please!

Burren

Stone dykes and stone grykes,
soil disappears down the cracks
along with the grey rain.
Plants scramble to get a hold
before the water trickles away;
running deep down the inside of the hills
and reappearing in lakes and turloughs
miles away, palely reflective.

A human sized landscape, it is barren
only from a distance, up close it is rich.
Turf patches, handfuls of sweet earth.
Men have been here a long time,
they take the stone and make stone things,
tombs, dolmens, crosses, walls and forts;
and yes, shelters for contemplative priests.

The seminarian contemplates, up here alone
he can imagine the sloughing off of sin,
an oyster being rinsed by the rain,
gnarled outside, with a wet pearly interior.

Thoughts of disappearing down the cracks; 
a strange fish swimming underground
through the darkened pewter flow
and sudden silvery streams, brief sunlight
on a karst spring, then back down
into a dark sinkhole.

Swimming ahead of the strange salmon
that has eaten the hazelnuts, Father Dermot
had warned them against the burden
of knowledge that the flesh carries.
Oh, flesh, how could he not have tasted it,
tasted hers, ripe and freckled when the sun
danced the lake water to exuberant sparkles?

He swims with sinuous strokes,
racing the salmon, twisting and spiralling,
grey mercurial water and the Atlantic awaits.
He thinks of the water cycle, imagines
himself rising as droplets of moisture
to rain again on the stark hills.

Rain on him, contemplating, contemplating.
Father told him he should be here for weeks,
and that a priest who has never fallen
into temptation is a priest out of touch with the flock.
He thinks he could stay here, forever, thinking
on the bare bones of the world.




This piece was written for The Camel Saloon (click here)