#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day20 #DYouKen #AnimalMyth

 

D’you ken —

Log-toothed builder,
Flame-lipped crow,
Dusty eco-engineer.

#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day19 #SiansYellowRoses #Florilegium

Sian's Yellow Roses

I. Energetics

Yellow rose, sun-aligned, a rising flare,
petals like a lion’s amber gaze.
Warming the solar plexus, seat of will.
Rosa foetida, born in the Caucasus foothills,
Persian Yellow, foremother of every golden bloom.
Named foetid by European botanists
who loved her colour,
but not her sharp, wild scent.

II. Language of flowers

In Victorian parlours,
bouquets spoke in code:
yellow for jealousy, for love grown thin, for warning.
Now the meaning softens:
it speaks of friendship, of joy,
of unfettered feeling
between those who choose each other freely.
Language sheds its skin; petals remain.

III. Rose as remedy

Rosehip and yellow petals cool heat-tired skin,
a gentle astringent for summer’s excess.
Solar herbs steady the heart,
lifting the soft fog Saturn leaves behind.
In the garden’s small apothecary,
the yellow rose stands, warm-handed,
a tincture of brightness,
a quiet gold that calls the spirit home.

#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day18 #GlimmersAgainsTheEnding #WhyYouWrite

 

Glimmers Against the Ending

I write because the light keeps calling.

Each workday I leave the house,

connect, perform modest miracles,

and daily haikus pin that to memory.

I write because the dark sits waiting,

madwomen in attics, old lace.

On the page I can gently question it,

let my inner sage speak.

I write because the world keeps ending;

some days I don’t want to fight that.

Still, I gather small glimmers

like, bread crumbs of hope.

I write because I refuse to vanish,

rewilding myself as much as a species,

sunlit, shadow-stitched, a glorious contradiction

moving toward whatever comes.

#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day17 #AscendingTheWater #ResponseToAFavouritePoem

 

Ascending the Water*

Heart blooms in the dark, 

black water cannot keep you -

Rise, fire-feathers.

*Haiku based on Sylvia Plath 

Crossing The Water - Sylvia Plath

#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day16 #BlueMentorTanka #SomethingThatCannotSpeak

Blue Mentor Tanka

Ocean without speech,  

yet you teach me to listen:  

Blue spaces whisper  

wonders, compassion, kinship 

the ways we are connected.

#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day15 #LoveThatKeepsAdapting #NonTradLovePoem

 

Love That Keeps Adapting

Today he finishes her lemon drizzle cake,

not because she can’t,

but because love has always been

the quiet clearing‑up after puddings.

Her wheelchair waits by the table,

a new geography

they learned to navigate together.

In the tearoom,

Dad and Lu lift the baby‑changing table,

making a path where none was offered.

Love becomes a small act of arrangement:

making space in a world otherwise inaccessible.

Later, Mum is wheeled back,

assisted to a comfortable place

to rest after a small, sugary adventure.

Tomorrow is their anniversary.

They are on a journey without a map,

but with many milestones

and a promise…

We will make space for each other, again and again,

however the world rearranges itself.

#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day14 #GLITCHED #PoetryAndTech

                ✧ Dude, where’s my thesaurus? (GLITCHED)

                     Dude, where’s my—

[fatal error: dude.dll missing]
system attempting recovery…

Mind if I drop the d—du—d_
dud
du
—
unbecoming in my verse.vrs.v e r s e
which is all about my scribb|lings
scrbblngs
s c r i b —
[buffer underrun]

My girlhood = filled()
composition.books
kittens_on_covers/corrupt file

Rhyming couplets →
composed to Tess—Te$$a—T3ssa
a pudgy Dalmatian cross
pudgy → pudg→ p_dgy →
{CHUBBYCHUNKYDUMPYFATFLESHYPLUMP}
rotund.tubby.tubby.tub—
[loop detected]

Pencil‑mark smudges
trying to draw round my own thumb
→ annotate() failed
→ handwriting driver obsolete

Writing: beguiling innocent past_time
past.time
past—
because I didn’t yet have the language
to depict horrors
only puppies & ponies & soft‑focus childhood.exe

Christmas 1984
my stocking held THE COLLINS
paperback thesaurus
A‑to‑Z index: fragmented
synonym_universe: expanding…expanding…

I realised pudgy could be:
chubby chunky dumpy fat fleshy plump rolypoly rotund tubby
vocabulary expansion pack installed
permissions: unrestricted

A gift of words
like a gun & ammunition
(ammunition flagged: unsafe metaphor)

My teens: darker verses surfaced
canonical / cannonical / can(n)on‑ical
Songs of Innocence
Songs of Experi—Exper—
[application crashed]

Thank you Blake
for the split‑screen worldview
that dogs my heels
divides my universe
teaches me to nod
“…that’s Experience speaking”
[voiceprint mismatch]

Lady Lazarus enters
creativity + madness =
frequent bedfellows
(bedfellows.dll unstable)

The trick: reign in the mania
keep the cauldron bubbling
but not overflowing
not drowning significant others
in sticky cerebral porridge
[warning: metaphor viscosity high]

Ted Hughes somewhere saying
she “relied on Thesaurus
to push her through poem after poem”
Oh Sylvia—
better faith in a book of words
than in a man
relationship_module: corrupted

“One day I’ll have my death of him”
prophecy.log archived
checksum: intact

So 6 years, 16 years, where am I now
my verse, my art
21st‑century gal
still with my Collins
spine broken / user broken / both operational

Pencil + fountain pen packed away
verse no longer scribbled
I text on an iPhone
in stolen downtime
modern_technology.wonders
no one guessing
I’m pouring out my soul
in free verse over latte

Thesaurus now online
infinite scroll
invisible index
to the untrained eye
I’m merely sending a text
not pushing poem after poem
and Hughes can’t point and say
“Dude, where’s her Thesaurus”
→ because it’s everywhere
→ because it’s nowhere
→ because it’s inside the glitch now