Poetry Blog: World Sleep Day

It was World Sleep Day last week and when I realised this I had a couple of thoughts. Firstly, I wondered how I’d never heard of this before. I mean, I’m a big fan of sleep and so having missed out on a formal day dedicated to it, I was kind of surprised.

My second thought was that I could write about it. Maybe an article about tips for getting to sleep – something that I’ve suffered with in the past – or even something scientific, like maybe 10 fascinating facts about sleep.

However, I ran out of time – too busy sleeping…just kidding – and therefore decided that I’d try and write a poem about sleep instead. There wouldn’t be much time to work on it or draft and re-draft, but I’d give it a go. As it turns out, this was a tricky one to write from the moment I introduced some rhyme and thus, I missed my deadline. Regardless, here you are; my poem about sleep and it just so happens that it’s a few days after World Sleep Day!

Sleep

Some nights like the proverbial baby,
I close my eyes & slip away into that friendly coma
to help me have a better tomorrow, maybe,
but other times, sleep is broken, cruelly unstable
and I'm isolated and counting lonely hours 
at the kitchen table
reading while willing submission to come to the fore,
but feeling just like the tyrant
that I'll surely sleep no more.
The nights where sleep is deep and fuller
exhaustion carries me into a world of dreams,
set sail on an ocean of movement and colour,
making life seem different from the moment I wake
while on other nights I drift off as I plot my route
on an imagined or remembered walk or run,
knowing this distraction will soon bear fruit
as I drift away, out for the count, to sample life's chief nourisher once more.

As I mentioned previously, getting rhyme involved slowed the whole writing process down here. That said, without it I think I’d have had a poem that was plodding, at best. As it is, I think the rhyme helps. I usually see it as a hindrance as it narrows down the words that I could include and often spoils lines and although there are a couple of rhymes that might be just a tiny bit forced, I think in all, it works.

When I was thinking about sleep one of the first ideas that came to me was the theme of sleep being so prevalent in Macbeth. Books and plays are often my first port of call as an English teacher. So I made sure that there were a couple of Shakespearean references in there and combined them with my own experiences of sleep, which is something that I’ve struggled with a lot in the past. Hopefully, it works and you enjoy the poem.

Poetry Blog: ‘Simple as that’

When I was ill – think death’s door to ramp up the drama, dear reader – I had numerous sleepless nights and chunks of these solitary hours were taken up by writing poems. Although I talked a lot about what was going on with my weakling heart, there was still a lot left unsaid. You can’t burden people with everything that’s going on in your head, can you?

As I began to get better and slept more, I sort of forgot about these poems. Some were repeatedly drafted, others clearly unfinished; snapshots of how I was feeling. Some were in a notebook, while others were scribbled down onto random bits of paper retrieved from our ‘drawing cupboard’ which still somehow exists, despite both kids being way beyond sitting at the table drawing. All were collected up and thrown together with the vow that I’d revisit them when the time was right. I took a picture of this one complete with scribbling, arrows, asterisks and late night handwriting. Quite a bit to decipher some months later!

This poem is a bit of a rant, to say the least and the more I read it back, the more I’m convinced I was channeling my inner John Cooper Clarke, yet without his gift for words.

'Simple as that.'

This heart of yours is having a laugh; it's as simple as that.
The sole aim of the holiday was just to relax
but your body wouldn't even allow that 
and instead you collapse at the airport, then
practically pass out on a promenade bench in the heat,
before having to call for help weeks later, 
when giving out paper became a bit too much for your health.
False hope in the hospital once again ended
when they then decided that your heart is need of being mended
and you're treated to an operation surely designed for pensioners
that you cannot help but keep on mentioning as
you're put on a ward with people 30 years older than you
and a crazed Slovakian, who laughs in his sleep and howls at the moon.
Consolation is thin on the ground, unlike the tea 
and the biscuits that shouldn't really be allowed,
you another have scar that is ugly and crap and in truth
your chest is beginning to resemble and Ordinance Survey Map.
Back home you discover a penchant for pyjamas that was never there before
style, much like your dignity has now been slung across the floor
and any remaining semblance of cool has been traded in,
there's no doubt about that, without so much as a crossed word,
let alone a fight and now, my friend, you look like a twat.
On top of this, you cannot leave the house without a hat
to keep you warm, cannot get to sleep until it's almost dawn,
cannot wash properly, cannot tie your own fucking laces, 
cannot walk down the street with anything other than shuffling paces,
you cannot run, you cannot dress yourself, cannot rant, cannot rave
and now you look like a tramp because you cannot shave
meaning that, as December looms with its festive banter,
your surprisingly white beard has you turning into Santa
and as life is forced down this prematurely ageing path,
this heart of your is having a fucking laugh.

So clearly I was a bit on the angry side then! And it’s easy to look back now and smile about it all, but believe me it was a horrible time in my life. Around 4 months of being stuck either in hospital or at home, feeling a bit sorry for myself, fending off peoples’ best wishes and enquiries and bein unable to do very much at all. And even before that, we were unable to enjoy a holiday because I collapsed in the airport. I suppose it’s all there in the poem! Apologies for the swearing if that’s offensive, by the way. Just words to me and words that had to be in there in order to capture my feelings, but I know some people don’t like that kind of thing.

I rarely bother with rhyme but in this poem I’ve made a conscious effort to use it. I was determined though that it wouldn’t be a simple rhyming poem. Instead, I opted for mixing up the rhyme so that while for large parts of the poem it’s quite traditional, occasionally I threw in a bit of internal rhyme just to mess with the structure. I wanted to do this just to try and reflect the disorder in my life at the time. I mean, for quite a while I never knew when I was going to simply fall asleep – often in the middle of a conversation – so it was hard to enjoy an ordered, planned day!

I wanted to present the poem as a bit of a rant and so there aren’t many end stops in there. Believe me though, when you’re sat on your own, wide awake at 3am, you can become prone to a bit of a rant, even if they have to be quiet ones!

As ever then, I hope you enjoyed the poem. Feel free to let me know what you thought!

Poetry Blog: ‘The cold does not embrace you.’

I’ve written about sleep and sleeplessness quite a few times before. It’s a topic that I keep returning to because every once in a while I’ll find my sleep pattern disturbed and often for a few nights in a row I’ll find myself either lying awake and unable to focus on sleep because my mind is racing or just out of bed, sitting downstairs in our house, wide awake.

This is a poem that focuses on the former of those two scenarios, although as a result of my mind racing, I eventually got out of bed and wrote the poem. It was a night where, if I’m honest, I’m not sure whether I was awake or sleeping fitfully and suffering with nightmares. One thing’s for sure; it wasn’t a pleasant night’s sleep and there was a lot that disturbed me. You think that nightmares are things you left behind in childhood, but then get reminded that you’re sadly mistaken!

The cold does not embrace you
yet, for a short time its shiver soothes your skin
like a smooth palm comforting you through illness, fear.
An uneasy dream shifts and your thoughts are strangers
caught in the void between the fevered images of disturbed sleep
and the disquieting thud of your heart as you realise you're awake again.
Without warning, the rough skin of working hands grabs at your jaw,
takes hold, clutches.
A strangers eyes stare out from a familiar face,
gripped by a mood you know all too well,
before one last squeeze,
then the calloused hand, shoves your face away viciously,
like an imperfect toy on a production line, rejected
not good enough to be loved.
You blink to try and wake only to find another face now,
her hot breath invading your nostrils,
her gibberish bringing spittle to your skin,
her disapproval at the runt of the litter writ large
in neon across unloving eyes and twisted expression
informing you again of what feels like their hatred,
before words are put in your mouth and you flounder,
helpless against a place you don't belong,
a jigsaw you don't fit.
Shaking free, you brace yourself, 
turn your collar against the piercing winter and stumble forward,
in search of somewhere warm.
And while these ghosts will always haunt you 
with their chill,
every once in a while the winter sun will warm your skin.

It feels like there are two antagonists in this poem. The first I’m not sure of and it would be unkind to speculate. However, the second is definitely my grandmother, who was someone that I had a fractious relationship with, at best. She was a woman who never seemed to display any warmth whatsoever to me, which as a child was quite perplexing. In company with my many cousins, I remember she’d frequently refer to me as ‘this one’ while everyone else got called by their name. Let’s just say that it was clear I wasn’t her favourite! I can’t say that her treatment of me didn’t bother me, as it did. But as I got old enough to make my own choices, I just decided to avoid being in the same room as her. Even now though, there are occasions when she comes to mind and it’s never pleasant. Hence, the words in the latter half of the poem.

I tried to end the poem on a more positive note, just explaining what I’ve just mentioned, really. Childhood memories will always be there and will always crop up and affect your day. But there’s always a positive to be found.

I hope you enjoyed the poem or at least it had some kind of effect on you as a reader. The memories I’ve written about were incredibly vivid and I hope that feeling is conveyed by what I’ve written. As ever, feel free to leave a comment.

Poetry Blog: Fragment

I’m returning to familiar territory with this poem; sleeplessness. It’s something I suffer with every once in a while, so it’s not a terrible problem, but it can leave me feeling absolutely exhausted for a few days. As a result, I often find myself somewhere between a zombie and a purely functional human being, particularly at work.

This was a poem I believe was written a few months back. In fact, to begin with it wasn’t a complete poem as it was a kind of ‘something’ that I found on the bottom half of a page in my notebook , sat beneath a different, finished poem. I didn’t even notice it when I went back to write the other up for another blog as it just looked like 10 lines worth of notes. Thankfully, I found it again when flicking through the same notebook a few weeks ago. Once I’d given it a read I decided that I’d have to sit back down and get it finished.

I have a vague memory of finishing the poem at the top of the page and deciding to head back to bed. However, before I’d gotten up out of the chair another few lines arrived in my head and I sat back down to see what I could put together. I imagine it was another half an hour before I headed back upstairs. Anyway, it turned into the poem below.

The sounds of your sleeping collide with that of the pulse echoing around my head in the otherwise silent room. Awake again.
It prompts me to move, eventually, sleepily, stumbling out of the room.
On the landing I freeze at movement in an adjacent room
as someone stirs.
Trying not to wake them, I imagine their panic and confusion in a darkened room, perhaps abruptly departing a dream
and still myself for a moment while they return once more to their slumber.
Toes curled over the edge of every stair, I descend cautiously, robotically
before brutally puncturing the silence with electronic noise and light
as I disable the alarm, listening for a stretched out moment
before silently opening a door to pad across the pitch black front room.
The irony is not lost on me as my eyes refuse to wake fully,
my vision comfortably blurred around the edges as I finally sit
and wonder what to do now.

I like to take myself off downstairs when I can’t sleep. First and foremost it means that I’ve got less chance of waking of the rest of the family. One of the main reasons for getting out of bed in the first place is so that I don’t wake my wife. The other reason is that I enjoy the silence of the downstairs of the house. Eventually I’ll settle at the dining room table either to get some ideas down in a notebook – if it’s ideas for writing or lines for a potential poem that have woken me. And this was what happened here.

I called the poem ‘Fragments’ for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because that’s what it was when I found it; just fragments of an idea. Lines scribbled down underneath a completed poem like I’d just had enough and wanted to just get some sleep. I also called it fragments as a reference to my sleep at these types of times. Sleep is fragmented when I’m like this. I’ll usually sleep for a little bit and then wake up, unable to get back to it. It’s then that I find myself getting up. Even when I eventually head back to bed I often can’t sleep and will wake up regularly when I do.

As usual I’d love to read any comments about the poem. I hope you enjoyed it.