Life Writing

I consider myself quite lucky to have the best of both worlds when it comes to Grandmas. I have one who's small, has white hair and bakes me cookies, and then I have one who goes to festivals, has epic stories about being kidnapped and has more cats every time I see her.
You can guess which one I'm going to write about.

My gran is an adventurer. She always has been. She travelled the world with my Grandad, a pilot, when they were 18 and ended up living in Malta for several years, which is when my Dad and his siblings were born. Unfortunately whilst there, my Grandad cheated on her (with the woman who is now my step-grandma) so my Gran came back to live in the Forest of Dean. It was here that her real adventures began, I think.
After a little while, she went to Turkey with one of her friends and this is where she got kidnapped by two Turkish guys yelling about money. Turns out they kidnapped the wrong people, but my Gran thought it was hilarious once the initial shock had worn off. Then there's the story of the cats that adopted her, rather than the other way round. One day there was a cat (later named Mr Biggy because of his unusually large belly) on the doorstep and it didn't leave. The theory is that Mr Biggs told all the other cats that there was a really nice lady down the road who fed you and let you sleep on her bed, because in a couple of weeks she had managed to accumilate 4 more cats: Biggy, Tiggy, Sammy and Roger.

My gran is also a very liberal human being. I remember she bought me a book about feminism when I was 10 years old, much to my father's disapproval, and told me to never let any man tell me what to do. I definitely didn't understand that then as much as I do now.

Survival of the Monsters

Survival of the monsters

It wasn’t a particular event or news story. There was no explosion in newspapers, no pandemonium and people building bunkers to hide from the impending doom. It just happened. Slowly and gradually maybe, but it still happened. The world has always been full of good and bad people and most of the time they balanced each other out. That was until one by one, the good people started dying.

Think about it. When was the last time you heard of a school bully dying in a car crash? The manipulative psychopath who got cancer? The child abuser who drowned? It was always the good people: the saints, the caring, the loving and the loved. With families and hearts of gold, they were the ones who suffered, who died in tragic, unfortunate circumstances. It was just that nobody noticed until a plane went down and every single one of them was said to be ‘the <insert relation here> you dream of having.’

Scientists tried to explain it. The believers did too. Most people just said we were too afraid of speaking ill of the dead to tell the truth about them. It wasn’t until extensive research showed that it was a virus in their blood that was causing good people to die that things got worse. Crime levels spiked. The death toll soared. People were committing unspeakable crimes as if that was the way to vaccinate against fair morality.

That was 2 years ago.

“Holly, you can stop now. I think he’s done.” I pushed myself off the top of the bins as my little sister took her knife out of someone’s head. The body fell to the ground with blood oozing out of the gash in its head as Holly turned to me anxiously.

“Was that good, Katie?” I was too busy admiring the sharp blade now dripping with death. We were in an abandoned shopping mall car park looking for corpses to deface because when you’ve killed everyone within a 5 mile radius, there isn’t much else to do on a Saturday night.

Holly is 6 years old. She’s young and innocent so I’m trying to prolong the inevitable, no matter how pointless that is.

“No, it was horrific.” I rolled my eyes and took the knife from her, wiping the bloody weapon on my jeans. My little sister beamed, the compliment lighting up her eyes like a firecracker. She grabbed for my hand but I shook her off, irritated. “What did I tell you about that, Holly? Stop holding my hand. It’s stupid.” I walked on ahead, the bitter coldness nipping at my fingers and a relief from the pungent stale air of rotting bins and bodies. 

“Sorry.”

There are 2 rules about living in this world. Rule number 1: Don’t show love. Rule number 2: Never apologise.  Nowadays there is no such thing as wrong.

Suddenly my sister screamed. I whirled around to see a man gripping my sister in the tightest headlock I had ever seen.

“Put her down.” I growled, my shaking hand grabbed the knife in my back pocket. “She’s not worth it.”

The man must have been in his late 20s. His knuckles were bleeding red, his eyes wild with the thrill of killing. Holly squirmed helplessly in his grasp.

“Is that why you keep her around then?” He retorted sarcastically and dug his fingernails into her flesh that was caked with blood.

“We’re related, unfortunately.”

“Great, so I’m going to break the neck of a little girl whilst her older sister watches? It can’t get much more traumatic than that.”

 A small tear leaked from the corner of Holly’s eye and even as I tried to repress it, I could feel the desire to save her rush through my veins just like the disease that wanted to kill me.

“Just take me.” I found myself saying. “It’ll be worse for her to see me die than it would be if I saw her go. She’s just a burden to me: always has been. It would be a sweet relief to finally be selfish again.”

The man regarded me and I waited in anguished anticipation for him to make his mind up. Just then my little sister crashed onto the gravel and I hurtled towards the man, plunging my dagger into his heart before he even had the chance to scream. He flailed but I pushed him down, twisting the knife further into him.

“Katie, you did it!” I felt Holly hug me from behind and smiled, even as tears dripped down my own cheeks for the first time in months.

The next morning I watched from above as my little sister found my dead body. Because these days you can escape your own morality but you can never escape your own humanity.

The Museum

Body

I watched letters typed up on an old screen I remember from when I was very little, thinking of my grandmother taking my hands and asking if I was sure I wanted to look. I want to say curiosity got the better of me and I pressed my small fingers onto the blue circles, but there was something about the darkness of the screen and the glass in front of me that made me turn and run. Young children don’t understand the immensity of seeing a human skeleton curled up in a box, someone that was once standing and breathing who thought and smiled and remembered. And what, 10 years later I’m stood in the same spot with my fingerprints on the glass and waiting for the lights to turn on.

And then they did.

Brown earth shrouded the bones as if to shield it from prying eyes, a reminder that we all go back to the same place we come from: from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, we’re all the same inside. Now this Egyptian skeleton never saw cars or skyscrapers or planes. He would have never seen laptops or phones or telephones. But it’s the same Earth that we walk on, the same Sun we lie under, the same stars and seas. I wonder who he was and who he would have been in this day and age. I wonder if he knows that every day someone thinks about him when he’s been dead for hundreds and hundreds of years.

I wonder if that’s why people so readily want to donate their bodies to science. Because they don’t want to be forgotten, they want to be remembered. Sure, they say it’s to further medical research, so they can help others, and I’m sure for some people this is not the case. We humans are absorbed in the idea of not being forgotten but we don’t do anything that’s worth remembering. If we do something worth remembering, it’s so that we’re not forgotten. There’s something twisted in that, wanting your life to be remembered by people who never even knew you, but there’s something so treacherously human in that too.

Part of me wonders if while we stood there in our baggy jumpers and lopsided shorts, there was someone else with us too. I wonder if the skeleton was behind us, not skeletal anymore but in his essence. I wonder if he sees little children running away and is grateful because the sight of his own bones is shocking enough for him let alone an innocent child, or if he wants them to press the glowing buttons and see him in all his dead, earthy glory, because he was a man worth remembering. Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he drifted through his life having achieved nothing, but either way his body is now on full display to be marvelled and gazed upon by eyes that didn’t exist when his did. Maybe this man achieved more in his death than in his life and maybe, just maybe that’s okay.
...................................................................................................................................................................

Bones

Thousands of years after my birth I am still here. 

At this moment in time, I am meant to be non-existent. My bones are supposed to have been buried so deep in the ground that I should be parts of trees by now. I should make up the layer of earth that my great-great-great grandchildren walk upon, I should be be the mud that is beside the river, the grass between strangers’ toes.

But that happy fantasy is just that: a fantasy. The truth is, I’m in a glass case and I have been for god knows how long. All I do is stand behind my own bones as I watch children back away in fear or press their fingers to the glass in morbid excitement. Mothers hurry their children away, feign interest in an Egyptian vase- ‘look, kids, it’s such an interesting design!’- or point out the exact cracks and crevices in what was once my skeleton.

After so long I’m still deciding as whether I’m grateful to be here or not. In a morbid kind of way, it's amusing to see people react to what is essentially humanity stripped down to it’s bare bones so dramatically. I love seeing the same family more than once; the children slightly older, the parents slightly more tired. But the novelty wears off quickly. I lose track of the time, days, months, years. I have memorised the exact words that describe my body, the words that explain the exhibits around me. I know where everything is and I know my spirit's boundaries despite my attempts to break that impermeable barrier and escape. 

My energy weakens the further I go from my bones but I have tried to obtain energy from elsewhere.

There was the time I tried to possess a human vessel, stretch my energy and merge it with hers. But just as an elastic band snaps when stretched too far, her youthful spirit throwing me out with a red flash of anger. There was the time I tried to completely draw out a human’s energy back when I was relatively ‘young’ in spirit and simmering with rebellious rage. After some vacant thought, I chose a middle aged man and focussed on his energy flowing out of him and into me. I visualised a yellow stream like liquid gold entering my ghostly veins and felt myself strengthen, but it wasn't long before I became exhausted and his vessel collapsed to the ground, just as my hopes of escape did. 

So for now, or forever, I am stuck here, dreaming of an afterlife where I am more than my cold cracked bones in a finger marked excuse for a grave.

All The Princesses are Sleeping

All The Princesses are Sleeping

We tell our little girls the story of the girl who slept for one hundred years

To be awoken by the kiss of a prince she didn’t know existed.

We tell our little girls the story of the princess who had skin so soft

She felt the discomfort of a pea a hundred mattresses beneath her

We tell our little girls the story of the princess who was poisoned

And whose only cure was yet again, a prince’s kiss

Why don’t we tell our little girls about the girl who almost sacrificed her life

So that she and her friends could have an education

And the women who fought so hard for something so simple as a vote.

Let’s tell our little girls about the importance of being awake,

Taking in the world and it’s beauty and it’s flaws and it’s grace

Let’s tell them about the importance of protecting their sisters,

Of not cursing them or poisoning them or pitting them against each other

Because our little girls deserve more than glass slippers and a ring on their finger;

Our girls deserve the bravery and courage to wake themselves up, to educate themselves,

To be their own princesses and to admire each other as much as they admire fairytale princesses

Iambic Pentameter Poem (kind of)

I hate the way my skin is blotched and pink,
And the remnants of spots on my pale cheeks.
I wish my foundation stayed on my face
And that I did not need it there at all.
I wish my lips weren't always dry and chapped
And I wish my hair didn't fall straight down flat
(But I wish I had not cut my hair short)

I wish my limbs were not sharp and angled,
I wish the skin around my nails was soft.
I wish my wrists weren't skinny and frail
And I wish my skin wasn't so goddamn pale

Sometimes I wish my hair was dark auburn,
And that I reminded people of fall.
I wish I could scrape my hand through my hair
Without it looking like a messy nest.
I wish I smelt like honey and vanilla,
And wore soft knitted sweaters when it's cold.

But the truth is I'm not suited that way:
I look bad in mustard yellow sweaters
And drink more coffee than necessary
And wear too much monochrome and leather
Sometimes I wear floral skirts and dresses
And confuse the people who think I'm cool.
But really I just wish I wasn't tired.

Poem Analysis- Balloons and Composition

Balloons

• Commas regulate the rhythm of the poem
• '---' gives a sense of the list continuing and Plath's amazement with the world and how extensive it is
• Exclamatory sentence makes Plath sound shocked
• Imitates the journey and life cycle of the balloon 
• Less punctuation towards the end of the poem
• Full stop at the end of the poem to symbolise the death of the balloon

Composition

• (blue) as an afterthought, as if it's important to Shapcott that the reader knows that the pencil is blue
• Becomes more disjointed as the poem continues
• Overwhelmed by what's happening
• (blue) as if that information is important
• More disjointed as the poem continues
• Sense of the poet being overwhelmed
• Begins poem with 'And' as if the readers have just stumbled upon someone's thought process, almost like we're intruding, the poem has been going on long before it's been written.

Typographical Crimes 

• Sansom uses disjointed punctuation and other 'typographical crimes' to show the reader how much punctuation impacts on a poem and how it influences the tone of the poem.
• 'Composition' uses lower-case to symbolise breathlessness, 
• 'Balloons' starts each line with a capital letter for emphasis, sharpness

The Product of Negativity

I am the product of all the times I said no.

Of the ‘play it safe’s and the ‘better safe than sorry’s

I am made of report cards saying ‘a pleasure to have in class’

And ‘she’s a quiet girl who should speak up more’

 

I am the product of all the times

 I was told to apologise before talking

And to cover your mouth when you smile.

“So as not to show your crooked teeth”

 

I was always told to ask for permission before asking a question,

As worst case scenarios were forced down my throat

Until all I could taste was someone else’s regret

And told it’s more valuable to listen to others than to offer

My own burdening thoughts

 

So when they say to speak louder, ‘Don’t worry!’

 ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ and ‘You won’t regret it, I promise’

I offer little more than a shy smile and think:

‘It’s hard to not be a product of all the times I said no’

Childhood Memory Poem

I have a memory

Of a television screen dropping from a wall

To project an image of a collapsing tower

The screen lit with red, black and grey

My blotched pink toddler hands gripped a net made out of twisted rope

As I gazed upon a gathering of people, a clump of individuals

Bound together by grief.

I have a memory of being at my grandparents’ house

Waiting expectantly for my parents to come back

(Even though I did not even know they were gone)

I stood by the door

Silent. Alone.

Until I saw a limp hand on my mother’s belly,

Her eyes ringed with pink, her cheeks wet.

I did not understand back then

That I was no longer going to be a big sister.

It’s funny how my memories of grief are the strongest ones I have

But have also swallowed up entire years of my existence

As if grief is the only reason

I have memories

But also forgotten them.