Contented Soul...

poetinside:

You wake in the middle of the night sometimes to go cry in the bathroom and you think I don’t hear it but I do. I can’t apologize enough for all of those things the men who came before me did to you. I wish I could promise that it will be different this time, but it won’t. I will leave you, too. 

You once told me that you are in love with me but that I shouldn’t let it go to my head because you are also in love with a pigeon that sleeps on your balcony. You say that since the pigeon moved in you have stopped having nightmares. How can I compete with that? 

I can’t make you happy and that daily defeat is wearing me down. You have sandpaper lips and with every kiss I feel another little piece of myself being rubbed away. I feel myself drifting further with every “I’m fine” and every “forget about it”. With every sigh. With every passive aggression. With every sleepless night spent talking you out of whatever anxiety- laden hole you have crawled into this time.

I will admit that, of course, I found it all fascinating at first. It was a turn on to feel you trembling as you lay clinging to my chest, slick with sweat and tears.The sex was always the best after a breakdown. I would take you quickly and you would wrap your legs around my waist and dig your nails into my back leaving red etches deep into my shoulder blades. When you yanked my hair and pulled me to your lips, begging me not to leave you as I came, I felt powerful. It felt like something out of a movie.

I thought I loved you at first but it wasn’t love. It was the idea of you I loved. The image of you, in black and white, of the sad, scrawny girl with bitten nails and unwashed hair that I had created long before I met you. If only I had really listened. If only I had heard the raw desperation in your voice. The very real despair. The genuine fear. 

But it’s too late now and I can’t make the nightmares go away. I can’t help you sleep. I will soon become one more reason to cry at night. One more thing to be afraid of. One more nightmare. One more memory that will make you even harder to love when I’m gone.

story-dj:

News taken from my official website: www.storydj.com.

Next week will see the release of an anthology of poetry written by me. This is very exciting, and it is in fact a first for me, as my last anthology included quite a bit of prose alongside the poetry, and before that I had only ever released novels. The time seems ripe for poetry, though. I have been writing poetry for as long as I have been writing prose - I have always written poems alongside short stories and longer pieces. Poetry has always been there, and anyone who follows me on tumblr will know that a lot of the creative writing I post is poetry rather than prose. Poetry is such a reactionary medium. A lot of life events, big or small, simply become poetry. Much of the poetry I upload on tumblr and indeed much of the poetry in the anthology has been written as a reaction to a specific event, a specific feeling - something that has affected me in some way beyond the superficial and has been transformed into a poem. The vast majority of them are emotional poems, good and bad - hopefully feelings that readers will be able to identify with in their own lives. Many of them have been written on the move on my iPhone, or written very late at night (which somehow seems appropriate for any type of writing.) These are universal feelings, immortalised in a moment. The power of poetry is that it can capture a moment, a feeling. A novel incorporates a vast array of influences, entire lifetimes, multiple themes, the same for a script, but a poem for me has always been a perfect way to capture a moment, a happening, a feeling, and immortalise it: process it. Poetry is the end result of life. Its similar to how a song occurs to me, just minus the music. Poetry is raw words and nothing else.

So why now? The time just seems right. I always have and still do, even now, consider writing as a hobby, something to be done for fun, not toil or work, but poetry especially. The major concerns of my writing life thus far have always been novels and the occasional script. Novels have taken months to write, to edit, to perfect, to publish, to sell, and then all the while I would be writing poems alongside the book. I would be writing a script, working on a film, and writing poems at the same time. I would be editing a novel, and writing poems at the same time. I would be busy with something else, something else “more important,” but the writing of poems never stopped, as tumblr followers will be aware - the flow of poems never ends. I write several a week, sometimes several a day, so I have amassed a fairly large collection. A very large collection. Some were published in The Miller and the Boy but again, they were almost a secondary concern. I was so unused to having short stories grouped together in a book, I was more anxious about them. Besides, short stories are longer, so they are more important, right? And everybody knows poetry doesn’t sell, right? Now seems the perfect time to answer both those questions with a good firm “wrong.” Poetry has snuck unnoticed into my life and I never really appreciated how large a part of that life it has been and continues to be. It genuinely surprises me that I write and upload so many poems, the work rate seems huge and I don’t know where I find the time, or when I’ve found the time. Poetry has been my silent and unassuming friend but now I want it to be loud. Now I want it to be out there with the novels and the stories.

That isn’t the only reason, of course. A far simpler explanation for the timing of this anthology is that I just have a lot of poetry knocking about, and I always feel odd and slightly guilty about leaving anything to gather dust. Even more than this, though, I have been quite surprised and of course very happy at the reaction my poetry has been getting on tumblr. Without sounding hideously conceited, the poems have been going down quite well, and readers certainly seem to be enjoying them. This is far more than I could ever ask, and I really do appreciate the support of tumblr users especially, more than I can say, but it seems as though people truly can identify with my poems. As I mentioned earlier, they are poems of feeling, emotion - universal feelings, the emotions of life, the experiences of life. If I have gone through something, the chances are that somebody else has too - and there is that perfect moment of reading when it seems as though the words were written completely and entirely about your life. We’ve all experienced that while reading a book. The moment when the writer seems to know you better than you know yourself, to be writing about your experience alone. This has always been one of the most powerful aspects of reading for me, and its something which I hope to bring to readers with the anthology. These are poems of life. I want every reader to be able to take something different away from the poems, and from the anthology as a whole - I want them to feel like I am writing for them and only them.

Which brings me to the contents and structure of the anthology itself. It contains 77 poems. Its a significant number. And those 77 poems are arranged in such a manner that they can be read all at once, consecutively and would form a narrative of sorts. There is a specific “journey” through the anthology, but again I want even that to be down to personal interpretation. Longer poems are interspersed with shorter poems, and there are some surprises. Themes encompass all of life: love, loss, hope, dreams, heartbreak, isolation, society, nature - every conceivable aspect of life is covered, and perhaps everything has a slightly harder edge, a remorseless feel because life is a remorseless thing. The poems don’t flinch away from real life and real issues, although there is also an allegorical edge to them as well. Its difficult to classify a poetry anthology - it certainly isn’t a novel, but there is a narrative of sorts, albeit a diffuse one. It isn’t a story per say, as each poem is its own story, but strung together there is progression. The obscure nature of poetry anthologies means that they can be anything to anyone, and there are a few surprises in mine, some pieces added in to make the collection more of an experience, to strengthen the narrative side. Of course, every poem can be taken individually - the entire work can be read a poem at a time, and I hope that some people will do that, too, and take something different away from each piece. The anthology will be released next week, and I will post the actual date/time after this weekend. Next week will generally be a big week for my poetry, as the “poetry shop” will be launching alongside the anthology, with plenty of poetry related gifts - things like personalised journals and key chains. Its going to be a big and exciting week!!

Visit www.storydj.com for more news as the release day draws nearer!!