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I said yesterday that I would write a poem about lizards. After seeing them again today, I decided to do exactly that. In Japan I loved mantis’ just a little too much but here it’s the skinks that i see sunbathing and then dashing away almost every day. I love that contrast in their movements.
In this poem I originally tried to stick to a haiku but then lots of alliteration came to me and I just had to put it down because it was fun to keep up for as long as possible. In the first paragraph I tried to use the L alliteration to slow the paragraph down as much as possible and used punctuation only to express new ideas in the similiess, which as seperate ideas, i hope were enough to slow the paragraph down. My intention was to adjust the rhythm of the paragraph to that of the slow lizards of its content. Hopefully it worked.
In direct contrast, I tried to speed up the second paragraph with all the S alliteration by using lots of punctuation to mirror the jittery movement of the lizards running away from “my loom”: my shadow as I near them.
The final paragraph uses repetition to express my loss and how I didn’t mean to scare them off. Of course, I always do, because that’s just their reptilian behaviour – the contrast between lizard and man, which in turn is what makes them so interesting in the first place. I feel this dichotomy every time when I want to just stop and enjoy them lying there but never quite get enough of them. Maybe one I day will.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it with all the crazy alliteration shenanigans!
Like this:
Yesterday I posted about a memory I didn’t want to soon forget. Here’s another one in poem form. I was listening to this while I walked home to the scene in the poem:
The bracketed title indicates and explains another side to the poem that words like “I” and “whiles” only suggest at.
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I wrote these on my way to Italy when I actually had some spare time. The first is a message to those of all stripes who feel passion for anything, the second a simple riddle and hopefully the start of a series I can add to. As ever they can be found in the Poetry section above. Enjoy!
A pair of train related haiku comparing the quality of the journeys as well as the qualities of people:
£8.40 Cross-Country Return To Edinburgh
True story/stories – I experienced both at least once.
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This one was the product of a longer train journey than it ought to be have been which was caused by disruption on the line outside of Rutherglen. The long wait got me to thinking about choices in life and how I often choose the easier but less successful option, less stressful options and land with less than I could achieve. However, I’m not a fan of bemoaning my life, especially not in poem as time tends to distill the things you write making the bad things more pungent. So, it evolved into the root cause of why I and maybe others who might read the poem, make the easier but ultimately less exciting choices in life. Soon the heart versus head dichotomy of decision-making reared its ugly head, which, in this poem, soon became a faith versus knowledge dichotomy as I compared the benefits of faith in myself and belief in general (‘the biggest part of me’) to the fork-tongued knowledge-based part of me, and ultimately in all of us, that seeks the happy medium.
I didn’t include as many literary devices as I’d have normally liked so it appears less cluttered and more like a debate than a poem. Not sure if I like it as much as a result but I did resolve to simplify my poems down a little and stop trying so hard to include every metaphor or similie into such small spaces at the expense of reader understanding and/or flow. Either way, give it a read along with the other poems in the Poetry header above.
Sometimes it feels like west central Scotland has two moods. Then it snows all day and suddenly the world seems more lively and vibrant than you thought it could’ve been.
This one’s pretty straightforward.
It comes after one too many run ins with gamers reticent to speak to new people or defensive with people on forums they haven’t met in person outside of their usual group. I knew when I started to run this project that I would come across this kind of defensiveness but sometimes I just want to shake them! “I’m a gamer too! I just want to improve the community!”
If he wasn’t in a band what would The Cure’s Robert Smith be doing?
Got the inspiration for this one after I bought a Sunday Herald, and piece by piece, read through it whilst waiting on the platform for my train. When the train arrived I left the additional papers you get with it that I had read on a seat nearby in case someone wanted to read them. I sit down and finish the rest of my paper.
A stranger comes along, starts reading the sports section I had left and then immediately picks up his phone, calls a friend and starts quoting the headline to him.
The title comes from a method marijuana farmers use to spread their crop without tying it to a locale and being fingered for it.
