The good people at Zouch Magazine have invited me to write here, and pretty much post whatever I want to. Sounds like a really great deal. Maybe I’ll write about Japanese photography, Serbian poetry, obscure Russian sci-fi movies, interview my heroes of the internet, or write an essay on the gentrification of my South London birthplace and my using poetry to put a death curse on all urban colonialists, etc, etc.

Anyway, consider this post a gentle wave, a nodded head in passing, a neighbourly hello.

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I run a weekly creative-writing workshop at my workplace. I am a drugs worker and the workshop I run is for service-users of the project. I try to offer a safe place for people facing addiction issues to explore their creativity. I believe that recovery is a creative act, and that any activity which encourages a person to access and cultivate our creative faculties will serve us well in our efforts to change course and re-imagine our lives.

Hey, it worked for me.

In the workshop today, we looked at a couple of poems, and from those poems we took a selection of words we liked, and from those selected words we created a poem. This exercise, I think, is known as a ‘word pool’. The words I chose were: smile, blue, mouth, burns, light, accident, heavenward, spinning, father, dream, die. 

* * *

Anyway, it’s been nice talking to you. Maybe I’ll talk to you again. Happy writing. Happy re-imagining your life. Happy wielding the alphabet above your head like an axe to the paper oxen.

* * *

This is the poem I came up with in the workshop today. Maybe I’ll use it for something. Maybe I’ll pick fruit from my teeth with it, or write it on the back of my head so it’s the last thing you see as I walk into the sun and disappear.

* * *

It always happens this way.

In the dream there is an accident, and

I die. Then, I am born

again. This time I am my father’s

father. I tell the boy

that he is a king when

he frowns, that only liars

get to heaven. The boy smiles, and

we watch as a blue light burns

above the mouth of the river,

spinning heavenward.

– Miggy Angel