The space you used to fill crowds me with

its silence.  The rooms, so full of who you were,

so empty without you.  I can’t bring myself

to clear them.  Your things are objects now,

to be taken to charity shops where they’ll sit

anonymously on shelves, to be looked at by strangers,

no more wrapped in tender memories.   

Can I sit in your home a little longer

before it becomes just a house?

Can I look at the ornaments you

picked out and feel that you’re still here

before the clearing out of your life for good?

October arrives gently, leading me into autumn

with pale mornings and colder air. A scarf of fog ribbons

along the canal. The water reflects white, white.

It’s OK, the trees are telling me.  It’s OK.

We know you’re hurting.  We see your pain, hanging

sharp above you like spikes on hawthorn.  You can

feel what you feel.  But while you wear your grief,

while you wrap it around yourself, you might look too

at the shaking of berries on the path – red

and orange like the wide star of a maple leaf.

You can allow yourself a moment of wonder

at the gathering of enormous scarlet toadstools

in the woods.  It’s like fairyland a man says to me,

having been enough surprised to dismount his bike. 

The skies are grey, certainly, and there’s a chill

in the air.  The colours of autumn won’t change

the fact of her death, and everything won’t be alright.

But the trees will still shed their red and their gold,

and they will stand bare against winter frost, as

they do every year.  It isn’t necessary to take a

lesson from this.  It’s enough just to be here

on this cold morning; awake, alone, alive.

Well, my body has got the better of me and I’ve stopped writing a poem a day. I’m just too exhausted to be creative. I’m saving the prompts I like for use at another time, hopefully.

Poetry for me is about joy and about creating something interesting or beautiful that didn’t exist before, and I can’t do that when I’m in an ME flare, as I seem to be right now. Such is life!

The next in my ‘bad girls’ series – this is a character from The Matrix. In the film, Mouse creates her as a distraction in his training programme. She’s been constructed by a man as both an idealised version of femininity and a trap – in fact she isn’t really a woman at all – but we’ll allow it.

Her beauty is deliberate –

she’s been devised as someone’s

ideal woman.  Distracting,

but that’s the point.  She’s a shock –

a rupture in the black-suited world.

Her lips are deep ruby with the

start of a smile directed at

only you.  You are impelled to stare –

your gaze is invited.  Her dress

too is a rich claret – spilled red

wine. Your eyes are pulled to

her body and held there. 

Even as you stare, you

know that she’s a trap. 

Something about the

red recalls blood – an open wound. 

She’s a warning, an exclamation mark.

A premonition. 

But ultimately she’s a shell –

weaponised femininity – to be

gazed at and feared equally.

Don’t look for too long.  She may

not be what she seems.  Don’t get pulled in

or the trap may spring.

An oak tree, perhaps, my
roots wiggling down into moist soil,
stretching into the earth’s shell for
the life hidden there. The mycelium
swaddling me with nutrients, while
my strong brown arms reach up to
heaven. I will provide shelter for
a million tiny insects. Ants will
form conquering armies around
my trunk. Caterpillars will
make tidy lines around my branches
waiting for their time to fly. I will
be mother to all of this life and I
will know that I am enough. The
sun will shine on me and I will
drink the rain. I will outlive kings
and never question my place in
all of this.

Well, you’ve been a riot, April.  Words have

been flying about all over the place and

settling in unexpected positions: under the

sink, in the sock drawer.  I found some

underneath the toothpaste, mixed together,

no sense at all to be made of them. 

They follow me everywhere I go. 

There’s a trail of poetic fragments stamped

into thick mud on the path where I walk

the dog – furled curled up like a hibernating

mouse, psithurism blowing about like a

dried leaf.  Literary madness.   There’s nothing

to be done but enjoy it.  To gather up those

words as I go, forming a Marley’s chain

of writing behind me, tangled, woven, untidy.

To place them in lines and boxes, feed them

and listen to them sing.

An ekphrastic prose poem about the song Decks Dark by Radiohead (From A Moon Shaped Pool).

A single long note, then a gentle rhythm. It feels like a relaxed heartbeat.  We’re going for a walk

in the dark, on a warm night.  Strange words follow us – we are ragdolls, we are cloth people –

and a piano track creates a path.  Notes tumble around us like rain.  We are drifting into

our darkest hour.  A mournful synth joins, the sound of a thought emerging.  Where are we going?

There are monsters in this dark. 

A sudden interruption of defensive words – we’re inside an argument.  It was just a laugh, just

a laugh.  The stream of words trails away and we’re shocked back into normality.  The piano

resumes, a delicate sound, reassuring us that the monsters are all in our head. 

But they’re not, are they?  Bass notes of the piano now, a warning.  The words are indistinct

as if we’re falling asleep.  Sweet darling, sweet darling. Repeated until darkness.