50 Things

List 50 things you'll never do.

Never; an eternity of nothings.
50 seems like a huge number, stretching on and on through the vast, empty space of my imagination.
I can't think of one thing, let alone 50…


Oh, I'm the definition of a time-waster. I need not apply.
Pick up the pen. My hand feels full of wasps. A single stroke:

1

And finish:

1.

Rest, now; my wasp-hand becomes a cavern, echoing with the leaden screeching of over-use.

I shall form a letter.

1. N

Keep going…

1. Never

This has taken eons.
I can't bear the sound the pen makes as it touches the paper; a nit-picking scritch of expensive metal on the sheet. A thousand years later, I take up the pen again.

1. Never fall

This word was easier than the first. And another easy one -

1. Never fall in

I can feel myself ageing. Why do the letters take such a number of strokes to form? I can run faster than I can write. Another word, a big word, a huge word, laden with promises and gasps and tears and smiles and ecstasy:

1. Never fall in love

The four-letter word that's on everyone's lips.

1. Never fall in love with

I hardly had to think about that one. A word has spilled from my fingers without me even realising it. Maybe I'm getting into this.
And now. My grand finale, my pièce de résistance, my coup de grâce. Three letters and I am finished. I pretend I can't hear the pen laughing at me. I pretend I have the strength in my wrist to pick it up, even though it weighs a thousand tonnes and my arm muscles scream at me to stop.

1. Never fall in love with you

The feelings I have writing the last word remind me of…
Funny that.

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Written for the prompt "List 50 things you'll never do". I couldn't think of 50 things, so I wrote a piece using the prompt instead!

I like this one. It's fun to experiment with structure. And it's always fun to pretend you're writing from another person's mind, if you see what I mean. I hope it doesn't get boring!

I'm off to University very, very soon. I have so many feelings about going it's absolutely impossible to identify them and write them here for you. I'll let you imagine.

Proverb I

Silence is a great healer.

It certainly heals you.

I see your bones begin to knit neatly together through your skin. Your skull, in the past a hive of twisted ideas – sprung from seeds sown by an angry boy into fertile ground, beanstalk – is stitching together its grin once more.

Joints pop, knuckles crack, nothing but the faintest whisper of sound in the blanket – suffocating – of thick, cloying hush. I see your hands twitch. They are fixed.

I can hardly bear to watch as you are resurrected. It’s not fair. Whereas I live in a whirl of sound and noise, a blasting, blaring, loveable racket that is as much a part of me as my very heart, you are not on my team any longer.

You don’t speak.

Silence is a great healer, and now you’re on its side.

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Written for the prompt "Proverb: Silence is a great healer". I like it, but I really think it has a lot more potential that I haven't explored!

I'm going to Birmingham uni! :D So excited, but so drowning in paperwork!

I Don't Take Drugs

God, I shouldn't have smoked so much. My head's fuzzy. Fusty.

God, this hospital's horrible. Like 1979. Stepped straight out of a time warp. Buildings with legs, now that's a horrible thought.

God, I've always had a problem spelling that word. Straight. Ever since I was young. I wonder what that says about me, Freud. I can remember teachers shouting at me. God, you're all horrible.

God, my heart's hurting. Feels like it's stuffed with tobacco, grey and used. Second-hand heart ticking away in my chest, someone else's chest. Heartbeat… heartbeat… heartbeat… heartbeat… heartbeat…
I feel you.
Sorry, it.

God, there's no water in this water bottle. It's like a metaphor for life, or something.

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I honestly don't take drugs!

This wasn't really inspired by anything... Either that, or it was inspired by so many things I can't remember! Short, I know, but at least it's new!

I had an amazing time in Devon.

Postcard

Greetings from Venice!

Dear Mimi. That full stop is there because I don’t mean “dear” by way of an address, as in Sir/Madam. I mean it as darling, love, light of my life. Dear Mimi.

All night we sing and think of you. These musician’s hands you once loved dance in a funereal remembrance of you. I remember how they used to look, my hands. They were perfect when they held yours, tiny in comparison. You never could stretch an octave, but that only made me love you more.

These strings represent my heart. Heartstrings. You didn’t just tug mine; you pulled them right out of my chest and wrapped yourself in them, laughing. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. You were all I wanted.

I used to be blind. With you gone, it was as if somebody flicked the Earth’s on/off switch. The sun withered. The land was dark. Without you I feared I’d never see again. But then, I sang of you, and a seed of bravery planted itself in my heart. Where you once were. It grew and grew, slowly, gradually, unfurling and pushing its way out of the dark, cavernous depths of my ribcage.

I arrived, and I saw you in everything. Every landmark, every plant, every paving stone. I sang, and my heart sang of you. This place shines, all over, with the light from your smile.

I will sing of you again tonight, Mimi, my lovely saviour. I’ve kept my nails short all this time, so that my guitar and I can sing for you.

All my love.

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Another creative writing, it didn't really have much to do with the actual exercise that was set! Venice, because I had Venice written on my hand. I've no idea where the rest of it came from. The name Mimi just popped into my head and then my hand wrote the rest...

Argument

I burn, you freeze. I scream, spewing flame. Your silence creeps slowly around the room, fingers of ice reaching out, slowly stroking frigid spider’s webs over everything they touch.
My eyes flash, yours are blank. My mouth curls into a devil’s snarl, fangs bared. Your lips are pressed together thinly, sewn with the white thread of quiet.
My red hands are claws. Small but perfectly hideous. I wreak destruction. Smash. Shatter. Kill.
You don’t use your hands. Long, thin, nails which would be suited to spearing my heart right out of my chest. But this doesn’t happen. You don’t fight me.
It feels like I’m stepping on glass. I cut my feet to shreds running over your spiked thoughts. I fling your own unsaid words back in your face. To no avail.
I’ll bury my shame in a box made from the bones of a dead man, placed in the ground by hideous weeping women. It burns in the flames of hellhounds. Eternal. Pitch. Black. Rest.
You, my antithesis, will quietly hide your frozen heart in an ornate box of silver and sapphire, bourne to the deepest recesses of your mind by wraith-like angels. A vault of unsaid words. Deadly silence.


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Argh, I've been SO busy! Missing much creative writing. But here's my latest offering. It was an exercise on opposites. I'm OD'ing on my fav thing, short sentences. Ah well, what can I say?!

Hand Poems

i.
Our hands fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It’s only right, it’s only natural. Each line on my skin is a record of when I told you I loved you. Every millimeter my nails grow is another measure of the time I’ve spent with you. When we grow old, our hidden moments, our whispered secrets, our special times when the earth and sun moved for us, will be hidden in the folds of our skin. Fingerprints.

ii.
I will act for you with my hands. These hands will throttle. These hands will soothe. With these hands, I will hold up the skull of Yorick, the knife of Macbeth, the ring of Viola. I will tear, tease, tickle. My hands act as well as my face. They are birds. They take fight. They are fists. They come crashing down to destroy. They stroke, they heal. These hands will repair all that went wrong in your world. You wonder what your hands will act for you someday. Will you defuse a bomb? Will you kill a man? Will you love someone so much that you give them your hand?


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Oooh, sorry, I totally forgot about my blog. Here's some hand-poetry to compensate! Done in creative writing, where we had to draw round our hands and write poetry inside them.

Ashes

Wheezy like a dying lung. Every part of me aches and strains, eyes so swollen and puffed I can't see you, I can't see you… You've gone melodrama. The grey bags under my eyes lined and full of purple dust. I can't breathe. I cry without inhaling, drowning from the inside. My lungs are full of ashes. I can't breathe; my mouth is a desert, an oasis of burnt-out cinders festering in my core. The bleak sands stretch endlessly before me, no salvation, no forgiveness for the traveler. My lungs itch, disintegrating. I am turning to ashes without you.

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Blergghhh, not sure about the formatting... Finally went back to creative writing after missing a few weeks because of Psychology exam. It's over now though, thank god! Although I have my Theatre Studies (practical) on Monday and Wednesday, and I'm so scared... My heart twists around evey time I think about it!

I'm also insanely happy because I've got offers from all of my universities! :D :D :D

Psychology

Golly gosh, I haven't posted in a while! I've been so busy revising for my psychology exam on the 29th that I've not been writing any new lyrics or anything :( So, just in case you're interested (this post is especially aimed at Terra and J, as she's not a feminist but she's arguing about women!), here's a discussion about Gilligan's theory of moral reasoning. She basically argued that researchers such as Kohlberg and Piaget focused too much on males, giving a distorted understanding of female moral reasoning. It's rather long!

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Gilligan argued that Kohlberg’s theory of moral development was androcentric (male-biased) in that males moral reasoning seemed to be more advanced than female moral reasoning. Holstein (1976) found that female adolescents tended to score at Kohlberg’s level 3 whereas male adolescents usually scored at level 4. Gilligan believed that Kohlberg’s dilemmas described hypothetical problems which placed too much emphasis on the principle of justice and lacked emotional relevance to participants. Therefore, Kohlberg’s dilemmas dealt with only one dimension of moral reasoning, which resulted in the androcentric view of morality and a distorted understanding of female moral reasoning. In 1977, Gilligan conducted a study where she interviewed women considering a termination. She found that female Ps did not focus on principles of justice, but on issues connected to responsibility. The judgments made were based on the impact of the individual’s behaviour on other people. Gilligan concluded that an ethic of care and responsibility was more representative of female moral reasoning than an ethic of justice. It would appear that Kohlberg’s work was limited by the focus on one dimension of moral reasoning (justice) when females use a different dimension of moral reasoning (care). From the Ps responses, Gilligan developed levels of moral reasoning which reflect the ethic of care. Level 1 is the self-interest level, where judgments are based on what is best for the individual rather than the needs of others. Level 2 is the self-sacrifice level – judgments are based on a desire to put the welfare of others before both self-interest and conventional rules. The final level is the non-violence and universal care level, where judgments are based on a desire to take everyone’s needs into account and to avoid hurting anyone who may be affected by the decision made. However, Gilligan’s research has sparked much controversy. Gilligan only interviewed women, so in effect, she has allowed 2 key variables to remain uncontrolled in this study – gender (there was no male control group) and the nature of the issue at the heart of the moral dilemma. Age was also not controlled. Therefore, the emphasis on care in moral reasoning may have arisen in this study because a) there are gender differences in moral reasoning as concluded by Gilligan or b) the subject matter of the dilemma has direct personal relevance to the individual so evokes a more empathic response. In 1988, Gilligan and Attanucci studied 80 males and females, and concluded that their results supported the theory that males and females use different orientations when reasoning about moral problems. However, 30% of women in this study demonstrated a justice focus. This raises the question as to whether there really is a significant difference in the way that males and females reason about moral problems. Walker (1989) studied 233 Ps aged 10-63. They were given Kohlberg’s moral dilemmas and also asked about real-life dilemmas. Their responses were scored according to both Kohlberg’s stage theory and Gilligan’s levels. The study was longitudinal in style (because of the age gap) with two years between the two assessment interviews. The results showed that most Ps had moved on to a higher level of moral reasoning over the 2 years. When tested on personal relationship dilemmas, both sexes used a care orientation. In fact, both sexes used both care and justice orientations. Also, personal relationship dilemmas tended to produce more sophisticated reasoning than other dilemmas. Walker concluded that the evidence favours the stage theory of moral reasoning, and that there is no male bias in Kohlberg’s dilemmas. Males and females use both care and justice orientations in moral reasoning, depending on the situation. Jaffee and Shibley (2000) reviewed 180 studies and concluded that a small sex difference does exist in the use of care vs. justice orientations but it is extremely small – it exists at a population level rather than at an individual level. Overall, males and females are much more alike in their moral reasoning than unalike. However, evidence generally supports the idea that a care orientation as well as a justice orientation arises in moral reasoning. This implies that other important dimensions could exist too.