Skeleton Architecture

I want to draw your attention to the amazing poem by Jacqueline Saphra - Cimex Lectularius, which you'll find here  if you scroll down. I love how Jacqueline purposefully meanders through ideas, starting with the bed bug of the title and wandering to seemingly unlikely destinations, before turning back and bringing it together. I particularly love the callousness of the last line which applies to everything and so much more besides. That poem is a stroke of genius. I'm not a genius, so I figured I'd use a technique borrowed from Kamsin Kaneko , using some of the words from the original poem to craft one of my own. I did it a few weeks ago in this post , creating a library themed version of Mary Oliver's Wild Geese. The words I chose to pinch from Cimex Lectularius are as follows: I have learned this week that... and that... which reminds me of... which causes me to wonder... like that... which leads me back... Perhaps... As you can see, they're the directiona...

Today's tanka is inspired by The Red Painting's song, 'You're not one of them' (as you can see - I stole that line). I love The Red Paintings, even though I think he might have said that 'time holds no bears'. My son shrugged at the lyric and said 'well, time doesn't hold snakes either.' The logic, my friends, is inarguable. It's a good video too isn't it? If odd.  Anyway... I am not really down with the whole binary thing, so I find the idea of 'us' and 'them' totally fascinating. Any binary division is bound to be a Venn diagram at best, a noose at worst, and really lacking in usefulness, in my opinion, so us and them, well, it's meaningless - we're all us, we're all them. It is all our fault and it is all our problem. I know at least two people who definitely voted the way I totally think they shouldn't have done lately. Do I ditch them? No, they are us. People cannot understand my way of thinki...

Fake news infuriates me. I can understand a foreign power wanting to destabilise a nation with lies, but I cannot understand the people in power in that nation lying to the people who have elected them, whom they want the votes of in future. That slogan on the bus for Brexit? People believed it, and voted accordingly. And Boris Johnson keeps on telling the same lie again and again despite it being shown to be a lie. My father in law tells me that politicians lie - that is what we should expect of them. It is not what I expect. I expect politicians to tell the truth about what their intentions are and then to do their best to represent the people in their constituencies while following the basic ideas of their intentions. Sometimes changes will have to be made and that's fine, but to lie just to get power, that's despicable, and no one who does such a thing should be allowed to keep their office. There aren't just lies about the NHS millions though, there are so ma...

Time magazine brought out a great issue in September, with interviews with lots of successful women. One of them was Cindy Sherman, whose artwork I remember studying at university. A quote from her was highlighted on the page: "Of course we're all feminists, right? We all want women to be seen as equals."  Of course we are. I thought that was obvious. I mean, what's not to like about equality (barring my comments from yesterday )? But then I thought it was obvious that we Brits wouldn't be stupid enough to vote for Brexit and my own mother did, I thought it was obvious that America was about to get its first woman president, and Jeezo, let's not go there.  For many and various reasons people go against their own interests all the time, so no, we're not all feminists...                                  ...yet. Oh, and this is what a page from my notebook looks like (when I'm lucky e...

There is a school of thought that says that feminism is simply the belief in the equality of men and women. It sounds reasonable, but... ...we started from a position of patriarchy - men were in charge and they got to do the most valued things, women had to do the rest, and anything which women did was devalued either because it was devalued first and so women did it, OR (and this is really important) women did it and they were of less value in a patriarchal system (I mean this literally - men were people, women were property), therefore the thing done was less valued. We are well on our way to breaking out of the patriarchal system now, barriers are being removed to women entering the roles that men traditionally did. We have lots of women in power. Most of those women are childless, and this is really important, because women's traditional roles in looking after people, raising children, all that nurturing stuff is still undervalued because of patriarchal hangovers. Until the...

There are so many pat things that we all say about what life is like, we have heard them so often that we sometimes just nod along. It can take a jolt to make us question them, like Dany, breaking the wheel (for you GoT fans). The other day I heard a bunch of older men speaking, they were all nodding at each other about how the nature of life was conflict - in whatever way, that conflicts arise and are dealt with and so another arises, and so it is and so it is and so it shall be. I think there's something peculiarly male and patriarchal about this idea, and I hope that as the structures of patriarchy crumble (they are crumbling, it's not pretty), so this notion can be questioned more. I don't believe there is anything truly warlike naturally within men, nor that there is anything intrinsically peaceful within women, but it has fallen to women in patriarchal society to do the emotional labour of bringing people together, which has been seen as part of their motherly rol...

I love it when people use small things to make a big impression. The flower in the snout of the gun, little acts of yarnbombing, murals to brighten up our world. We can use these things and a million more small acts. They might not seem like much to do, but the tiny roots of these acts of beauty can make structures crumble.

Today's tanka arose from an image that turned up in my head. I don't know what her name is, or the kid's, I don't know what's happened (although a patriarchal apocalypse springs to mind), nor what she's going to build. But I know she will build it.

I generally avoid watching or reading stuff about wars. There is nothing that I can do about men in power sending young men to die and to kill people for whatever reason they've thought up. We hear about 'heroes' who have killed lots of people on someone else's orders. Often people who were trying to kill them on someone else's orders. I do think that sometimes something needs to be done, but I really do believe that too many men in power send too many young men to kill each other, to brutalise others, and to brutalise themselves, to the damage of us all. I also believe that people in power rule by division, the Tories are an excellent case in point - destroying the livelihoods of the poor and then somehow managing to get them to blame other poor people for their situation. The divisions they have fostered have given them power, and done huge harm to our country, particularly to the poor who have had their marrow sucked while the rich have plumped their feathere...

This started off as a ranting poem about Brexit, but even though I still firmly believe in my rant, it doesn't achieve anything, so instead I've made it personal and noted that we all of us have things we don't want to understand, and they will make us stuck.

This is another tanka that's come out of the work I've been revisiting lately. It's about gun control, 'illegal' immigrants, human trafficking. All of that cheery stuff.

I don't seem to be achieving much at the moment. I'm trying to write a synopsis for the Rose book, and in doing that I'm losing confidence in the story (which is me, not the story). My youngest stressed me out by tumbling all the way down the stairs and hitting her head (she seems fine if sore), and my middlest child is out of sorts, which is constantly worrying me. I am finishing up with very little useful brain.  Anyway, I saw that Sara at Mum Turned Mom  had suggested the prompt 'High' this week, and it reminded me of the song of the same name by New Model Army , which considers how irrelevant all our concerns are when seen from the top of a hill. There are lots of other songs with a similar feel, but I like New Model Army, so I headed to the top of my local hill to see and hear what I could see, singing to myself another one of my favourites by them - I Love the World .  I've ended up with a poem inspired by I Love the World (for the structure), and...

The prompt at Mum Turned Mom this fortnight is 'Colour', and I've been thinking about what to write and keep coming back to political allegiances, thinking of all my friends with their red and yellow backgrounds to their Facebook posts, to the conversations I keep having about who the hell it is that keeps voting Tory. On the morning after the latest general election I went out for coffee with a friend, to celebrate the Tory humiliation, and mourn the fact that they're still in power. I don't know if that couple were Tories, the poem was originally about a friend, but I've changed it to bad mouth people I don't know. Sorry about that! Wearing our colours We went for coffee to celebrate, to commiserate, to pick over the bones of what was won, what lost, of who let us down and we wished that everyone had to dress in the colours that showed what they did. Then we would know who it was who didn't bother, who hid amongst us, for there had ...

This is a poem I wrote in response to The Prompt from Sara at Mum Turned Mom . I first wrote it thinking of the current situation in British politics, but in the darkness of the terrible event in Manchester recently it also speaks to that situation. I am so sorry for all those who lost loved ones, who were hurt, who were terrorised by the bomb that went off in Manchester.  I am also sorry for all of our young men and women whose fears are targetted by groups like ISIS.  There is always an increase in racism and in anti-immigrant feeling after an event such as this, whipped up by those who wish to keep the people divided and voting for those that would keep the rich rich and the poor in 'their place'. We all get caught up in things, and it is always important to question our thoughts, as well as what we're told.  We do not have to stay on this road to division and hatred. We can stop, help each other, just as the people of Manchester came together to help each o...

One of the things I love about writing poetry is that you can put in secret messages. Some of them are so secret they might never be decoded, others can be pretty obvious, but still offer an opportunity to plead innocence. Weather is a good way to talk about things, we are all used to weather being used to tell us things in programmes and in books, so it works easily in poems too. I've written a poem about books which was actually about a person I know, although that one's not currently available. This poem is about plants. Honest. Worthy of the sun This seed is just as worthy of the sun but staked and tethered has no room to thrive instead, the same trees race to feel gold rays, taking the place of others pushed aside. Many, it seems, must naturally fail, yet flowers are diverse here down below and if we could find more space in the sun who knows what wonders we who tend might grow? For those who fear the plant may 'come a weed, shading the leaves that ...

Hello there This winter has been pretty uneventful on the storm front. I thought that was what the weather was now, storm after storm after storm, but instead it's been pretty much OK, and not even that cold. It's been grey and wet and windyish the last few days, but nothing exciting. No power lines have been torn down, I have not struggled to close car doors, no crazy snow storms, it's even been pretty calm on the wind front, so I've actually been using an umbrella, which is pretty rare around here! But I'm feeling down in the dumps (lots of rejections, lots of rain, this will pass), and the news just keeps on happening, and who the hell is running the world and why did we let them? Ugh.  So, my writing prompt today was to write up a storm, and I looked out of my window and wrote what I saw, then thought about it and rewrote it to reflect how I'm feeling and how the world looks through my eyes. And here it is: What the wind wreaks Mostly you can...

My Instagram feed is full of protest marches I'm not on, and I feel like I'm letting the side down. Truth be told, I don't want Theresa May to cancel Donald Trump's visit to Britain, and I don't see why the Queen would be embarrassed, she's kind of used to dealing with powerful bigots. However, I hope that Theresa is challenging Donald's policies, I hope she considers them when she is in trade negotiations. I hope Boris was right when he said that Britain would not quail from voicing differences, even if they are voicing them in private. Anyway, with Trump sticking by his hateful policies and getting up to who knows what else while we're all reeling from that, with hate crime in Quebec, and with Peter Capaldi leaving the TARDIS, I was feeling pretty hopeless last night, so I wrote a note to dear Theresa: Dear Theresa I know it's hard when your friends disappoint, and you want to keep what you had, but Theresa, he's not the same. He...

Did you know that I have actually had proper jobs? Not that this writing biz isn't a proper job, but I mean something that people actually expected to pay me for, where I was employed because I was clever and had certificates to prove it. Where people in suits (and people in uniforms) listened to my advice (I'm not saying that they acted on it, or listened particularly attentively, but they were quiet while I was talking, sometimes). Poems like this are basically me saying "you're alright, Civil Service, I don't really want to come back." (to which the Civil Service would probably say, "and you are?"). I still feel like I shouldn't say it, and I'm not going to argue poetic beauty for this one, it's just something that I had to say, so I wrote it down in my notebook and then realised that even though I'd not written it as a poem, it was one anyway! So here you go (written as a poem this time): Tories are Wrong The Tories wer...

Oh there has been so much happening in 2016 that I'm not a fan of. Death's guest list has got way out of hand, and then Brexit and now Trump, not to mention the terrible situations that lots of people around the world have found themselves in. Things are changing, and not in the way I had hoped for, but that said, we have made remarkable progress in the last century. I'm hoping that we're like the frog jumping out of the well. For every three feet higher she jumps, she slides back down two feet. It's dispiriting, nobody wants to slide in that nasty goo, but it is still progress. Not long ago I went to a writing workshop in Glasgow where we were asked to write a long list of five things we loved, five things we hated, five things we believed etc. All these things, we were told, could be written about. So today I'm writing about one of the things I hate. The thing I wrote was:  "I hate Tories." But that's not fair. It's not just Tories. ...

I've been poetically absent for a while. I've been reeling in the wake of Brexit, which I did not see coming, and which has left me grieving for the Britain I thought I knew. I know that the leavers reckon we remainers should get over it and move on, but that blase attitude is what allowed them to vote leave in the first place. For me, being part of Europe is an important part of my identity and how I want to live my life. I'd much rather be part of Europe than Britain. Especially this Britain, this one that has shown itself to be racist and nasty and to have no compassion for the rest of humanity. For a while there I was anticipating a second anarchy, and I'm impressed that Theresa May was willing to pick up the poisoned chalice of leadership at this time. So far she's doing it with aplomb (apart from the whole keeping nuclear bombs thing, but that insanity is not only her doing). Still. I would rather leave Britain than leave Europe, and I haven't been able...