Where are you orbiting to, my little planet?

A freckled and frivolous cake there was

That sailed on a pointless sea,

Or any lugubrious lake there was

In a manner emphatic and free.

How jointlessly, and how jointlessly

The frivolous cake sailed by

On the waves of the ocean that pointlessly

Threw fish to the lilac sky.

Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was

Of a glory beyond compare,

And every conceivable make there was

Was tossed through the lilac air…

                             From Gormenghast

Mervyn Peake

I’m thinking a lot about surreal poetry. I like crazy things – they seem to make more sense to me than the world outside my window. Like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll or Mervyn Peake – my own rhymes are nonsensical. That’s why I love writing them. Poetry is perhaps not what they are. Rhymes more like, like Nursery ones but a bit more…wrong. Defective.

     I want to learn how to sew and embroider, so that I can start making my own li’l fabric books. They will be small, childlike, and have a button and a loop and inside will have a few pages with writing sown into them made out of the short ditties I do, with patchwork fabrics and laces. They won’t be perfect, because it’s me making them, but they will be a bit tatty and hand-stitched, with prints of Katie’s drawings or flowers or silhouettes of cats. They will be ragged books of defective rhymes for deranged li’l dollies. Or ragged ditty-books for defective dolls: depends which way you look at it. The sort of thing Coraline would’ve had to read, if she’d ended up living with her Other Mother forever…

     I get bored easily, and impatient with my dreams because they don’t materialise by morning. But for now I will imagine this sort of thing inside a tatty book:

Lily fell into a pumpkin head

And the pumpkin head was red.

It beat like a heart,

Soft like a pillow,

And moaned in the wind like a weeping willow. N