Flamingo

A bright pink plastic flamingo
flutters down to the balcony awning.
The corner of my eye catches it
and tells my heart to start pounding,
the bile in my stomach to rotate,
my skin to prickle and perspire.
"Is this about the children?" she asks.
A pause. A blink.
An explosion contained in terse, controlled
- clipped - words.
"What. Children." I say.

"The children in Africa? In Congo or Sudan?
The children in Afghanistan, perhaps? Pakistan?"

She smiles, irritatingly pleasant,
pink and plastic in her perfect mask.

"is this
about the children?"

My eyes, if they could, would flash
a warning.

"In the hospital? In the orphanages?
In the cancer wards watching their
parents inject poison to save themselves?

In the morgues?"

A pause. A blink.
A smile.

"Well,
is this about
the children?"

"What Children?" I gasp, a fish on the jetty.
"What fucking children?"
I cry, I throw at her flamingo face,
"There are no fucking children!"
my words round and precise,
until they crash against her lips
which arch as she breaths back
"Exactly."
Pen twirling, eyebrow raises
like the sure leg of a waterbird,
"Exactly."

-Amanda Wells, 2014

Love letter

Dear Amy,
I've had 12 friends named Amy, did you know that?
So I feel I can address you by name
and you and I will remain safe in our anonymity.
I risk you never knowing, by the same token,
though I expect that if I die, someone will tell you.
If you die first, then you'll either knew it all,
or nothing at all. But I digress,

Dear Amy,
I love you all.
You were the first I ever let in, and the first
I put up my boundaries for - brick and stone, metal and glass.
You introduced me to paradox, at once inside and perpetually,
fearfully locked out. There and not there
long before Schroedinger was ever born.

Dear Amy I learned rock climbing for you.
Learned to cling with fingerpads,
praying that the rock biting into my skin
would cling back and stop me falling.
Watch the red lines appear sharp and slow
on my white flesh - my arms and hands.

Dear Amy you showed me the meaning of mirrors.
One way glass in its truest form, as I tried
to look through my reflection to find you
but was left caressing smooth, cold, silver glass.
Dear Amy the shards still stick in my soles.

Dear Amy you are the reason my voice wavers
when I tell him I love him. And I do love him.
I waver with the memory, or perhaps my voice
tremors under the weight of words
I never said to you.

Dear Amy, I wish I could only relegate you in my mind
to the past where I could reimagine us - as better
than we were. I don't wish you were dead,
I don't wish you dead.

Dear Amy, I don't really know you now.
They tell me you are happy. I -
I am glad. Know that though I do think of you,
and this letter contains too much and not enough
truth, and I am showing you how I came to be,
I do not always think of you.

And I'm sorry I never said what I wanted to say,
or what you needed to hear, and I'm sorry
you didn't hear either. I'm sorry for the metaphors
and the poetry, and for never speaking plainly.

Dear Amy, we haven't spoken in years.
Dear Amy, the distance and the years are my fault.
Dear Amy, love Amanda.

Well-Spun and Falsehood

Well Spun

Lately you breathe words out in strings

and they crumple, and scatter on the floor.

Your face a picture of contrite earnestness,

but yours, seeing mine, knows that I perceive

you - not your well-spun promises.

You clamour and cling to my clothes -

enough to make me scratch at my skin.

How much more do I give to the void -

words are not enough to tide me over,

this garden will not keep me here - I can't

see anything growing, anyway.

(2014)

I have been writing a lot lately, and quite a bit remains in my notebooks, waiting for another day when I can recraft the poems into something a little more elegant, and more representative of what I'm trying to say. But this one sprung from the experience of someone I know, and it seems to work, even if it is in a raw state.




In other news, I've been painting lately too - I'd say I've been "almost manic" in my creativity, but that is a lie. I have definitely been manic. Borderline on needing to visit someone with experience in levelling out brain chemistry... but not quite.

I do feel proud that I am able to identify this in myself though. I am aware that this may not always be the case, but I'm also proud that I've surrounded myself with people who are intelligent enough and compassionate enough to help me if I should slip off the edge.



And for a second poem, one that takes an idea and runs with it, so that it isn't quite fiction nor non-fiction.

Falsehood

You tease out words like future

and paint images of gardens

and kitchens, and mason jars.

Juggling glittering ideals of the path

you see laid out before me,

light dancing in your eyes

of these concepts you weave the way

forward. A fence is between us,

cut from my eyes across your teased

words and paths. You do not know 

my feet, my womb, my fingernails.

The difficulty lies in the colours

bursting in my night sky,

wrenched from between my clenched limbs,

even if I made it to fifty-four.

(2014)

Doomed Songbird

And another poem for you... this one on a topic that I fear will form themes in my work for a long time to come.

Doomed Songbird

Doomed songbird who left

an empty bottle of cheap red wine,

a chair by the railing,

a violin in its velvet coffin.

Black Bulbul, your plaintive cry

is etched in my skull

and I hear it played back through my bones

like a record, whenever reverberations play.

Flightless bird you fell,

shattered the glass before you.

Fear - not your wings, your feathers

will remain behind my eyelids

as long as I can see the sky, or broken things.

Written by me, tonight, about events of 2 years ago... has it been that long already?

Comfort and Mud

Alright! So - here is some poetry that I've come up with. These are two I wrote yesterday.

Comfort

You are buttered menthol

to my throat raw from screaming.

Your hands thrust my arms 

above my head - clasped -

your mouth closes tight

on my lips - stops

the sound from leaking out;

swallow it whole,

and make me quiet.

Mud

We're all made of mud, I think.

How else to explain it?

Sticky, messy lives. 

Gritty, thrown together, not planned -

and the scientists always say

the key to life is water, don't they?

We're churned, and mixed and thrown together;

We're dirty and horrible and get in

each other's noses, smeared

on each other's skin.

Sometimes trodden upon, and sometimes,

in wiser hands than my own

built into something beautiful,

fired in a kiln to last.

But we dry up, and we crack - when theat

essence of life, water, runs dry - we crack

and find it hard to move. Aching bones

arthritic fingers stretch, creaking towards

muddier times so that the dry-sore skin

might be quenched.

But it isn't so easy as metaphor.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and I

want to go back to mud.

Renaissance

It is I, sporadic blogger.

I've been having a bit of a creative renaissance lately. I'm not sure what has sparked it, though I have my suspicions that it isn't 100% healthy.

For reasons that I won't go into in too much detail, my moods have changed a bit lately. I'm less *controlled*, which has been both nice and scary.

One of the upsides is that I am tapping into a creative energy I hadn't realised I'd lost. I have been painting and drawing and writing with scary compulsion. And it hasn't been shit - to my eye, anyway. So I'm thinking I might start using my blog here to post some things, just so that I can look back and go "Oh yeh - remember that time I went crazy and started being an "artist" again?"

Good times....