These people are breeding.

This is a rant not a poem, sorry ’bout that!
The first rant, walking back from line dancing/gossip time with the gals I was stopped by an elderly man, he asked me if I knew where he could sell some tape cassettes. I gently told him it was unlikely he would find anywhere to buy them and he explained to me that he had found a Dab radio in a charity shop, but was short a couple of quid so he had offered them the tapes as part exchange, but they refused. Two pound short. He started crying and said he just wants to be able to listen to music, his home is ever so quiet and he misses sound. Two pound fucking short, they’re meant to be a charity shop, they’re meant to be about helping people. I gave the man my head phones and popped a song on YouTube for him before giving him the two pound. Bless his cottons he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But really two fucking pound, surely they could have knocked two pound off the over charged second hand radio! When we did stop doing stuff to help people so as to line our pockets with money instead?

Second rant. Spread across my Facebook page today are home made video’s of a man standing on a first floor ledge above some shops here in my hometown, on the pavement below are emergency services. Watching are a group of so called adults, filming and slinging abuse. I’ve just read 52 responses to the video and all but one are offensive. The dumbest one I read was ‘He’s asking for a cheeseburger. That’s not mental illness, he’s just a cunt.’ Cos, yeah they use the cheese burger question when they are evaluating at the doctors, ‘hey, how are you today, let me ask you a question, are you partial to a cheese burger? You are, great news it’s not mental illness, that’s another bed I’ve saved at Peterbruff. The most illogical one I have read is, ‘they (the ambulances) could be off saving someone.’…hmmmm, the man is stood on a ledge, what he isn’t worthy of being saved?

I feel nothing but shame when I see people respond this way to another human. To think I am actually sharing the same air as these people, worse these people are breeding, these people actually have the fucking vote. When I think that women had to fight so fucking hard to able to vote and these men actually have it by default. These are the very same people that are screaming from their arm chairs not to let the refuge’s into our country, because obviously every single one that the UK allows in are actually going to be coming right here to my little town. Their argument? Look after your own…isn’t that man on the ledge one of our own by their very own definition? Humanity is shot to pieces we’ve lost our ability to be empathic towards other humans. These people don’t need to be standing and staring they are there out of their own desire to see someone worse off than them, they are feeding on the circumstances of this man. The worse thing is they don’t know why he is up there, they’re just passing judgement, anything to make themselves feel better. Clearly they have very blessed lives and are enjoying flaunting this. These people are human trolls and that guy on the ledge can’t just ignore them and they’ll go away. At what point will people stop and see that learnt negative behaviour will be our downfall. I wonder how many of those adults will go home and spend the evening talking about the attention seeking cunt that was wasting the emergency services time, and how many children, innocent, pure and loving minds will hear this, and the dreadful lessons they will be learning.

I feel nothing but shame. This is the world I am offering my daughter, my nieces and nephews, children of friends I know and ones I haven’t met yet. We’re leaving them a world that lacks humanity. How the fuck will they survive.

Hungry ducks, hungry hearts.

You stood back for a moment watching

as the hungry ducks swarmed around

my daughters ankles. Beaks open,

ready for fresh bread.

Your offer was hesitant and full of faith

as you handed her the bag of bread. Her

eyes lit up, she had more food for

the snapping beaks, your eyes lit up

in response.

Self absorbed in a vortex of reflections.

When you taught me …
Say please, to say thank you, to be grateful, to be polite.
When you taught me to always smile, to speak softly, to help,
to at the very least offer, to save a seat, to give up a seat.
When you taught me the importance of clearing my plate…even the bits I didn’t like.
You never told me why. You said, one day I would know and to at the very least try.

You never told me that you were preparing me for a world where I would often feel like an outsider. You never said that my manners would set me aside from othersYou never said that I would be given a beautiful glimpse of humanity through the glassy eyes of strangers.

When you said sorry every single time, whether right or wrong,
And when you never left me wondering,
When every teenage row was completed in minutes,
When you never let me sleep on angry words,
And you never slept on them yourself,
You never told me why. Never sat me down declaring that it was your way or the highway.

You never told me that my strong whisper would command more power than any raised voice or that my sorry would one day break my heart over and over again as I battled internally with the concept of being too kind, too forgiving. You never told me some people will never be sorry and will happily sleep on angry words. Neither did you tell me that what others perceived as a naive weakness was in fact my humanity and that there would be days when I would feel so very alone in my beliefs.

When you told me to stand my ground and that what ever my belief was, let it just simply be a belief in something. When you said two wrongs do not make a right,
don’t use that language with me young lady
and
who do you think you’re talking to in that tone?!
You never told me why. You just said treat others the same way you want to be treated. This was easy, I wanted everyone to treat me the same way that you did.

But you never said some people would demand my respect based on title alone without true ownership and that no matter what I did I would never receive there respect in return. You didn’t tell me so few had a basic understanding of the fundamentals of adjacent pairing. You never told me the lengths some people would travel just to save face (positive face; negative face, autonomy face, fellowship face, competence face.) So many faces that need saving in a society self absorbed in a vortex of mirrors.

You never told me why. You never told me that some people had only darkness inside of them and that these people would do all that they could to strip away my light.
You never told me why,
but each and everyday you showed me why.

Curiosities of a mud filled sky.

Cold, wet earth.
Grey clouds and droplets of rain.
Daffodils already through, garden readying anew. Transformation begins. Vibrational reflections felt, heard and required.
Even in winter, I come here when tired.
Damp dirt to awaken my spirit.
Life’s cycle, clearance nearing completion.
Spring will bring new hope.

Freshly grated ginger.

A quiet corner shaded from sight,
a peaceful place to rest my eyes.
Ginger tea to warm me through,
as thoughts wander over to you.

Karen Hayward 2015 ©

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.

Flowers in the attic where do you hide!

The feeling creeps in slowly.
Panic, as I flip through once, twice, three times. I search the normal places, beside the bed, the couch, at the top of the stairs, by the window in the kitchen next to the heater, the window that shows me the sun as he wakes and the moon as she wakes. It’s not there and not even the sparkling stars in the clear skies can make me feel better. I search inside bags and tucked beneath the mattress, I pull out the bed and feel my heart sink, my eyes prickle and for a moment I question my sanity. What if. What if I didn’t own that book, what if I just borrowed it, that would certainly make sense and suddenly it feels like my world is crashing, I just want to read the book, now, I search some more determined to be sure that the book is at least not here. Emptiness envelopes around me, darkness falls upon my heart, I feel a great void where a story should be, not any story and certainly not a recall from the many times I have read it before, a void created through the lack of pages to turn, the lack of worn out paper in my hands. The emptiness has become me.

The wee mountains forever as I cook.

Memories.

The whole flat smelt
of aged tannin and
a low whistle could
be heard at all times.
‘Tea?’
There was always time for tea, sarnies too.
You might call her a feeder, she wasn’t but some might call her that.
Food was a sign of respect, you went anywhere they offered you sweet tea
and food. I used a cooker
for the first time there
in that kitchen with
windows that looked
down the hill past the subways and out toward mountains, my Gran always laughed and said ‘Just a coupla wee hills.’ They were mountains to my young
eyes. She spoke constantly
in her rich Irish roots peppered with her Scottish life, if I concentrated hard enough my English mind understood
some of what she said.
Her voice was soft,
a whisper a beautiful
melody, she spoke as I grated potatoes, carrots and onion, her smile told me I was doing good. ‘Eggs, Gran and flour and water too.’ I was reading thr recipe from my mind and hoping I had remembered everything, we had cooked them a few weeks before in school.
She wears a house coat,
she has many, a blue one,
a pink one a brown one,
every morning she slips it over her clothes, I have never seen her clothes, I can only presume she wears them. She told me once, ‘wash your smalls in the sink every
night. That way you’ve always got clean.’ I asked what if you needed them…’she laughed ‘Go with out.’
A frying pan black as death and thick with grease
sizzles at my side.
‘Listen child.’
My Mum also says this phrase.
‘When you cook, you cook. Stay sharp keep thoughts out’
I didn’t listen, I burn most of what I cook because my thoughts make me
wander. We sat at
the table, the small
window behind me
and the radiator to
my left, I feel warm
and safe. I don’t
recall what the
food tasted like,
just her smile as she devoured the plate.

Dark angels reflect in the black of night.

There is a fierce fire that burns inside my soul,
hidden in the dark forgotten corners of my mind.
Engulfed with the flames of hell venom rises as my innocence is lost in the beating of my racing heart.
One becomes two as I watch with the calm of an ebbing tide, word upon word, truth upon truth tumble from my worn out tongue into the universe. All barriers down, this game of chess belongs to me, make her a pawn then watch me as I take your Queen and destroy your King and precious Kingdom. There’s a fierce fire that burns inside my soul, a flame of burning hope and eternal protection, the fallen angels reflection.