This is a project that I have been working on with Jonny over the last year. It has a scratch title of 'Gnarly Watkins in Love'. Its the first page but still needs colour and polish. Watch this space.
Too Long to Warrant the Effort
It gets like that sometimes doesn't it? Whether it’s the gym, cooking proper meals, cleaning the windows or visiting your Nan. You leave it so long that it starts to eat away at your thoughts when you've got a few minutes for leisure. I don't mean evening TV leisure. Those minutes on a Saturday when you've got the shopping done and done a few minor jobs around the house. You find you've finished earlier than you planned, so you get the paper, make a cup of tea, maybe take a rich tea biscuit or two and sit down at the kitchen table and expel that sigh of the 'at ease'. You take that first sip and into your mind it nags. You should be doing it. For me it always has my mother’s voice. For me it is writing.
Okay so it has been months and months. There has obviously been good reason. Not just that Pacific, Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad are damn good series that deserved taking up my precious time. But the thing about time is that it warps ideas and memories. When the voice comes: You should be writing, I always answer back but it’s not a simple thing. Thing is - it is a simple thing. Writing is just putting some words on paper.
That's what I did this week - I just put some words on paper. I want to share them with you. Not because it is what I warrant as good. But rather to exemplify the idea of the first step can be easy.
I tried to respond to a competition but missed the deadline last Sunday due to a full work load. Excuses excuses my mother is saying and as per usual she is probably right. The basic brief was to write a marine or Qatar's sea history related poem. This is what I have got:
Twenty-seventh day at sea,
Five dead,
Sun above
Smacks sense
From head squashed
Next to head,
With dilapidated bodies
And broken spirits
I step from the mass
With my Siad
Holding my tether
Over the side
And fall through the divide,
The slither of surface
Splitting worlds.
A barrage of bubbles
Stream up my body
And bounce off my nose
And upward into hell
I descend in hope
Trumpeting;
An ear-thumping,
An ear-thumping,
White animal.
Take me from this sea!
That's it - unfinished. I won't over analyse it but the things that sing out to me that need addressing are the opening line, and the second half of the third stanza. I don't even know what the white animal reference was all about. The poem is based on the life of the nineteenth century pearl diver. An incredibly hard life that often ended in an early death if not craziness due to the bends.
On a second foot I believe in responding to with I am thinking and feeling inside and in between writing the above I also came up with the following. It is not good or cute but it is fun.
Big fat mamma
Big fat mamma
You aint having a piece of me
You aint really any no-one
Big fat mamma
Big fat mamma
You aint got a heart
And you aint got no caring
Big at mamma
Big fat mamma
You think if yo self
And y've got nutting sparing
Big fat mamma
Big fat mamma
Your mouth runs away with yer
Using up words that you've stolen
Big fat mamma
Big fat mamma
Your tongue is twisted
Your words are hard
They make people blister
They hit people hard
Big fat mamma
Big fat mamma
She's a big fat mamma
She's a big fat mamma
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)