Sarah D's NaPoWrimo 2022

  Day 13 I. joy Joy is joy is joy, there's not a lot to say about it, everyone's joy is the same, we feel quite giddy. Contentment though, contentment hums and sings and is various and multifarious, contentment is the bright bird on the ledge, which can go either way, into the strange air, la via miraculosa, the feathers of a wild explosion, grey on grey on grey. Is everything going to be ok? The thrill, i think, is in the not knowing. ii. hope everything is better- look, look, there is a bluer sky when i wear sunglasses. happyish people on the shore. these pools are tessellated with orange starfish. every pebble has a different pattern- that's what wear and tear can do. there is a polishing machine in your imagination, here comes the sun. i dare hope. you angle your winter face, a new fritillary found like thrift between the red cliff and the air. i imagine you smile.

  day 12 small thing to get down to the nub of things conversation wears away the dog worries at his foot the rose distills its essence I boil metaphor in a pan the syrup left is so sweet there's just enough to put onto your fingertip to taste so concentrated, stars explode there is a photograph of the entire galaxy it lives in a file somewhere compressed to png a dot in the memory, wow to the trillionth degree

  Day 11 Large about something big It was huge you couldn't miss it, lying agog on the bypass from the North, rubble piercing its skin, rust spined, graffiti on its flank, demolition grin. Not to be bigging it up, it was Northern pride, self perpetuating tunnels, half yawned from the Liver buildings Thank you Mr Williamson, that utility hallage, that neoclassical pillarage at the service of industry, the dead clerks like flies, stuck paper files, the flaked concrete and shattered limestone of the chip on its shoulder, psoriasis of peeling plaster, the heart clocked in half out. And might it lever itself from its damp foundations where sewer rivers run, crush the houses in its wake, slide ship hull- bellied in the Mersey, ruins of some white whale

  Day 10, Love How it falls, love, how it falls, like a clumsy child that couldn't tie its shoelaces, and the pavement knows. The shock in the palms is real. how it falls, but upwards in the cornering bus, you all impatient to sit up at the top, the city laid before you like a picnic, the too red of late strawberries. how it falls, like late leaves, the precise shade of old gold how did you ever live in the antiquity with their mystery gods, with their dear rituals? how it falls, like cosmonauts who perform their daily tasks with slow precision, but always giddy at this weightlessness- and home seems so much smaller how did you fall, before your turn , how did you fall when it was your turn? The dull of gravity, unless you were a bird, if you were a bird, love, then you soared.

  Nonetheless They find out fungi know fifty words which seems too few to sing their world- they could not tell the sadness of the ice cream vendor in a cold April; philosophy's more their thing perhaps, or maybe lines of sun caught up in dust, instructions to use the cilia of speak meshed beneath our chilly towns, where the children are lonely and smile at the cold comfort of ice cream

  Bird superior (Leonora Carrington's painting of Max Ernst) If I had a muse, I'd dress him elderly in pink feathers, make him drag for art. He'd exist, as all muses do, in a frozen tundra, sigil of unicorn, meek yet all about himself, a bird superior, yet quite ridiculous- dainty yet savage, a coquette and a harpy. He and Art would exist there- I could visit and thaw my own absurdities, where he parades, all mermaid tail and yellow stocking. It seems as though I long to live with dust and heat and in the warmer skin of me alone- not for me, the pale shiver of the World, thin as a gentleman, an advocate for permissions I no longer need or dress for. And my dreams agree.

  Day 7 - contradicting proverbs  " mountain  never  meets  a  mountain but  a  man meets  a  man"  -scottish proverb The hills   Man can meet man, woman, woman or any such, but they say mountain does not meet mountain.   Yet, earliest in the half dawn, by the cuillins, I heard them first; unanchoring and pulling loose their ropes, the ballast dragged behind them, leaving scree, rough jewels.   The turf and the peat loosened and curled, the ground untangled of its white tree roots, the landscape riding on the coat tails of lovers as they moved their dance.   And in the full of day, the ordinance survey wept to see the landscape so redrawn, a battlefield of mass and emptiness, the fingerprints removed.   If we love at all, it is like mountain meeting mountain - all cordillera linked, yet, all lonely summit. I’ll meet you where the sheer faces clash,   where the stone is red and soft, where the wind will ...