A little chalk poem

This very short poem, chalked on the pavement, won me third prize in the Mayhem Pavement Poetry competition yesterday:


Unfortunately  
vodka
cannot erase
you from
my brain
as easily
as rain
breathes
a half-
chalked
poem
back into
nothingness

I won a book of poetry.  Not bad for a quick ten minutes' chalking!  Admittedly the last line was one I had written previously, but not found a home for, so recycled it for this purpose.  It worked well for the medium. Yay poems!

Twenty years is a long time

Today is 20 years since my father passed away.  I was 14, he was 49.  It's a long time.  There are a lot of things in my life, and in the world in general, that he has missed out on.

We are having a memorial this weekend to finally inter his ashes - he's been on the shelf and in the shed for 20 years, poor guy!  It's funny, I don't miss him constantly, it's not like a pain or an ache, but more like a sensitive muscle that just twinges every now and then if I think about it or move the wrong way...

He would have been a great Granddad. He would have been a menace on Facebook.

Anyway, in the spirit of remembrance, here's an unfinished piece I wrote a couple of years back about the day he died.

The end of the chapter

It’s winter.  The air in her bedroom is cold, but R is warm, sandwiched between several layers of duvet and the womb of her waterbed (don’t hassle her, it’s the ‘90s, they were cool then).  It’s morning, early, but not too early, quiet but for the click-click-click of the dog’s claws on the wooden floor of the hallway.  He wants to go outside and R can hear him but she doesn’t move just yet.  It’s the last Friday of the school holidays (dogs have no respect for weekends and holidays) so she’s savouring her lie-in.  One arm snakes out from beneath the covers to grab her current bedroom book (she has three on the go – one for the bedroom, one for the living room and one for the bathroom) and flick on the bedside light.  She is quickly drawn back into the world she reluctantly left the previous night, when her eyelids could no longer resist the beckoning advances of her cheeks.

Nauseous or nauseated - and does it matter?

Readers of my blog will know that I'm a logophile - I love words. I'm also passionate about grammar, punctuation and syntax.  Many people glaze over at this point, but I'm certainly not alone, as evidenced by the numerous grammar debates, jokes and memes cropping up all over the internet. (If you've never watched one of the Jack's Films Your Grammar Sucks videos, you are missing out!)

What I'm not yet sure about is how much of a purist I am. While I, like many others, nearly wept at the announcement that the Oxford Dictionary was adding to the definition of "literally" to allow it to also mean "Used for emphasis while not being literally true", I do accept that common usage changes over time, and sticking rigidly to archaic conventions is unnecessary. In saying that, the day that "would of" or "yous" gets added into common usage is the day I stop speaking English.

Working at a University I am particularly careful about my grammar, even in emails and informal documents, and can spend hours (ok, maybe minutes) deciding whether to use "forums" or "fora" as the plural.  There are also all kinds of debates about this on internet. Even so, there are times I come across something I haven't previously heard of and then it gives me pause - if I have been using a word incorrectly for 30-odd years, and most other people use it incorrectly without obfuscating their meaning, is correct use of the word necessary?

A Short History of my Vagina

Time! It is not currently my friend.  Working full-time with a 45 minute commute, looking after a five year old, trying to do my masters, writing for the student magazine, editing my ex-husband's book and carrying on a new and wonderful LDR all suck up the majority of my time.  But I will be back in gear soon!

In the meantime, please feel free to check out my latest published work!  It's called "A Short History of my Vagina".  Go on, you know you want to...

http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/mayhem/issue1/OnyxLily-AShortHistoryofmyVagina.shtml

Loquacity

This is a piece I wrote for a creative writing paper, but I thought it would work quite well on here.

I have an addiction. A semi-secret delight. Hello everyone, my name is R and I’m a logophile.

I have always loved words, and although most of the time I agree that simple is better, there’s nothing I like more than the mouth-filling sweetness of a multi-syllabic expression that captures precisely what I want to say.

I realise now that my early experiments were not always efficacious, but at the time I couldn’t understand why my mother chuckled quietly at her birthday card addressed “to my beloved mother”, or why my standard four teacher tactfully suggested that four adjectives per noun was a little excessive. By high school though, my verbiage was becoming more accomplished, and I recall the evil delight of making an annoying boy in my class blush by asking him, loudly, whether he masticated.