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Poetry piece TMA05 for my A215 Creative Writing module

She Told Me

I could see,

at the time,

the hurt she felt inside.

The river of betrayal breaking the banks of her eyes,

the guilt in mine.

We sat in a bar,

actors in a drama,

unfolding.

I told her,

there was someone else.

A glass smashed,

dropped by distant hands.

The sharp hard tears,

swept and thrown away

by a bored boy with a broom.

I told her,

I was sorry.

Chanting  the word over

and over again.

A charm to ward off the misery,

but it was just a word to her.

Empty of comfort.

A thorn of sentiment.

I told her,

I didn’t mean to.

I told her,

It just ... happened.

Her head was bowed,

as if praying for a soul.

Maybe mine? Maybe hers?

She had been hurt before.

Not by me, another me.

She must have felt cursed.

She lifted her head,

eyes like the rain

on the window behind her.

She told me,

‘I’m pregnant’.

She ran out the door.

I never saw either of them again.

TMA01 Fiction Piece for A215 Creative Writing

The Old House Convention

I stand outside the ruins of the old house, a place that can no longer be considered a place. It’s shunned appearance causes blindness in the people that pass it every day. To them, it simply doesn’t exist anymore. The house’s other siblings, standing proud, loved and secure on the street beside it, ostracized it long ago and mock with their unbroken windows, jeer with their happy occupants and bully with their bright bricks. Alone it not so much stands but stoops as if waiting for time to take pity and ally with nature to finally sink it into the ground. Its blackened interior holds more secrets than the pyramids. Its graffited walls displaying the lives of many souls, of vagrants, of junkies and of thrill seekers in a diary of destitution. I hear a group of kids behind me and look back to see one throw a stone, smashing what little glass is left of what were once windows but are now hollow eyes staring blankly into the world beyond. I walk into the house as sprinkles of shattered gems fall like tears of sorrow and am greeted by the wind whispering a lament throughout the gloomy interior.

            This is my home, my sanctuary, a free house that greets you with melancholic open arms. I slink past used needles deadly in their potential danger. I sail through an ocean of empty aluminium vessels that once gave the drinkers the promise of hope, unaware they had left what little hope they had at the door. My nose flares at the scent of subtle suicide. There is poison in the air and it is holy in its omnipotence. My cathedral of catharsis cleansing with tired tragedy as I stop to purify my feet. I walk the steep stairs, a stairway to heaven or hell? It’s only a matter of shifting perception as my keen senses soak up midnights mire. I move silently, a ghost in the gloom. The hairs on my body twitch as I sense the others somewhere above, waiting for me. I pause at the top and look out into the darkness, a master of all I survey, and in my reverie I am taken back to another time.

            I was very young when this house had a purer soul, before the accident that had robbed it of a life worth living. I remember the day it happened. The sun shone high in the sky, clothing us in blankets of warmth as my brothers and I played outside. My mother was off doing her daily rounds checking defences and boundaries. We became hungry after a while and went to the kitchen to see if we could find something to eat. It was noisy and busy. The scent of a roast permeated the air as the kitchen staff was hurriedly getting ready for a celebration. The house was full of people so we had to continuously dodge feet in case we were stepped on, this game was always accompanied by the angry shouts from the cooks and waitresses as they in turn avoided tripping over us and dropping food. This we eventually succeeded in doing and raced away into secret spaces to devour our bounty. There was no way of knowing how it happened. I only remember the sickly smell then a flash of an explosion, flames, screams and pandemonium. My brothers darted in every direction and out of sight. I was about to run after them when another explosion knocked me unconscious....

I gave a kind of whimper as the memory faded and I was left on top of the stairs again. A lot of people died that day, my brothers included, and this house has been a scorched curse on the earth ever since. My mother was never found and I never left, a constant caretaker of an endless moment in time. I hear meows and screeches of my fellow creatures coming from the room behind me and I shake my head. They are getting restless. I turn and catch a glimpse of my short black fur in a piece of broken mirror, faintly iridescent in the moonlight. One good eye reflects back a solitary firefly in the dim light, my whiskers long. I have chaired these nocturnal gatherings for many years and as I walk into the room I am greeted with the reverence of a priest. After the gentle butt of heads and noses a circle of the neighbourhood cats surround me. Let the meeting begin......

8pm

8pm?.....8pm!!!!!....I’m late. The queen is going to kill me. How many times has that old witch been pissed off with my time-keeping. I’ve ran out of excuses. I scurry down alleys and tunnels that loom like the entrance to Hades. This time it wasn’t my fault as the recollection keeps me irritatingly entertained as I lumber through streets in this burden of a costume. Ah, yes, the costume. It wasn’t the one I had wanted but it was all that was left by the time I finally managed to get to the shop. A sad, supposedly white but was obviously aware of its own colour blindness, costume with long floppy ears. I stumble. Check my watch. 8pm...8pm??.The bloody thing must of stopped. How late am I? She is going to have my head. I promised I would get to the party on time. I turn the corner and see the club in front of me, a long line of colourful characters like a row of playing cards standing on end wait outside to go in. Jam the office tart is snogging the bouncer as I walk past.

‘You must be off your head to turn up this late’ she says as she hands me a drink. ‘Drink that. You will need it when she sees you.’

I attempt the walk of the proud condemned as I enter this booming hole of flashing rainbow doom.

The place where I write

I, a lonely lover of linguistics, search for a spot to speak. I clamber over mountains  of myth that contain the broken bones of forgotten words, lost letters that constantly cry out to be used again in the songs and sonnets of heroes and ancient races. Once whispered in breathless sighs between lovers or shouted out of the angry mouths of warmongers they now lie without a place to call home. I stop. The vibration in the air has changed. A subtle breeze begins to burrow into my nostrils as I breathe in the scent of lost love letters mingled with childishly written birthday cards to fathers and mothers. This place has no end and no beginning, it has always been and forever will be. In this  shadowed realm of infinite possibilities and scenarios to be picked like precious pearls from a primeval sea I begin to feel the thin veil sunder. Two worlds start to join as I hear the sound of the traffic outside my window. This is not a comfortable place as I’m brought back to my senses to a more concrete and solid state.

In front of my desk looking out onto the apple tree in my garden I am reminded that there are places in between the one where I sit. The scribbled sentiments on the page are not only written in many worlds but from different times that converge in that one moment to find a place that they can call home. This place where I write is a consecrated circle where spells are written and cast, where literary homunculi are formed from subterraneous thoughts to walk without wires. Places are never completely physical, they are anchors to a space where the muses live and who whisper in the wind.

The Other Side of the Mirror

There is a figure that no one sees in those dark corners where light inherently knows not to venture. It’s a lonely corner you pass everyday that tugs on your sub - conscious, that whispers in your ear but revolts the laws of society. The pack mind abhors the vacuum of self trapped solitude, assimilates a misguided oneness and adapts to transform it into something it can comprehend.  It is doomed to fail, physics will build many structures in innumerous worlds with innumerous laws and with no fault of our own, leave us locked behind a glass we continuously hammer on.

Freewritten poem for National Poetry Day....

Innocuous Lie

A passing word, a lyric, a fleeting memory of a scent insipid,  

As innocuous as the games of a malicious child,

Who reads the book but understands less the rules.

In unknowing malevolence it skips on chalk,

In an empty playground where all laughter taunts

Choices past bold made, now seem worse than folly,

Promises once amethyst pretty, lie in ruinous sublimity.

How easily the Fates lose interest in a walled, broken city.