Like Salix babylonica I am double-named: Categorised on paper but also known in casual terms. A blunt and easy handle eroded to a stub by daily use; and a triple-shot polysyllabic spray for formal forms. They both derive the same result: they both catch my attention but changing contexts changes labels changes my direction. My [...]
I want to pretend I’m above the comfort zone: that I stare at problems with a stout unblinking glare square my shoulders, square my jaw, square my everywhere: but I can feel a fib like a cracked rib bone. So I’m tired and tensed up, that doesn’t matter; I’m still just as disciplined, still as [...]
A chord, a chime of kinship: you too? A pulse of simultaneous blood.
letter to syllable to word to thought, memes to sentences, phrases to memes; alphabet curls giving meaningful shape to the erratic vibrations from amorphous dreams. lines and rhymes and a logical structure, ideas arranged on metrical shelves; set down the words in a rational way, or not: dispense with the borders themselves. lines and pages, [...]
From court to court, from hall and lecture, from hut to class to palatial dome; from the play of children to the solo gardener: music finds every place its home. From chants and rhymes and canticles sweet, it runs through cultural veins, it feeds and informs through jingles and lilts excites the heart and brains. [...]
I planted and planted, my parents sighed, thank heavens she’s outgrown that nasty phase; A sentence that could only be uttered in a horticulturally blinkered haze. I turned and tilled and composted the soil, coaxed the clay into lushsome dirt, I kept the weeds off the morning glories and pruned the belladonna pert. My parsley, [...]
The invitations pile up, and the snails in the letterbox feast: each embossed ornamental card will be several weeks of feed at least. Delighted to inform, to celebrate the union of unintelligible patches the molluscs have lifted my obligations by chewing up the ornate dispatches. They don’t distinguish between fancy and plain; they eat everything, [...]
Not so much rebellion as a workaround: I propagate my seedlings in the cracks. In whitespace, marginalia and borders, Sprouts uncurl and bring me what life lacks. What was once desperation is now a happy fact, I grow over all the edges like a vine. I bleed and spill beyond the tidy demarcations: don’t bother [...]
Tiny marks and scuffs and stains that form life’s education come unexpectedly, unpleasantly, and without due demarcation. The process, necessarily sly, of ongoing edification means the bumps and hurt and offences all want clarification. Jolts, insults and wounded feelings lack immediate signification: but retrospective, begrudging gratitude earns them justification. Maybe an uncomfortable journey is the [...]
I don’t believe in God, but still: O God when I am furious, O God when I am ill; let me remember good things and well (turtles, terrapins, terracotta; rain and wine and lighting) and don’t let me begrudge anyone else simply for not seeing inside my head where the chaos composts and seeds a [...]
