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A poem of mine which i've included in Waiting for Gulliver (page 55) is called:
Who growled up my nose?

Here is a little about me and the story of how i came to write it:

Who growled up my nose?

Looking out of the window, of my very small flat, with the approaching winter sunrise filling my eyes with exotic colours, I felt, in my strongly medicated state, a curious rummaging within. So I grasped a pen and simply wrote. The outcome was my poem Who growled up my nose? which opens with:

        The blue glowed in fiery energy
        the green pulsed with dazzling brightness
        the yellow night darkened the sky
        the purple dawn brought its hazy clarity

        i thought why am i so happy it's so unfair

It was only some few weeks previously that Shropshire poet Sally Richards, whom I had recently met, had challenged me to begin writing poetry again, after some 27 years had passed since a little scribbling at university. Encouraged by that challenge – Sally continues to encourage me – and fuelled by all that was happening within me – and indeed in my life – I tentatively allowed creativity to flow:

        someone said that only the evil die young
        yet i am old and about to be born
        my teeth will not obey me

        food is such a love of my life
        i really hate it taking over
        starvation is unattainable
        i crave for a toilet seat of sandpaper

Truly, the inspiration had its own course to run. It was only later, as I was reflecting upon the words, that I realised how much of myself – as in the quote above – and my working life – as in the quote below – found expression in its stanzas. In particular I could see some reverberations, from within myself, of times of being alongside people as they died of incurable causes. Yet, as if by deliberate contrast, there are also feelings, from deep inside, engendered by my necessary involvements with others who have taken life, even that of children, by murder.

        i cannot curve the square
        crossing the i seams so dangerous
        the gift was lost in the bush
        why did the pail roll across the road

        spiders are so crunchy on toast
        beware the one who smiles
        always turn the key before coughing
        in escapable woodenness reappear

        so the end continues wounded
        never is always happening
        the belly flips its flop
        embrace eternity as its flits away

It was after the breakdown of my health to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and anxiety in May 2004, which led to my early retirement on medical grounds in January 2005, that I began to write. Already in my fifties, with two adult children, and after many years work within prisons, hospices, schools, colleges, with the police and in the community – almost entirely in England but also briefly in Kenya , Israel and Eire – I found my poetic inspiration beginning to stir.

I was absolutely thrilled when this poem, my first ever piece to be published, appeared in Poetry Express 21 in 2005.

Migraine has been part of the reality of my life since teenage years and therefore it's no surprise, I'm sure, to find that I've written a poem about it and here it is - taken from Waiting for Gulliver

Unwelcome Again! (page 92) is a humorous expression of how migraine affects me and how i feel about it!

I've written it to be a performance poem. So read it aloud and let the rhythm carry you - but not as migraine carries me! an unwilling prisoner!



Unwelcome Again!

nature’s light
cruel sight
varied sounds
ear rebounds
stabbing pain
muscles wane
stomach churns
nausea burns
balance awry
falling sky
wooden face
disturbed place
unwelcome again
bloody migraine

Ow! Yes, that works. Thank goodness for the 'blue' at the end!