is that I came here to play.
What You Need To Know About Me … Day 3
poetry
A Field Guide to Sheree – Day 2
Commonly known as Sheree, with the scientific name being Nigtum Deam, found mostly within coastal areas, regularly at sea.
She is able to listen with attention and sometimes offers unwarranted advise. Her heart is in the right place.
She thrives in green humid spaces, on mountain sides in solitude, often retreating to Scottish glens to laugh at the moon.
She starts to pale and fade in monotonous, negative climates where light is limited and restricted.
She can be lured by white chocolate lattes and any variety of breads. At which point, she will shift into the pleasure zone, all petals opening to receive joys with a smile.
Try to praise this chaotic world – Day 1
after Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh
Try to praise this chaotic world,
as the first of April dawns fresh,
with welcome light, and slight breeze of delight.
The blossom is waiting to bloom
as the fruit trees inch towards the sky.
You must praise this chaotic world.
You must keep hope when things go awry
while those few, usually white and male,
act like stewards for all humankind, communities
they have very little contact with
let alone care about.
You should praise the chaotic world.
Remember you are not alone, within you
are generations of people who have been here before.
Who did not moan or falter but protested.
They survived so we could thrive
in companionship with the trees,
seas, hummingbirds and ferns.
Praise the chaotic world
and the chance to emerge
as Spring light has returned
after when we think that all was lost.
Welcome to 30 Days of National Poetry Month
It really wasn’t on my radar. But I must have signed up for a co-writing salon with Lemon Grove Writers. And you know how it is, afterwards they send you they send you other emails, sharing the stuff to buy into. Well one such email was sharing that the Lemon Grove Writers were offering a free 30 day poetry prompt email send out for the month of April to coincide with National Poetry Month in the States. As you know I’ve tried a number of years to write a poem a day in April, some years more successful than others.
It’s free, what did I have to lose? So expect to find a poem a day here for the month of April as I try to create something to the given prompt. I begin today with the weather.
If you want to receive these poetry prompts in your inbox, just sign up here. Happy writing.
Endure
This wasn’t the way he promised it would be.
Bare floors, five to a room, babies’
faces lined with hunger, piercing
cries towards an empty oil lamp.
Love squeezes out of lives.
Boys shooting boys as regular as angel
dusting on banana leaves, long
and glistening. Violence standing
caged on corners with broken
standpipes, living next to dread.
The seething and faltering silence
as the dreamed for life
bobs on a distant horizon.
The moon is nowhere in sight.*
*Laventille, Smokestack Books, 2015
Poetry is not a Luxury
As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of
our lives. It lays the foundations for a future if change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’, on Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 37.
Drinking Fugitivity – Found PoetryFilm
This short piece is a mash up of a certain clip from Joaquina de Angola: Memory of a Liberation by Aida Bueno Sarduy and music from Insight Timer, called You.
Seen recently in Barcelona at CCCB, Joaquina de Angola: Memory of a Liberation by Aida Bueno Sarduy is an audiovisual installation that recovers the story of Joaquina, a young woman enslaved on a plantation in Brazil, and her escape.
From the exhibition’s text details it reads:
“A work about archived, forgotten, and silenced voices in the history of slavery and colonialism.
This audiovisual installation brings to life the act of “unarchiving” an event recorded in colonial history as an escape. A 15-year-old enslaved girl fled the plantation where she lived, and her owner, after an unsuccessful search, placed an ad in the newspaper offering a reward to whoever found her. The archive reveals nothing more about this incident: it merely collects it as a piece of data.
This piece challenges the oblivion, archiving, and silencing of this character. To unarchive, in this context, becomes an artistic and political act that brings Joaquina de Angola out of the shadows of the document, removing her gag and chains so that she can tell her own story. This act not only questions the record but also raises questions and delves into its details. It is an inquiry that brings Joaquina back to life and acknowledges her as a cimarrona, calling upon ancestral memory as well as imagination, intuition, and spirituality.
Since the beginning of colonization in Brazil, alliances and exchanges of extraordinary significance have taken place between Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, but these have also been silenced. The presence of entities known as caboclos (Indigenous spirits) in all Afro-Brazilian religions is perhaps the most consistent and profound evidence of this. Amazonian peoples, Indigenous peoples from across Brazil, and quilombola communities—formed by Afro-descendant peoples—have shared ancestral struggles for the defense of their territories and against colonization and exploitation. The installation speculates on these possible Afro-Indigenous alliances in Joaquina de Angola’s journey toward freedom.”
This extracted masheup with music created above by myself, hence a found poetry film, is my take at a beginning of exploring fugitivity. I’ve been living, breathing, talking, practicing fugitivity for a few years now. I’ve mentioned it before, and it was Dal Kular who first introduced the term of me via her then newsletter, Field Notes. Dal said at the beginning of Jan 2023,
“Whatever the out-there-in-the-world fuckery is going on in 2023, I declare myself a CREATIVE FUGITIVE. A way of living in this world but not of it.”
Her take on creative fugitivity has stuck with me. I’ve gone on to read more around fugitivity. I’m even writing a chapter, at the moment, around black mothering and fugitivity. Fugitivity is taking over my life. And again I’m creating a project here in my portfolio to collect my wanderings and wonderings around this concept and way of being.
For me in a nutshell, fugitivity is the act of flight. It is the withdrawing of my labour and consent in the current system of white supremacy culture, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism. Fugivitiy is refusal and resistance. Divesting from the current way things are playing out as the few hoard the wealth of the world at the expense of the many.
Originally the fugitive was the runaway, the escapee. Hence why the audio-visual installation and consequent fugitive poetry film was created. I’m starting from the origins of the escaping enslaved. Running, fleeing captivity towards freedom. Freedom being the end point, the destination but in the process of escaping, there is the in-between space between what they were fleeing from and fleeing to. And here in this liminal space is where fugitivity is ripe.
There/ here is the lingering in the midst of flight, where I choose to SLOW down and be. To linger with nature. To seek my joy and pleasure in the world around me on my own terms.
Fred Moten in conversation with Saidiya Hartman, both of whom we will be exploring further, said,
“I often use – and I always think of it in relation to Fannie Lou Hamer, because it’s just me giving a theoretical spin on a formulation she made in practice: to refuse that which has been refused to you. And that’s what I’m interested in.”
That is fugitivity as a method, kin-making and place-making, as a practice that I intend to explore within this project archive.
Taken from Darkling
Morchella Elata- Black Morels
Fruits from March to June in copses, woodland and mulch.
To survive under such harsh conditions, is deemed a strength.
Sometimes resilience and resistance can be tiring and dangerous.
Life Writing
During my time of hibernation, (have I mentioned that here?) I’m resting of course but I’m also writing and dreaming and catching up on the things I want to do with my time and energy.
Another one of my abstracts was accepted for a special publication by Demeter Press around mothering and life writing. I completed an essay in 2023, around my Black Matrilineage and last year I complete an essay around Black Mothering and Creativity. This is probably going to have to be redrafted this year, but in all honesty I was just happy to submit something, as I had a major block around this essay. I think it was because I allowed my creativity and energy to be sucked into other people’s creative dreams and lost sight of my own last year. So when it came to writing the essay my well was dry.
Anyway, I’ve started the reading and writing around my third essay now which is all about Black mothering and fugitivity. I love fugitivity and it is one of the supporting words for 2025. As I mentioned before, I’ve been exploring fugitivity for the last few years and what this means as a practice. So I’m mighty pleased in having the time and space to explore it further and deeper through writing this essay.
While going over my abstract again and riffing off from it, I remember my creative non-fiction novella I created called rubedo. I think this came out in July 2016, after the 2015 shit hit the fan episode in my life. rubedo was my exploration of this time in my life and how I got through it. It was through finding myself after years of repression and not listening to my inner wisdom that I came to be who I am today.
Anyway, I revisited rubedo with this chapter/ essay in mind, realising that 2025 is 10 years since this episode in my life. It sometimes feels as if it was just yesterday. I know I felt it keenly last year when Darkling came out. Darkling is my first poetry collection since Laventille (2015) and the shitstorm episode. And to tell the truth, I’m waiting for the the shit to hit the fan again, as I’m sure there are people picking their way through Darkling as I type to try and find evidence of plagiarism again. As they say once a plagiarist always a plagiarist! It’s not a term or label I identified with then or do now. As that’s not me, that’s not who I am but that didn’t stop people then or now from looking for the evidence to prove/support it.
But I’m not here to talk about that. What struck me about rubedo is the raw honesty of it all. And how writing, writing it all out literally saved my life. I’m so grateful that Ian brae enough to pick up my pen and writing through the shit to now.
Here is what I wrote about my capacity to love no matter what:
“But something does inside die this day. And the days that follow. Something
inside of me, the capacity to have patience and make allowances for other
people’s bullshit was destroyed during this lynching. No doubt, using the term
‘lynching’ will invite criticism. I know when Andy Croft my publisher used the
term to condemn what was happening to me on social media he received a
fair amount of criticism. But I do not use this word lightly.
Ironically, in the months leading up to my death by social media, I was
researching and writing poems about lynchings in America. I was referring to
the postcard images that were collected as souvenirs by the spectators of
lynchings at the time. There were those people who got their hands dirty
during a lynching, who actually tied the knot of the noose, beat the victim,
mutilated the bodies. And there were those who came along to watch the
spectacle. Viewing the death of another human being as just another social
event, a festival, something to be enjoyed. Both killers and spectators relish
the sport.
This in my opinion is what happened to me. A public lynching and
souvenirs where taken. One person on Facebook, joined in the thread of
conversation with a comment as a means of marking it. This person was
rubbing their hands with relish, saying that they didn’t want to miss a thing as
this spectacle was just too good to let pass by.
When I died this cruel death something inside broke. I’ve recently come to
realise that is was my heart that broke that night. I’ve been visualising my
heart with a rose in the centre. This rose is closed. This I read as a symbol of
me shutting down, dying inside, shutting off the natural flow of love from my
heart for my family, friends, for the world around me. My heart was broken, so
I have been denying myself and others love. I’ve been living in fear, fear of it
being hurt again, fear of my heart being broken again, fear to love.
In a way, this had to happen to me. For one, I’ve always disliked that capacity
in me to keep forgiving others, letting them back into my life when they’d let
me down and not lived up to my expectations. I’ve taken on board the
responsibilities of others, thinking I’ve had too high standards and I’d been
unfair. That capacity has been obliterated. I can’t take anybody’s bull shit
anymore. But at the same time, this capacity to forgive is part of my large
capacity to love. And if this is who I’m really are , then I shouldn’t fight it any
longer but accept it.
My true self is my capacity to love, to love fiercely and powerfully. I accept
that now and I’m no longer blocking up my love. I can’t live in constant fear of
being hurt, of getting my heart broke again because then I would not be living
true to my capacity, true to me. I would just not be living at all.“
I’m so pleased that since then I have found others, such as bell hooks and Joy James, who write about revolutionary/ radical love and validate my ways of loving, which at times hurts me but also brings me a while heap of joy also. You can’t love without the expectation or knowledge of getting hurt.
Living Wild Studios 