bring you back to life

You died. And with everything I have I’ve tried to bring you back to life. I’ve triedto recreate you as you were, as you are. I’ve tried to disbelieve. I’ve tried to think you besides me. I’ve tried imagine you next to me. I’ve tried to talk to you. I’ve tried to bring back every memory. I tell myself what you would say, what you are saying. I imagine you alive. I’ve tried to write about you in different ways. I’ve tried to write your present as present, and your future. I have written your past. I wish you were here.

autopilot write

She thought she knew where she was going so she began to run. She ran as fast and as far as she could towards the setting sun. Blood red and orange rays slice through a sky they stung her eyes and face. She heard a song, a melody of chaos untrapped and poetential unravelled. The hot coals beneath her burned the fire that pushed her heels to run faster, jumping with each note, inspired, trying to catch that setting sun. I know of darkness. I know that if it catches you it will consume you. It will start with your habits, and your mind- unnaffected. And when you stop to catch you’re breath that is when it catches you unaware, its cruel claws will grip the flesh of your mind and let it rip, pulling it apart from the hinges of your skull. The pain- unbearable and nothing- the invisible you is screaming in a madness that only the maddest acknowledge. and now that darkness- it is faster than me. I feel its coldness on my heels, its sharp teeth sinking in like ebony needles piercing through the soles-souls- of my feet. It is death, already pulling me into a grave. It is life, already laughing at everything I could have been. It is that potential me of a past other-choice, already a decayed corpse, sometimes stealing glances at this present me and saying- you aren’t that bad- considering. Considering the destruction you are capable of- it could have been much worse. It could have been much better, but that is life. and this is now, what can you do? I’ve lost this plot, the song on repeat and all I want to do is type but not think, typing thoughtless letting words be words and flow onto this space and become meaning.

Writing Practice

A story. 10 minutes. Something creative. Post yours below. Begin now. Goodluck. Boom.

 

She tucked herself tightly into the blanket. Wrapped around her like a mummified corpse, and the room: her tomb. Locked into the night and a darkness so that the only thing visible was a sharp slice of light from beneath the door. She always slept on her side, facing it. She always stared at the light and let it lull her to sleep. This, she did today, time passing tick and tock closer to the dawn she would soon wake for, sleep almost reaching then leaving her when she remembered, and only two minutes left to the end of ten. Today, she stared at that slice of knife, and it stared back at her, and then, it cut into two. A shadow appeared at her door. 

work in progress- fire

At first there were the embers of  a fire

Unsettled history quivering uneasy

Beneath a gust of wind diseased with resentment

blackened with 1300 years

Of hate and blame and blameblameblameblame

blameblameblameblameblameblameblameblameblameblameblame

Like –when you say a word you say over and over again

and forget the meaning

 

-so began the flame

 

and when hands shake in fear

and fear shuts them into fists

shaking fists will eventually punch things

 

 

Nurtured unconscious reflexes

A cold-blooded murder followed by the sentence

‘they are all the same’

‘they’ one word meaning millions

‘same’ meaning -psychopathic murderers?

millions of psychopathic muderers

because you say- they- are all the same

 

action-packed mass gaining momentum seeking

answers in the wrong places, pointing fingers to

the wrong faces

 

And then, a gust of wind

An incident -to place atop

that skyscraper-list of wrong

that final piece required to make

It all fall down-

so -it fell amongst the embers

struck the rocks of their evidence

and the fire begun was bright

and the bright fire brought delight

so  people gathered

tossing flammable proof into the fire

stories of fact and assumption

history predictions feelings real

and imaginary

lets all gather it into one

 

toss into the fire

look -how fast it grows!

How exciting its blood-lit curling dance is!

I am tired

I am tired. And I miss my father. When flights booked are unbooked. Plans made are changed, rearranged to fit the format of a present, and it is nobodies fault. Complications arise business will break at times and, it’s nobodies fault but fate. But it’s been eight months and counting and I did the mistake of expecting to meet my family, and now I’m still here fighting with a butternut pumkin knuckles grazed as they slice its cover off strip by strip smashing into the cutting board. I am tired, of cleaning up after you before and after everything I do. Of listening to you’re egotistical melodramatic tone making drama from everything dramatic like a newspaper honing on every incident of bad news and forgetting the rest. I am tired, of people forgetting that people are people and instead seeing them as things as entities and objects, means to ends and then complaining that it is only because they can’t meet ends. When meetings of people end then life disintegrates into quantity not quality and it becomes cold chaos that- nobody even notices. They won’t take the time of day to ask how you are, or care to listen. I am tired of the way the world keeps losing real people.

434 words

Dear here and now, thank you for giving me this time and place. I have felt restless lately, I think, and lonely, I know. As such I have been trying to communicate to walls and anonymous audiences, waiting for reactions, thinking that this – a like- in essence, might count as a reply, a reaction, an answer to the questions that I always seem to be asking: Am I good enough? Am I worth a fragment of your time? Do you accept me? Do you like me? unhealthy unanswerable questions of need and yearning that are but the voice of my ego acting up, and dear ego- I know- you have not been fed lately, and that is because you are overweight. A proud and hungry, greedy thing, fat with too much praise, too much pride, and not enough reality. Dear ego, I have been trying to starve you. To tell you that you don’t need a diet of praise and pride, that the greatest strength you can be is when you stand there in silence, a knowing, quiet thing that uses its energy from the inside out (rather than the outside in), that helps me write, and write with confidence. A quiet humble pride that takes not each moment for granted, that has a goal of truth that it will seek amidst the grains of root and soil, and crumble and crush all of reality between my fingers until I find these gems of truth. Dear here and now,  I need to refresh and return to the foundations of my mind, to let go of desire and to seek that rawer thing below it. To write without want and to want only to write. Here is the start of a thousand words. It is a trailing train of words and I hope that the smoke of its ideas will stay like in sunny day without breeze, and let that its time be at sunset because, that is one of the most beautiful times in a day, when the red rays of the sun reach the earth and reflects in golden orange reds in fires and pinks and everything is like a warm sigh of perfection in place and the world is warm with the change from day to night in the most spectacular show that has ever taken place and will never happen again in the same way. Each and every different day is  a miracle and magic. It is a fingerprint of everything it is, a living breathing thing. Here the day is braced with gray clouds, and on the horizon the slow summer’s sun begins to set, and so colours those clouds a warm yellow- it is the fireplace in the corner of the room. There is a bird, it lives on the tree to my left, and it sings a song of many melodies, and always makes me laugh. Sometimes I think it is a clown bird that makes these songs like an adult cooeing to a baby, making faces to make the child laugh. This bird sometimes, sounds like a cat meowing, and sometimes sounds like the whistle of a train. I think it can mimick any sound and these are the sounds it chooses to. I’ve often wondered why birds sing, and why they make the sounds they make. and how wonderful can good music be? how inspiring. When you listen to a song and it inspired you and almost makes you cry. It makes you want to dance and laugh and write and be- to do something amazing, to create something from this amazing creation.  Here and now, I thank you for this time and place, I welcome you to break me, to change me as you see fit, to help me become my best potential. I am ready to live. I am ready to learn. I have a mind and it has thoughts, but I know this world is fragile, is volatile- and so I will not hold onto anything too tightly, I know, if something is right, and I am of sound mind and might, the truth will follow you and be reclaimed no matter how many times it is let go. This is not a 1000 words, and perhaps I will add more to it later. Meanwhile, I must prepare for a capoeira Roda, time is happening and it is reminding me to rush. Thank you for yours. 

not a 1000 words.

So, I am stuck now. I have overthought things. I had a poem I wished to edit, but I write poetry from passion and the idea for it is getting weaker by the minute, and a friend told me how to edit the first stanza. I appreciate that. I was also happiest with that first stanza, and after various time-consuming and mind-mashing attempts to change it I feel I have broken it into something, less, than what it was. Driven by the wrong kind of energy. And I don’t know what to do about it. I wanted to perform that one in two days time. I still do. Only I don’t know which one that one will be anymore. It is terrible. I need to stop, either start fresh and new or something else altogether. I need to breathe. I need to stretch. Perhaps, if I were to describe my idea here it might help make things easier to see. It is a poem about the events happening in the world today. I have been troubled about how- following one certain incident- there is a hate growing out of proportion and quickly, and it is at the expense of people who have nothing to do with it. It is a story about how, following a history of conflict and this incident, a fire has begun, and some people are letting this hate get out of hand by recalling other events and reasons in history that can fuel and justify it. When they should recognise this as a time to keep their hate in check, because the world is already full of it, and that is where the problem lies anyway. The idea was of the embers of a fire- lets call it -history- and then an incident, that struck a rock and began the flame, and a gust of wind- lets call it- resentment- that blew it into a fire. And the incidents and proofs they recall, the facts, the evidence they recollect, let us call them flammable things they throw into the fire. Some are fast-burning scraps of paper and some are slow-burning logs, and all help make the fire grow. And the more stories people recall, the more flammable things they toss into the fire, the more it grows, the more mesmerised people are of the fire, and the crowd gathering around it watches hypnotised watching it grow, it is exciting- how can it not be?  I am so tired of this idea, now. And of these 1000 words, I will retry this later. here is what I have done so far, here it is. Apologies for the incompleteness of this post, and thank you for reading.

At first there were the embers of a fire

Floating fragments of tarnished history

a thousand years blackened with blame

everyone pushing eachother into

One another’s frame.

And We- are human – capable of monsters or magic

being happy or tragic.

We chose to compare and complain

Placing us parallel thus creating a plane

That slices at our differences

Creating mutants

And then, a gust of wind

An incident -to place atop

A skyscraper-list

The final piece required to make

It all fall down-

and when hands shake in fear

fear shuts them into fists

And it fell amongst the embers

struck the rocks of their evidence

-so began the flame

a spark of resentment

that toxic evidence

the fire is hungry

and greedily eats

the flammable proof they toss into

into it

Look- how fast it grows!

How exciting its blood-lit curling dance is

How blinding!

1000 words

‘ I wrote at least a thousand words a day from the age of twelve on’ -Ray Bradbury

what does it mean to write a thousand words a day, I wonder. Will any writing do? does writing to a friend count as words, and, if it does, then surely talking must to0? When does a word qualify as the written word? when it is a visual entity on screen or when it is thought in  your mind? I might ponder (what an old school word eh) upon all these questions and more, and still, they will not make a thousand words. I would like them to be a thousand words of writing something true, something real. So, where to start- I might think, only to realise that I have already begun. The real question then, is how to continue. I will carry on from here, it is the only place that is real- the one true point of reference: the here and the now. It is: this. When I look at -it- directly there is a silence, and above me, I feel the ceiling is inhibiting, that it is too thick a box and is claustrophobic. But it is cold outside, there is a chilled wind that speaks of ice lurking in the clouds, and I know this boxed room saves me from it- but it also keeps out the inspiring endless sky the moon and stars that twinkle like spotlights in a distance that allows you to recognise distance and forget yourself and see the world, the world as something altogether different, as a whole, as a planet in a galaxy of stars slowly rotating between a fiery sun and cold moon, and millions, billions of stars. Some of them already long dead- but- isn’t it incredible how they still shine? that their effect is still with us and in it there is that -truth- among the stars that tells us of a -truth- here. Of consequences, of impact, of our footprints in this world. That the way we tread upon this world has an impact. It is a change. A done deed is a dead star that still shines with consequence. The world has a memory more advanced than ours. It breathes in the action and reaction of our ways and changes with it, incorporating it as part of itself and -it- being a sum of all things. While our memories are tainted with our ego’s bias approach, our broken mind’s different thoughts, the stories that we grow by, that we tell ourselves, the different things we notice, the ways we might regurgitate our pasts in different formats depending on what we hold onto from a present scene, and sometimes, it is not much. Sometimes, the sound in our minds is louder than the sounds out of it, and they shouldn’t be. That is when our memories fail. That is the ego singing its song of me and taking your attention to it when you could have been present, you could have been totally there and you could have been -being- you could have been -there-. This, is my attempt at a thousand words, I don’t know if I have reached it although I suspect probably not. My aim is to keep writing (or attempting to write) a thousand words a day. Soon, I will be able to recognise what a thousand words look like, and these words will flow like the river of floetry and my mind and thoughts will progress with every thousand, it is a step towards reaching the best potential of the writer in me.

i want to teach the world to fly

I want to teach the world to fly

this is an empty space so why

cant we? why 

don’t we create something- New

why fit the format of a poem or

a paragraph?

why write words in sentences, then 

sentence the words we wrote?

why write right and right the words we write?

when we are its creators let us

be creative let us

bend and mend and break and fix this

in different ways to see

what cosmic chaos

we can create

 

why not break it all and speak it all in 

metaphors in stars and fires

and

symbols

 

broken

senses first

sight- it is a mess observed from burning eyes

sound-it is a silence broken with egotistical coughs

smell- it is last nights dominos and salted crisps

I think I’m broken today

my eyes hurt

When I shut them, a thousand sparkles

explode

when I open them, they ache to close

to look at this screen makes them sting and burn

I need to make things right

I need to write

in the words of Ray Bradbury

‘You must stay drunk on writing so 

reality cannot destroy you’

senses first, clean the senses

clothes in cupboard

folded. fold things. neatly

packed in order in neat

compact piles and boxes

put them all in boxes stack 

them up and put them out

out of sight. out of mind

and smell. light a candle, that

pink jasmine pillar candle besides you

and sound- perov stellar is 

a happy song. perhaps

perov stellar will guide me in those

final steps to a clear mind.

start.