Choice gem from my facebook chats: it's a WINNER...

My response to the simple question, "hows things?":

"goood. busy. working on a funding application for barefoot in the park. and musical's got a song structure! as has my set of performance poems. SO everything's chugging along nicely...
like an oversized, pregnant steam engine waiting to burst its guts across the rails."


Where did this come from? I could probably psychoanalyse, and say the steam train stems from my father's love of trainspotting, and the pregnancy from how swollen my brain feels at the moment from the excessive number of activities I'm involving myself in..... But that would ruin all the work of the image in the first place. Dayyym.

Bury me in the Dales

(Writing comes most easily to me on trains. Mostly. Here's one from a rail journey through Yorkshire last Summer.)

Bury me in the dales.
That is all I long for.
Tucked away on a sun burst day
With crisp white cut-out clouds
(from your own kindergarten classes’ lessons)
and green folds enveloping
my senses.
Tired on time and drowsy,
I feel the trembling of the train’s engine
shudder up through my feet
up through my seat,
I am greedy for the dales.
Glugging down its errant
Knavely stance,
Drunk, and drugged
Huddersfield’s golden stone
glows rich and gleaming
and I imagine how it must have been
One afternoon in long-distant days
To find oneself steaming -

Oh to be
immersed
in the moors -

Steaming along