Poems from a Cruel Summer

This year, I’ve sang Bananarama’s ‘Cruel Summer’ and fucking meant it.

I’ve always liked that song. For all its throwaway pop-tart charm, there’s something slightly sardonic about the recurring piddly-plink coupled with the drear of their combined voices. It brings home the duality of the season. That dusty road where sunny expectation meets your burnt out, suffocated reality.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m coming out the woods, only to have another setback. My flow is resurrected then halted in a series of fits and starts - a dodgy tap that spits and hisses but refuses to give up.

Siobhan, Sarah and Keren wouldn’t have given up, would they?

Damn, they’d be cracked on with ‘Robert De Niro’ by now………Fickle fuckers.

Suppose I’m more like Siobhan in the Shakespeare’s Sister ‘Stay with me’ video - you know, that one when she’s morphed into a total loon.

I jest, but as usual it’s because I feel the need to balance the vulnerability of sharing my shadow self. Especially when my online moniker is ‘Mother Of Hope’ (*awkward*)😬

It’s my way of reminding you all, that you too, have permission to be many things, and that no matter how low you get, humour is the saviour.

These poems are mainly sad or angry, but here they are anyway. There are seven - four rhyme, three don’t.

So if you don’t wanna read ‘sad or angry’, may I suggest Bananarama.

But do avoid ‘Cruel Summer’.😉

A Pool Of Grief

I swam inside a pool of grief

Alone with ailing stroke

Submerged by tendrils underneath

As arms of algae choked

I reached the edge to catch my breath

Thought I’d attempt to leave

Once more, I felt those heavy hands

Was but a brief reprieve

After A Few Cycles

You can never know

The properties of something

Until it’s tested

Jostled and pounded

Put through the wringer

Spun round and round

Exposed to hot and cold

Stretched and scrunched

Hung out to dry

That’s when you discover

What lifts

What stains

What fades

What holds its shape

What emerges as shreds

What turned to rags

After a few cycles

Is when you discover

The quality

Of what you had to begin with

When You Crush A Fairy

When you crush a fairy

You’ll find no tell tale trace of scarlet on your boot

No broken wings

There’ll be no shriek as you crack her, swiftly as a nut shell

But, rather like the way a bee stings, a shard of her will pierce you all the same

Impale

Embed

As nature mourns, perhaps you’ll notice more dew drops forming on the dainty lace of your morning cobwebs

Become aware the wind howls that bit louder

You can be certain that in the eyes of every frog, you will come to know your own trapped prince

And deep down, you’ll be condemned to wonder

How much brute force you needlessly applied

How your thud has scarred the tender belly of the good green Earth

The mounting sum of all you harm.

Rule Book

How can I say no

When I am backed into a corner?

Placed over a barrel?

Have no other option?

How can I take issue

When you call the shots completely?

Hold me in a headlock

Raise my lips, I’ll smile sweetly

It’s hardly a suggestion

When a ‘no’s out of the question

When I’m frog marched like a villain

With no grounds for an objection

If there’s only one right answer

Then it’s not like I can comment

Dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s

Correct me, your assignment

Feast upon my weakened flesh

Benevolent piranha

Dress up as assistance

As you swear you mean no harm

Hang my husk of fading dusk

Beside your shiny tick list

Cast your pause upon my flaws

Demand another backflip

Work that pen that maims me

As you mull my fate away

Be my guest and drain me

If it’s what the rule book says

Haunting Painting

I loved you as a lonely child returns to haunting paintings

Probably read too much into the sorrow in your eyes

Life had been a corridor and I’d grown tired of waiting

Separating wheat from chaff, the devils from disguise

.

Once you were a friend to me, but then you grew frustrated

Painfully, I clock-watched as your past consumed your mind

Time became an enemy, I know I was impatient

Willing it to disappear, release me from my bind

.

Gave the clouds false meaning, built my castles out of nothing

Optimism is a curse, conspired to see the best

The universe is neutral so my faith loses her footing

Nursing bruises as my slaughtered dreams are laid to rest

.

Summer was a cruel maid - led kittens into rivers

Wishes, precious embryos, I learned to hide away

Dared not birth them with a voice, for fear I can’t deliver

Conceal golden somersaults, consign their fate to grey

.

Lonely girls can overthink, fixate on haunting paintings

Prone to make too much of what’s illusion or a lie

Holes that bore into our souls are pure imagination

Clever trick an artist played, persuades a fool to buy.

Gone

Skies no longer courting cloud

By bearing roses red

Unabating thunder storms

Extinguish roads ahead

Picked yourself up like a pro

Fine just moving on

Must be cut from different cloth

……..I can’t believe you’re gone

.

Sunsets juice their pint of blood

My pound of flesh stings sore

Peace drowned out by violence

Low on armour for this war

Kill me, I’m an untrained soldier

Silence is your gun

Wound me just like mother taught you

Leave me dead and gone

Magic Porridge Pot

My words, they overwhelmed you

That’s what you said

But what was I to do?

When feelings kept on stirring

Thick and fast

‘Just enough’ but then……

More and more and more and more

Simmering away

Until they spilled over

Unable to be contained

Could not keep a lid on it

Tumbling out, regenerating

Through the door and into town

Snaking paths to find you

Wanting so badly

To satisfy

With all my white heat

Left you drowning, I know

Because…….

I wouldn’t stop

Couldn’t stop

A Magic Porridge Pot

You ceased to need

My hot sweetness

You’d once hungered for

And so, you turned the stove off

When you’d had your fill

Meanings

A Pool Of Grief

Sometimes there are pauses in a heartache/bereavement when you catch your breath, replenish yourself, only to feel yourself slip back drowning again. Reclaimed by the swirls of unrelenting dark water.

After A Few Cycles

This poem uses garments in a washing machine as a metaphor for people in our life. The ‘fabric’ they are made of (the measure and quality of how they show up).

As with most new garments, (new person in our lives), things usually start out well, presenting okay. It’s only when you’ve ‘been through a few cycles’ (endured some shit together) that the true quality of the ‘fabric’ is revealed.

Hm…..

When You Crush A Fairy

In this poem, ‘crushing a fairy’ is a metaphor for breaking someone’s heart or spirit- damaging something pure. It’s about karma.

I’ve always wondered if karma (if real) is intention based or not. Does karmic payback (if it exists) depend on whether one intended to cause pain? Is it possible to do certain things and be blind to hurting another? Many people charge ahead as though oblivious to the suffering of others, but deep down, they surely must know.

We can’t possibly consider all we destroy just by being alive, but there is a balance to strike between marching on regardless and contemplating the impact our actions have on others.

Rule Book

There are situations (often officialdom related) that we become embroiled in, that we have no or little say in. Often they can be dressed up to pretend otherwise, they masquerade as ‘help’ or ‘voluntary’. This is a little rant about one of those.

Haunting Painting

Composition wise, this is the one I’m most proud of on this Stack. I liked the imagery as well as the rhythm. It arrived as song, a humble little melancholy melody. Like an off key piano. It’s about attributing more meaning to something than actually exists. We want so badly to ‘believe’. Sometimes you have to have stern words with yourself, remind yourself that something that feels very real……is just bollocks.

Gone

This one came to me in song.

Ever been abandoned by someone close to you? Knowing they’re still out in the big wide world without you, floating about like a red balloon and that it doesn’t seem to bother them a jot. Yeah, that.

Magic Porridge Pot

Sometimes you have so much emotion that it can swamp someone. Thinking about this gave way to considering the metaphor of ‘The Magic Porridge Pot’, the well loved children’s tale. Thought it was a good analogy. Of ‘white heat’ that won’t stop coming.

When something ends, what are you supposed to do with all that unwanted ‘white heat’?

PS: Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope you appreciated some of these or that they spoke to you in some way, made you feel less alone. You can find more under the heading ‘poetry’ on my home page.

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