poem eighteen: it couldn’t be

TW: rape, domestic violence

*

It couldn’t all be climbing on
Nelson’s Column, three inch
heels on my tall black boots,
to sit next to the lions at one AM
and watch a guy roller skating
in Trafalgar Square, while we
smoked off our pints, laughing
eating chips, catching the night bus.

It couldn’t all be like this
when I stopped remembering
how to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, kept quiet
and let things happen as they fell
because you bought me a mic
and said I must never let
myself go, that I had an image
to maintain, what was I thinking?

It couldn’t all be rock n roll my
love. It couldn’t all be your way
even if it was in your city, even
if the words sliding over my lips
were floating on your tune,
even if you were almost a whole
foot taller than me and what could
I do about it? Say no? Funny.

It couldn’t all be funny, even
though you turned up to the shop
with flowers, looking sheepish, sorry
you’d thrown me around, sorry you’d
said harsh words, mangled the parts
of me you said you loved. No, that
isn’t how it went: you only said ‘sorry’.
You never explained what you meant.

*

Sorry for the dark waffling stuff, people. Others don’t appear to think about what they’re saying to me and what it might trigger for days after. Poetry is a way through that for me.

poem seventeen: redemption

branches stretch to black
veins across the sky’s blue
skin; I can’t hear the beat
of this word without consequence,
a hidden piece of me shrinking –

knowing there were things
sex & singing couldn’t smooth
away, things pints of beer
wouldn’t wash off, no matter
how many hours passed our way.

maybe it doesn’t exist, a dream
like the words you recycled
for me, maybe it’s a distant
old thing, like stars. redemption.
let it roll & bump off your tongue.

*

This was a prompt I noted down last year – the word ‘redemption’. What a loaded word. Ancient history, though, when I was younger and dumber.

poem twelve: music

My friend, I have missed
the unexpected moments
feelings only you
bring to my impatient words
layers of sound, of movement.

*

A love poem to music.
I’m working on a song for the first time in maybe eight years, with a musician friend. That’s a long time to put down a part of yourself and attempt to forget about it. It won’t work.

poem six: once upon a time

There was a quiet girl, though
she wasn’t always quiet, born
full of sound, her first wails
in the night shushed by turns
with shaking and soothing
but soon the noise formed
into words, she put meaning
to the music of the world,
needed to hear and be heard.

But the world picks and chooses
and nothing’s quite as useless
as a little girl who sings
with the ducks and killdeer on her own
making up stories in her head.
She couldn’t stop if she wanted
though the shaking became slaps
and kicks, still no one listened
only heard when it suited them.

Eventually someone came along
with the same kind of broken heart as hers
and he put their love into music with words
like a secret, and if none of it was true,
she still believed it, and even now doesn’t
want to let go of the feeling
it gave her (no one had ever done
anything quite like that before,
so she will always be grateful).

Sorry.
There’s no happily ever after.
In fact,
I don’t know how the story ends.

poem five: april 5, 1994

He was dead, and the girl
on the tv in our classroom
was crying, and the boy
they filmed couldn’t speak
with grief, and the girl
said What will we do now?
He made my life easier, he
understood. And our teacher
laughed, her face cracked
into a smirk, she told us –
thirteen, fourteen, young
– kids don’t know a thing
about how hard life can be.
And a girl in my class spoke
up, said what if her dad’s
a drunk? What if she’s abused?
Sometimes a kid does know how
hard life can be. The teacher
rolled her eyes. I said nothing
and the girl knew nothing, but I
was grateful for her voice
and his, my silence ever louder
in my head. I would miss him too.

*

Well. It’s obvious isn’t it? Twenty years without Kurt Cobain today. I didn’t want this poem to focus on the suicide itself after yesterday’s effort, but more on how we are affected by music & culture, how teenagers are perfectly capable of understanding how hard life is, and how there’s always an adult who forgets what it was like to be one. So this poem didn’t take place on that date, but some days after. And at least one quiet, awkward girl was hiding a hell of a lot in that classroom when the teacher reeled off her shit. RIP Kurt, and thank you endlessly for (accidentally) helping us get through things, even though you weren’t able to keep going.

poem thirty: the end

OH MY GOD IT’S FINISHED.

Yes, here is my last poem for NaPoWriMo, and I’m still alive.

I saw a prompt some time ago about writing a poem giving thanks to a poet … I do not know where I saw that prompt. Anyway, I’m sort of thanking my tutors at university with this (writers, poets), but I’ve also ended up recognising the contribution my singing teacher from fifteen years ago made to my artistic life.

We are always learning. Too often we realise we learned something fifteen years after the fact.

(Also this poem is not to be taken as a good example that I suddenly know what I’m doing when it comes to writing. For one thing, I wrote it in 20 minutes. Until this month I’d never written anything in 20 minutes. And for another thing, I still have a lot to learn. Ask me again in another fifteen years.)

***

At eighteen I learned
to sing from my diaphragm,
how to hold and bend
the notes, how to breathe.
She told me talent did not
make you an artist.
She told me art was found
in what you could control.

I used to write poems
that didn’t make sense.
The words danced
but fell flat after one
pirouette, stumbled away
through the space on the page
and dragged themselves off stage,
saying “that’ll do”.

Eventually I began to learn
how to keep a poem
on its feet until the end
of the dance. I have to sing
to them: deep breaths, bend
the space around the words just right
so they dance in lines, smiling,
curtseying when the curtain falls.