jumbled colours

Well, I obviously am hopeless at keeping a regular schedule of updates. I also haven't much to say, because I haven't been writing that much over the last few weeks. Probably the result of multiple external and internal influences, but my creativity in regards to words has really been on the ebb recently. Also, it was my birthday (I'm a Bealtaine baby!) and massive drinking seems to have an adverse effect on my creative flow. But, I feel a stirring of images in the back of my head, so poems will surely follow (in multitudes, I'm hoping, since I'm supposed to be compiling my dissertation). So I will make another update very soon with some new words, once they begin to take a recognisable form.

The odd nursery rhyme never hurt anybody

Maybe a poem a week was a better goal. Here is a draft of this week's, in all its cheesy glory:

70

I stay up late, by candlelight
at the drafting window
I go more miles than I’m supposed to
and come back through night.

As long as the wax is warm
and pools in my palm I move
nimble-toed and taciturn.

In the sunlight mornings
with your warm apple skin
covering my hands, we suss all we can
of the sun, far into westering

sky, until there is nothing for it
except to lay, spent
and cold in the dirt.

You are caked with mud
and mast and all manner
of junk; l take you down to the river
wipe away the twigs and blood

from when I bit your lip,
tasted sugar, and couldn’t stop
until the salt dripped down my chin.

A passerby sees innocents, vexing nature
with our play-dams of twigs and spit
and I am thinking only of
taking myself a tall, cool drink of water.

Comb the winter from my hair
and put it away somewhere; I have
enough candle to get us back a time or two.

I’ll darn your dresses by candlelight
you hem my shirts far from the window-
draft; the distance is dour and slow going
when we're damning ourselves, to outrun the night.

Tam Lin, New Poetry

So I'm working on a new research paper centred around the Scots ballad "Tam Lin"; something which I've been interested in doing for quite a while now. Feminism in old ballads, light the way! I'm working through some articles by Martha Hixon and Charles Butler, but there doesn't seem to have been much work done in regards to the comparison of elements between the different actual versions of the ballad. I'm hoping that I can at least bring some small insights into the piece through looking at all eleven versions side by side.

Otherwise, here is a new poem.

The Texas Dreamer Blues

The harp notes coaxed from my
stringy heart,
my little ukulele heart

have tall tells they
long to tell
to tubas and horns and
great golden bells.

I woolgather all day long
with a spindle that drops
and swirls
glittering golden threads
from the straw-strings that my thoughts
have scratched and shed.

I rustle them up,
like grub, like cornbread,
cover them with honey and pour the wine,
and wait for my home-coming
honey and
listen down the tracks
for my home to come
to come home whistling
to this little tune of mine.