I wish I had been Isadora Duncan

I wish I had been Isadora Duncan,

Whose passionate dances moved people to tears

And who lived the life of a true artist.

I wish I had been Isadora Duncan, even

Despite her untimely end

Entangled with her scarf in the spokes of her wheels

And buried amongst the greats in Pere Lachaise.

Instead of teaching second rate drama students

Bright eyed with wonder,

Whose spirits will be crushed

As they make Shakespeare sound like Beckett.

I wish I had been Judi Dench,

Serious actress yet comedienne too

Q to James Bond, Elizabeth I to Fiennes' Shakespeare

(Though I would never have done As Time Goes By.)

Receiving my dame-hood from the Queen

With humility, grace and good humour.

Rather than getting my degree

From Anglia Tech poly

And slaving at a provincial theatre

Until I finally admitted defeat and took this job.

I wish I had been Patsy Rodenburg

Mistress of voice, never deferent,

Teaching accent, diction, character

To the RSC and the brights at Guildhall.

Never one to boast I would be safe

In the knowledge of my contribution

And would speak modestly on Radio 4.

Rather than acting as Set Designer

Lighting Technician, Props Sourcer, Prompt

To my pupils who haven't learned their lines.

I wish I had been Tom Stoppard,

Pre-eminent playwright of the modern age,

Feted at opening nights at the Royal Court

Re-writing Hamlet, declaring

Rozenkratz and Guildenstern are dead.

I'd be a muse for the younger generation,

Who would try and emulate my style,

And I'd be delicioulsy indulgent to them.

But I find myself here in this echoing hall.

Surrounded by 18 year olds pretending to be trees.

Yet I put on my face.

And I enthuse at their efforts.

Maybe I can act after all.  

A Marriage of Mathematicians

They began as an equilateral

60ᵒ between each of them

And the outside world.

A pair of perpendiculars

Whose lives intersected with joy.

An axis of symmetry.

A perfect parabola.

Then the slow movement towards isosceles

Two sides still equal but beginning to

Imbalance, by degrees further apart.

They recognised this,

No longer a perfect number, but

Disconnected curves,

A heuristic hyperbola.

They must find a solution.

No longer positive integers,

They were not the sum of all their divisors;

Irrational numbers, with complex fractions.

They searched for an equation

Seeking out the answer

To Fermat's last theorem.

But Aᶯ + bᶯ could not equal cᶯ

Scalene.

Parallel lines. Unparallel lives.

Their inverse proportionality

Closing in on them like an ellipse.

Opposite rays.

No longer kissing numbers.

No algorithm can save this.

Mathematical logic cannot quantify

Their lives lived upon opposing gradients.

The kinetic energy of their modalities

Pushing them apart as repelling magnets.

Their poles propelling them further away

Until their lives are lived

Equidistant.

The start.... is the hardest part

..which is the first line from one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite albums by one of my favourite bands- 'A Hiccup in your Happiness' on 'Warmer Corners' by the Lucksmiths. (Phew, too many favourites for one sentence. But let's BREAK THE FUCKING RULES.) And it's true, it is. So here we go. This blog is a way for me to get out some of the thoughts, feelings and untapped creativity in my brain. For many years I've been too afraid to show anything to people and I've decided it's really time to get over myself and just DO IT. 


I've been working on a set of poems set in a University, all about the characters who work, teach or study there. Slightly wanky working title is 'University of Life.' Sorry Alain de Botton, I stole your idea.


Dewey Decimal 021

They say I've been here from time immemorial

They think I don't hear their breathy whispers

The young librarians, with their shabby hair

And too tight clothes. So tight that when they lean

Over the trolleys to put the books away

Acres of flesh are exposed from the back to the buttocks.

Flirting with each other, trying to impress

With their knowledge of Foucault and the history of sexuality.

It's true I came here to study in 1967

And never left. It was my spiritual home,

A place of  rebellion, youth, excitement,

Where I felt free and alive.

Abortion rights, ban the bomb, women's lib,

Away from the crushing boredom of suburban London.

President of the student union, I took a job

In the library to make ends meet.

Gradually I grew older than the other activists,

And found solace amongst the special collections.

Until one day, I woke up, and I was middle aged.

Things change. I always thought I would change with them.

'Our strategic engagement

Must reflect the changing dynamics

Of our service users in the digital age,' they say.

But yet I'm dissapointed. What about the pure joy of

Taking books from shelves and reading them?

I used to get excited when

I found journal articles and copied them.

On carbon paper, inks staining my fingers.

The pleasure of paper and print and words

Indelibly inscribed upon my hands

So it took white spirit and wire wool

To remove them.

I was the one, the one who knew it all.

Long loan, short loan, inter-library, Sconul cards;

The go-to woman of the second floor.

Sitting behind glass, surveying all I knew,

The boundaries of myself within these four walls.

Who else knew the reference for The Faerie Queene

Without searching frantically through hundreds of slips of paper?

Who else could list the items in reference

In alphabetical order, according to author?

But now what use is this knowledge

When a catalogue will suggest further reading

Or a database can search through

What is stored in my brain in milliseconds?

No longer even needed

To stamp books. There's a machine for that now

Books swiped, it spits out a receipt, like a cursory shopping trip.

Sometimes I have dreams about them.

Their young bodies firm, not fleshy

Hiding amongst the books

And fucking so the dust flies

From the books long neglected on the shelf.

The automatic lights go on and off according to their rhythms.

One leg lifted and wrapped around the waist

Of the other.

It's a dream I've always had.

The clothes change

The faces change

But the positioning forever the same

Dewey Decimal 021.

In my dreams it's never me,

My heavy breasts too pendulous,

My thick middle too flabby to grip,

But I peep at them,

Through books on library and information science,

And reminisce on what could have been.