I've been absent from my blog for a long time because I forgot my password.
It was really obvious, so that was silly.
The warmth and kindness of a lot of people who've responded to my poems at slams and my stories on facebook have brought me back to The Echo Hill Adventure, so here I am, kicking off again now that Poppy is 6, Ollie is a hormonal 12 and Hamish a 6 foot tall 14 year old.
Here, as requested, are the two poems inspired by the famous bees in my wall!
I guess in a slam performance I can bring out the ironies and the sarcasm and the deliberately overblown. Read everything I write with a grain of salt please.
All in the mind
In my wall, there are
bees.
They seized the
opportunity of our temporal impecunity
Our untidy hoarding and no
time to bin it
A wall with loose
boarding, and no time to pin it.
One day the sight of
hesitant flights
Converging studiously to
a point
At the joint between
plate and stud and creamy paint-cracked weatherboard
Told me the muttering at
my bedhead, inside,
Was deep in the liminal
invisible cavity
Between wall and wall –
not, as I’d feared
Part of the murmuring depravity
In my liminal invisible
cranial cavity.
But still, behind closed
eyes
The seething and
scratching and thrumming
Was breathing and
catching and drumming
In the membranes of my
skull;
Restless droning in the
darkness between ear and ear
Wove with patterns there
of angst and fear,
So I fled
To the other end of the
bed.
And slept in peace
Between clean sheets
With the pillow over my
head.
Until early summer, when
the scent of honey rose with the heat.
When melodic humming down
by my feet
Spoke of industrious sweet
brewing
From blossom and bloom
Of nectar and syrup
In my very own room;
The strange little noises
of chewing and nibbling
Meant that sweet honey was
stewing and dribbling!
I stretched out and
listened
To the distillation of
liquid gold;
In my mind’s eye, it
glistened
In pale curtains, fold on
fold,
Always moodily lit, both
day and night
With obedient workers,
pictured mid-flight.
I marvelled that inches
from my now-turned head
A tiny queen was tended,
cherished, fed;
The nocturnal song,
sustained and muted chords
Resonating through the
building’s boards
Wrapped & lifted
Me as I drifted
With the vast and curious
hive-mind for company.
But one roasting morning
I woke to a roaring
I lay like a carcass in a
fiendish buzz of flies
Then opened my eyes
And saw the window
teeming
With two hundred workers,
seeming
To be striving for the
sun.
One by one
I freed them to navigate
their hesitant flight
Into the light –
Then found their entry;
With no sign of a sentry,
The back door of the hive
was by my pillow.
The old building’s wood
Had not withstood
Optimal humidity of
50-60% at 32-35 degrees centigrade
And the nibbling
Of the queen and her
thousand siblings.
None had stung me, but
this had flung me
Into a new cacophony of
doubt;
So now, garden variety
forms of anxiety
Accompany the buzz and
scratch & murmur.
I picture waking shrouded
in a bee-swarm
Or swatting through a
blizzard bee-storm;
And again, in bed, in my
head, they’re
Drawling with ceaseless
tenacity,
Scrawling with night-time
vivacity
Crawling with restless
ferocity,
Bawling relentless
atrocity...
I hope that after the
specialists come with smoke and
A jemmie bar, I’ll no
longer be awoken
By the sound of a vast
city by my ear
But truly
The ligurians are too
unruly
They can’t live here.
A sequel: The muse in my
wall
I’m not sure how they
feel
About the seal
Approval stamped upon my
verse –
I’d say indifferent, or
worse.
Still some days rowdy
Some days drowsy, on they
hum, ho hum;
Hot days a cacophony,
While cool nights’
bedtime melody
Lulls me to a false sense
of security.
But me – the seal has
stoked my hopes and stroked
My self-belief; it’s soft
relief
From writer’s block,
insidious self-doubt.
Let out,
My muse looks hesitantly
to the sun…
But time, a poverty of time,
Conspires;
Aspiring, tiring, daily
grinding.
My epic novel wants to
soar
But daily living shuts
the door.
My ideas flow, but oh, so
few –
And the bees must go to
pastures new,
But the apiarist, too,
has lots to do.
And summer rises to its
stride
And still my busy
bee-friends hide
Strumming their eternal
chord
Behind the paint and
weatherboard.
The forecast warns of
oven heat
And beating sun past
forty one
The morning hesitates
Anticipates
The day’s bake.
The kelpies’ yelping
Calls us out –
The smoke we smell
Is not the conflagration
we expect
But Peter Davis trying to
inspect
Our hive.
A pine-sharp tang unfurls
As smoke-strands curl
Round needles fresh
ignited;
He needs to know the
hive’s extent.
Purlin to purlin? Vent to
vent?
Above the noggin? Against
the cladding?
And all the while, like
Aladdin
Smoke blossoms out
From metal spout
And keeps my muse-bees
tractable and docile.
Pete has me tap the
paint-work in the room
To guage their industry
inside the gloom;
But paint is all there
is.
With the humidity &
nibbling
And their scratchy bee-feet,
prickling,
Their canite
dance-floor’s worn to nothing;
A satisfying crunch and
crumple;
A roiling boiling, angry
jumble
Crescendos out;
A shout – “get out!”
I slide the window up to
let them free
Then flee.
We mask the hole with
sticky plastic
Contact, just a bit
elastic,
Like a blister, like a
drum
Resonating with their hum
Keeping them inside, but
barely
A great, round hole is
plugged up – squarely.
My muse, meanwhile,
begins to murmur
I push it away, from day
to day;
Kids disobey – guests
overstay.
Debts to repay. I think
I’m OK.
Nothing to say! Just not
today.
Too much cliché in the
cold light of day.
Well, anyway…
Often, a flurry of workers
escape
And launch toward the sun
– inside the room.
They buzz and dance
Against the glass they
cannot pass
Until they spill onto the
sill
And dry to dust, their
unquenched lust
For nectar, dew and
sunlight all betrayed.
Likewise, some
words fall on to the page
But nothing sage
No notes of brilliance
spill or slip
Or even drip
Or seep out of the
blister of my hopes
Just tepid tropes
That tumble like a bee
that’s lost its sting.
Winter comes.
The bees are gone.
Jemmie bars and smoking
Leverage and poking
Honeycomb in buckets
Lots of “damn!”s and
“fuck it!”s
Workers, queen &
drones
Are happily rehomed.
And all is silence.
No melody or song, no
soft, orchestral throng
No musical score nor
grumble nor roar
No ear-assaulting
dissonance
Arouses my ambivalence
To spur me onwards to
compose
Anything in verse nor prose.
Epilogue - Spring
In my wall, there are
birds.
I’ve no words
For their audacity
In finding the capacity
To nest between the
panels and the ceiling.
But now I’m feeling
A narrative is blossoming
anew;
There’s build and flutter
below the gutter
And hatch and cheep and
wake and sleep
And feed & cry and
learn to fly
And swoop and sing and
dance and soar…
I feel like I’ve been
here before - ?
