Blue is the colour of the deep sea, of high skies and of cracking ice in Antarctica; a place of bleak austerity where nothing grows and hardly anything lives. Blue overrides everything, blue is nothing, and blue fades into blue when we try to locate the horizon. Blue is the colour of the curling tendrils of smoke that dance from a thousand cigarettes, the colour of body bags and the colour of the dark veins that run along the hands of those who hold you. Blue is the eyes that haunt me.

Black is oil pouring from crevices in the ocean, black is the bottom of a mine, the back of a cave and the hollow centre of an eyeball. Black is death and cancer. Black is engulfing, endless and enduring, and like its counterpart, black is at once both empty and full, nothing and ceaseless possibility.

Green is the colour of newness, freshness, of jungles and fruit trees and the glowing guardian of springtime. Green glistens on giddy waters and ripples through riparian banks. Green is also duplicitous; it stains rooftops of decaying copper and mottles branches with lichen. It is the rising stench of baked seaweed, but simultaneously the zing of freshly cut grass: decay and

My eyes scan amongst the reeds and scattered leaves. From this angle, if I strain my sockets, your reflection comes into my peripheral. A version of you in monochrome with projection of cine-film layered into my concentration. My heart skips a palpitation and I can’t help but wonder if you see me too.

Your return was like a movie. I’d been working on the soundtrack for months. Building up a collection of carefully selected chords and blending hand-picked, eclectic harmonies. Weather shot: the lighting was how I’d ordered it: low, broad clouds with deeply furrowed silver linings and smaller ominous shapes stretching as far as our lost horizons. Everything was in place for this dramatic opening scene. I wanted my world to perform to receive you. Perhaps it would be enough to persuade you to stay.

Very wide shot, cutting to wide shot: A unsought figure saunters on to the set, causing a surge of agitation. Things are getting out of my control. Like the long suffering words from a writer’s fingertips, the imposter is tortured into relocation, almost as a figure oozing from a quill. Sunlight filters a convincing spotlight on her dramatic exit as the orchestral opening to All is Full of Love begins echoing; the haunting harpsichord rising from the pit of a chasm.

Close Up: My face - an exaggerated mess of exaltation, exhaustion and excitement contorts in pain as, like a thief, my shifty eyes move side to side expecting to extract answers, exacting upon you; extra-diegetic in a thought bubble.

Your return was like a familiar movie. I’d played it in my head countless times from the music to the weather, and each cleverly orchestrated shot in between. Our faces twisted in misery until we saw each other and the pain of the last two years melted away. Like excited school children we chattered nervously over each other and flouted all the conventions of normal speech. Our film was 'gritty', unpretentious and emotional.

As it went, your return was like a movie: that passed me by. Another day bled into the next, and I’d listened to stories about 'your return' from people who'd seen it first. My arranged music faded to hoof and horn until eventually there was nothing.

Lara sad and flat-pack
grasps hand.
Abstract attack ransacks by slap back
at flats. Whack, clack n crack at that;
hack asthma as rhythm,
Lara - a nymph - stands back, aghast.
And as far as far can grabs masala.
Swaps parts, transplants hands as flashy
balls fly.
My hand smacks an almanac.
Lara gasps.
Stacks maps at dawn and
abracadabra!
Has fatal attack...

This poem is made from my tweets, which are fed into the tweet cruncher and spat out into recycled poetry.

My sad picture had a cry
that perpetuates the right.
We're 25 hours in across the cycle of emotions
needn't matter...
is pleased to see a divine set change as a question.
I listened to dusk.
Candles lit,
getting bitter-er...
would still dreams of emotions this time!
Shall we walk with words,
sibilance expression,
discussion!
He deserves his happiness, without dirt,
our psychogeography is hope
after I've bet.
You keep.

Earth Hour came again last night, and due to sharing my living space with other people, I asked politely if everyone minded observing the time, which was met with respectful candles in the kitchen. I like to think of the earth as breathing a little sigh of relief when such things occur and hope that in this case observing the hour also raised awareness of how my housemates could contribute more. I used the time to disconnect from electricity and technology. As a teacher, it's rare that I am able to do this for extended periods of time at the moment. And during the hour I wrote, by hand, about a pebble.

I'd been to the beach early on Friday morning on my way into school and gathered a selection of pebbles and shells to use as my lesson for the afternoon. When I presented each child with a pebble and announced that I wanted them to write for 20 minutes, non-stop, about it, I was met with some brilliant Harry Enfield impressions. "Huh! Miss! As IF you could write about that for 20 minutes." "I could write a novel, just about a pebble..." was my reply, which was, predictably received with sniggers and lots of eyebrow activity.

Needless to say, 20 minutes later, half of the class had written over half a page and wanted to carry on, whilst the other half had had great fun throwing pebbles around, conducting 'research' into onomatopoeia.

A novel I have not yet had time to write, but during the blackout, this WIP is what I have so far on pebbles

Its porous surface contains black holes,
vortexes
filled with secrets seen
over centuries.
On the crest of a ferocious wave
its journey
rivals
that of a monarch butterfly.
For some time the pebble rested,
like the corpse of Atlantis,
leagues beneath sight.
It silently
witnessed
swarming schools weaving
their collective thoughts through
oceanic clefts until they
settled into the fissures;
rewrote topography.
The rhyme of tides echo
into chasms,
which blow out chorales,
spiralling to the shore.
Amid the hieroglyphics
the pebble waited
in turbulence
before committing to the sea
the way a thousand shipwrecks did before it.
The paths etched into its surface;
labyrinthine corridors
of broken dreams,
of messages of love
and stamps
of existence snatched
into the swelling stomach of tsunami.
The stench of seaweed baking in the sun
filters through its crevices
carrying olfactory hallucinations
of days
in times past.
Days when light fragments filter through
its counterparts
casting shadows like the mountains.
Dark days
of lying
in wait underground
like lava tunnels deep
beneath the surface,
fostering evolution.


The Guardian published pictures of the blackout around the world. It's lovely to feel a part of something so big.

Buena’ dia', whistled the man through his gapped teeth and ratty moustache. He had a bottle of aguardiente ensconced in his dirty jacket tied on with bailer twine, and took advantage of the first available space to nestle his head into the bristly seat cover. I studied his face. A face you could climb up; its crags and boulders mimicking the Andes; rising in the surrounding pueblos. His left eye was a pastiche of the lake at Cotopaxi – minus the perpetual rainbow thrown into the sky.
Darkness seeped in from the edges turning the sky black and the cityscape into a grid of LEDs framing faster moving lights with the erratic motion of phosphorescence. The surrounding hills disappeared; surrendering the landscape to the imagination and changing the narrative of the city. Quito was a place of secrets. A means to an end. Eagerly, I awaited my chance to escape it.
I arrived on Isla San Cristòbal having flown through clouds piled on top of each other like mashed potato sculptures. If you've never sculpted mashed potato; give it a try. If you mash sweet potato or other root vegetables you can make a variety of colours with which to sculpt. The peaks of Cotopaxi and Chimborazo – Ecuador's two tallest volcanoes – interrupted the windless skyline. All the way from Quito to Guayaquil the clouds made shadow pictures across the hills, which rippled like oceanic clefts and hid Andean stories in the belching belly of the earth. The pacific rolled beneath; a slave of inertia; unfazed by the moon. It buried these volcanic archipelagos under a trampoline of white clouds through which I caught glimpses of randomly placed lumps of rock and thousands of outlines of sea creatures.
This was no tropical island. The cutthroat heat seared the coastline image to my retina; its surface as rugged and windswept as the shore I’d left in Falmouth. Its plant life as ragged and withered as an acrimonious break-up. In the highlands where the sugar cane provides sweet relief from the dusty sun by day; the dawn rolls in across the sky; a divine set change as morning breaks and night's onomatopoeic chorus fades to hoof and horn. I hear his voice on the Southern wind and his face is carved in the lava tunnels which expose time’s secrets and assure me the world will be okay.
I’d read Dillard and listened to Corgan. I’d seen Attenborough and studied Darwin. To me this was the origin of the species. Where it all began. Where things were going to come full circle. To make that circle complete I’d armed myself with a quest: to bring a twenty-first century electro opera to where its first seeds were cracked by those finches with parrot-like beaks. Children walk around mimicking this action, by pressing the tips of the thumb and forefinger together so the fingernails make a seed picker. The finches changed the way people viewed the world and I needed something to change the way I did.

I've been walking
new lines
to rewrite psychogeography.
Like the memories carved
in a child's
etch-a-sketch,
the new ones are discombobulated
by déjà vu.

Let's not pace in fissures
gathering salt for our wounds.

If I'm to believe everything I read on the internet, I haven't blogged yet this year. I'm hoping that can't mean that during this same 2 and a half month period I haven't written anything of interest at all... Although the majority of my words currently tend to focus on 'eliciting vocabulary', 'assessing knowledge' and 'engaging' young minds. Or engaging tutors and teachers alike in academic, middle class language that somehow justifies what I'm doing in the classroom. Yes, rather than spend my time conserving energy, reading and writing and practising what I preach, I am encouraged to document every interaction I have with every pupil, parent, teacher carer and pet snail in order to evidence that I am a good teacher. The fact that I haven't had time to blog, am getting good results and producing creative resources isn't enough, and it's only going to get tougher.

Still, for the purposes of writing to model good writing to my students, I'm still finding some time to be creative albeit turning a Heaney poem into a short story or redrafting old travel vignettes. This is a WIP - Duplicity.


Duplicity

There goes another one; faster than the one before. Monochrome faces pass me by; their expressions a blur. The coarse shriek of the warning bell forces them into high definition and I snap back into focus. “It’s English first, ain’t it?” asked Joe. “Yeah! I think we’re doing creative writing today ‘n all.” We walked to room 31, past the old library, bursting with books and infinite possible combinations of words. I’m always on the lookout for new words. Only yesterday I’d discovered duplicitous: two-faced, dishonest, double crossing. I hope to find a way to use it today...
It was probably near lunchtime when all the heads turned towards the door in un-choreographed synchronicity. Who was it that had granted us reprieve by interrupting our maths class? Mrs. Reeves, the school secretary, whispered quietly to Mr. Glen, as fifty-eight eyes tried to lip-read. Twenty-eight heads turned my way, as I recognised my own name and slowly gathered up my things. I tried to push the uneasiness away by twisting my hands inwards in claws of bitter nausea.
The air was stuffy and disinfectant choked at the back of my throat as I sat in the sick bay. I was waiting for our neighbours to collect me. Apparently. I nervously excavated the ledges around the window frame – graveyards to the tiny bodies of flies, buried and suffocated under dust. I watched the playground from the window. Outside, there was nothing remarkable about today. In here; I sat counting bells to try and measure time.
The car smelled of fags and mould as smoke snaked its tendrils up into the roofing. Mr. O’Leary chain-smoked, desperately, whilst his wife fiddled nervously with the radio controls. Nobody told me why this pair came to pick me up or what was going on, and the silence taunted me with its duplicitous emptiness filled with possibility. Mile upon mile passed by in a blur of images, like watching a film on fast forward, but with no sound.
Arriving back home brought temporary relief in its familiarity. But then I saw them. Ma catatonic on the sofa and Pa crying. I’d never seen Pa cry before. I’d barely seen him display any emotion at all, apart from when they brought Stephen home from the...
And then I understood.
Stephen. Something had happened to Stephen. My eyes scanned the room for answers. Pa strolled over and put his arm round my shoulder. It was one of the only times that man of iron had showed me tenderness, and I warmed to it like molten lead. “It was a car. He just wasn’t looking. It...”
I turned my head to look into eyes like a wild Irish Sea. Jim Evans patted my shoulder, trying to force a smile which added new topography to his face. A face you could climb up. He was so close; I could smell the faint stench of ale upon his breath and feel his threatening shoulders looming in on me as he whispered “It’s a hard blow, son... A hard blow.” I walked over to my Ma, her arm outstretched, but she couldn’t find the words to say. Our hands entwined as roots of an austere tree. Like the sounds of a seagull rummaging through the refuse on rubbish day, I heard mutters and whispers from the faces that stared sympathetically. ‘That’s her eldest boy. The poor lad, the poor wee lad.’ I didn’t know how to act, as another old man, with teeth like tombstones, shook my hand to pass on his condolences. I wanted somebody to hold me and tell me everything was going to be OK, but they wanted me to be grown up about it: be a man.
I looked out into the night; its nothingness mimicking the emptiness of the room, of my heart. Somewhere in the distance I heard the approach of sirens. One thing about boarding school is the way your whole life seems to be driven by a series of bells. I shuddered back to the room, hearing the intrusive gurgles of my youngest broth... My only brother, now; Frankie. He just wasn’t looking became a new mantra in my head. And I fought back the tears that begged “Why?”
The ambulance got louder as it approached our road. In came the corpse; bandaged and hidden. The vultures that stood to the side bowed their heads as they muttered more condolences and finally pushed out into the night. Ballyfermotters feast on a funeral, I mused, and imagined the takings in Fibber McGee’s exceeding most week nights as the procession drink to their good health next to the stinking cemetery of the Liffey.

This week's collage assembled from tweets and experiences has the theme of transience; occupying space between rejection and replacement.

Museums are time machines
we step and wander in
transience questioning.
The hands hang in hunched
hooks of hasty hindrances.
Words expelled;
exhausted.

Lake is iced slush;
a pupitive space
not yet frozen over.
Blue bucket swirls in brackish bareness;
gathering debris and duplicity
of occupying two territories
and none at all.

Recalling topography of
forbidden location,
flamboyant flourishes
of graphology,
each scattered leaf.

Rejected from tree.

I'm still thinking of silence. John Cage's Silence isn't really a new idea. Shackleton wrote about it in his diary and many writers before him used the connotations of silence within their work. What would radio be without silence? Silence plays an important part in art and poetry. I wrote a dissertation about snow and its connotations of silence. In my delirium of solitude I was associating his silence and all the snow in some sort of pathetic fallacy. Snow - a blank field - is both empty and full of promise. Silence carries the same duality. Perhaps his silence means he's trying to forgive me? Perhaps it means he wants to punish me? Maybe he hasn't given it a thought? How can people say silence is nothing, when its so full of options? I'm filling my time with music and making, reading and writing because it detracts from the over-possible-ness of silence. Similarly, Cage experimented with sounds - claiming that any sound constitutes music. Sometimes when there's too much sound I need to empty my head, and like Jenny Diski; seek refuge in ice and snow to escape from it all. It's interesting how, prior to this recent Arctic blast, we connote snow in such a way. People's attitudes towards silence and snow are changing out of some necessity for them to do so. We'll see if 'Cage against the machine' make it to christmas number one this week...

My new idea for pushing my poetry into different directions is to make collage poetry sprinboarded from the news I've read and tweeted. This is an arrangement of words telling the news as I see it!

Sunday Collage

flightless fly
defined by transfinite recursion
wanders in
representations of cardinality
and fractured fissure.

Suture of silences
anguish languish in language
and mocking my clattering ejectives.

delphic aleph emphasises
phatic legacy;
prophetic epiphany
connotes rainbow.