Coming of a Different Age

Strength is shown in many places:
bitten lips; grey gaunt faces;
blistered hands and leathered heel pads;
resistance of ugly school fads;
standing next to a pariah;
rescuing victims from a fire,
but the most extreme example of this
is true compassionate forgiveness.
And this loss I feel deflates me but with no sense of giving up.
Just filed away, in mothballs, covered and carefully hung up
at the back of my wardrobe with your old red checked shirt
its brutal gesticulations told the history of our hurt.

Arms dangle now in darkness,
frayed, threadbare, faded.
Rubbing shoulders with my first date jeans.
Both are uncomfortable. Unwearable.
Costumes of dead characters.
Self-interested adversaries
deprived of the fight.
Victories have never been so hollow.
Generations realigned.

I don't like being found.
Lost girls never have to grow up.

Nothing is Greater

I'm Patsy. I'm Margot. I'm Daisy. I'm Zelda. I'm Tallulah. I'm Billie. I'm Janis. I'm Amy. I'm Amanda. I'm Bjork. I'm Courtney. I'm Joni. I'm Melanie. I'm Bonnie. I'm Kate. I'm Kate. I'm Lisbeth. I'm Naomi. I'm Alison. I'm Lara. I'm Joanna. I'm Glenda. I'm Emily. I'm Jane. I'm Daria. I'm Tori. I'm Miriam. I'm Missy. I'm Mindy.I'm Jeannie. I'm Morticia. I'm Amelia. I'm Erin. I'm Lily. I'm Lillith. I'm Luna. I'm Tilda. I'm Bliss. I'm Alice. I'm Lotta. I'm Davey. I'm Darryl. I'm Judy. I'm Stevie. I'm Stevie. I'm Anathema. I'm Mary.




I was thinking about influences and inspirations. We are all the result of all we absorb, adore and those with whom we identify. The above are some of my parts.

Who are you?

To everything / There is a season

A heavy hand is on the earth,
restricting smell and sight and breath.
Euphoria of Summers passed.
Winter's bite delayed.
Withdrawl of energy and light.
Debits paid in credit's drought.
Hushful loss of thoughtful feathers.
Warmth beckoned,
we await the return of life.
Chapped knuckles crack in damp environs.
Long-gone the Spring of sun-hot step.
Sator Arepo tenet opera
rotas, rotas, rotas.




This was inspired by a combination of the weather in Maughold at about 3 o clock today (overcast, oppressive, heavy aired, birdless) and a conversation I had with fellow TEDxDouglas-er, Michael Daniels.

Michael's talk was on magic squares. I had heard of them in Latin, but not in numbers. It was fascinating to listen to and really engaged me from start to finish. I love language and spend so much of my time based in linguistics and medical thought patterns that it was like going on an adventure holiday into unfamiliar terrain. The world of mathematics is a foreign country to me and Michael was our charming guide.

I love the people I met at TEDxDouglas and the way it made me feel; hopeful and inspired.

Thank you to everyone involved, especially the volunteers.  This Island has really blossomed this year. It's an honour to be a part of it.

"At the second stroke the time sponsored by experience will be..."

The passage of time has never been stranger than now.
Objectively, I know that we still orbit the same mass of energy.
We still rise in the same light, live in the same dark
and watch the trees metronomic renaissance every Spring.
But the last few have trumpeted past as elephant-mice.
Events eclipsing the passage of time like never before.

And before...

There was a time that to you, every day before this one was yesterday.
There was a time when all days that follow today were tomorrow.
Then came the signifiers: "One tomorrow"; "Our yesterdays".
Now greatly extended we say "The Olden Days" and "Dinosaur Time"
and "50 hundred million years in the future!"
But the one that broke my heart was this:

"We saw Amalie and Isla there and Amalie had broken her dress on one of these" [wrought iron gate post]

"Oh, did you see them? When?"

"Before. When **** could still walk"





This was inspired by my son and a poem by my sister. She blogs over at www.bookwormsandcoffeemonsters.com on all sort of things and has just had one of her short stories accepted by a very exciting magazine. That's her story, though. I'll let her tell it.

You know I love you, right?

Not a Popular Opinion


I’m culturally appropriating.
You’re rating my passion
through the eyes of a career gold digger
looking for meaning unwritten,
themes and motifs and meta imagery.

I say what I see.
I’m on catchphrase constantly.
I’m good, but I’m not the one.
I’m frustrated by what I've become.

<sigh> narcissistic ramblings…
This child that went brambling
Now sips prosecco listening
To pseudo-socialist expressions espoused
By folk who don’t want to work.

“The system’s not working”
But you use it to support you.
You don’t earn any wages but bemoan the ways things are
while you profit from the sweat of others who are.
Thing is, I agree, things aren't the way they should be
but I find it hard to take you seriously.

You see, when I drag my bones out of bed
and pay all my bills and work ‘til I’m dead
You’re still sleeping.
You’re reaping your meager existence
from the aches in my muscles.
And honestly, I know there are some who can’t work,
They’re too sick, they’re too hurt by the weight of their age
But when you rage that your cheques not through
That the world’s not fair,
That it owes something to you
I can’t help it.
I’d like to give the help that you’ve received
To someone who knows what it’s like to really need.
A refugee.
Someone who wants to work,
Wants to support their family.

It’s not a popular opinion, I won’t earn any friends with this.
And honestly, there are some who will call me a hypocrite.
I claimed money when I first had my son.
Was made redundant when they noticed my bump.
It’s not legal, but neither was the war in Iraq
And we all know that that situation’s coming back.
Zero hour contracts, 50 hour working weeks
Flush the weak from a system that rewards the wolves.
There’s no paid overtime, we’re on Victorian rules.

Now, here I sit eating quince and cardamom jam
And my old punk friends wonder who I think I am
With my fancy little accent and shoes that have no holes
Now there’s middle class flab on my working class bones.
But my ideals haven’t changed, I still think we should protect
The vulnerable among us, give our elders our respect.
Speak to me statistically, romance me with the cold hard facts.
I don’t want to hear recycled bigotry, especially if it’s Murdoch Media backed.

I believe in the freedom of education.
I believe in the N.H.S
I believe that if you tell one generation
They’re doomed, you’re dooming all the rest.
I believe in the power of discussion.
I believe in empathy.
I believe that the kindness of strangers
Shows truthful humanity.

The amount of tax unpaid is now 30 times the money claimed
And yet the papers tell us that it’s benefits to blame
For why the cupboards empty and the pension pot is bare.
They tell that the CEOs don’t have enough to share.

Now.
I don’t work in finance.
I failed economics.
But I did work in promotions and
I know my demographics.
These pigeon holes we box us in, through judgement and research
And the one you’ve chosen causes my causes to be smirched.
And objectively I know there are so damn few of you
That the cost of it is almost worth forking out
Just so the folk who want to work
Don’t have to deal with you!
So when I’m fighting for the corner of the ones who need the aid
I would appreciate it greatly if out of my way you stayed.
You can pass you life in this way, you’ll find no judgment in me,
But please do consider if this help you really need.
Or if it would be better going to a refugee.
Someone who knows what it’s like to really need.

It’s not a popular opinion.
I won’t earn any friends with this.
But in this situation,

Empathy wouldn’t go amiss.

Humanity is a Virus


Lady Gaia blew the sleep sand from her dust encrusted eye.
Rippling verdantly she turned, serene in what she felt and why.
Intrigued she watched as her leaf-locks dis-re-dis-reappeared
in pixel squares. She raised a brow and thought, ‘That’s weird’.

She sought Ra’s malady-monger opinion.
He squinted and told her to stop thinking
about string theory and quantum bunkum
and try to get more sleep.

So she ignored it as best she could,
 although she began to feel strange.
Her friends were kind enough not to mention
her face was becoming quite changed.
Malodorous gases clouded her vistas,
she developed orbital detritus.
Even poor Luna’s surface wasn’t spared;
a sad case of environmentitis.

Jupiter came concerned for his friend
and of the terrisy he might catch,
raised the alarm and Lady Gaia
to Ra was swiftly dispatched.
With somberly professional flair
and a touch of harsh halitosis
he pronounced what she was scared to hear,
a terminal diagnosis.

“I’m sorry, my dear. It is clear you have caught
an industrialized case of the humans.
There are things we can try, but to you I can’t lie;
The prognosis is millennia not aeons.
As a titration resource I’ll give you a course
of anti-anthropotics.
It’ll slow them a while, come back when you feel
a definite change in your tropics.”

So Gaia took the microbes with great sad apprehension
and loosed them through her fleas and on her water’s surface tension.

The first wave seemed to go quite well
and the tooled-up apes retreated
in the face of the poxy buboes swell
and their fruitless attempts to treat it.
Gaia felt buoyed by this seeming improvement
and decided to contact direct
these creatures hell bent on destructive denuding
and persuade them this path to reject.
She consulted humble Roodrelac
The universal mediator.
(his heroism know no bounds.
We’ll discuss his story later).
He inspired her with native thoughts
of harmonic shamanism.
Persuaded her to try his spores
To help improve her vision.

She’d never felt so overwhelmed with new connections formed
A flood of shared experience and a flickering sense of divorce.
She returned to Ra: “I’ve found a way! I’ve heard it really works!
I can guide them through my inner strength and corrupt their own networks!”

“What quackery! It’s never proven. It’s just the placebo effect
The truth is some planets have natural immunity, or some we’ve come to suspect.
It’s a treatment nearly no one survives and the physical costs are most dreadful.
It’s still being tested, it’s not even licensed. It’s hippy-dippy and experimental.”

“Go on.” Said Gaia, her eye a whirl of desert storm sand concentration.

“They say that within them is coded a course of ultimate auto-extinction.
Apparently if you encourage their enhanced neuronic evolution
beyond the pace of their cellular form they will drown in their self-made pollution.”

Gaia looked shocked.
It hadn’t occurred that she’d have to get worse to get better.
She wanted to weep
But the glittering hope in her core
Wouldn’t let her.

Now she has fifty year checkups with Ra and he’s writing a ground breaking study.
Proving conclusively the treatment was real.
We wouldn’t want to prove him wrong.

Would we?