Day eighteen!  Really rough draft of a poem I want to edit, haven't had a lot of time again but wanted to get some ideas down.

Body: Missing

She's lost her body sometime
over the last couple of years.
She's not exactly sure when; it
edged away gradually, leaving
a doppelgänger in its place.
She'd like it back, if found.

It was always elusive, its
dualist mind freed from flesh
through ascetic detachment.
She miss the paradox she
never knew existed; floating
numbness cut by sharp awareness.
Noises jolted her heart in a
prison of ribs framed by
coat hanger collar bones;
hyperaware, she slept
as if on a cliff top.

This new body seems a lot more
forceful than she's used to; she's
conscious of it pressing against
her clothes, reflecting in windows.
It's much more muchier,
to use Alice's terminology,
ever-present, material, materialist,
grounding perceptions with desire,
strange sensations, emotional nausea.

So she runs through the vertigo,
running as if to find her old body
but now she can hardly picture it.
She runs to feel free, to escape
herself, her new self, create
new paradoxes.
She's both detached and physical,
mind lost in movement.
Egoless and free,
she keeps running.

Day seventeen and another haiku, sorry, today's poem is still half-written and will probably take a while and re-surface later on in the month!  It's a response to yesterday's one- realised the opposite poem could mean the same thing from a different perspective which I found kind of interesting.  Might try a 'mirror poem' at some point :)

Others you want to
curve inwards like a black hole
away from people.

Day sixteen- just a haiku today, been working all day and haven't had a lot of time.

Sometimes you feel like
you want to run forever
away from yourself.

Day 15- half way!!  And two poems this time, although one was definitely not written today, or even this year/decade/millennium...  When I was in primary school, I was obsessed with Formula One- I could recite stats from 1996 onwards (and from before that if they were in the F1 books I read) and can still describe most races from 1996-2000.  When I was in Year 6 (1997-8), I wrote a poem about F1 which I recently found.  It's embarrassingly bad and I cringe a bit when I read it, so have tried to write an updated version for today's poem.  Have included both here :)

The Grand Prix (age 10/11, 1997/8)

A peaceful track
All nice and smooth.
Then, all of a sudden,
things start to move!

Engines rev up,
What a noise!
Ear-bursting sounds,
The drivers poised.

A chequered flag waves
As cars move along.
A red blur passes
On and on.

People cheer,
Jordan!  Ferrari!
I can't wait
Until the finale.

The excitement bubbles,
It's getting tense.
Look at the fog,
Isn't it dense!

At last it is
The final lap.
The winning driver
Raises his cap.

A storm of clapping,
A lot of cat-calls.
The flag rises,
Then it falls.

The track is silent.
It is hard to believe
That only ten minutes ago,
Twenty-two drivers had to leave.

[irony is that, even though it's not great, I don't think I could write a rhyming poem now!]

Microcosms

A race is a driver's life
in microcosm.  Five lights signal
release of revved potential
cut with strategy and chance.
It's a series of split-second
concrete moments; time
stops and contracts as present
flickers to future and back,
mediated by adrenaline.
All emotions are played out
and suppressed at once.
It's a game of chess; drivers
move like pawns towards
a predestined chequered flag.
The best drivers know the
importance of detachment,
the apex of free will tempered
with team strategy and skill.
Selfish loss of ego.

Day fourteen and for the first time, I'm posting a poem that's not technically new...  I know it's cheating but really haven't had time to write a poem today and it's one I wrote a couple of months ago and haven't used in a 'formal' sense yet.  Needs a lot of editing anyway!  Will make up for it by trying to write a 'good' poem tomorrow, feeling v guilty now...  Managed two weeks though :)

Homeland

Some say it’s in their genes,

alleles coded like a map.

Others swear by flashbulb memory,

geomagnetic homeland fields.

                                           Maybe.

It was my grandmother,

recently widowed though you’d never guess,

who wanted to watch the salmon leap.

I waited by the door as she folded

blue and pink dressing gowns,

shook the duvet across the double bed.

We took the high road,

stumbled over October-damp rocks -

Nanny in her quickstep heels;

I in my unremarkable wellies.

You’re so like your Gotchogo, she’d say,

so practical and such patience as I stared

through his blue eyes.

We stopped at his tree – rowan -

sapling potential burning gold

amid rotting leaves and moss.

I watched the Ben in the distance,

russet and pine against grey Scottish sky.

We walked on towards the burn,

rippling in the distance.

The glen thinned in shafts of shadow.

We waited for a flash of quicksilver.

The first thud of failed fish spun my head with nausea;

I watched them float, flow and sink.

Nothing prepares you for life’s futility,

shock paralyses the mind with guilt.

I don’t know if any made it upstream.

Time suspended in an endless cycle

as Nature dashed its infants against the rocks.

But time’s not a snapshot.

Even now, decades on, I can still hear

the constant rush of water.

The suicide-slap of salmon on rock.

Day thirteen!  Not a massively symbolic or interesting poem today, v tired and brain not thinking metaphorically at all.

Guitar Lessons

Fingers fumble over frets, jar
discordant sounds as I try to
learn the language of chords.
You're fluent in finger-picks and
strumming while I'm still stuck
on notes, never mind the grammar
of guitar tabs and chord patterns.
Minus the visual pattern of words,
the guitar language blurs in my mind.
Listening was always harder than reading.

Practising one evening, something
shifts.  A slip in thoughts and
sounds merge into something
intuitive I didn't know I knew.  It's
magic, a rush of vertigo through
the bloodstream and I'm high on
free detachment usually linked to
long runs or bone-dark nights
where the sky's a pattern of stars
and you can breathe infinity.

Logic can only take you halfway.
It's the wonder behind science,
the strange alchemy of patterns.

Day twelve!  An attempt at describing watching the comet Hale-Bopp when I was ten and space-obsessed. Doesn't really convey what I was trying to, but enough there to rework at some point :)

Hale-Bopp,  1997

I liked the stars because of maths.
Year 5 times tables challenge won
a book of constellations- all stickers
and glow-in-the-dark pictures and myth-
and I was obsessed.  Science and stories,
fiction and facts fused with wonder.
The book stayed in my schoolbag till Year 9,
long after I knew it by heart, tracing
Braille-like stars with nervous fingertips.

Homework was less scary against
a backdrop of darkness and infinity.
It's amazing what a ten-year-old
can absorb, swallowing information
with the intensity of black hole gravity,
freaking out to Bowie's Space Oddity.
Even as an adult, the song still spins
my head with nauseous vertigo.

We watched the comet through the gap
of curtains in my parents' darkened bedroom.
Lights out and shadowed, I stared at
the fuzz of two and a half thousand years.
Leaning out the window, I breathed in
the wonder of millenia, willing my
stardust cells to merge with comet magic.
I could sense Bowie's Starman waiting
in the sky.  Now, years later, I still
feel the vertigo of infinity, the sense
of everything and nothing at once,
your own contingence in the universe.
In the scheme of the cosmos,
you hardly even exist.

Day eleven and my first attempt at a poem about 'love'...v unlike me, I know!

Love is

an abstract noun fluid with
meaning that shifts like tides.
It's refracted through prisms of
perspectives, intangible as shadows
on a cloudless night.  Love persists
between distractions and thoughts,
the elusive egoless boundary.
It's there in the breath
of a winter morning's half-light
and the rhythm of a run that feels right.
Love's lost in self-consciousness, flows
anonymously through atoms and cells.
It's the sudden vertigo you
don't understand, or don't need to.
Love's relative, flowing through
intensities; a perfect union of
self-less harmony and detachment.

Day ten and another Alice in Wonderland poem...  Am thinking of doing a sequence of them so there's no 'ending' to the poem, or maybe that's part of the point!

Alice Again

There are times when it's easier
to pretend you don't exist,
that you're just a vehicle
for shifting perceptions of others.
Falling down the rabbit hole, she
reached magic constant velocity,
total release from self-imposed self.

Wonderland's a mesh of mirror-maze
detachment and full-force feeling
and she rides the pendulum like
a long-distance run; time contracted,
relative to a microcosm of perceptions.
There are times when she's sure
it's all just a dream; except that
she doesn't dream, usually, or not
that she remembers.  Memories meld
pseudo-memories, neuroplastic neurons
forged by transient imagination.

Logic-lost, she's drifting in a world
where time has no meaning and
light-wave perspectives curve space.
You can run but you won't get anywhere,
distance dissolved infinitesimally in
an illusion of motion.  Like herself.

Day nine- poem in haikus!  Haven't done this before, kind of fun :)

Haiku Sunset

Red paint streaks across
a palate of sepia,
purple fades to grey.

Crumpled paper leaves
scatter all over the ground,
blown off by the wind.

Sky darkens; coaldust
smears black shadows across the
leftover pastels.

Inky sky pinpricked
with flickering matches and
a fingernail moon.

Mercury spills a
blurred silver stream through darkness,
ghostlike Milky Way.

Cosmic belonging,
the rush of infinity;
nature's vertigo.

Breathe in the stillness;
can you feel your self dissolve?
Ego lost in space.

Day eight- very short and rubbish, sorry, didn't sleep at all last night and brain not functioning properly!  Which is the subject of the (mini) poem...

Nightless

Tiredness buzzes brain with insomniac
fuzz; caffeine-jolted thoughts flit
irregular images jittery with adrenaline.
Night blurs time like nebulae.

Day seven- made it through a week!!  Poem based on an orbitorium (planetarium) we visited in Poland.

Spaceman in Torun

Face blank as a starless night, he
stands sentry above the bolted door.
Schoolchildren swarm like excited ants,
lights flash the darkness glowbug-green.
Semi-adult with childish excitement, the
room whirls with interactivity; lasers
and sounds cut the shadows like lightsabers.
Mute as a mermaid in an alien language,
I stare at unfamiliar words and symbols,
decode accented consonants and still
new words blur into background stars.
It would take 219 x 10 (to the power of) 21 years
to travel to the edge of the universe
by turtle, we discover, and triple-check.
Who would think to, I don't know, but
suddenly I'm hovering in the stars;
Milky Way snaking across the blackness,
a distant spill of cloudy glitter as
I cruise on a reptile's rigid roof.
Leaving the orbitorium, I glance
at the watchful spaceman and smile.
Body of stardust and alien language, yet
another space traveller on the wrong planet.

Day six :) co-written with Heather Humphreys, Rebecca Jones and Clare Everett in a bar in Poland after an AMAZING day!

Torun Renga- 6th April 2013

Scrabble, chess, coffees,
early April Saturday,
super awesome friends.

A lazy Saturday morning.
Laptop city in the house.

A floating spaceman
over lost planets in the
orbitorium.

Tagliatelle
raspberry cocktails, vodka
apple juice and coke.

Sunshine and mooching.
"I have a choice of three beds!!!"
DSLR snaps.

Prosze pani Fi.
Djekuje bardzo Heather.
"Choice of three sauces."

Eight mugs of coffee,
drifting from cafes to bars,
coke and coffee-high.

Sunny, cloudless sky
beautifully cold and bright
hot chocolate, please.

Day five- broken last year's record!  But poems are getting a lot more 'bitty' now; this one needs a much stronger ending...

Alice

As she grew, so did her experiences,
broadening, deepening in intensity,
sense-sharp spectrum of feeling.
When she shrank, the world contracted,
telescopic, microscopic microcosm,
narrowed perception through muted senses.
She'd been shape-shifting for a time
fixed in perspectives, unquantifiable.
In her mind, it began when her up-and-down
parallel lines softened in space, curved relatively,
and she realised she was already falling
down a rabbit hole of emotional vertigo.
It was a place where you run
until you choke on burning breath and
still only reach your starting point,
where surfaces shift through paradox.
Keep moving through the nausea,
the only constant is change.
She's moving in all directions at once.

Day four- this is as far as I got last year!  Hopefully going to get further this year...

Friendship Band

Friendship's an elastic band
you stretch and release.
As you increase the distance,
I navigate the tightrope of potential
and snap painfully back to the start.
It's the uncertainty of emails
sent to a cyberspace void,
the hung-up non-calls because
you're "too busy to talk":
constant emotional vertigo.

Stretched to breaking point,
I sometimes want to cut
the quivering band, run
until pain burns nausea and
distance merges memories.

The irony is
you wouldn't even notice.

Day three...still going!

Driving at night in the snow

you imagine you're a space-ship,
stars flying through headlights
as you tempt the accelerator,
foot shaking the clutch.
The road's a slippery wolf
under a sheepskin blanket
but you know the stories.

The world stretches dark echoes
magnified by frictionless vertigo
and you can see your heartbeat
pulsate the blurred windscreen wipers.
There's something unsettling to
silence of whirling flakes,
the absolute loneliness of a
world of white.

Day two...  Slightly different poem this time that needs a lot of work, particularly towards the end.  Very loosely based on philosophy but mainly about vertigo coming from an ear infection!

Vertigo

Life’s a pendulum-

swing that leaves you

dizzy with vertigo.

And that’s just your part.

Add the rest of the clockwork:

the intricate cogs and wheels

of social relationships,

the steady tick of time passing,

the alarm-call of emergency.

Throw a spanner into the works;

watch your microcosmic world

grind to a halt-

temporarily-

as life swings on.

Who are you to question

the clockmaker?

Who are you to question

design theory?

Some made-up boundary

between productions,

hardly aware?

It’s just mechanical.

Don’t think about it.

Avoid the confusion,

the endless dramas.

Forget the guilt,

the interminable nausea.

Reroute neural passages,

actively forget.

You can’t stop momentum.

It’s mechanical, after all.

NaPoWriMo...

OK, NaPoWriMo...  Great opportunity to actually start writing a blog?  Although, as a not self-identified pseudo-writer (if that makes any sense at all), I should probably have been writing one by now.  It's that weird intersection of wanting to write but realising that it could be egocentric, then remembering that no-one will actually bother reading it anyway...  Anyway, enough random rambling about self/selfishness (although, as anyone who knows me will know, it's kind of a broken record with me so I'll probably end up going on about it again at some point).  Here's the poem- not finished or polished in any way but that's the point of NaPoWriMo I think...

Mermaid

Sometimes you run
until your feet feel mermaid pain
and joints grind bone-on-bone
like calcium clockwork
and that's the moment
you don't know you've been waiting for
and you run five, ten miles
more than planned,
mind lost in the rushing sea
sharpened by salted wind raw from dawn
footsteps balance the earth's shift.

You're semi-aware, endorphins
loosen your senses to drift
mindless clouds through a hazy sky
sense of self solidified in motion.
Coded in muscle, you point
outside, inside your body; ego
dissolved in runner's high.

There's a reason she never
returned under the sea.