The wonder of teeth

Yes, I’m back!  It’s taken quite a while, with so much going on…

Anyway, here’s a little something that I’ve just written for a poetry event that I’m taking part in this month… https://www.facebook.com/events/281339909434543/

“Oh, the wonder of teeth”said the crocodile sleek
to his friend, the craggy old crow.
“They are such a marvellous invention
and are with you where- ever you go”

“Oh, the wonder of wings” said the craggy old crow
as he perched quite far up in a tree
“they carry you far, the carry you wide,
over seas, in the rain, in the snow”

Then there came from the grass, which was awfully green,
a squeak and a sigh and a laugh as the local field mouse,
who was just passing by in his travel from the city of Bath.

“Oh, a tail is the best” squeaked the field mouse from Bath
“it has helped me in so many ways,
for it flicks side to side and by this, it will guide me
as I plan every route to escape”

“Dear field mouse from Bath” laughed the sleek crocodile,
“I’m afraid you are wrong, for you see
my teeth are quite sharp and can cut anything
from a mouse, to a crow, to a tree”

The craggy old crow and the field mouse from Bath
now both shivered and quivered and whispered,
“dear crocodile sleek, with your teeth oh so sharp
Have you caught all your prey for your dishes?”

The crocodile sleek, with his eyes shut so tight
said not a word for a minute or two;
he was thinking quite deeply about his reply
though he knew very well what he’d do!

“Oh crocodile sleek, are you now fast asleep?”
said the craggy old crow, bending near and
the field mouse from Bath now too stepped
towards the sleek crocodile seemingly still.
The cogs in the brain of the sleek crocodile
were now whirring and turning quite fast
for he knew both the craggy old crow and the mouse
had no route of escape- that had passed.

Craggy crow flapped his wings,
field mouse flicked forth his tail
but their actions were too much in vain
as the sleek crocodile, with his wondrous teeth
opened wide, pulled them in- they were gone.

“Oh, the wonder of teeth” said the sleek crocodile
As he settled now for a nap
“How marvellously moreish, how delectably sweet,
Who knew a craggy crow and a field mouse from Bath
Would make a charmingly satisfying a snack!

Decision

It’s my decision,

I’m driven

By you

You are the one

Who placed stars in the sky

Made my heart sigh

When I see a radiant sunset

Orange, pink, purple; colours that you put together

You made each one of them perfect

Yet put them together

And bam, there you have it, the perfect combination,

The sensation of beauty in our fragile world

But I recoil at what we do

It’s true, I didn’t always listen to what you had to say

But you didn’t push , you let me just get on with it.

No recrimination, no turning away;

Sitting, listening, watching, until I realise

My pie in the sky attitude, my I can do it by myself, thank you very much

Didn’t get me far, in fact, it jarred me, confused me,

Deviated me from what I should be doing

People say it’s a shoo-in’, but I’m inclined to disagree.

Our holier than thou behaviour, our let me show you how much I can give,

The I’ll get round to sorting stuff out tomorrow, the who do you think you are?

You can’t run my life, in fact, I say you don’t exist and I persist with my

Berating, insinuating that you never threw stars, breathed life.

Life is strife and we have nothing at the end of it.

Nothing. Just dark. No second chance to dance but face up to the fact

That the pact we made with you was made in invisible ink; it disappeared

Like your promises.

Whoa!

Where did that anger that hatred come from?

We all have our own views on the path we choose

And, as much as you don’t like what I have to say,

You won’t change my way, my footsteps following my best friend

To not the end, but on, on to a place of sheer perfection;

You don’t reject anyone that comes to you;

It’s us; we decide to ignore, push you away,

Led by a sway of public agreement,

Led by what we see.

We try and say

We try to explain that you created all things

To live side by side

Like the songs says together in perfect harmony

So, as much as I tell it how it is

You won’t desist but mock my belief, releasing the bile

That you wouldn’t chuck at anything else.

But I’m driven,

It’s my decision

To be in love with you, be in love with everything about you

Even when I don’t understand the plan that’s for me,

The plan to bring me into what you’ve set aside for me.

It’s not a joke, a ruse, a strange cult where we have to do all weird and, quite frankly,

Some disturbing stuff to get the thumbs up from our illustrious leader.

This plan is more, more about freedom, about unshackling myself from

Things that hold me back, that attack me on every front, habits that don’t

Actually benefit me in any way.

It’s my decision

To be driven

With passionate, way out of my comfort zone, love.

It’s my decision

To be driven

No coercion, no arm twisting, no threat of hurt,

No hypnotism, no schism, no brain washing,

No quashing who I am.

No telling me that I have to do it your way

Or I’ll be punished each and every day.

It’s my decision,

I’m driven

By your absolute, perfect, no holds barred

Love.

 

 

 

 

Mercy

If I could truly understand what mercy meant,

I’d be so much better at it.

How do I show mercy?

How do I react to random questions, or to people who are so different from me?

Let me think.

Mercy is about love, about grace.

What’s love about? Mercy.

And mercy means sticking by someone, not berating people who have a different opinion from you.

It means helping, it means encouraging, it means baking a cake, making a meal, phoning, stopping by to say “Hi”, it means not letting language be a barrier.

It means putting all your differences aside and loving, even when it’s too hard to love, when it’s easier to hate.

When we learn to live merciful lives and not “I want everything yesterday” lives, lives that are greedy, full of me, me, me, then we might get somewhere.

Mercy is true, compassionate, understanding, more than tolerant, and full to the brim with love.

Breakthrough

dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/breakthrough

Too much pressure, filling up my head with so much that doesn’t need to be there. So much dross, rubbish, careless trash thrown at me, pouring, grabbing searing pain and it drops like rain; drop, drop, drop until my head can’t take anymore.

See, I’m on the floor waiting for your breakthrough, waiting, passionately crying, frustrated at the greed, the need to cause pain as a source of gain; and the world goes insane again & again.

No more of this; this isn’t welcomed, this isn’t taken into our hearts; all it does is to part soul from bones, bones that groan, that slide into the divide of nothingness.

Yet not to be discouraged by what is happening; to be discouraged as you want to know more, love more, serve more, waiting for fresh revelation, one that not only frees the nation but frees my spirit, cos I’m in it to win it.

So come on, break through, break through so that I can move, think, talk, laugh, love, not in spite of life but because of it.

Silence

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/silence/

When the room is filled with the emptiness of noise, the walls creak with the overloading notion that silence covers your every step.

And each footstep, marked in humble solemnity, graces the cold stone floor, moving with such grace, such swiftness that the motion in itself becomes a joyous symphony of ebb and flow, bend and turn.

Around each corner lies another place of solitude; in that niche, that cramped space silence brings freedom. Freedom from the constraints, the demands of life.  No voice is heard, only lips move raptly, creating shapes, creating words that bring the cries of the heart to the feet of their Creator.

Each silent prayer is a loud thanksgiving, a heartfelt song of praise, an acknowledgement of need, of humility, of love.

No voice is heard by those that pass by, with their cameras and their audio guides.

But the silent speaker’s heart is filled with inexplicable joy as they chat with their loving God, as they listen to His voice, as they receive blessing upon blessing.

No silence can ever mask their rapture.

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA

 

Slog

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/slog/

When the daily grind never seems to end and all the world’s worries have landed on your head.

When you’re full to the brim and the brim is slog and the slog is heavy and the slog is tough. Every part of you is tired, every part is worn. Every part keeps working from dust till dawn.

You slog your guts out just to get by, and you’re stressed in your chest, and your head feels high as a kite at night when the sleep won’t come cos your mind is filled with this and that, with too much grey and not enough light.

Pumping the blood around your veins is the wonder, is the failure of a life less gained. Dark red strips of thunder plunder your every breath, every step you take and the moves you make are leaden, down trodden begotten by all the slog.

But the slog won’t win though the slog can try to push you to the edge of goodbye. The slog can try but the slog will lose it’s grip on life, it’s grip on you for the chains that bind just can’t pull you down; you’re the winner, you’re the champion who wears the crown.

You’re the winner, you’re the champion who wears the crown.

 

Daily Prompt: Twinkle

via Daily Prompt: Twinkle

 

You shine, radiant, full of beauty.

It’s more than a twinkle, although that’s how it all began.

We couldn’t see, at first, where you were.

We looked closely, but couldn’t see.

There, in the corner of the smallest room.

Twinkle.

Not afraid of who you are, what you were meant to be.

Even though you were only a glimmer, that was all that it took!

You didn’t care, you shone; you wiped the smile off every face,

You challenged, you said “No!”, said “This is me, deal with it!”

Twinkle.

Stepping out, brave, focused.

Twinkle

Come on,come one,come all, have a ball, stand tall.

Speak out, shout out, sign out, say what you see, believe, complete the sentence.

Twinkle. Shine. Radiate.

New Rooms

So, before I write write, here’s a little entree.  I’ve got “rooms” in my life that have, quite frankly, been filled up with rubbish, toot, baggage, hurt, etc etc.  Slowly but surely, I’ve been de-cluttering these “rooms”, not by myself, but with 2 very dear, patient prayer warriors; through our meetings, God is at the heart of my healing.  As painful and battling as it has been, it has also been remarkable and pretty wonderful not to have such messy “rooms”.  The windows are finally open, the carpets have been cleaned, and the fresh air of God is in the building…

 

New Rooms

I’ve been doing some decorating.

Some stuff has been ok and not too messy to deal with- only having to take 3 layers of wallpaper off instead of 10.

Then there’s the rooms where I couldn’t even turn the handle- bolted and secured with so many locks that it’s taken crowbars, hammers and a good deal of power to get in.

A dark room, with curtains thick with dust; a glimmer of sunlight drips in the haze. Floor to ceiling junk , boxes, suitcases, manky, unpleasant.  Imagine the programmes you see where the owner has filled it with books/paper/stuff they don’t want to get rid of/stuff they hoard.  Paper archways, with just enough head height to get under.  There’s always the feat that it could give way at any moment.

Could you live like that?

Could you live with the possibility that all this junk could, one day, more than possibly, crash, with you underneath?

So, the cleaning had to commence.

Painful is a word that springs to mind when you are faced with the utter crap, the rubbish that you’ve let build up, clogging up your veins, making it hard to function, getting by by living on the edge of fear and irrationality.

Life is life when you’re teetering, when all you do is smile, I’m ok, I can cope, no, I don’t need any help/it’s all in the past/time to let bygones be bygones.

Easy? No.

And the wretchedness oozes from every pore; shortness of breath, legs that won’t, can’t stop shaking.

The anger that wells up, the indignation, the bruises, just walk away, walk away.  But if I walk away then this room will stay just as murky, as horrid, as tiresome.

So, I breathe and muster all my strength against the part of me that wants to run, to hit out, to break the chairs, and I start to move the furniture, cleaning the walls, shaking the curtains, wrenching the old pictures off the wall. This stuff isn’t needed anymore.

Pulling the barbs, the stings out, and letting my Healer replace with love, with His furniture, His way of living.  I owe the ruins of my life nothing. I owe My Redeemer everything.

Every breath, every cleansed room, every burst of sun, every open window. Every stripped back wall now painted in radiance. His radiance.

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Time

Time waits for no-one.

Time will not stop for us to catch up with it.

Time marches on, regardless of our lives.

Time goes backwards, forwards, but the contents remain the same

Well, we can’t change time, but we can change those contents.

We can’t change the memories, but we can change how we see them,

How they affect our lives, how they impact on the here and now.

Deep rooted love and fear; hope and despair- products of our timescale.

Products. Feelings.

And what do we do with these memories?

Cherish them?  Hate them?

Hold onto or delete them, like slides in a power point,

The ones where we’ve put the wrong words with the wrong picture.

The ones that make no sense, well, only to us.

We cannot delete time, but we can delete how it makes us feel.

Those slides that we don’t want to see, that repeat themselves every so often;

What’s happened has happened- here’s where time comes into play.

Time moves us on, time heals, leaves scars, scars that remind of where we’ve come from.

Scars that say to the world “I got through it”

Scars that say to these slides, “you’re not going to ruin me”

Scars that say “pack your bags and get out!”

Time does not wait, does not change.

But we do, and in time, we will be the stronger for it.

Consequently

Words trip off the tongue like pasta into water;

Their impact is never lost on me,

Especially if they’re served with a delicious sauce.

Their taste lingers, lovingly, absorbing into the blood stream

Running rings around my body.

Each syllable has its resonance;

Each connective, its sense of reason.

So I cherish every second that we speak

And I log them deep inside my memory, along with a snapshot

Of the time, the place, so I will always see your face.

In that dark, forbidding place, your grace lights every corner;

Your beauty shines through, your sense of humour still as strong!

Holding hands, we let the silence surround us,

Drinking in the thoughts in that space.

Consequently, I will always love you, like so many others do.

Consequently, I’ll wrap my arms around you.

Consequently, I’ll sit beside you, even though we’re miles away.

Consequently, I’ll tuck you inside my heart so that we’re never apart,

Never ever apart.