Just Writing Week: Another Worstdraft

The arcade beneath the office block,
plague hospital beyond, the Georgian close
tucked neat behind the underpass,
the weed-choked steps, a hanging wasteland garden
walked by hungry eyes at night
but safe as houses in the day;

these places, all the others, every view
we saw together, every path we both danced down
while swapping sugar-high perspectives:
what happened to the way we used to walk?
When did we start shuffling and shambling
with the rest, start creeping to their tempo
and not keeping our own beat?
If you came here, if I went to your town,
would you, just once, wish to dance again?

Just Writing Week

I've christened this week (roughly this week anyway - from last night to my gig at the Jazz Cafe on Thursday) Just Writing Week, in my world anyway. I'm paring my tweeting and my Facebook participation back to less hyperactive levels and trying to spend the time writing instead. This is pretty much worstdrafting - throwing words out and seeing what happens - but I thought it would be interesting to post up what emerges on here, given that this is, y'know, sort of meant to be a poetry blog and that.

So, here's the first result. It doesn't have a name yet and it's maybe a little misshapen. Cradle it gently, as you might tend a wounded bird:

I come to again
in this hotel room dark
where paranoia eats the curtains
like a fleet of moths

the wine and whiskey in my bloodstream
laying plans with my enemy hormones,
chemical defence to make my body
shuck my soul, leave me just another zombi
in the low sun light of day

so inviting
this annihilation

all you have to do
is one more whiskey,
let yourself go under

be submerged
in dreams of other flesh, memories
of her piano
and the screams still ringing
their defiance
on this too-tame night

and now the sun’s too bright
through these windows
which do not open fully,
a suicide and lawsuit prophylactic,
this attempt to dodge
the human liability

this sun too bright
and last thing I remember
it was night

(and yes, I am reading Caitlin R Kiernan again. You should be too.)