Shouldn't

You shouldn't have

If you hadn't

I wouldn't have

I didn't

You did

I did not

Oh yes you did

I didn't mean

You did

not

did

not

did

you

DID

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE

YOU SHOULDN'T

YOU SHOULDN'T

DONT

DONT

NO MORE

                                                                          🌈

The pandemic was a difficult time for everyone in the world. Very few escaped its consequences. Here in the UK during lockdowns, people in care homes, flats without outdoor spaces and those in prisons, including young offenders institutions, must have felt the restrictions particularly acutely. At its nadir, I think we were only allowed out once a day for exercise and were not allowed to sit on benches in the park or lie on the grass in the summer. Children's playgrounds were taped off.

It was a terrible thing to hear and read that domestic violence and in particular, violence against children, had increased.

Even those of us lucky enough to live in places where we had enough rooms to be separate and on our own should we need to, with an outdoor space or garden to go and breathe fresh air should we long to, got very sad, even depressed and the relentless daily reporting by the government on the daily death toll added to this general mood of depression I remember. 

                                                                        🌈

Skeleton tree

At art college, I made a skeleton out of fallen twigs of Ash. They were just the right shape and size
and weight for gluing together with a gun. I had fun. Now I could put my knowledge of anatomy into
good use and I completed the whole thing and hung it in a wire bower.   I suppose it may have looked
a tad macabre, maybe even jarring in that jaunty way skeletons have, their slightly humorous appearance -
why is that ? -
sometimes feeling like an afront when we present them at the wrong time.
I suppose I shouldn't have left the dear thing in the wardrobe of the flat I flitted from without paying
the last months' rent because it was outrageous.

Bumpy Ride

Here we are,

You and me,

Going along together,

It's so very bumpy.

I didn't mean to jerk you so,

It was a daft idea to take this ride,

When you were so comfortable inside.

Epilogue, a Ghost Story

How many stories begin at the end ?

She used to read all the beginnings of stories, then the ends, just to see how intention worked.



Life is loss,

Time is loss.

We have this feeling of going forwards, but, it's really a question of undoing.

What we have at our end is nothing.

Water and Stone

We're water and stone,

Rising up against each other,

Inclement weather regardless,

The violent drops of sharp rain

melt upon our surface.

The Heft of You and who came before

Your head in the crook of my neck,

How you tried to hold it up,

My hand on your back,

The softness of your hair,

The weight of you transferred from within,

To where I would carry you

Until your own legs would

along the rocky ways,

Where stumbling stones

always impede your path.



When you were born,

The snow lay deep,

Up to the tops of our bins,

No doubt even higher,

If you went higher up.



Full moon bright,

The Midwives expected lots of births that night.

The sound of the hum of the helicopters,

Soft as the murmered concern amongst us,

Safe in our beds with our newborns,

Grateful not to be arriving by air.

In praise of my breasts

I never had the kind of breasts that I could hoik up and squeeze together to form a pleasing cleavage.

My oldest friend once described my body shape as Maori, which I've relished ever since. 


When I was young, the thing was to be thin and that preoccupied most of my girlfriends, though most of them never achieved that aim, loving food too much and probably not being so convinced of the goal itself deep inside. Not enough to forgo the food they were so justified in loving; chocolate, cake, chips and all kinds of other calorific things.

Me, I got into the idea of abstinence. I learned to love the empty feeling in my belly. It felt triumphant, defiant. It possibly echoed the emptiness I felt deep within that part of ourselves we tend to label soul.

I'd seen alot of things on tv. War generally. The documentaries about concentration camps in the War  and news reports on the famine in Biafra in particular. I couldn't understand the spectral figures of the children walking on their sticks for legs. They looked like some conception of an alien to me and my heart hovered between broken and astonished at how we are sculpted by what we are allowed to consume and what we are denied.

I never wept. I never do at the things that affect me most. It goes too deep.

Like when my Mum kept watching the terrible disaster when the coal slag heap fell upon the little school in Aberfan. I watched in silence as the village kept vigil and brought the childrens' tiny bodies up so tenderly from under the rubble. My mother sobbed. It was probably the release she needed desperately from all the troubles she had endured herself as a child. 

I learned to fast and control my intake.

I learned to take tablets to give me diarrhoea if I wanted to get rid of things I felt I shouldn't have ingested. And they were many.

One day, dragging myself up a hill to my hovel of a bedsit squat, I felt as if I couldn't go on. I went to the doctor and I suppose he misdiagnosed me, for want of accurate information.

There were years ahead of me in which I would allow myself, if not to fully understand, then to come to some arrangement with myself in which, my Maori-like breasts would feel beautiful to me.

Our lives, the film and the colours it would be, 

from white to vivid technicolor and the whole palette

in-between.

Those days when the sky was a flat grey, 

no lights to seek out depth in pavement

or highlight the grains of variation in the red

and orange brick behind

the sharp edged privet hedges.

Our window looms,;

a black square as we push the gate open on it's tight spring. 

Only the faded pastels of the Hydrangea's dried out flower heads 

lend a gentle tone to soften the suburban chill

of a late November afternoon.

Cake

I baked a cake for if you come,

but if you don't I won't be sad,

As long as you are truly glad,

Your happiness engenders mine,

As long as you're good,

Then I feel fine.




A mother's love runs long and deep,

It doesn't always show.

She tries to let you live your life,

And he tries to let you go.

She tries to let you go

much sooner than you'd know,

you know,


that's the way she works,

this love that's not on show.

Bagatelle

They're playing bagatelle, it's a made up game about making up stories;

Who are the characters ? She says.
You make one up and I'll make one up, he says.
A man with a gun, says she.
Okay, I choose a person who's come in disguise as a tree, says he.
No way ! says she - choose something like another man with another gun.
Why ? he asks.
Because it's war, she replies.
I choose a person who's wearing a tree costume, he says.
Why ? she questions.
Ingenuity, he says.
Ingenuity won't win your character this game, she says. My character's got a gun.
Ah but there's also this character with the ability to resemble a tree.
Bullets will rip through and obliterate tree costumes she says.
Is that the kind of world you're going to make up ? he asks.

There is no point in making up a world,
she says
when there's already a real world.
There's the world and there's the truth about the world.
You mean there's the truth and there's the made-up version of it.
No, the world exists and stories are made up.
And whoever makes up the story makes up the world.

Try to welcome people into the home of your story, that is, give your characters the same benefit of the doubt you'd welcome when it comes to yourself.


A slightly adapted conversation from Autumn by Ali Smith

I am well

thank you

I am well

I am well

though some time ago I was not well

but I have got better.

One expects to get better until

until one feels the grip of Death.

You can, of course, untangle you from His taloned grasp,

you can slip, so sylph-like if you are slippery like that

and shiver away from His icy clasp,

His unwelcoming embrace, but

you have this feeling

this growing feeling like a sunset, that,

one day, he will come with a warm cloak instead,

and wrap its warm and welcoming softness around your whole being

and then,

only then,

will you sink

deep and low

into the depths

of

His

cosy nest.