31

My body is my body. I’m not bothered what you think of it.

It’s carried me through all these years no matter what I’ve thrown at it.

The marks on my flesh; the scars on my organs

They’re trophies from my battles with the metaphoric gorgons.

I’m feeling freed from the cycles of love and hate and love and hate

Now I’ve relinquished thinking on self-comparative debate.

Some people get my name wrong and they pronounce Georgina

But I’m not diminutive in stature or demeanor.

Dubbed as weird, mad, aggressive and crazy

Because the clarity I see, to them, is hazy.

Censored by illiterati, told I’m inappropriate.

Asked if I was born with bollocks, labeled frigid, called a slut.

I’m conscious of all my decisions, chosen to remember them

At times when I am finding out if they were right or they were wrong.

I don’t claim omniscience. I hold intelligence in awe

I’d rather know I’m ignorant and perfectly flawed

For the journey’s earning’s learning in its absolute form

And it gives your seasons reasons for your earthly sojourn.

They say “Don’t get her started” and “Not again, here we go”

When engaging in discussion and opinion of their point is low.

This is my elixir, though. This heady mix of raw debate.

With sowing of seeds and the joy to watch them germinate.

Frustrated by the limitations I cannot see

That seem to bind most others to a life semi-free

With their worries of decorum or etiquette or saving face.

I’d like to rip their blinkers off, put Technicolor in their place.

You’ll never know what you could be if you never try

And then you’ll blink and you’ll be at the end of your life.

I’ve seen too many dreamers go to holes in the ground

And damsels in distress choosing to wait to be found

By princes preoccupied with kissing the seeming dead.

I can’t understand why they don’t rescue themselves instead.

I love Lara, Xena, Tank Girl and Janeway

For standing up and counting, for doing things their own way.

Ignoring real heroines, a culture habitual.

The women on that list were completely fictional.

I’m not sold on the Lady myth. Keep your expectations.

Sell them to someone who’ll accept that degradation.

Do you want your daughters to grow up with choice?

Then encourage them to speak in an authorative voice.

Teach everyone to accept that “no means no”

But it also means “stop asking” and “leave me alone!”

If someone cannot answer it’s still not consent

And you don’t get to decide what unconscious people meant.

Those lines that you claim are blurred beyond compare

Are clear as Autumn air, no matter what clothes you wear.

Attraction’s not a circumstance of pink and blue

So stop trying to squeeze a right foot in a left hand shoe.

I stole that line from Carroll, from the Man Upon A Gate

But unlike him I know that there is too much to relate.

For the journey’s earning’s learning in its absolute form

And it gives your seasons reasons for your Earthly sojourn.

There is too much to discover for to ever be bored

And you’ll find its only you who is even keeping score.

So accept your physicality and mistakes of the past

For your time here is limited and goes pretty fast.

Do you honestly want your last thought to be

“I didn’t spend enough time just being me”?

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?

Univocalism for Mark Grist

Go boldly, Vox; not long.
Toll for joy or glow for glory.
Now, hop off.
On words.
On show.
On story.
Form worlds from orbs of sorrow.
Grow onyx onto frost.
Yon lofty owl or shock prof,
do good for song-boys lost.
Hold on to shows on Rocks, bro,
of R-words - protocol shot.
Of rosy-fond folk of whom
Monty's (not oddly) not forgot.

In TIAs

They call it a stroke, but a stroke's a caress,
A present borne through gentleness.
T'would be better to call it a bolt from the blue,
A malfunction of synapses- give it its due.
This burgalar of words.
This remover of movements.
Imprisoning souls in disconnected flesh.
Self-enforced censorship, unable to express.
The Orwellian Nightmare of frustra-lingua.
(feelings unnamed continue to exist)
Inside this less-than-lustrous figure
The personality refuses to cease and desist.
Surreal conversations
rebuild the connections
and help to recover the words.
It emerged to me
the best neuro-surgery
is performed in the theatre of the absurd.

Rum Goings On

Once upon a rum soaked night
The boy with scars external
Met the girl with scars internal.
Her asbestos heart was set alight.
The scars began to fade.

They shared a quiet privacy
Public personas shed like skins
Intimate darkness lets light begin
A moment stolen in the dawn
Her tarnished soul was saved.

The first in years to know her past.
Midnight black and blue regrets
With all the memories he forgets
The die of loss is long since cast.
With sorrow this road's paved.

Once upon some rum soaked laughter
The girl with scars internal
loved the boy with scars external.
They shared a happy ever after
Brief but pure and sweetly grave.

Malcontented Walrus Man

Somehow he oozes free
from a car designed for a being
a fraction of his mass.
Ego-swollen, he appears to have made
an inescapable life jacket of his self importance.
His tiny, malice-filled head and disproportionately scrawny neck
are the knot on his body's balloon.
He patronises women
while imagining them naked.
Leering at their turned backs.
Sycophantic to their faces.
Bullying and deceitful
he counts tears and anguish as conquests.
I wonder, will he ever taste his own medicine?
Chaos and finger-pointing, gossip and harrasssment.
He does not deserve compassion.

Call To Arms

Every day I read the news with growing trepidation.

It’s regression on a massive scale. The end of civilisation.

We’re not punishing those that caused this mess with lies, with greed, with ego.

But blaming folk who’ve nothing done and warring with nations we don’t know.

What year is this? Who’s in control? Where is Lady Justice?

She’s bound and gagged in a divan bed. Ransomed for the fame of her captress.

Of equal weight (or so we’re told) to celebrities, diets and twerking.

The blood on her sword is only her own so clearly, this system’s not working.

The children that need us the most,

Tragically fall through the ‘net

And children are taken when good parents seek help and hysterical healthcare objects.

Open your eyes and ignore the damned press! They have profits to make, don’t you see?

Horrors that happen go unreported and affect us – that’s you - and it’s me.

I do not believe it is really so hard to lay aside neighbourly spite

And just keep an eye out, get involved and speak up if something just doesn’t seem right.

Notice the pensioned! They are people too and their stories are going untold.

As we focus on disposable incomes of youth and deny our own growing old.

I don’t have the answers. I’m not the Messiah (or even a naughty boy),

I am just one person, sick of the nonsense and sick of acting coy.

I’m not asking for money, or a signed petition, or change in far flung lands.

I’m saying your community needs you before it ends up in God-knows-whose hands.

Get involved. Take an interest. Speak up! Go out!

Disenfranchisement is dead.

Earnestness is the future!

And without it?

Total extinction instead.

Recipe for Disaster

A handful of sugar.
A penny of salt.
A pinch for your thoughts,
your light and your faults.
A tight squeeze. A light squeeze.
Freshly squeezed orange
and you.
We squeezed into my single bed:
room enough for two.
But only room for one
in my heart and in my head.

Freshers Love

You tongue your way to my pleasure.

Fist claws cotton.

Breath escapes.

The film plays on -

Unwatched.

Sunlight plays on your spine.

Life continues below.

Our world is now.

If only I could remember your name.

Clown.

Just one more clown in his circus you are.
Such a public mockery.
You are a tool in his all-consuming self-love.
Unwilling to face the one way, blackhole nature of it all.
You stand in painted smile.
The audience watch clutching breath
for him to pull out the chair.
The ringmaster owns your eyes and time.
Are you so blinded by footlights
that you can truly call this
astounding self-degradation
love?

Just one more clown in his circus you are.
Watch the pretty girls lead the horses away.
The spectacle is leaving town.

Lazy Dreveries

I blow chains of momentary beauty
But they cannot capture the moments with you.
Watching the world hurry past
I saunter through thoughts idle and unworried.
I know that you will still be as imperfect
as the day you lent me your coat in the rain.
The old dog smell of wet leather
still warm from your body.
In death our flaws are in perfect perspective.
Who cares that you were always late?
now that you are.
 

06/04/04

As a teardrop I fall for you.
Melancholic. Mesmerised.
So far, so fast, so frail I fall.
Shattered before I crushed.
A stolen heartless kiss -
That thoughtless thief of trust.

Pools of blue that overflow.
Tissue peppered cheeks.
The condiments of grief.
I smile through gritted teeth.
And love love as my foe.

Hiding

Long sleeves. Long legs.
These lines are too telling.
I wish I could explain
how this pain helps that pain.
But language is limited.

20/03/2010 Dear Gio (but not for Gio)

Surrounded by vices as strange as sliced toast
Interacting with many half-living, half-ghost.
Some glowing brightly, some dulled by life's blade,
but everyone wants something from you, I'm afraid.
Some want your body, some want your mind
Some of them only want you to be kind.
The best are the ones who want you to be you
and the ones who just want you to smile.
The ones who will paint you with custard and glue
To away a fun little while.
Who'll help you survive, help you to say no,
teach you things about Glasgow you never would know.
Ride bikes with you, share with you, get you a job.
To share a good joke with, to share with a sob.
To drive one way round Nottingham, eight or nine times (!)
and hypnotise randoms with powers of rhyme.
A gallery cafe, a man in a dress
and all of the time at Paisley Road West.
The long walk home never seemed so long
when walking at five forty-five
And shiny posh bars never seemed so wrong.
You'd rather be seen in a dive.
And if you find these friends my boy, hold them tight.
They're rarer then wormholes, more precious than light
and all of the time that together you'd have
would be sacred, remembered, occasionally mad
but thoroughly lived - and that's the whole point.
In life's murky waters, I urge you: anoint!
Your life may transport you to a Dear Green Place
of culture, catastrophe, darkness and grace
and then, maybe then, you will make friends like these,
my long lost and ever-beloved Weegies.

Per Luciana Zapparoli - L'Anniversario D'Oro.

This

I drew this for my mother-in-law on the occasion of my in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary.

It is an image of her on her wedding day.

The "50 anni" on the top right is a dream, not even imagined to her on her wedding day.

All the things listed on the top left are the things that came to pass in their life together - the things she could have forseen: Children, love, problems, work, happiness, hard times, tears, grandchildren, friends, dreams.

The road she is walking is moving her from the past to the future.

The roots under her feet are the roots of their strong relationship, the things that have made their relationship work: Love; Family; Strength; Experience; Luck; Hope; Patience; Determination; Sacrifice; Humour; Morality; the Church; Propriety; Life Education; Faith (and faithfulness - the word is the same in Italian)

I know my sketching skills leave a lot to be desired, but hey. The idea was there, just not the technical ability. Perhaps with practice this is something I can work on.

14/10/13

I feel I am just waking up
from 10 years in Van Winkle dust.
Head is clearing, footsteps lighter.
Horizons wide and vision brighter.
Emotional ballast I've unburdened.
Old grievances I feel I've pardoned.
Not that I'll forget, of course,
But from that me I'm now divorced.

Is this me now growing up?
Or just a midlife crisis?
It's not too young, my half-full cup,
I'll probably die of bronchitis!
Those days we can't choose but to see,
when antibiotics don't work
because no company wants to fund
research with no glamorous perk.

I know what I want and how to get it.
All I need now is time.
And a canyon of work, of which I'm not afeared.
My life will be Reason from Rhyme.