Poetry
Words that wander, wonder and stay a while.
Poems about childhood, growing up, school, memory, feeling different, and finding your own way in the world.
Doing It Differently
Don’t do it like that,
you must do it like this.
That’s the sound of the playlist
that’s forced onto me
by well mean, well-meaning teachers
who are staring at me
across a room
full of gloom.
Sit down, shut up, get our data done.
You must put your hopes down
and jump through the hoops
of the powers that be.
Don’t you dare start doing it differently.
No malarkey needed here. Do you hear?
Malarkey! What a great word.
Word. Add an S at the front and it becomes sword.
What does malarkey actually mean?
Silly, nonsense, foolishness talk.
But inside my brain a genius walks –
there are colours and sounds
and a world that’s unbound.
Once I’m done with your hoops
and the jumping around
like a clown,
you’ll see me up high
with a glint in my eye.
Doing it differently.
Goodbye.
Ex Am
PRE
Skipping, dancing, laughing at life
Wings at the core, waiting
Ready to unfurl and take flight
Standing in hope sunshine
A line of children
All the same height
Looking each other in the eye
Able to reach the same things
POST
Life results in an envelope
Ripped open
Out falls shade
I’m looking up
They’re looking down
On me
I’m looking down
On me
It’s all on me
Dull
No dancing
Still
Stuck in the stone
Of failing
The exam that killed me
All those years ago
At 11
Plus
Forever
First Flirt
There’s a boy over there.
I’m going to hop on this wall,
I’m going to make him look over
and see that I’m tall.
He’s older than me.
I’m making him see
that I‘m all grown-up
so he notices me.
Here I am.
Hopping along a single brick wall
at the front of my house,
being all tall.
Here I am.
Crying on the kitchen counter,
mum’s TCP cotton-wool
dabbing my knee.
I’m crossing my fingers
he didn’t see me.
And
And what if we weren’t taught writing rules
And creative thoughts ran free in schools
And it didn’t matter a jot where we sat
And the tadpoles and chicks were invited back
And we could watch in wonder and awe
At sunlight speckles on the floor
And the clock on the wall didn’t chase any tests
And the beating heart we could feel in our chest
Was about the excitement of life and not fear
Of starting a sentence with And
The Dressing-Up Box
I tried to repaint it a while back – disaster!
My dad would have laughed.
His DIY was gung-ho too.
It got shoved into the shed,
dead and empty.
But back in the day –
and the day before those days -
there was not one single thing
dead about that box.
It was full to overflowing
with life, that box.
As I think of it now,
a welling wave of dressing-up-box memories
wraps me up
in tulle and uniform hats
and a whirl
of badly acted ideas and lyrics.
That dressing-up box
dressed me up
for life’s every eventuality.
It gave me a taste
of believing
I could be anything.
But maybe not
a painter and decorator.
It All Makes Scents
Chanel No. 5
came into my life
on the twentieth of May 1981
and never left.
That’s not to say
I haven’t dallied
with others.
I’ve holidayed with
Eau Dynamisante.
But I’ve always come home
to Chanel.
Laundry is always Fairy.
I can’t use Persil.
It reminds me of the sheets
of cancer that stole my dad away
on the thirteenth of May 2003.
It can only be Fairy
since then for me.
If I want a waft
of my childhood home,
I unwrap Imperial Leather.
And I’ve just started using Dove –
the same as my mum,
who has loved me forever.
After Dad died, I cried
in Boots, asking for
a bottle of Youth Dew
for Mum for Christmas,
because Dad wasn’t here
any more to buy it for her.
Mum never really liked
Youth Dew.
But she chose to love it
because she loved my dad.
That’s true love, I’d say.
I expect I will spray
Youth Dew one day
when I’m trying to make sense
of her death
and I want my mum.
Maybe when I’m gone
and my offspring want a waft of me,
they’ll go to Boots
and ask for
Chanel No. 5
I wonder if they’ll cry.
Other People’s Lives
How have other people’s lives
become the fodder for our brains?
Why are other people’s lives
the thing we reach out for?
How have people we do not know,
and will never meet,
become the ones we worship
at the feet of?
Not holding in our hand
the person beside us.
Not scrolling the face
of the person beside us.
Staring at the screen in our palm,
not noticing the palm tree.
What a futile face-palm
our lives have become.
