Random thoughts for a grey Tuesday morning

First random thought – Insomnia has its upside – waking at five am, I decided to tuck into one of my Christmas presents, Kate Atkinson’s, Life After Life.  Two hundred and five pages in, and I am enjoying it enormously.  Visions of well-to-do Edwardian family life banishing all remnants of the ‘mares’ that had awoken me.  A second upside to waking early and having tea and hot, buttered toast before dawn is that I now feel perfectly entitled to a second breakfast of, a home-made soyacino (my preferred proper milk having run out) and healthy custard creams – i.e., Belvita Yogurt Crunch breakfast biscuits.  Better still, the soya didn’t even curdle when heated.

Second random thought – Red lipstick and red nail varnish are the best antidotes for melancholy moods which otherwise might be hard to shake.  The shade of both, though, being key to the cure.  It cannot be cheap, thin or watery but must be deep, lush, highly pigmented, terrifyingly exciting and conjur all the glamour of the best of retro Hollywood in one heady application.

Third random thought – my poetry muse has been on sabbatical for the better part of a year….but……may….be….returning….?..

Elegant Martinet

She worked so hard at self-control,

aches plagued her un-oiled parts at night

at this effort of fighting life.

Or fighting for her life?

*

The years wore on.

Then, came a battlefield too far,

the horror of it.

Family the howling enemy,

ripping through blood ties,

and her not so serried ranks,

heckling that her decorum had been in vain.

Her life’s greatest battle pointless.

*

Where aches once were, came

a slow, silent crack ,

rendering shell, bone and softer matter.

And then the unraveling.

Speech first.

Gaping with wider blanks

from which she perilously hung,

terror in her eyes,

as she trod the missing language

and desperate forgetting to come,

worse than one drowning.

Ok. Ok.  So it’s only a first draft, and only a possible beginning, snatched from the arms of morpheus…..cut me a little slack.

…More random thoughts to follow shortly, no doubt.