Maiden as mother as crone
Through the centuries passing through the ashes the smoke from your cigarette
Cupped beautiful between your knuckles
And the bitten-nail sweetness of your smile
I will never forgive you this moment
Tears traced parallel
It is not within me to forget

Birthright

I don't really care if it doesn't make sense, or if it is simple in terms of language, or stupid in concept, or if you think it's cliched or silly or whatever. Zie is as much a part of me as I am of hir. Trying to get inside hir head, a background of neutrality and calm. It's funny, because you wouldn't pick hir to be the calm type, but despite hir fanaticism, hir nihilism is born truly of neutrality, a world without make-believe boundaries. Destruction as a form of deconstruction. If zie could take the world apart with a scalpel and tweezers, to see how everything fitted together, zie would. Curiosity like a child.

Blood
from the blood
from the blood
from his blood
from him.

Thrice-removed.
Vision is pure.

It beats in my heart
It beats against my skin
Learning the ways,
Stitching the gaps.

Sneer
Sneer and scorn
Me and mine:
The blood is all.
The blood is all.

Ashes you were
Ashes you are, will be.
The blood is all.
The blood will live.

Your flesh will change,
Your bones can break,
Your eyes are weeping:
The blood remains.

Be still. Be quiet.
Can you feel the threads snapping quiet, the needle bent against your will?
This is mine, my birthright
Working
Worming
Through the blood.

Sleep still.
Time for waking soon enough:
Sleep within my breast
And I will whisper secrets to the ashes that will be.

The love I have for you fills me until there's no room for thought left anymore and I am calm

Norm

Note: this is a really quick sketch of a poem, and I'm going to work on it more, and fill it out, and improve it. Sally knows the man in question, he comes into work. There's so much more on this to come. I'm really glad I'm writing this one. Norm is a gentle soul.

I see him once a week.
He shambles in, white hair, white beard;
Father Christmas come out of the rain.

Today he was heralded by Dan and Mez -
Knowing smiles: 'Norm's coming!'
Something to brighten your day.

I always laugh when you're here.
Such sincerity, stumbling through sentences
Now, I don't mean to offend you...

Norm, I could never be offended
Not by you, by your voice still thick
With the drawl of a country you left fifty years ago.

Not by the honesty in your blinking eyes.
We spoke, today, of Hemingway
Of bitter old men who lost the world.

How old am I? I'm eighteen, Norm, and here it is,
Norm, the story of how it could have been,
Might have been, both sixteen,

And as you cut to the other side of the street I glance up,
Eyes bright: Cut you a smile as sharp as glass,
As calculated as the equations drawn straight in the margins of your books.

Fists snarling through the air
Playful as the dog that snapped,
Turned,
Cracked the teasing bones.

Hibernaculum

It has found a place
To sleep
Within the quiet grey hollow of my intestines
And it dreams
The shifting pattern of mist and frost

I exhale, heroic
It stirs, and slumbers on
The sudden corners of desire are blunted.
I inhale
Softly. I close my eyes.

I have no poetry left in my soul anymore.
Spent so long convincing myself my words were unnecessary.
Can't find them again.
Cut off the head and be surprised when the lungs fail.
No electricity jolts through these fingers,
and no amount of pumping on those ribs will start the heart again.

~

Which is more or less why I haven't felt able to write. Writing about not writing - shut the fuck up, me.
First poem. I've completed day 1. The rest will flow.

The idea is to write something (thoughts, poem, story, thoughtlessness) every so often. Not going to promise once a day because lies are bad.

It already feels silly. Self-deprecation is an ugly trait.
It'll work out. I'll write something and maybe it'll be good, and maybe someone will read it (at the very least, Sally will, and she'll like it regardless because she's good like that, so that's a positive).

There are positives in lots of places if you turn on the macro lens in your brain.

I want to introduce myself. I'm Isabelle (as uncomfortable as I am with the name).

I've put off creating one of these things because I was and am still terrified what it will lead to - with the intention of writing, of pressuring myself to write; will I write too much or too little? Will I improve, or will I stagnate? Both are equally likely and equally detestable. The narrow margin of just enough, just good enough, is almost unattainable.

A word about the name, which seems more important to me than it will, surely, seem to anyone else. Although it is slightly obsessive, Asche is a character that really drives me, that has pushed me to think a lot about my own absurdist philosophies and well-intentioned nihilism. (what. what. somebody stop me)
I haven't felt so enthusiastic about something like this in a long time and it has allowed me to get back into research, writing, and connection to people - I've made new friends and consolidated others - and I hope it leads also to a development of my acting 'skills'. Asche feeds me, because zie is so alien. Zie can look/be anything I want, and yet at hir core are my own philosophies taken to extremes and made physical. I'd write more, but I'd give the game away.

This is doomed to failure, but that's okay.