TFE'S Pocket poem prompt

This week, after lots of false starts, I decided to have a bit of fun with TFE's Pocket poetry prompt (www.totalfeckineejit.blogspot.com)
and not take it too seriously.


The thief of self-belief

Yesterday there was a poem
in my pocket. By lunchtime
it was gone. Instead all I found
when I reached in my hand
was a tiny, wizened man.

He stood on my palm,
chest pushed out,
eyes darting greedily round.
‘I am the Thief of Self belief,’
he said. Seconds later he’d gone.

I hunted him out of the bedroom
where he’d built an effigy
from my red suede shoes
and my green silk dress,
with a yellow balloon for a head.


‘I am the Thief of Self-Belief’
he cried, sweeping across my desk,
smashing my cursor key,
shredding my poems like confetti
all down the stairs.

I tracked him down in the garden
where he’d started
to dig up my bulbs.
‘I’m the the thief of Self Belief’
he yelled, laying waste to a bed.

So I fled back inside and as fast
as I could gathered up the words,
words that littered the stairs,
the floors - I even found
some in my hair.

Then I stuck them all
back together and crept outside with the page. But I am the thief
of self belief he hissed
as I dropped the poem on his head.

Love and lust and holy relics

Here’s my pome, prompted by Total Feckin’ Eejit’s weekly prompt. It’s technically supposed to be inspired by Valentine’s Day thoughts of love and lust and romance, but this is what came out.


The relic

The relic is trapped in a filigreed frame.
My sister, who sent it, swears by its powers.
It comes with a booklet on Gerard Majella,
the patron saint of mothers and mothers-to-be.

When I hold it in my palm the metal pulses
with the sorrow and hope it has witnessed.
I leaf quickly through the booklet
then shove both it and relic in a drawer.

That night we make love, but something’s changed.
Something sacred has slipped from the room.
Urgency has been replaced by tenderness
and the relic lies silent in its drawer.

What about . . . .

Word clouds.

Are they a bit adolescent? (Something about them reminds me of 5th year english folders trying a little too hard) But they're sooo nice and satisfying if you pop a poem into them and see it emerge transformed.
The poem that I put in looks way better than it does in actual, on the page, print. I got the image from www.wordle.net, where it's copywrited to Jonathan Feinberg (who is apparently a really gifted word cloud designer).

Here's the original poem.


Dublin

It was June when I learnt you had passed away -
a long, long time after the burial.
After your bones had been weathered chalk white
and your skirts had been tucked in some drawer
and your faded silk shawls had been claimed by some girl
who danced on your grave and made light of your fame
and swore she would never end up
the same way.

You were regal. There really is no other word
to describe your grim grace, the stern measured gaze
that you cast on the people who walked
on your streets -
But you still had to die, I suppose.
Smog stained and tatty and everything else that you were.

Now when I walk on the pavements up there
I notice the cracks, the narrow paths
that cut between headstones and graves.
Sometimes I think I might shrink,
slip between them to join you in your ancient sleep,
you and the millions lined up in graveyards,
like dominoes, ranged toe to head.
Here the living take up far less space
than the dead.
I watch my step instead.

Red Car

Total Feckin' Eejit's having a party, and in honour of the event I've dragged Pure Fiction out of retirement, but this time it's purely for the poetry.
The party's in honour of Nuala Ní Conchuir's latest poetry collection, Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car. I love her blog and I've been dying to hop on TFE's poetry bus ever since it started out, but before I managed to leap aboard, it crashed. So this time I'm grabbing the chance before the bus gets too full, then I'm heading over to TFE's for what sounds like the party of a life-time.

Driving

The road is not red,
exactly, more of a pink.
‘It’s the sandstone that makes
it that colour,’ one of them says,
but that is not something
you need to know, when you’re
six-years-old and you’re sitting
in the car with your knees
pulled up under your coat.

And your eyes are pinned
on the hill ahead
and the road is pulling you
forward, onwards,
eating you up, eating up
the time this drive will take,
when the three of you,
just you three,
are together.

And everything is pink.
The gently patterned hill.
Your hand on the back of the seat.
Their faces, turning slightly away.

Signing off

Slán and thanks to anyone who's visited - and TFE, thank you for reading. It wouldn't have been the same without you.

Aunt Dee and onions

After almost a fortnight of sitting in a crumbling, draughty courthouse, I’m still not entirely sure what the Quilty case is about.
I do now know that there is a man called Mr Quilty, a tiny eighty-seven-year-old as spry as a jockey who trots up and down from the witness stand like a fifteen-year-old boy. I also know that the case, from what little I’ve gathered, centres around a dispute over landownership.
Whatever else it’s about, it seems to hold a strange fascination for the editor.
Less than 5 seconds after I return to the office in the evenings I’m being hauled into the glass box.
‘Well? Has the shrunken little fecker cracked yet?’ he snaps. I shake my head in a doleful sort of way and he snatches my notebook, leafs furiously through it, and flings it dismissively back to me, his eyes glittering furiously.
‘Right. Feck off out of here so,’ he mumbles, before bellowing out into the newsroom: ‘Miiiiichael - We’ll have to go with the Mullally's Bog Man-eating fern story. That little feckin’ splinter of calcified perfidiousness is still refusing to give in.’

Sitting in the draughty courtroom, trying to concentrate on what the dormouse-like young man from the planning office says, my mind keeps wandering back to what Clementine told me about Aunt Dee.
The truth is, I never really knew Aunt Dee at all. Clementine doesn’t agree. She says people choose to reveal different aspects of themselves to different people. But I don’t know. I think Aunt Dee was like an onion (which incidentally, according to Clementine, are ready for harvesting). All those earlier experiences were part of her. They formed her. If I want to know who Aunt Dee really was I need to find out more about her other life. I need to go to Hollywood.

No time for gin - there's beans to pick

I got back from work to find the house strangely silent: no cooking sounds, no sizzle of strange spices being flung into a wok to the strains of Clementine’s meditation with whales cd.
Maybe she’s left, I thought and was surprised to find I felt abandoned rather than relieved.

I found her slumped in a chair in the back garden, surveying a selection of berries and vegetables heaped on the table before her.
‘What is all this?’ I said. I wondered if maybe she’d finally cracked and confiscated the entire contents of the eco-unfriendly vegetable shop she's always giving out about on Market Street.
‘This,’ Clementine said flatly, waving a hand at the heaps before her, ‘is some of the produce of your vegetable garden.’
‘What?’ I sank down next to her. ‘But . . . I only planted a few peas . . . and one or two other things. But not this. Never this. I mean, surely not . . .’
The truth was I wasn’t sure what I’d planted anymore.

‘Why,’ Clementine said bitterly, ‘would a single woman, living on her own, plant enough French beans to feed an army?’
I felt my face grow red.
‘Actually,’ I said stiffly, ‘You gave me some of those French bean plants. And for your information the Irish army happens to be quite small.’
Clementine humphed. It seemed she was in a bad mood.
I hadn’t had a great day either.

The chief reporter had called in sick for the third time in two weeks.
‘Swine flu my arse,’ Michael muttered, slamming down the phone. ‘More like the aftermath of a bank holiday booze-up.’ He eyed the editor’s glass office nervously before landing his gaze greedily on me.
‘You’ll cover it,’ he said brightly. ‘You’re the editor’s golden girl right now. Even if you feck it up he’s not going to slaughter you. Not much, anyway,’ he added, ushering me towards the office. A moment later I was snared in the editor’s terrifying glare.
‘Yes?’ he barked.
‘Dee’s volunteered to cover the trial for you,’ Michael said, before darting back out of the room. The editor looked me darkly up and down.
‘Well? What the feck are you standing there like an amadán for? Get down to the courthouse – and I don’t care how good your shorthand is, if you mess this up you’re fired.’
‘It’s the Quilty trial,’ Michael whispered, handing me a folder and shoving me out into the rain. Ten minutes later I'm listening to a Dr Ryan giving evidence, studying the back of the oddly attractive Garda who I no longer find attractive's neck, and trying to work out what exactly the Quilty trial is all about.
I’m still not sure.

‘Do we have any gin?’ I said to Clementine, now staring gloomily at the rows of runner bean plants lining the paths.
‘We don’t have time to drink gin,’ Clementine said crossly, standing up and handing me a colander. ‘We have beans to pick.’