Room:

Construction lines like scaffolding
Build and criss-cross in my mind’s eye.
On paper, in drawings and paint.
This room once so forbidden
taboo
strictly keep out,
no admittance
Do not enter,
keep out
Yes this room – is now mine.

But I feel like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch
When her old croc of a husband dies
And she is left with a promise to ‘complete my life’s work’
She enters his study and is overwhelmed by bundles of papers, scrolls and books.

I too am engulfed by the scale and breadth of objects amassed in that one room.
Like Miss Havisham surrounded by her decomposed wedding feast of fifty years
I am encroached upon by photographs of ‘jolly japes’ from the 1950’s.

Like Mrs Rochester my addled desire is to take my revenge
by a small pocket fire.
Just to eat up these useless things.
Taking care of business.

Unfortunately Miss Havisham and Mrs Rochester died
in the small flames they desired
for a small amount of
-          Just for fun revenge
-          “I’ll show you”, revenge
-          “This will teach you”, revenge.

Well it doesn’t have to end like this.
I’m definitely not going up in flames
but the past is.

Even if it’s metaphorically
cleanse the room.
Not in anger
but in a Spirit of creativity
the Spirit of renewal
The spirit of change
new growth.
O’Donnell tenacity.
In Hoc Signo Vinces.
(Under this sign we are victorious)



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Collect Art Publication July 2023

Image
 First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition Stone all the flowers   The year of the art school tutorials. The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to you. The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.   Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters together. As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger. As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.   Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences with him. Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. She, in the face of all this decay   Chooses to destroy flowers with stones. Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their elemental pigments.   She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun. It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the flower fades (Isiah 40:8). She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine co...
Read more
Image
Blackbird Egg Time slows down in the Victorian mirror. She is haunted by every face that checked themselves in the glass. She is on the cusp. A life about to begin in earnest, on the tipping point of adulthood. On the apex of future relationships, sexuality and desire. “Yes” she says, “that’s me in the mirror”, long brown hair, grey-blue eyes. She is just an ordinary brown bird. But common or garden blackbirds create sky eggs, objects of beauty and desire. Each one speckled slightly differently in the genus. If only she can create of herself such an object of yearning, her small brownness will be worth the transformation. On the Hall-stand crafted in a grand antique style, are a collection of blackbird’s eggs. Saved in small glass containers with their lids tight shut. Through the glass she sees pale blue specked eggs, broken with raggedy edges. The armoire ominously overshadows her slight fourteen year old self. Whom she sees reflected back in multiple mirrors, framed in the warm glea...
Read more

Chap Book #3 Gone With The Wind

Image
  Delighted to be published in:-  https://www.cistaarts.com/product-page/chapbook-series-3-gone-with-the-wind Learning craft from the wind   There was once a woman. Who learned craft from wind, art from the sea and design from the earth. She sewed intricate organic patterns in labyrinthine repeats. Her creativity was celebrated through the land. She was known as La Corachine, beautiful shell of the sea. Her daughter Powys was as natural as the elements, precious as comfort and radiant with gold-nature. One day an old woman coloured like an autumn day came to their door. “I want what is yours.” She said, and stuck a pin into the girl, who transformed into a brown-bird and flew off. “Old woman”, cried the mother, please cook a meat and potato pie for us. “Of course”, she sang, catching the brown-bird-daughter. And made her into a pie with potato skins. The leftover bones she threw into a corner of the garden. In three days, a beautiful tree g...
Read more