Day 25 | #NaPoWriMo | Good-natured caveats and dat

You know that awkward moment when you rock up to a motive and you're wearing the exact same outfit as your friend?

I don't - I never got that.

(Is that a thing for people? Is it really that deep? I feel like it's been a plot point in way too many sitcoms with female characters. To any females reading this, can you clarify this for me, please? Thanks in advance.)

Yeah. I never got that. Until last night when SugarJ Poet told me I'd copied his title for Day 24. It's awkward because it was slyly in my drafts - started on Day 23, I might add -  but I hadn't typed the poem up yet, so it got peak.

He beat me to the upload/share and I forgot to change it. (If you're reading this and are slightly confused, this has been uploaded a few days late and backdated, lest the out of sync upload dates bug me). It's not that deep, but he was cussing me out for it in the group chat, so yeah. I'm playing. And hella petty. Anyway, preamble over.

[EDIT: Rah. His has the definite article and everything. Okay, L received.]

I won't say what this one's about, but reading it back to type up, I started to think of Omar Bynon's I Go For Long Walks Now, to which a good few other poets - including the aforementioned title thief - have responded to. I'm telling myself this is my [unintended] second response (here's my first). Omar's poem is now available in video form, if you haven't read it yet. I'd direct you to the Barbican Young Poets 2016/17 anthology, but this intro has enough hyperlinks.

Anyway, here's this one.

Enjoy x

On trying to write happy poems

Maybe I can't write happy poems because I'm not. I'm a poor actor and a bad liar, so I don't know how to tell you to be happy or how to bring joy to your day in any other way than “don't be like me”. I think it will to be the most consistent thing I tell my children, if I have them.
I’ll show them my notebooks of fake-deep, stuffed with metaphors like overflowing kitchen bins, each as meaningful as an empty fridge and tell them "it’s the reason why I cannot give you the life I want and you deserve. Why to this day I wonder why your mother would waste her time, what in the hell she was thinking or doing or taking when she chose to be with me’ why I question your existence every day." I imagine my eldest, how she’ll look up at me with the cosmos in her eyes - so bright and full of everything I’ll never see but at one time hoped I would - and say nothing. Maybe do her best to console me, and for a moment at least pretend to understand the man that failed at everything but them. And I’ll tell her through our foreheads: “please don’t love a man like me”.

Day 7 | #NaPoWriMo | I think I may have a problem

I did the first draft for this hours ago and went back to rework it to fix the logic and cut the fluff. It's is an hour and a half later at the time of writing this and it's a bit of a shambles. It's in scraps and I've rewritten the first line a good your times to the point where I don't even want it as a first line any more. I had a plan for tonight, started it before leaving the rehearsal space and was determined to at least have it uploaded by 11:30pm. LOL. Well, I had a plan. Personal lesson for today: always abandon the plan. It feels like a good idea at the time, but it makes it so much harder than it needs to be. Or you finally end up doing it once the plan has been dashed and you relax and stop caring, as demonstrated by my Day 1 poem. But yes. Abandon the plan. Always ignore it (unless it's an essay; in which case, follow it unless it's deviated from the task. Or your life. This is very bad advice. Don't take it.)

Today's is a response to Clipper by SugarJ Poet, which is in turn a #NaPoWriMo response to I Go For Long Walks Now by Omar Bynon, published in the Barbican Young Poets Anthology, pg. 7. Please check out both poems.

HEARTBURN AND STRESS

(after Clipper by Jeremiah "SugarJ" Brown)

These days I stay away from sour fruit
because I’m too prone to heartburn
and wretch when what should be sweet is sour.
So I never understood how you or my brother could enjoy tart citrus.

Then I remember the time Mom developed a stress ulcer
and the doctors told her to avoid dairy and white bread.

As I offer you half of my sour tangerine
and the half I’ve eaten summons stomach acid,
you tell me you saw our friend today.
I ask you how he is and you tell me of the bags he was clutching under his eyes.

Later I text him what the doctors told my Mom
about the dangers of bread to the body; 
how some things are better shed than given, 
how it is better to spill milk than drink it, and at least take some pressure off your eyes.