Tag: poetry

Creative Writing

Stag beetle

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The beetle, named not for doe-like grace
but for those jaws jutting from its head
like battlements, like weapons poised
to maim. I have never seen a stag beetle
fighting, or rutting, embodying its name -
only watched their ponderous paths
through leaf litter, shining in plate armour
at the feet of sycamores. 
These stags are jewelled scarabs
to a ten year old. Ancient people made gods
from them. This one, still and hollow,
I too make immortal. Curved bronze, 
metallic umber shine in clouds of cotton. 
Jaws cradling daisy heads, 
entombed in my matchbox.

Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash

Creative Writing

Baptism in fog

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Go outside. Hang your body-steam ornaments in licked-steel air. Free your heat to mushroom loam as you drop your clothes.

Step onto velvet moss, black juice of ancient peat welling between your toes. Follow snail glitter paths and filmy cobblestones into dank smoked cold.

Your vastness is filling. Silence gives way to a staccato of crows. Clouds cataract, steal your hands. Kissed in soft cold you are Moses, parting the sea, Cleopatra, plunging in milk.

Billowing towers flow up and crash over. The sky parts to a diffuse, pearly spotlight as you turn with ballerina-grace in a silk-chill tornado. Every leaf turns to look. Den-curled creatures and writhing earthworms burrow up to see you disappear from view.

A transitory flash of amber bathes every silent stone. You're the air after a snap of the fingers, the imprint of words in the wind.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Creative Writing

Visitor

Posted on 
The first time I saw an orca breach
I wasn't stopped by power or photo opportunity
but the silence after, as the sea’s breath slowed
like it wasn't hiding creatures the size of buses
in its depths. And me, perched on driftwood,
my small bones feeling the miles from home.
The mountains scraping the sky, turning purple
in twilight, do not know my name. I am a visitor
butchering their names upon my tongue. Still,
a longing rises within - a desire to belong,
without ownership, like moss sits with gravestones.
The leaf litter is thick with whispers older than
my bones. I do not rake them into neatness, but
step in, full aware of my clumsiness, my chest
open to their green unravelling. Aching with wonder, 
a willingness to be made unfamiliar, to let the 
vastness seep in.

Photo by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash

Creative Writing

Writer’s block

Posted on 
Send me the language of stars.

Draw me with pheromone-spiced memories into unmapped woods. Ferns unfurl, unrolling slow, revealing perfect quills. Soft ravens cry tears of ink.

Flow out of my pen as I translate the ripples in the mirror.

In a flooded library, white walls molded and crumbling, sodden books come apart in my hands as I magpie translucent words and dissolve the rest. “Intrinsic” and “perpetual” collaged into new stanzas on waterlogged mahogany.

Spore prints tattoo my skin. I loop love words around them in handwriting only I can read. Sink my feet down through bright moss, osmosis flavours of millennia from the roots, draw it through my body and bloom it white-lit in my lungs to speak its story.

Let me weave strong intention in wrinkled hands, unhesitant. Let me conduit the endless as the lightest raindrops dust diamonds in my hair.

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

Creative Writing

Worms

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I shred letters from you into bedding for my worms.

Over months, heavy words break through writhing bodies in warm, damp dark.

Hundreds touch and consume the last tattered pieces of your lost love.

Nine months later I grow tall, proud stinging nettles with what's left.

Photo by sippakorn yamkasikorn on Unsplash

Creative Writing

Submerge

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In meditation upon you I lost myself.
My toes curled into themselves and I fell inwards.
Filling with storm floods. Naked in dark water. Swimming with gills.
I breathe your air between wet lips. I am paper thin pale, you colour me red as I break my ribs to go deeper.
Entwined, we become both more and less.
Electrons energise, orbiting, exchanging. We are pure reaction, molecules of sex, coded so complex
I became intangible.
Indelible. The marks we lay upon each other. The vivid dreams of life together. We held hands tight trying not to tremble. Creaking loudens as water swells. Swallow screams as we submerge.

In black water our bedsheets become jellyfish wrapping stinging strings around my neck. Your eyes empty and you slip away as silver bubbles steal my breath.

Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash

Creative Writing

Empire

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Pixels buzz on dusty screens
Motors whirring in gestation
I built all of these machines
Calculating wrong equations.

In light it fell through tin roof rust
One raindrop sparks the crashing system
Night falls painting metal frost
Captures the corroding kingdom.

Then snaking vines constrict cables tight.
Weak walls collapse. And bursting in
Sunlight blisters unkeyed plastic.
Mold empathic eats synthetic skins.
Leaves blanket, dew coats nettles
bold with burning stings.

My empire was dead but it grew.
In the passage of years I may discover
In deep soil, a decayed resistor
And think back to when it was new.

Photo by Kiyoshi on Unsplash