Skip to main content

A rough-around-the-edges poem: Talk Me Down

I’m on the precipice of panic, I’ve said something and I can’t retract it

and worse still you won’t let me. I’m on the cusp of begging you to forget me

but you’ve already made it uncomfortably clear that no matter how near

to the cliff face I feel, you’re not letting me go anywhere. And so I run.

Wind in hair, feet pounding ground, I’m endeavouring to outrun light

and sound but then you catch me by the collar just as my feet

are about to become unbound. I’m on the edge of something now,

inhaling sea air and as my lungs contract you try to pull me back in tact

but I’m still wriggling against you. You can’t understand what I’m hiding

from on the cliff top, why a long drop and a slow stop might seem

more appealing that whatever these emotions are that I’m feeling,

which should give you an idea of how itchy they make me, or maybe

an idea of how few I’m showing and how many I’m really concealing.

I can feel a world of love inside my chest, and despite my best efforts

to stifle it, it is now stifling me. Shoving happiness in every crevice

and in every blank space around me and now this has finally found me,

I’ve never been so simultaneously content and hell-bent to ruin something,

mostly for fear, or blind panic, that someone else will take it away.

You say that’s a stupid tactic for saving myself, and I want to disagree

out of pure spite despite knowing that you’re right and that this here

cliff top, is not a sensible platform on which to turn my feelings around.

I take a step closer to safer ground, legs crossed and pulled up towards me,

still comfortably close to the crag, as I wait for you to talk me down. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Diary of a Whatever I Am Now: Transition period.

Transition: 'the process or the period of changing from one state or condition to another'. I wanted to make this blog more of a regular thing once my PhD was over, for several reasons. Partly it’s just to log what happens next and this, in itself, is two-fold: I want to have some kind of documentation of this recovery process (yes, that’s what I’m calling it) that follows the PhD, but I also live in hope that someone who is struggling with having finished their PhD might find this blog some day, and breathe a hefty sigh on realising that the weird grief-cum-relief they’re feeling right now isn’t totally abnormal – in fact, it might even be quite common. I also want to get into the habit of writing more – something I’m encouraging my own students to do now and I hate giving out writing advice that I haven’t/am not taking myself, and so here we are. This is my first post as a Whatever I Am Now (because I still don’t have balls big enough to write The Diary of a Writer in th...
2 comments
Read more

Copycat: Second book fears, panic-writing, and plans for a sequel

When people ask me how I wrote Copycat , I have to explain to them the constant state of panic that I was in while I pulled this book together. Intention , my debut novel which was also published by Bloodhound Books, was a labour of love that lasted three years in total, and five years to the point that it was published. I wrote that book as part of my PhD programme, which also means that throughout those three years I had a great support network in place to get me through the process of writing a book. The reason behind the Copycat -panic then was that this would be the first novel I would write without someone holding me up, and those first steps to get the book together were nervous and wobbly ones to say the least.             Copycat ’s  first draft came together in about two months. At the beginning and end of most days, I would sit down at my laptop and I would push and push until I managed a few hundred words at a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Diary of a Whatever I Am Now: Corrupted Hard Drive.

Take a walk with me. We’ll go back to August 2010, late August, when I finally found out that despite my below par A-Level grades, there was a university in the country that was prepared to give me a chance. Praise be to them. Ahead of starting this journey, my generous mother bought me a laptop. A brand spanking new laptop. That my kind and patient sister, and her partner, set up for me and taught me how to use. They deliberately picked something that would suit the university life style – and they were bang on the money in that respect. That laptop lasted I-don’t-care-to-remember how many assignments and a 10,000 word undergraduate dissertation. Let’s not forget, either, that during my first and second summers home from university, I also wrote two “novels” (I use that word in a bland and unimpressed tone, incidentally) that were typed on that same laptop. From there, we moved to postgraduate studies. More assignments and eventually a 25,000 word dissertation. By this point ...
Post a Comment
Read more