Three good things I saw at Parliament train station on a Sunday afternoon

A woman with a kind voice helped a man who had fallen over and cut his leg. She didn’t know the man.

A man picked up rubbish that wasn’t his and put it in the bin. He didn’t sigh or complain as he did it.

A girl on the train tried to keep the door open for a man who was running to get the train. She didn’t know the man.

Yay for humans!

FilmLife Project Blog Challenge

So the FilmLife Project is a collaborative project in conjunction with Donate Life Week 2012 (19-26 February), that aims to inspire and encourage young people to have conversations that ask and find out their loved ones wishes around organ and tissue donation.

And the FilmLife Project Blog Challenge asks bloggers to answer 3 questions about organ donation. So here I go ...

1. What’s your take on or experience with organ donation, and why did you choose to take part in the FilmLife Blogger Challenge?

I am a registered organ donor. When I think about dying and what I want to happen with my body I can't think of anything better than it being useful to someone who is still alive. That just makes so much sense to me. The same way as you'd give some tomatoes to a friend from your garden, or donate a cot to a family who needs one once you don't need it any more. It makes me feel less anxious about dying and more at peace. As for why I took the challenge, well I think about life and death most days so it's good to have a new outlet :)

2. If you were to donate your organs, which one would you love to donate, and why?

My brain. I know so little about it. If it had a lifetime with another person some of the kinks might get ironed out and a few of the strange, mysterious areas brought slowly into the light.

3. Who in your family would you need to talk to about organ donation, to be sure your loved ones knew your wishes?

My partner knows. I guess I should probably tell my mum and my siblings. And later on, my niece and nephews. Anyone who cares to listen really ...

Blue days

Alice wears a blue dress

My shoes are blue too

She has no friends in Wonderland

My shoes are new

It is a discombobulating story

More so for adults than children

Who know how dangerous it can get alone

The show is outside and there is dust everywhere

My new blue shoes are dirty

This should not be something

That bothers a grown woman

But all through Wonderland all I can think about

Is the dirt on my new blue shoes

And how they will never look new again

They want to shrink her and grow her

Tease her and chop off her head

Much like the tasks of any life

When all you want is a nice cup of tea

Some days I am so scared of dying

I have to hold my breath

The story goes on weird and wonderful

We’ll never get to see how it ends

I saw the ASC outdoor production of Alice in Wonderland which was very entertaining and affected me more than I would have thought ...

Getting wise

My final two wisdom teeth removed

a brief, brutal hammering of shattering teeth and ground out bone.

My face is numb.

Talking is difficult.

A friend asks me: How are you going in the Getting of Wisdom?

I'm not sure I can answer yet.

But being forced to keep my mouth more or less shut for a few days

may not be such a bad thing.

Speech Night

The future is bright! The students are talented! They win awards! They sing and dance and play their instruments! We clap! Little pockets of extra clapping eddy through the auditorium as particular sons and daughters win awards for being talented! We are excited that they are so talented and the future is so bright! We are lucky to know such talented, bright, futuristic students! We look forward to the time when they rule the world because then the world will be bright and talented and happy like Speech Night! This will be much better than the world we live in now! This will be much better than the world we created! We can’t wait! Grow up you young people! Take your brightness and your talent out into the world and save us from our mistakes! We clap fervently! We clap so many times throughout the night! They tell us to hold off on our clapping until the end of each section! But we want to clap for every bright, talented student! The students who didn’t win awards clap too! They are lucky to be near the bright, talented students! Some of it might rub off! We are all hoping some of it will rub off! (what happened to our lives, where did our talent go, when did our brightness start to fade, who did we let down, how did we fail to be brilliant and make the world a better place, what dreams did we give up on, we sit in the dark for two and a half hours and we clap and underneath our clapping lie the questions we don’t want to ask). That was very good! What bright, talented students they are! Hoorah for their awards! Hang onto it students! Hold tight to your bright talent! Don’t let go! Don’t let us down! Don’t let yourselves down! Stay bright! Stay in the light! Clap! Clap louder! Whoop if you must! (the drive home is quiet, we listen to 80s songs on the radio, we stop at McDonalds, we don’t speak, we have run out of things to say).



Me and you and Park Ji-Sung

Park Ji-Sung is your new

favourite player for Manchester United.

You like him because he zips around

the field with his funny run

and his flopping hair, and gives off

slightly less machismo than the other players,

young, arrogant and chest thumping.

I love your reason for liking Park Ji-Sung.

Watching you watch him makes me happy.

In this way, no matter how badly or well

Manchester United are playing (and I know

the team suffered a terrible, humiliating defeat

recently at the hands of Manchester City),

when you are watching Park Ji-Sung and

I am watching you, everyone is a winner.



Better than Gingerbread

Our neighbours have painted their house

yellow and white.

Not just yellow. Lemon yellow.

Each morning when I look out my window

I see their Lemon Meringue House.

It's a sweet way

to start the day.

Life imitating art

So here's something funny. I wrote a story, a couple of years ago, about 3 siblings who go to rescue their father from the family home because it is filling up with water.

It's sort of about my family, but not really at all, in that way that stories are.

Anyway, at the end of the story, the siblings go back to the family home only to find it has disappeared. There is nothing left but a huge hole in the ground.

Last year my mother moved out of the home where she'd lived for more than 20 years (not really our family home, but kind of). In a convenient series of events, she moved next door.

The people who bought the old house have just demolished it. So all that's left is some rubble and a (kind of) hole in the ground.

Pretty spooky huh.

The power of a good story - can make pretty big waves in this thing we call the real world.

A poem from my friend Jason

My friend Jason came to the launch of Your Looking Eyes and sent me this poem in response. I love it because the whole impetus behind the book was art responding to art in different forms. Long may it continue. Thanks Jason!

Sometimes, as she was reading to us all,
it looked like her eyes were closed.
But they weren't.

The ground was there,
under her nice looking boots,
it was worn away in a shape like a stone puddle.

Out the window was a man,
maybe her brother, but he looked like a man,
looking after the two kids.

Behind me I could feel the other art works,
kind of jealous,
wanting our attention.

There is something else to say,
about how I felt after I left,
Like a person with another person.
that one is another story.

On poetry

girls with owl eyes

and brittle bones

brush their wounds

onto white surfaces

star shaped

they spread

like mould in moist corners

crystallise over time

then fall

like skeletal autumn leaves

in unexpected places



The reader

My chapbook Your Looking Eyes launches today. Here is the opening poem:

The reader

In this piece the writer is stuck for words

She wants you to remember the thing that makes you squint

Sucking a lemon wedge

Fingernails on a blackboard

Draw a picture of your eyes

A place where you felt safe

Grandmother’s kitchen, flour on the table

That self- made cubby at the park, tucked between

the trees with sticky dark leaves

Smell the residue on your fingers

The time you ran – was it away or towards?

Whisper the sound of the shoes you wore

And that song, was it early Madonna

or a chorus from The Clash

maybe that opera duet (with the two men) or

the bit of piano concerto that they used for the ad

The one that’s in your head when you wake up

Close your eyes   hum it softly

Art that asks me to do something. Am I doing it right?

Is someone watching? Will they laugh at me? 

Cool morning glow

Today the sky is cool grey,

glowing in the morning light.

Like the slate verandah we had

at home when I was a child.

It makes me want to

press my face against the clouds,

close my eyes, and fall asleep

with the warm sun on my back.