Tales From The Edge Of My Living Room
I’m still here and still reeling.
Brexit and the election of General Trump has numbed me into critical silence. Also for personal reasons barely known only to me I have been on a social media and blogging sabbatical, but this mini break has still been creative. I have been writing songs, poems and short stories, squirrelling them away in a literal and metaphorical scrap book ready for a rainy day. I’ve been watching the world and reading books, absorbing and creating. I felt the blogging urge today so I thought I would share with you a few of my thoughts and updates.
I received Crow by Ted Hughes for Christmas and I’m in awe of its black and bleak genius. The words and images leap menacingly off the page leaving me smiling at what a dark conjurer Hughes was. His words have renewed my hunger for poems that tell stories and that don’t always conform.
I have almost completed the 2nd draft of my long gestating novel and soon it will be ready to be read by a couple of selected readers for feedback, then I will travel forward in time to see whether I ever get a publisher or not. If I do I will put extra effort in to finish the book ready for its glorious release. Of course it is also possible that having seen my own successful future that I will rest of my laurels and put less effort in, changing the course of my own future, which in turn may cause a space-time paradox, which is kind of cool.
I have written a few songs that seem to be part of the same theme and the songs seem adamant that I should record them and release them as an E.P. Maybe this will happen. More importantly I have a title for this collection of songs and because I like commercially non-viable titles my provisional name for the record is:
Nursery Rhymes and Terrible Crimes (How I caused and subsequently survived the Trumpocalypse)
I’m also writing Aardvark Tales Part Two. As we speak Aardvark is nagging me for more pages. It will have a lot more pictures and it will be a paperback. That’s all for now. I need to retreat back into my fall out shelter but I’ll leave you with a poem.
The Black Dog Nebula
He’s not alright
You can see it in his eyes
He felt like an alien
Sent to the planet normal
he thought he spoke the same language but his words came out tangled, ready to be wrestled and misconstrued
His home world, Fragment, was in the black dog nebula
It felt good to have come out, at least to himself
But he was still afraid of the scrutiny
He’d opened a trap door and now he couldn’t close it again and the monsters were calling to him
and the laughter
the laughter was the worst part
chilling and chiding, like joke shop chattering teeth clattering against his ability to cope
Why he’d been sent on this mission he didn’t know
His telegram asking for more intel had been lost by yodel, all he had was a card saying “sorry we missed you.”
Says it all he chuckled to himself.
Copyright John de Gruyther 2017
The World Outside the Window 