Dearest baby girl.

(My baby aged 2….she’s 9 now)

Dearest baby,
my beautiful lady,
I’ll love you always,
never maybe….
did you see it?
Her smile?
She understood,
she heard your
silent screams,
saw your
violent pain,
that lady that we saw,
she’ll put you
on your lane.
She wants to
help you out,
will carry a
little burden,
will be your
whispered wings
as you roar into
the skies.
Did you hear her?
She heard you.
My little lady,
my darling little baby,
she heard you,
she’s gonna walk
at your side,
help you battle through.
She heard you.
She heard you my little lady.
She heard you.

Narcicist .

I recently had the pleasure of sharing private messages with a narcissist. By pleasure I mean soul destroying energy draining horror. I wouldn’t normally choose to communicate with such a person but in this case my eye was off the ball and before I knew it he was under my skin. I blocked him. Yet his presence has continued to annoy me. The fault lays entirely with me my intuition screamed at me that there was something wrong about this person, but this clashed with my beliefs that we shouldn’t judge a person on first impressions….what the fucking hell was I thinking! I communicated with him for just under a week and in that time he shared anger, gas lighting, manipulation, obsessiveness, a desire for power and control as well as an ability to wield that power and control. All of these emotions convert to energy as an empath I pick up on that frequency of energy….the problem with this is that most other people can’t , so his public posts just appeared to them as harmless, quirky as us writers are, but harmless. Of course in his pm’s he was able to explore my vulnerabilities with more vigour, but it was also there in his public posts and replies. I should have been able to shake him off but the reality is his clear disrespect toward me has highlighted my vulnerabilities and taken me into a place of questioning. Amazing how quickly a narcissist can get in and fuck with your head. In short he disrespected me as a female writer, us females are already fighting enough stereotypical crap as it is we don’t need individuals to play along too. He did this in a number of ways, covertly communicating in such a way that he expected me to not notice. I did notice. The vulnerabilities he highlighted have been dominating my mind and pushing me into a corner to clearly stand up and define who it is I am as both a person and a writer. I guess in a way the situation has made me question whether he didn’t take me seriously as a writer, because up until this point I haven’t taken myself seriously as a writer.

Over the next few weeks I plan to explore the different ways in which this person was able to disrespect me as a writer. I could of course sweep it under the rug, shrug it off and pretend it never happened, but why the fuck should I, my writing style pushes the boundaries and I often explore topics that allows society to stereotypically label me. This is the problem.. I am who I am, I am not the words on page I am the spaces between them and for that alone I deserve respect.

Heavy and bleak.

Some days feel so heavy and bleak,

A scented haze for the muddled and weak.

But what if tomorrow is all that I seek?

But, what if tomorrow is just another day in the week.

What if tomorrow I wake up and can fly?!

Or perhaps I will sit and watch stars shoot by.

But what if it rains from the skies up above?

What if it cleanses the hurt and leaves me just love.

But if tomorrow I fall, I trip or I lose?

But what if tomorrow just simply soothes?

Some days are heavy and bleak,

but tomorrow may hold all that you seek.

Deceit of a poet.

Emerald skies of burning blue as white tufts of wisdom float past on the rays of a flaming sun. Inspiration woke me before my eyelids fluttered and this mattered not for my eyes have not seen, truly seen since the last time my soul screamed from the other side to look. Ownership is the materialistic economy of a rich mans world and I am poor in possessions and rich in ownership. Floating particles of death shimmering in the morning light, freely rising, freely falling unaware of any fear. Words caught on the tip of my tongue that beg and beg to be spoken and if destiny is true if our map is drawn out in blotted ink before our soul even contemplates this life, then why fear unsaid words? If all of life’s fine events happen for a reason then I am free to utter thoughts of fantasy and reality and own my day. I am free to own these intrinsic words I splatter across the page that I pull from the empty wardrobe of lost hope covered in webs and crawling with spiders. Hearts break on the beating of the roach’s wings and shattered dreams are scuttled onto a breeze of dark shores. A poets self deceit cuts deeper than any mans lies. The creation of a story based upon a false prophecy stretched beyond the realms of reality searching for the nicks, nooks, crannies something to hold, to grab to elevate the soul toward the summit. The glorious summit, and I wonder why it is that I fight this need for the summit. A thousand definitions can be formed from the utterance of thoughts based upon chemicals. A million different ways to be and I have never been A typical. Blue is red, red is green and all the colours need to be seen and my heart beats. My heart beats and beats my stomach flutters as a swarm of bee’s buzz through my soul and I am okay with this. I do not fear living. Personal autonomy and the thought tank of morality hand in hand coding for that predestined reality. Free me. Put a label on this box and clarify the meaning of interactions. Thoughts, a maze of indifference in a storm of magma a molten mass of dissected words, cut and pasted letters, broken images from a a black and white stills devoid of colours that will one day become igneous. Rocks of life. Beaten down beneath the feet a thousand life soldiers, ground into the dust of oblivion and lost deep in the outer realms of space among the dying lights. But some, some have the power to become, to be the flattened stones skimmed across an ebbing tide, to be the crystals held close to our hearts, to be the stone we never throw and never look at that attracts dust the way it attracted you, in multitude in broken thoughts and fears of unknown origins.

Raindrops falling.

You are rain,
sleet perhaps,
you do not fall with
the fierceness of
hailstones.
You are the red blush
in my cheeks,
the searing heat
in the tips of my ears.
Your tears fall upon
my glass pane world.
Trailing.
Faltering?
No simply halting.
Reflecting.
Poor drop of frozen
rain, can you not see?
Every path you take,
every path you took.
Look.
Leads to the same end,
no matter how hard
the fall,
no matter how fast
the race.

Cidar chasers and bong in hand.

Do you remember? I was ninteen you were twenty one. UCAS letter in hand,
I had the world at my feet.
Dole check in your pocket,
you were already beat.

Lost souls we met in the dark,
Cidar chasers bong in hand
Sexual energy flowed between,
Whilst I called all the ones
You walked the miles
To meet me beneath the sun.

Escape for you was futile,
Your kin my kin,
Deprivation their everyday,
So when it came that I should leave,
together we packed for an adventure,
You see.

UCAS letter in the bin along side my forgotten dreams,
Mystery became secrets are darkness fell,
My body became flesh disconnected from spirit.
My beauty lost, I could see no light,
As you ripped apart my fragile belief,
and stole away my strength to fight.

I worked, you slept, I cleaned, you searched,
Eyes wide open identity broken,
you sat on that couch and he uttered the words,
and I never understood, but for the thrills,
Dysmorphic belief,
the soft tender eyes captured in stills.

But to wander and wonder and despair at the love,
the anger that reigned
the lies that fell true,
you begged and plead
and you told me a lie,
I asked that you be the thing that I need.

I see you sometimes, you came back to this place.
You live a life of pretance where i’m the mistake.
I wonder still if strength found you at all,
did you admit to yourself,
or did you let yourself fall?

If I keep moving I can avoid detection, walk unseen on the streets of distraction.
I can run through alleys of fear in darkness, not looking where I am going.
I can avoid eye contact, no one need see my broken spirit.
If I keep moving, impulsively I can heal, band aids of despair I no longer care.
If I keep moving you can’t see me and I can’t see what it is to be me.
If I keep moving at speed and refuse to take heed, I can transform, I can become the mask, a sanctury at last.
If I can keep moving, I can forget, I can fight, I can survive my darkest nights I can endure the sharpened knife in this loveless war.
But this coldness isn’t me and if I keep moving i’ll forget the reason to be.
If I stop moving your light penetrates my dark.
If I stop moving the universe directs my way.
If I keep moving I can outrun the future and create my own, if I keep moving I can sit in peace upon my icey throne.
If I keep moving I can live in the whispered shadows created by fragmants of the moons glow..but oh what a glow.
If I stop moving I feel your light penetrate my dark.
I feel whispers of you on my skin.
I feel you in the calmness that follows our storm, a questioning battle of what I believe to be norm.
The body is purely flesh and bone, flesh and bone, whispered thoughts whislt I am stuck unfucnctionable in that zone.
If I keep moving I have no reason to feel and I can pretend that none of it’s real.
If I stop moving you penetrate my dark.

Karen Hayward 2016 ©

Shelter beneath wings of love. Haiku.

Soft white feathered wings

an illusion created

protective comfort.

Restrictive looms.

Restriction of blood flow

a torrent of thoughts

with no place to go.

Limitations of reality

a soul destroying fatality.

Confinement. Confine me

within your walls of conformity

your abnormalities

displayed in crimson

blood against the walls

of society.

I am circumscribed by your delusional

realities

the inbred specialities

of commercialised

nationality.

I never used to iron.

Ironing. For years I refused to be a slave to the mould of hot steaming iron. I refused to smooth away the crinkles, press creases and stand in the ultimate housewife position. Legs spread, board out, piles upon piles of stylistic statements before me, all of them requiring attention, all of them requiring me to become the atypical label. A housewife, a wife a mother, a female, a girl a lady. We iron.

We stand for hours, up the board, down the board, bored, bored, bored. You were in or you out. I was out. I was the black death of womanhood my views contagious, my opinion death like. So I ironed less and welcomed my self induced plague.

I iron. I became the label that society imposed on me. Sickened by my acceptance I remove my bra in protest.