A poem every day in April (2019 – 2020)
2019
Day #1: A Fresh Start
Myth of a vacation,
holiday home by the sea,
a detox tea,
illusion of a face mask,
hot bath,
sacred steam, hold me.
Promise of letting go,
fresh start –
the past falls apart.
Like an orange,
peel me into one piece.
Be warned – I will grow back
with thicker skin.
Day #2: April Showers
Anyone for tea?
Hail outside.
Long phone calls,
“Grand stretch in the evening”.
Rusted bike,
Matted fur.
Smile of the sea –
Spotted with dimples of Spring.
Day #3: Incorporate Music
Chateau lobby
Setting for film school;
Feather stone
Filmed on a
Piano fire
Back at 505
Welcome home
Grassy headlands
Meadowlarks
Day #4: Anxiety
eating not eating
thoughts on loop
loops swoop
through me like
a palpable
palpitation. or
a nauseous
nightmare – night
arrives and
doesn’t go
leave
please
leave
Day #5: Back To Nature
Eagle ferns,
Under the M6,
Over to Nether Kellet,
Toward Caton Green.
Dulse seaweed,
Corner of the Claddagh,
Bay of sunlight,
Basking bottlenose.
Cherry blossom,
Canal path to Aldcliffe,
Slippery turn off,
Autumn leaves.
Petrichor and turf,
Soft evening curls,
Away toward,
The blackbird.
Day #6: Nostalgia
Home: paper dreams,
Feathered kites,
Grassy moments,
Lilac bruises,
Silver strand,
Sparkling arm bands,
Floating – across Galway bay.
Day #7: Start With a Time of Day
Part I
06:20am
Dear friends have talked of
Sleepy lie-ins, snoozed
Alarms. Groggy eyes and
“Where am I?”
One ear
Half-alert to the bullfinch
Part II
06:20am
Dear soul, I told you
We could rest now
I begged you to fall
Backward, into the Land of Dreams
Bare stomach, I felt
You growl. “You’re getting
Weak”, I heard
You speak.
Brain, I felt you race
To the start, before
Dawn broke. Inner chatter,
“Your life doesn’t matter”
Part III
06:20am
Slept for nine hours,
Woke without fear
Resurfacing when Surface
Was once impassable
Ephemeral drifting
In between so beautiful
But numbing
Day #8: A Love Poem
I wrote to you too many
Lifetimes ago. When
Rhododendrons blossomed
And moons had meaning
Or at least, I meant to
Write it. Twenty sixteen, I
Felt too strongly. No trust –
Notebooks covered in dust
Muddy Lancashire trials
Filled with failure,
Of playlists never made
I’d send you postcards
Always guarded, in some way
A brave truth tapping on
Your shoulder. So elegantly
Tessellating with mine as we lay
Traversing multiplicities
We carved. Together but so
Often distinct – not apart
Not separate, but visits
So succinct,
on the brink
Day #9: Focus On The Colour
Golden brown mountain turf
Against the foreground of a cream goat
West-end houses primary blots
Blinding the grey sky with light
Red sky at night
Galway spectrum of dearg
Day #10: Femininity
The guilty feminist
Endless vacation
Oceans of pink
Angry short hair
Angular exasperation
Becoming the self
Day #11: Not From Your Perspective
Chewing hay ,
Slowly, carefully but contentedly.
Rolling mountains,
Twitching ears –
Another fly, another day.
Throw a bale in,
Velvet nose.
You call it simple,
My focus,
Connection to the ground.
Hooves sink slowly into the soft sand.
Away, I gallop.
Day #12: Spring Cleaning
Freewheeling, descending Rahoon Road.
Light breeze, sure it’s a soft day.
The whisper of wind, rinsing out
Rusted, greased-over spokes of thought.
Easter break.
That time we rolled down
Spring Lane toward a village
Of daffodils – punching in a dream
So loud about what we contested
So silent about who we were
Who we wanted to be – she he we
Revision.
The small of the woods
As we navigated Bailrigg.
Listening to the Strokes and James Blake.
Branches cross-hatched across a seemingly simple walk-way
Hospital .
Flowers bloom, skies open.
Confined, to a bed for many weeks.
But growing at the same time.
First date in June.
Rained down the scent of Northern leaves.
Transform, transcend, it’s Spring.
I’m on the mend. But wounds are
Blossoming
From Aprils past.
Day #13: Celestial Bodies
A demi-moon
Shades of grey crossing my
Sleepy vision
Woman in twilight
Squinting
Dissertation is done
Lunar glow
An aura of mystique
Day #14: Make It Rhyme
return to childhood
doing what we could
to make things perfect
create things we’d then forget
not sure where writing began
where it ended, will end, when it can
granules of sand falling
through distant names, calling
absent friends who
ask to make amends
Day #15: Describe A Smell
algae – brown green sludge-
waft up toward my
senses. wash over me like
the wave that brought
you here to the shore
that licks at the hooves
of my new forest
overwhelmed by a salty
address, a welcome to
the coast line
the sea says
“now you’re mine”
curbed by the soft
meadowsweet
commonage half-bog land
fields of heather
Day #16: Any Dreams?
Greek Island
Hot sunshine
We argued about who would
Take the chairs
Up the mountain
So we could sit
Forgetting there would be stones
Forfeiting the heat
To dive in
Cool blue
Day #17: Body As a Friend
Inisboffin
Toward Fawnmore
There is the cat that
Came on the boat
In its carrier
Being unloaded
At its new Bofin home
The garden is the island
The skylarks are defeaning
They almost mute the sound
of the waves
Striking the cliffs!
Below me
The west quarter is desolate
I have this feeling
With me for the
First time that
I am an artist
I am thinking of Plath
I am thinking of yesterday’s
Coffees and cocktails
Thank you feet for carrying me here
Day #18: A Happy Place
Boat journey,
Cromwell’s fort,
Rocks smash,
Upward between waves.
Nauseous children,
But a smiling woman,
Amid a cloudy sea-scape,
In beret and red scarf.
Day #19: Without Your Name, Who Are You?
mango pudding
pear tree
flight of this bird
spring fuelled
searcher of colour
traveler but settler
waiting for a long time
for not too much
occupying spaces
of pause
Day #20: A Liminal Space
Varda did not create them,
Minorities did not opt for them.
I did not take the road,
Upon which emptiness resides.
We find them in corners,
Back tables of café bars.
Transitory shadows of
Fugacious flowers, blooming too
Early in April. Born in media res,
Subsisting with the icy sunrise,
Ceasing with the abrupt dusk.
A vicissitude is on the horizon!
Women seal up the cracks in between,
Soldering our wounded Earth.
Day #21: It’s The End of the World
let’s escape to an inis
of utopia, crescent-shaped,
punctuated by a vacuum
of swirling water.
let’s abscond from an iris
of hazel swirling infinitude
Day #22: Nourishment
The Herbalist told me,
On the phone,
“Do whatever feeds your soul!
Don’t let them order you,
To lie down, be passive, rest your bones.
You’ll just feel alone”.
The Rheumatologist warned me,
In Merlin Park,
“Maybe you shouldn’t embark,
In academic endeavour”. It seems to spark,
Autoimmunity; immunodeficiency; hormones,
Certain medical… unknowns.
A palindrome of
Nurses’ Stats at Noon.
Don’t nod! Whatever you do.
Day #23: When The Party’s Over
cycling through deathly
quiet streets at 5am
hoping that the moon
doesn’t catch me as
my hi-viz sparkles
in the dawn
_______________________
blackbird warbling loudly
streetlamp flickering
mudguard scraping
across the front tyre
as we race toward
sleep
_______________________
Day #24: Liar Liar
The guitar lies:
Nylon strings,
Squeaking out,
Frets missed,
And barre chords muted.
The acoustic resonance,
Of tinny vibrations,
Tricking you,
Into believing,
In the hope of a cadence.
Day #25: Pick An Animal
Solitude and solipsism
They lie in the
Sunlit bay window
Purring profusely
Gazing lazily toward
Blackbirds who
Taunt on the horizon
Day #26: girlhood, boyhood
Favourite author:
M C Beaton
Favourite singers:
Joni Mitchell,
Orla Gartland
Favourite film:
Madeleine
A “girlhood”
Of power.
Day #27: The State Of It All
Planet in tatters,
Barbed wire lining the edge of
The beach, where the sand
Crumbles underneath the grass.
Zero hours – zero value.
Searching for Hope, ambition,
Solidarity in balance,
These brief moments of
Calm, relish the respite.
Day #28: Reflection
I see myself
In the Gurteen bay
Shallow cove,
Reflected back is
A wobbly silver-blue,
Grey clouds shrouding
A clear silhouette.
Ocean washing in,
To tell me (in hushed tones)
Who I am.
Who were we,
Swimming for miles?
The little terns,
Screeching cheerily above.
The cusp of a Summer,
Tide turns.
Day #29: May Flowers
fionn regan first day of may
bluebells blooming on the
odd day that escapes the
fog of winter past
fleet foxes 3rd may
borage and bog-rosemary,
crowning cotton spluttered tufts
sprouting from trodden-down turf
house martin swoops
silently through the
humid air – who is
hanging upon whose wing?
Day #30: Catharsis
Peeling off layers,
Of unwritten words,
Like cutting the green pip,
Out of a tomato.
A small, precise art,
Of emotional crafting,
Weaving a flow,
Of notebook pages.
Ruffled in a pile,
Under my desk,
The wrappers of
Emotional edict:
This is how I felt,
That is what I did.
On we struggle,
Wrangling the gloaming.
2020
Day #1: Dawn
Chaffinch: blue hue,
humungous beak
overbearing
his downy tummy.
Sing me to sleep again
at 8.03 am,
light popping
through the shutters
with his sounds
on a purple morning
beam.
We all return
to the spooling
rays of aimlessness
when the dawn brings
no answers.
Day #2: Growth / Decay
rhizomes –
you never tried to reach
for more than you knew
you deserved
never transcended
glass ceilings
that cocooned you,
comforting
bamboo, ginger, turmeric – suddenly
erupt through the underworld,
quietly dethrone spuds
jubilant axillary buds
hold hands like the
women who planted them.
Day #3: Is anyone listening?
One month ago,
I flew to Berlin.
In a filled-out auditorium, watched
Irmã – Friends in the End of the World.
A pink meteor destroying everything
The sisters had known.
Screaming resilience,
Cast members exuding harmony.
Audience’s tears shining in an aspiration
of solidarity.
Return flight, I sang
the animals were gone
When I landed, they were.
An echoing washed-out street.
Glistening cobblestones listening to their silence.
The meteor struck a different tone,
Everything ended not in the way we had planned.
We had to project our cry
Across closed shutters.
But clamour on we did.
Day #4: Earthly pleasures
meadowsweet gently offers
exploding balls of sweet honeydew
(always the New Forest pony’s favourite snack
on the bridle path)
in an over-saturated over-exposed
spring-time chiaroscuro
white flowers amongst greenery
line the grand canal,
bending as spaniels sniff their roots
greedily
the towpath has come alive
with bees reclaiming their zoo
of abundant dystopia
fragrance of hope but
no nectar produced
rejoice, hairless perennial of damp waysides
19th century aspirin
heal our pain
accompany your rosaceae family
in rising from the undergrowth
we overlooked for so long
Day #5: The View From Up Here
ben lettery
wet hillsides
binn leitrí
peak of the dark stream
everything a subdued
green brown grey
the kind you can’t paint
without some auld fella
down the pub calling you
the next paul henry
graphitic bedrock
joining neighbouring
sloping ben glenisky
with friendly envy
uisce flowing over
pale quartzite
short-sighted
steps
onward
Day #6: Obsession
A parabolic spiral of the mind
Counting, ticking,
Check box, to-do
List
Measure for measure
Judge perceive judge again
Lost
Indulge
Lavish
Overflow
Bike spokes
Spiking out at
All angles
Orderly flow
Diluted, filtered
Disrupted
A gait altered by
Stony ground underneath
Losing momentum
c h a o s!
On the ground
Stony concrete
Gravel in wound on knee
Day #7: Chemical Reaction
Ideas on carbon paper
Standing alone with their hydrogen bonds
Fire, flame, spread, contain
Toxicity in a vapour
Of viral spread
Oxygenise your bonds
Bobbing along
Connecting
Breaking apart
A friendship responds
Extinguishes the fumes
Brings clarity to ions
Of stories –
A creation blooms
Day #8: Hometown
Beauty is an experience, nothing else.
It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features.
It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.
Love letter to the unreachable:
I imagine that in lockdown,
Your smog is lighter,
Spring cherry blossom crisper,
Your knife crime sparser.
Scrappy dogs well-groomed,
Paws floating across barren pavements
In delight.
I suppose that
Your patios are full –
Of cheese and crackers,
And mild family rows.
Are deer at Wollaton Park
Poised in the silence,
Waiting for a siren to blur?
Victoria Centre void of browsers,
Nottingham Forest supporters
No longer taking their pilgrimage.
Raleigh Bikes locked in the
Lace market, near the Contemporary.
Unmoving, rusting slowly.
Urban sprawl turned midlands refuge,
Solidarity in brutalist fineness.
Day #9: Natural Light
puffy amber purples
rolling over toward
the island
as we sit –
held above royal blue
in our thrones of white sand
waiting for the rain to come
little ringed plovers scuttling
along the strand
small flashes of beiges
and creams
a shimmer hits the perpendicular
angle of a wing
a beak clipping the sand eels
from their temporary
granular homes
with the rain comes the
surplus of seaweed scent –
connemara dillisk,
carrageen moss –
cuts across the salty surface
happily, grey again
Day #10:
It’s a great leveller
Wrote the old white man,
Sat in a leather armchair,
Behind his rose-tinted,
Cologne-scented spectacles,
Women of colour dying at his doorstep,
Coughs infecting the test-less,
Tests infecting the welfare system,
Systems infecting already scrambled
Minds of the helpless.
Hope – a middle-class myth
Full of toxic positivity
Tales of productivity
A notion too far removed
From the Earthly existence
Of us.
Day #11: Heaven / hell
Heaven is a place on Earth with you
Once it was
A spot below
Kirkby Lonsdale village
Springtime
Cold with red hat
Warm hands holding
Hope of a hazy horizon
Now it is a sea
Between us
Connecting, magnetising
Compassion and cosiness
Gestures mirroring
One another
mo chompánach
Day #12: Submerged in Water
we began rooted on the beach
present, bright, real, right
dissociation: the fact of being
separate or not connected
we submerged ourselves in a dreamlike
journey from ground to ground
dizzying, every motion
whirled in contradiction
although the tide imitated a rhythm
randomness generated randomness
concealed in the bay
further wildness beckoned beyond
we waded on, hoof by hoof
not because we could
but because the island called to us
strawbeach isle, directly ahead of aillebrack
oystercatchers squawking
at gobies who hid in rockpools behind us
don’t lose yourselves
in the wave
break
Day #13: The City
Citylink 660
To move from namelessness
To a lyrical labelling
Is to move from West to East,
A city allergic to street names
To a creature defined by them
From the West coast “opposite Spanish Arch”
To the junction of Capel Street, Mary Street.
Next to Bierhaus –
Around the corner you know?
To Cow’s Lane, off Lord Edward St.
Whose cow?
Why do the Dolphins need a Barn?
Bus arrives at Ashton Quay.
I give myself a name.
Day #14: Pink, Like Your Brain
Pink, like your brain,
White wires crossing red,
They told us to rewire, retrain –
But where does each electrode connect?
Circuit board of fleshy substance,
A crosshatch of flying sparks,
An elegant but elusive dance,
Ineluctable dark.
Day #15: Euphoria
sandwiches up a mountainside
soda bread and strong wafts of heather
boggy shoes and soggy socks
springs that seem to leak from quartzite
steps that soaked into spongey sphagnum
humidity washed away with atlantic breeze
Day #16: Bearing Fruit
Thank you, Plum tree,
At the root of the garden,
One arm waving free,
The rest in uniform growth,
Overshadowed by your pear
Sister, who frames the idyll,
Steady trunk running parallel
To yours, in the shadows
Hedgehog burrowed
In your bedrock
Snoozing the afternoon away
First fruit to be domesticated
By humans
Last one to be noticed
Plume of purples emanating
Day #17: Grief
Truffaut
Sounds that used to fill
Roomy corners with
Scuttling and scuffling
Gnawing and questioning
Bites of curiosity
Full of vivacious
Paws and red eyes
Suddenly still
Lying underneath the wheel
You let it spin without you
Day #18: How did the sky look?
I paint with a knife
Aggressively, urgently
Deep reds and purples,
Intoxicating acrylic fumes,
Firing through the page.
How did the sky look?
Memory becomes irrelevant –
A draw to warmth usurps
Realist ambitions.
Day #19: Tough to be a bug
tightly wound woodlouse
drawn to the damp
shielded by a shell of grey
crispy skin
rolling at the slightest sound
turning in on yourself
an intricate routine of yoga
poses and tai chi
isolated isopods
found in the sand dunes
in the carpet bobbles
and in the bricks
Day #20: Moon
Moon is the symbol I associate with my old friend.
Your colours grey-blue,
Your surface appearing so far away –
Grey hoodies from sleep-deprived writing.
Thriving twilight, quiet anger.
Feminine energy,
Cycles of thoughts,
of ways of being.
Moon is the image I see in your eyes,
When ambition glows through.
Irises glowing with luminescent hysteria
That comes with writing magical realism.
Putting dreams into words,
Laying words back to bed.
Day 21 – Hands, Wrist, Teeth
Impacting wisdom tooth,
All dentists closed,
Grinding to sleep,
to a halt.
It’s yours until you release it.
Day 22 – Into the Woods
Entrance, Blidworth Bottoms,
Periphery of Sherwood Forest.
Take your time, part the ferns.
Breath – one two – breath – sharp fog.
Silver birch, rowan, hawthorn.
Major Oak, growing against sandstone.
Move with the breeze,
Elastic leaves.
Day 23 – Focus on the Texture
textures of a working desk
made to look like wood
– but not
leaves like plastic
ceramic mug
fake-leather-bound notebook
encasing ideas not dissimilar
to connective tissue
jumper is a creamy hue
soft wool, woven around
guitar-player fingers
Day 24 – Black Hole
Writing is the black hole of forgetfulness.
A darkened desk.
Moments of pause,
Misty confusion,
Mysteries of lost words.
Then, a thought!
The scissors in Dial M for Murder.
A conclusion to endless internal ringing.
A synonym.
Day 25 – Extinction
empty bowls,
dormant cutlery of personality and idiosyncrasy,
jugs holding sunlight on the draining board,
live for the warmth on the back of my neck,
yearn for the thorns,
who brush against calves,
are insects lurking?
need the facade of purpose,
to rest in moments without.
Day 26- Serpentine
“There’s no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.” – Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
Figures of eight,
Three-loop serpentine.
Lines on the beach,
Drawn with dry hooves,
Filed squarely,
Into chunks of motion.
Pattern against expanse –
Spiralling into churned-up mess,
Before the tide washes slate clean again.
Anticipating the end of a season,
Final moments of an August squeeze in.
Day 27 – Fight or Flight
shoulders scrunch
the flinch of a muscle
normal people
nip and tuck
creaking open of a front gate
accidentally sleeping in
the shape of a poem
the crevice of hope
Day 28 – As A Weapon
I use my heart as a weapon
and it hurts like heaven
– sending out signs
on the string of an electric guitar
fret by fret, notating the story
of how we met
Day 29 – Monochrome
Rolls of film are loading in,
Clicking into place,
Stretching across, just a little.
Rewind, focus.
Shutter speed is slowing,
And light is swooping in.
Drink up the sunlight in your lens,
Osmose the springtime through your pen.
Day 30 – Dusk
Crepuscular creatures roaming the South Circular Road,
The yowl of a Dublin fox, scrawny, more brown than orange.
Warmth through the glass pane as the grand stretch fades,
Shutters closing, bathroom shades.
The turn of life as we have come to know it.
Carried away with the light are faces,
Places I miss. Spaces we inhabit,
Too much, we can’t separate from them.
Blackbird, humidity, hydrangeas, fluidity.
Tenebrous visions.
Frances Wilde 