Wonderful Poems from Hallsville School

On Friday I was privileged to pay my first visit as Patron of Reading to Hallsville School in Newham, London. The visit was the first of six scheduled for the 2018/19 academic year, and I had the pleasure of working with Years 5 and 6. I am excited to share some poems that emerged from my workshops. All the workshop participants should be extremely proud of themselves!

You by Layla

You are my swimming pool

Keeping me relaxed and calm

You are my house

Keeping me safe and sound

You are my Turkish food

Keeping me healthy and full

You are my rollercoaster

Keeping me happy and joyful

You are my TV

Keeping me interested and amused

Memories by Jayden

I sit on the plaster

Waiting to matter

As everyone starts

To chatter

I wish they knew

How I felt

As I waited for him

He was holding

His scooter handle

I wanted him

To blow out

My fire

He kept looking

At his computer

Until he puffed

And he huffed

And finally

My flame went

Away

Colours by Clara

Lavender purple describes me

Purple is a galaxy in the sky

It is a unicorn

Peaceful but cheeky

Lavender purple is a cupcake

It is a colour everyone would choose

It is as cute as a newborn baby

Purple is a heart no one can break

It is a colour you

Don’t see everywhere

Purple is a mix of blue and pink

Great in every single way

Because it is amazing

Like me

Colours by Raquelle

Black describes me

It is empty but full of emotion

It is the friend that is always there

It is the dark next to the light

Black describes me

It is the silent assassin of the night

The stranger to the morning

And the strange quiet that is usually there

Black describes me

It will always calm you down

In daylight or in the night

Black describes me

It likes isolation but hates being alone

It is the thing to take away your worries

And send you off

To a journey of sleep

Black describes me

FREE STORY #3 - THE GREAT PET AUDITION

This is the third instalment of free stories on my blog that assorted agents and publishers have deemed not worthy of publication. I am proud of them, so am happy to share them on this blog. Enjoy this one, entitle 'The Great Pet Audition'


For my sister’s birthday she wanted a pet – 
“I want a dog!” she claimed.
So she held an audition to see who to get
and the neighbourhood dogs all came. 

“You’re lively and fun,” Sis said to Dog One,
“your task is to run round those trees!”
But doggie was twitching, he couldn’t stop itching
because it turned out he had flees!

“Now sit in this shoe!” Sis said to Dog Two
who was sweet and remarkably small,
but doggie went hiding, and Sis couldn’t find him
anywhere at all!

“Now you lick my knee!” Sis said to Dog Three
and she laughed as he started to drool,
but doggie kept nibbling, he wouldn’t stop dribbling
and slurping away like a fool. 

“Now show me your jaw,” Sis said to Dog Four – 
“I’m after a powerful beast!”
The dog cocked his head, then went for her ted
and he turned the toy into a feast!

“Now fetch me this stick!” Sis said to Dog Six
and she threw the stick up in the air.
The dog made a dash, and then with a crash
the dog leapt straight into a chair!

“Nine, Seven and Eight – leap over that gate!”
Sis said to a trio of hounds.
They huffed and they wheezed, they puffed and they squeezed
but they couldn’t get up off the ground.

Now Dog Number Ten was last, but when
my sister told doggie to wait,
with one single bound he jumped up off the ground
and he bolted straight over the gate...

...Leaping up in the air he pranced over the chair
and he glided with purpose and ease.
With his powerful jaw, zipping like an outlaw
he darted his way round the trees...

My sister ran after with gales of laughter
and screamed “you’re the pet that I’ll choose!
You’re clearly the best!
You bet all the rest!
STOP RUNNING!”
...but doggie refused...

...He yapped and he growled, he snapped and he howled
and he shot down the pavement with glee,
‘til he found what he’d sought, and he stopped with a snort
and he barked at the foot of a tree. 

And Sis was astounded. “At last! I have found it!
She clambered up into the tree.
“I know who to get! I’ve found the right pet!
A CAT is the creature for me!”

sausages. 

Spaghetti Betty and the Spag-Bol Troll - FREE STORY

Several years ago I wrote a series of what I hoped would become rhyming picture book texts. They went through some edits at a major publisher, but they were not taken on. They have been hawked around various agents and publishers, but nobody wants to publish them. No matter! They are not doing much good festering away on some computer file, so I thought I would make them available on this blog for people to enjoy/ignore at will. Here is the first story, entitled SPAGHETTI BETTY AND THE SPAG-BOL TROLL. Lemme know what you think!....


There was a beast named Big Bad Betty
who really, really loathed spaghetti. 
If she saw some on a plate
she’d give a look of fearsome hate
and bellow with an angry howl:
“THAT IS NASTY! THAT IS FOUL!
GET THAT PLATE AWAY FROM ME!”
She couldn’t stand the stuff, you see.

The villagers, they loved spaghetti
but they were scared of Big Bad Betty.
They built a big room underground
where their stash would not be found.
They stacked it high upon the shelves
with help from their spaghetti elves
and locked the big door with a clink. 
But Betty said “what do they think?
Do they think I have no brain?
They’re hiding spaghetti yet again!”

So with her only friend, the Troll, 
she grabbed a spade and dug a hole.
By the light of the shining moon
they tunnelled down and reached the room
with the huge spaghetti stores,
and they destroyed it with their claws. 

When next the villagers wanted tea
they went to fetch their spaghetti
and found it torn upon the ground.
A better plan had to be found!
Then Harold had a bright idea:
“We don’t have anything to fear!
Let’s have Betty round for tea!
I promise it’ll work! You’ll see!”

So for Betty’s evening meal
the villagers prepared some veal,
and beef and pork and lamb and frog
and octopus and crow and dog.
They made a dusting of gnats and germs,
sprinkled it on a plate of worms
and invited Betty round to eat
from a tray of tasty treats. 

And Betty growled, “they know, the fools
that I am smarter than them all!
That’s why they’ve invited me
to sit and have a champion’s tea!”
So with her only friend, the Troll,

she went to eat the great big bows
of animals, and gnats and germs.
And her favourite dish – the plate of worms!
She ate the lot, she sucked and slurped
then settled down to eat dessert.
She licked her big bad lips with glee:
What have they prepared for me?

Then Harold coughed and cleared his throat
and served her up a little note:

“Those weren’t gnats, they were confetti!
And those weren’t worms, they were 
SPAGHETTI!”

At first Betty was very cross:
“How could they trick me? I’m the boss!”
But then she thought, “I love my meat,
and now I’ve found another treat.”

So every year, on that same date
the villagers prepare a plate
of oozing, slimy, slick spaghetti
and share it with ‘SPAGHETTI BETTY’.

And Betty loves her nice new name.
She thought the Troll should have the same,
so now when she sits down to eat
a plate of spaghetti with meat,
she always prepares a nice big bowl
for one of many  friends –
‘THE SPAG-BOL TROLL'

ON JEALOUSY

Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to write about, and what simply to leave in the dark recesses of my mind. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of the latter. It feels like I have not done much writing at all lately, poetry or otherwise. I always write with an eye on my putative audience, and if I feel that a particular thought or occurrence is of limited interest to anyone but myself, I will shy away from writing it. Writing is often something I have to sit down and force myself to do. Perhaps this means I am not a ‘proper’ writer, in the sense that writing doesn’t tend to come pouring out of me like sap from an especially fecund tree, as seems to be the case with some people. For every reason to write, my mind fabricates several reasons not to.

I am also conscious, when I post on this blog, that among my readers might be people with whom I have done, or hope to do, business in my capacity as a performer and educator. With this in mind, I do not want to write anything that might jeopardise potential business opportunities. It is as though I have a Careers Instructor, or the voices of my parents, constantly lodged in my mind - “are you sure you want to write that? What if so-and-so sees it and decides to offer that commision or gig to someone else?” In part these concerns might be reasonable: a lot of dark thoughts cross my mind all the time, and publicising them might well give the impression that I am more mentally ill than I am. But I am not a robot. When people choose to do business with me they are dealing first and foremost with a fallible person and not a mere CV. Furthermore, if I call myself a writer then it behoves me to attempt to express myself authentically. Sometimes an issue comes up for me that necessitates being both written down and publicised.

I am talking about jealousy. The more I think about it, the more it becomes apparent that in my career as a writer and performer, jealousy seems to be my biggest obstacle. It underpins almost every other difficulty I encounter in my work. I’ve no idea if this is the same for other people; it tends not to be the kind of thing that is discussed very openly. For all I know, admitting to it here may mean that I am depicting myself as some sort of monster, but I hope that is not the case. Even if your tendency towards jealousy is not as pronounced as mine, I hope that what I have to say is of interest, and indeed speaks at least to a part of you. For a part is all it is: in admitting to jealousy I am merely acknowledging an unpleasant aspect of myself; I am not claiming that this aspect represents anything close to the entirety of my being.

How, then, has jealousy been affecting me of late? Firstly, I’ve found that I have been focusing far more on the successes and failures of others, than of myself. Social media is a great help to me in lots of ways, but it is detrimental in the ease with which it allows us to obsess over other people’s lives. Often, the first thing that comes into my mind when I sit down to write is not ‘is this going to be the best that I can do?’ but something along the lines of ‘is this going to be as good as x, y, z?’ There is a very competitive streak within me that uses other people as a benchmark when I should instead be deriving my sense of worth from within. For example, when writing I often judge the success of a piece by how many ‘likes’ or ‘retweets’ it gets. I look at other people and feel jealous of how much apparent approbation they are getting, and how puny I seem in comparison. Sometimes I post the same poem or article several times in one day, in the vague hope of generating more and more publicity around myself. As a sort of challenge, then, I am going to tweet a link to this blog post just once. If people want to share it that is up to them, but I am going to try not to promote it. Little steps.

Jealousy also affects me as a consumer of art. When I was doing my MA, an important piece of advice that Michael Rosen gave to us was to be “porous” with our reading, to consume content as promiscuously and voraciously as possible. My tendency towards jealousy sometimes renders it hard to do this, since not only do I measure my achievement with reference to the success of others, I also have a tendency to inject my ego where it is not needed. For example, it can be hard for me to watch other performers or read other poets as a detached observer, and to refrain from comparing myself with them, either favourably (in which case I think that I should have got the gig instead) or unfavourably (in which case I berate myself for being inferior). In other words, I have a habit of making myself the centre of everything. How many artistic opportunities have I shut myself away from because my ego was too fragile to handle them?

Jealousy can, then, inflate one’s ego, but it can also diminish one’s sense of self too. A particularly pernicious aspect of my jealousy is that it can cause me to completely lose sight of myself as I focus all my attention on someone else. I’m going to illustrate this with a slightly odd example, but perhaps one or two of you may be able to relate to it. Just under a year ago, I was watching Youtube and stumbled across someone named Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson has subsequently gone on to become incredibly famous, and this is doubtless in part because he is a blistering orator who talks about some incredibly important issues. I happened upon his videos at a time when I was very anxious about a lot of things that were going on in my life. I developed, for a while, a weird obsession with Jordan Peterson, to the extent that the importance I placed on my own thoughts became secondary to the importance I placed on his. I should say that this was not merely an example of jealousy, but was also closely related to the OCD that I have suffered with for a long time, and was related in particular to the very specific issue of my impending marriage (and not to the myriad other things that Peterson happens to talk about). Bizarre as it sounds, I kept wondering to myself, ‘what would Jordan Peterson say about this?’, and to become intensely jealous not just of him and the apparent clarity of his thought and the cult-like following he was generating, but of everyone who is able to go through life, and transitions, without suffering from OCD.

A crucial aspect of jealousy, something that differentiates it from mere envy, is the desire not just for what someone else has, but the desire (subconscious or otherwise) to see that person harmed in some way. Thus, I became desperate for something, anything, that would knock Peterson off his perch. I revelled in every article that did him down, and there are quite a few. And to bring the issue back to poetry, I have found myself, in my darkest moments, focusing on specific individuals and wishing them harm. I should say at this point that I am not really wishing them harm, with the italicised words taken literally; rather, the jealous part of me is wishing some form of failure upon the successful part of them. As I mentioned earlier, there is much more to me than simply jealousy. It just happens to be the jealous part of myself that I have chosen, with difficulty, to focus on here.

I feel it would not be fair of me to ask you to take these thoughts seriously and for me to do nothing in return, Therefore, in return for you reading the above and hopefully not judging me too harshly, I will make a promise: every time I am tempted to go online and obsess over the successes or failures of someone else, I will instead shut my laptop and do some writing of my own. And every time I am tempted to go online to check how many likes or retweets a piece of my writing has received, I will try to do the same. I will try both to see the inherent value in myself, and to do the same with respect to other people. For as I mentioned above, I do see the value in these things. The jealous part of me is merely one of many parts, along with the parts of me that love, that respect, and that care.

x

The Artistry of Us

I sit here with you

and I think to myself

that I haven't written a poem in ages. 

How can I be a writer

if I don't even write?

What kind of artist

sits here watching TV

instead of making art?

Yet as you sit here with me,

your warm hair burrowing into my shoulder, 

I mould my hand round the words of your waist. 

You mouth a sonnet as you ask

if I'd like another cup of tea

and it dawns on me that 

simply being here with you

is a kind of artistry;

that life so far has been the start

of a continuing work of art.

As we sit together I realise

that to be your husband

is to be an artist

and that no other poem,

nothing else I write, 

can compete with the artistry of us. 

TWO NEW POEMS

Too Many Cats!

There are too many CATS in the house where I live

and I don’t CATS know what to CATS do.

They’re under sofas, on CATS the CATS shelves,

and even in CATS the loo.

CATS They’re on the wardrobe and in CATS the sink;

they CATS lurk behind the door. CATS

They get where CATS they’re not wanted -

far too CATS many to CATS ignore.

There are CATS on my mum and CATS on my dad,

above him CATS and below CATS him.

There are CATS CATS that get into every nook; CATS

there are CATS too CATS many CATS in this poem!

Not Enough dogs!

There are not enough dogs in the house where I live,

I wish that there were more.

I’d love a nice dog when I get home from school,

barking at the door.

I’d take my dog on nice long walks

through sun or rain or fog,

then I would give a juicy treat

to my little dog.

I’d love to own a lovely dog;

I’d love get to know him.

But there aren’t any dogs in the house where I live

and there aren’t any in this poem.