Biography
I like to write to make sense of things that happen in my life..or things that don't.
Somebody once asked somebody else, excuse me but I can't remember who it was;
"Why do you write?" and the other replied, "Why do you breathe?"
Sometimes I don't know what I'm thinking until I have written it down. Sometimes I know very well what I'm thinking but hide it,disguise it because it's too much, too strong a thought so I dilute it. I take it down the fields and bury it under a tree. Sometimes I maybe use nature too much in my writing, but a friend who recently called on me said..jeez you live right in the middle of nowhere. To an extent she was right. Nature is everywhere and I can't help it merging into my thoughts more often than not. I do venture into the city now and again and was born in what used to be a pit village on a valley side southwest of Newcastle, within hearing of the Naval ships that used to sail up the Tyne. If stood on tiptoe,I could see the bridges crossing into the city. Junior School used to still have Co.Durham stamped on the blue book covers and the best day was spent sat on the floor amid the contents of the stationary cupboard.Paper everywhere.
What I love about writing is that you can just write, whatever comes into your head,you can create your own worlds and make the unreal real and the real,unreal.
I'm pretty bad at performance poetry but have had some good help and advice from the good folks who have come along to The Hole Int'Wall at Hebden Bridge(where I used to stay, and sometimes still do, before returning to the Northern Wilderness of the Dales)and intend to try again before giving up.
Samples
Oyster
Take this ticking grain of sand
from me.
This tiny thing,
friction, burning,
corroding my soul.
Never becoming
The pearl it promised.
Take this ticking grain of sand
before
I implode.
© Deborah Jordan. 2009
Desire
Posted on Monday 3rd August 2009 4:52 pm
Your gaze
wrapped around me
like a dragons tail
but I stayed
in the centre,
feeling your coiling scales
lash me to the mainsail.
This boat rides unforgiving seas
I balance
on naked feet.
Wooden boards
sigh beneath me
and you
stand before me,
thin black wool
between you and the night.
With hands tied,
I trace your
body
and though
you are
fathoms deep
I hold fast
amid the waves.
Slowly I raise my head,
catch your shadow in
my eyes
and swallow you whole.
© Dej Aug 09
I went to look for the moon but all I saw were stars, one brighter than the rest
But then, the trees sighed, the wind gently exhaled the cool Northern air
and I heard the heart- beat of the earth.
I turned to where the sound came from
the wind brushed the trees just enough aside,
And there, like a sliver of opal, the moon cut an arc in the blue sky.
© Deborah Jordan. 2009
The Pebble Man
He held the pebble up to the light. It fitted inside his palm like some small mute, limbless creature of the sea. He held it under the stream of water and dull browns became lush glistening sables, matt greys became infused with silver tones and subtle blues. Colours came alive again, as they were when he had taken the pebble from the stream bed. He had never found such a beautiful stone. He replaced it on the ornate shelf on the corner wall with the shells and the other pebbles he had picked up on his solitary walks.
The water fell onto the grey curled hairs on his chest and from there into rivulets down his torso. Tilting his head he allowed the gentle force of the warm shower fall onto his face and he hummed a tune filling the small bathroom with sound.
Music filled many gaps in his life. Sounds seeped into the corners of his house and his mind. Sounds of his recordings, sounds of his own voice and his restless fingers drumming on the kitchen table. Sounds of his melodeon, as he sat in the wide window seat letting his mind and his eyes wander across his wild garden as his fingers wandered across the keys. Music filled spaces where other noises might have been. Music lived in the room that might have surrounded the sound of children. The muted colours of old cassette tapes lined the walls where pastel spines of books might once have been. Plastic CD boxes were racked up neatly in spaces where gaudy coloured toys may have occupied. That was not to be. Somehow his life had not offered up the chance for a family, or if it had, he had been looking the other way and missed it. Looking down at the ground stooping to pick up some crystal on the path or so lost in his own thoughts that whatever chance there may have been completely passed him by.
He was not even sure where his own thoughts led him. He seemed to just be a passenger on a slow train ride through long dark tunnels and the vast, dusky yellow arable fields of his home county. Now and again he took another train, a train into the hills. The air was fresher and the stones were sharper. His mind wandered different paths as did his tired feet but he was no more sure of where he was headed than he had been in the place he called home.
The bleak day came when he had to leave that place he called home. He thought it would always be like this, this house, him. He wandered the fields and the woods, walked alone in the rain and snow, walked in the gentle light of spring and the heat of the long summers of the past and had always turned around, walked backwards for a few paces to see the house in all its changing lights. The stones and the red curved roof tiles absorbed colour from the tones of the day and the paintbrush of the weather.
The house had wrapped itself around him for forty years and he knew every stone, but now he was losing it. Reality had crept in like the mould that had slowly spread across the window frames and this reality was just as unwelcome. He had somehow forgotten to pay bills and even if he had remembered he did not have the money to do so. He had barely noticed the decay which had been living its own life around him. As the paper peeled from the walls and the doors fell from their hinges, he had just sighed and rearranged his precious things on their shelves and dark wooden tables as if he and they lived three feet away from the walls of the house. Three feet away from reality. Shells inside shells.
He was a shell and as he held his hand up to his ear he heard music. It was her favourite tune, a Breton tune he played for her on his melodeon. For he had met a woman once. He allowed her to slowly enter his thoughts and to a lesser extent, his life. He both welcomed and resented her presence in his house. He had not had to consider anyone else for so long. His small home was indeed his castle and he had long ago raised the drawbridge. He began to doubt himself in her presence and was haunted by deep scars and bad memories. His habits were his own now, not for any other eyes, not for anyone else to judge him. He began to see his life through her eyes and it unsettled him. It unsettled him so much that he usually arranged to meet her somewhere else, anywhere else, anywhere other than his small home with his music and books, his collections of precious things he had gathered on his travels.
If he had only known how much she wanted to be one of those precious things. She wanted to be held close, to feel as treasured and caressed as his unique finds, wanted him to see her hidden light, see the way the light and sable shades shone from her warm brown eyes. She wanted him to see her uniqueness. She wanted to be a pebble.
© Deborah Jordan. 2009
Published in Mudluscious. Autumn 2009
Goddess Dance/Soul Emerging
Between the smoke and the fire,
dancing between
what is, and what is yet to be.
Unshed tears and silent screams
between the mountains and the valley,
the sea and the sky,
the river and the land.
Liminal space.
Borderlands,
dancing between
what is, and what is yet to be.
The dance of transformation
the pain of a birth.
Soul emerging,
a dance of death
and life.
A caul of smoke
a song of fire.
A cry with closed lips,
dancing still,
into unyielding winds
and an unrelenting land.
Still
she dances
she dances.
© Deborah Jordan 21st Nov 2008
An Gaoth
I am the air that brings the snow
on seven peaks.
I am the chill that sends a shiver.
I am the force that lifts the wings
of eagles and merlins.
I am the hurricane that
sends you wheeling.
I am the hand beneath the waves
that rise to mountains and turn the boats.
I am the gentle violet breath of spring.
I am the warm breeze of heather
across the moor.
I am the one
who whispers and the curtain moves.
I am the wind.
© D.E.Jordan 2009
Published in Mudluscious Autumn 2009
All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.
Last blog entry
Posted on Saturday 30th January 2010 12:47 pm
Draw words from me,
spinerette.
Take this thread
between pale finger tips
as you lay back over the edge
of the hanging stone.
Face the sky, inhale the light,
breathe my dreams,
spinerette.
Weave me,
through you
and don’t let go.
None will catch us
as we turn circles
in empty air.
Hold me, entangle me,
fall with me.
Submit,
to this silent trap.
Leaves fold around us
and together,
we become formless.
Embalmed in
honeyed essence,
entranced, we slowly spin.
Inhaling dreams
exhaling light.
Fine, green, filtered light,
the light of trees,
falls through the air.
Breathe my dreams,
spinerette.
Face the sky
and inhale the light.
© Deb J. Jan 30th 2010
Image from 'Fallen' by Nykolai Aleksander.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxjpYHhfRyI
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View or make comments. (8 comments)
Janet Ramsden
Mon 15th Feb 2010 14:44
Hi Debs, thanks for commenting on my Chinese New Year poem.
Janet.x
ps. the metal tiger isn't made of scrap, it leaps over the scrap at the end of the year. :-)