(It was that kind of day.)
After using my cardigan as a makeshift glove to pick my nettles I headed back inside with my spoils (a dandelion, a nettle leaf and a reedy husk) and was promptly told that I had to write a Haiku with the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable scheme about my emotions, based on one of these items.
I Do Not Do Poems.
However after we'd vomited up our drivel and our teacher had told us to go she pleaded that could some of us, please, anybody submit our tweaked and edited poems to her for publishing (anonymously) on the college's intranet for the "poem a day" scheme, and what can I say?
I've never been one to refuse a desperate forty-something English teacher who genuinely thinks that Freud is a good person to psychoanalyse her students with.
Anyway, if someone is indeed reading this harsh crit would be appreciated - I'm convinced I need to work in 'trodden' somewhere.
~~~
Today
I feel fragile and
Broken, half a nettle leaf
Full of poison sting.
Covered in glass-sharp needles
That shatter under your skin.
The walls are white, gleaming tile. The lights reflect orange and blue onto them in stripes and circles. The floor is a grey brown black, totally absent of colour, though not in the way children learn in primary school, ‘all the colours make white and none of them make black, here is a prism, this is why the sky is blue, two times two is four, ta ta ta’. Set upon the voids are little tables, and these are hard grey plastic and metal. Looking up at the tiles we can see four entrances set into the room, where they naturally flow from one wall to another, making corridors and doorways look as if they were formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. Through these holes stream a continuous line of people, wearing nothing on their heads save stubble and white gowns on their bodies. These people stand in loose rings at their tables, and as they take their places more file in until the room - no, it is a station, for this is a closed down stop on the Underground, scrubbed and made new for this last travel to a different place - is filled. But oh so orderly, with all the people in white packed as if to be seeds in a sunflower. It is beautiful. And even with the bleached look of the gowns and the harsh light on porcelain, it looks natural too.
When all of the tables have been filled all the people in white relax their postures, standing at ease. Smiles grace their faces. The terrible military precision with which they arrived is gone now. They are safe, as it were, on the journey. All of the platform anxiety has gone, even though if you looked for the life of you the sight of a screeching metal beast would not be seen anywhere.
A little woman of slight stature who can’t be more than twenty reaches into the pocket of her beautiful white gown and brings out a pill, small and orange. Its colour stands out against the clean fabric and she sets it down in front of her on the plastic table set out for the purpose, like this is her contribution to the world’s largest picnic. Like the cracking of a glowstick or an invisible signal sent through a hill of ants everyone else does the same, still smiling calmly or with a concentrating look. The only emotions missing on every face are those of worry, fear or doubt.
Some of them bring out letters. A few, with a sheepish roll of the eyes or a grin, bring out stuffed animals or other lucky tokens. Others bring nothing at all, save the little orange pills. But that’s all right. This is only a journey, a means to an end.
After the rustle of reedy arms on the shore everyone has at least a little capsule in front of them. A full minute passes whilst everyone stands as statues. It would be uncanny and inhuman if it were silent, but here and there is a whisper, or a murmuring voice. People are praying. People are running through lists in their heads.
People are saying goodbye.
At a half past noon on this day - except how could any of these people know that, for they surely are not wearing timepieces - another secret signal passes between the beautiful people, and they take these pills, and swallow them.
Again, it’s a little like a drama, like a group of children have been sat down and told to improvise or over-act some seemingly innocuous action. Some of the pills go down gullets quick as a wink, whilst others carefully position their own on their tongues before slowly rolling them up into their heads and gulping with as much fanfare as a boardwalker. Some of them are furtive about swallowing their pills. Some of them - mainly smiling older man and women - reach wizened hands out and feed the pills to each other, a cracker-pulling of a celebration. All of this , once more, takes less than a minute.
You would not be alone if you wondered whether this was a rehearsed thing, if it truly were a performance of the most beautiful and deadly kind. But nothing more than a shared belief holds these people’s actions together.
Of course, hours later when a lone survivor is torn from the smiling, hugging bodies, their stomach pumped and their simulated stroke treated, their sobbing pleas to be left alone ignored - only then will those unaware of the bewitching event know what happened. The papers will ignore the unwilling testimony of this survivor, call it a rehearsed event of a brainwashed cult, but this survivor’s secret will be safe with those who witnessed it - those who have journeyed on, and you.
“I hate you, okay?”
That’s probably the hundredth time you’ve said that today.
“I mean it this time.”
…And that’s why you’re in bed with me. Yes, it all makes so much sense now. You only keep me around for the filthy, filthy hatesex.
“I’m so going to get you for that-“
I barely felt that slap! I can’t wait to see what you do if you actually, you know, express a feeling like love or something to me.
“I feel offended now. You’re infringing on my masculinity.”
I did no such thing! Now stop protesting about whether or not you have a burning hatred for me, and come here so I can hold you in my arms.
“One day you’ll wake up with a slitted throat and a massive picture of a dick drawn on your face with permanent marker, and you’ll realise how serious I was today all that time ago.”
Ah, it’s… Technically tomorrow, actually.
“Shit, really? We don’t have too much - oh, that feels good.”
See what not talking gets you?
“Now it’s your turn to stop talking, dear. Do that again.”
Happy to oblige.
“I love you really, just- ah.”
I know, I know. Shhh now.
In a house on a hill at the top of a street where two intersecting lanes meet there is a room.
And in this room on the hill, there is a desk.
Right now this desk, with its maple syrup coloured wood and brassy fittings is covered with many things, which we shall list here:
-One lamp, on and shining a yellow light
-Assorted pencils and pens, scattered
-One pot of ink, dribbling blue
-Three maps, only one of which depicts a place you or I could ever dream of visiting
and one girl, slumped over the lot.
Let us take a closer look at this girl. She seems to be all in order - white silvery wisps of hair escaping from a great plait, pale skin dappled with greyish freckles, black shining eyes under dark slate eyelashes, a white dress. Even the buttery beams from the desk light don’t lend her colour. This girl looks all washed out. This girl looks like she needs warming up.
But this room she is in looks so cold, so dark. Even the great tapestries on the wall, even their heavy weight of thread and carpet don’t look like they would bring warmth. As this girl sleeps, her full lips leave little puffs of steam in the air and her breath escapes to the rafters of this room, crowded with metal and wood.
In a few hours, this girl will be shaken awake and hustled out of her father’s strategy room, berated by stone faced goblin butlers who will pinch and prod at her thin white skin as if to test a peach for bruises.
She will be hurried down the thin and winding corridors of this house on a hill, and handed over to old maids as plump as sows, made to stand on a worm eaten stool and be stitched into the most beautiful velvet dress ever seen. It will be as purple as the marks on her arms that the goblins have made, almost a perfect match. It won’t bring any colour to her, any more than the light of a lamp would stain her skin. She is a moon, in her house. Colour, words, they are only reflected on this girl. She is a mute princess, a monochrome beauty.
But for now, we shall leave her sleeping, and if when the butler and footmen find her she has had her thin arms ever so gently moved to a more comfortable bony pillow, we shan’t say a word.
After all, she wouldn’t tell, would she?
PROFIT
So hey original writing blog, you're now a commonplace book type thing. It'll get me writing more anyway.
So, I'm currently working through the editing of my second draft of my nano novel. I've actually got a few of my excerpts completely polished and edited as stand-a-lones, for work and my creative writing course, but now I'm making a start on the work as a whole, properly. And to help myself focus on my character's continuity (my novel is character and relationship-driven, after all), I've decided to post and illustrate some of my character files from my scrivener scribblings from way back in November. Look out for spectacularly bad art coming soon!
Freddy
Ruth’s former best friend. Seen as a bit ‘up herself’ by many of the others that know her, (i.e. "The Cockney Girl") and is followed around by "The Hipster Squad" (A group of people who are a bit sloane ranger-y, very posh and dress like Jack Wills models).
She is the to-go person for 'new' music, as she listens to inner-city late-night radio shows and makes old fashioned mixtapes and CDs- “the only way to get around copyright these days”.
She is “Lizard Friends” with Ruth at the beginning of the book, but quickly drops her after she thinks Ruth is a lesbian; possibly has some bicurious tendencies toward Ruth, though is probably firmly in the ‘Gay When Drunk’ category.
She’s got a bit of a quick temper and won’t let any argument rest.
Helps her older brother with his cigarette-selling empire and even has a pencilcase made out of malboro light packets.
Classes
She takes Music Tech and philosophy (plays the guitar and lugs round large textbooks).
Appearance
Pale skin and curly/frizzy (although well-managed, so only frizzy when she is off-guard) ‘burnt orange’ hair. She has slight ever-present dark circles under her eyes from staying up to listen to late-night radio and callused finger tips (from playing the guitar).
She is extremely thin and always wears a selection of charity-shop baggy jumpers, cigarette jeans and various battered shoes.
One of the sorts of hipsters who would never admit to being a hipster; a bit of a bitch.
“The next day over lunch I tell Harry about the meeting. Her first response is "any hot girls?" and the second is to ask whether there were any kick-ass costumes that she could possibly sneak in and steal. I love my muse.
The second person I tell is my brother, because he won't stop teasing me about Rose; and there's no other way I can explain knowing so much about her and the others in so short a time without making it sound more suspect, so I end up telling him. His response is "any hot girls?" too, except I can hear the multitude of things left unsaid that make the statement different to how Harry meant it.
People are funny, sometimes.”
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