Get my poetry published

...just waiting to hear

A friend and I have decided to devote a day a week to non-work (for me meaning non-programming) and do art/writing/whatever we feel like of that sort of nature. One of the things I’m going to do early on is start sending my poems off on that day every week.

I’m going to send some more off this next week, and see how it goes. This will only be my second lot of submissions so I think I can take another couple of rejections before despair hits ;)

but I’ve been writing a little more recently. That’s to say I’ve written two poems this last week, and I’d not written anything for months before that. So maybe the dry spell is ending…

tomorrow

so here are a few. It’s a bit hard to pick things to put up on here as I think my better ones are often also my more personal. Anyway, here are 3.

In the sun

She’s laughing in the sun
she did it laughing, laughing in the sun

He’s stepping out onto hot concrete
from his house where it sits placid in the suburbs
there’s nothing on his feet

now he’s laughing in the sun

She’s dancing little steps to no music
but there’s a tune in her head
and she’s laughing as she picks up a note
someone dropped
- a shopping list that reads like a sonnet
reads like it’s for her

He couldn’t count the times they called him dumb
couldn’t count his fingers
now he’s counting birds on the wire up above
and he’s laughing in the sun

Lucky me

Only I could sleep amid this noise
The clank clash bang
the whirring belts, the press
the hiss
And here I lie
dentable, like plasticine
or velvet,
curled up tight
until some passer by with booted toes
disrupts my slumber
so I might cross his path

Window

Last night my sister slept in my bed with me
because she came home crying and wouldn’t be alone
She took up half my space but I couldn’t sleep anyway
I was thinking how she’d said, ‘I can’t do it anymore’.

I held her words away until her breathing changed
and I was left alone with the hum of the fridge and the first birds
I let them hit me then and thought I might cry
lying there on my back, with her on her side asleep.
In my distress I couldn’t help wondering
if we’d ever make it.

Now it’s morning, it’s six o’clock
and I’m getting her train instead of her
I feel sorry for myself because I didn’t sleep
but then I see that the black sky is dissolving into blue

and there’s a man on the platform further down
when the train pulls in, simultaneously we reach out our hands
and I see how for this brief window in our lives
he in his world is a reflection of me in mine.

I’d better submit some stuff soon. I’m away for a bit but I’ll do it as soon as I get back

at least once a month

And a weird thing… I didn’t mind. This is most strange. I mean obviously I minded in that I’d clearly wanted an acceptance, but I didn’t get a feeling of hopelessness and defeat from it at all. I’ll just try another publication now. This is most unusual for me. What’s going on?!

Just waiting now…