broadcast me a joyful noise

I had heaps of fun with my stories! Two full gifts and two treats, and I don't think anyone guessed that they were by me (muahahahaha?)

Phantomwise (11556 words)
Fandom: Alice (2009)
Summary: Hatter’s tried to explain the problem that Wonderland folk have with standing between two mirrors, but none of it makes a lot of sense. It’s something that you don’t do, something to do with memories, and Alice can’t quite tell if it’s anything more than superstition.

I watched Alice almost the day before signups, and I'm so glad I offered it! Writing this allowed me to stretch my weak plot-muscles, and include a huge amount of random stuff from the books, and generally kick around in an absurdist sandbox for a while.

seven wonders of the scientific world (2376 words)
Fandom: Luther (TV)
Summary: Alice has long known that she only has respect for things she can't manipulate; very few people fall into this category, which is mostly populated by constellations and the elusive wavelengths of invisible light.

I nabbed this as a pinch-hit; I'd really hoped to write something about Alice Morgan, and this came out just as I wanted.

eff-em-ell, and other quotes for the official biography (2334 words)
Fandom: Shakespeare Retold
Summary: Tim flat-out refuses to use either 'ma'am' or the proper styling of The Right Honourable with someone who's been comparing him to various parts of a donkey's anatomy for as many years as Katherine has, so Prime Minister it is.

Last minute treat! SO MUCH FUN. I love the Retold version of Taming of the Shrew.

A Daughter of the American (Psycho) Revolution, via the Lineage of Marion Crane (645 words)
Fandom: World's Wife - Carol Ann Duffy
Summary: Bad things happen to girls who want too much.

Woo, poetry! Poetry about girls who die in horror movies!

a brief period of turbulence

ladies and gentlemen, please remain calm.
this is nothing more than a reminder
that the oversized metal box
to which you have entrusted the continuation
of your single precious and all too mortal life
is being hurled through the air at unimaginable speeds,
held countless miles above foreign surfaces
by some obscure laws of physics
in which you have never really believed.

you will notice that the captain has switched on the seatbelt sign;
the toilets on board may no longer be used.
please remain in your seats
sedating your nerves with complimentary drinks,
and with your seatbelt fastened
low and tight across your bladder.

our crew is here for your convenience
and to prove the plausibility of wobbling one's way
up and down the forbidden aisles
in three-inch heels. their smiles
will remain sunny even in direst straits,
and should therefore not be used
as an indicator of safety.

should oxygen masks be required,
tachypnoea is frowned upon:
please conduct your respiration
with the decorum fitting a world traveller
to whom a trifling indication that the air itself is unsafe
is hardly a reason to breathe faster.

in the event of an emergency landing at sea,
please adopt whatever position best serves
to instill a sense of blind hope.
the light on your lifejacket is activated by water
and has a battery life of approximately two hours longer
than the time it will take for hypothermia to set in.

once in the lifeboats,
those of you who brought your laptops
despite our explicit instructions
to leave all possessions behind
will be turned upon
and eaten first.

we do thank you for your patience at this time.

invention challenge

it's hard not to dream in recipes
when the only text that unblurs in my sleep,
just long enough to be read,
is a list of instructions to be followed.
my daydreams are beginning to suffer likewise
the culinary form as their spine:

they scoliose, and in their bending they require
three cups of coffee drunk only for the taste,
a stirring narrative with a citrus twist,
a pinch to wake myself up
and two handfuls of your hands, full
to bursting with ripe promises and love.

there are recipes catering to every palate:
those who cannot tolerate responsibility, those
whose stomachs churn at the lightest taste
of debt. acid reflux on the lips warns
against wanting more than I can realise
with the ingredients that make me up, and

rows of black words take control of my wants.
I will learn to yearn as directed,
to whisk up a foam from an empty space,
to take a mortar and pestle to my life
and moleculise the loneliness --
crush and blend it with the rest.

I awaken with no flour in my hair, no burns
on my fingers, but at night the kitchen is
alive with mistakes. things curdle. begin again
and use less salt this time. the book
falls open at a page stained with repetition
and molasses, and the recipe says:

in a moderate heat bake the gingerbread shapes
of a family and ice them with harsh city noise;
for their eyes use the memory of sky.
by day I grind down my own bones
and by night I will forever be here
whipping up dream futures spiced with

partings, age, raspberries and time
growing fast and as wild as can be
in a box painted with clouds and set
out in the city air, sixteenth floor, to grow
high above loud lymph traffic lighting its own way
back to the sentinel nodes.

homily

morning in the principality sees
the slow ticktock of those whose rhythms fall
by chemicals not clockwork,
minds pushing towards their own peak and
chasing Pipe dreams in the grey morning air.
dreams of our sort only:
the waking images pieced together
and projected onto nothing.
no act of sabotage, no guns
no speech no written law will force
the true dead dreaming into our heads.
the morning is a symbol. the morning --
is an arbitrary birth
for those who wake from nothing, or never.
our cogwheel hypnagogia lie parallel
to their gradual climb upwards into noonday smarts.

no place now for every god
who daily sang the sun into the sky,
and fewer candles every week
are lit by feebler hands than mine.
the larger picture (projected -- where?) suggests that this
was never my purpose; it was always yours.
the fires set alight in minds and
what we might call hearts
are of your devising, you who named me
something new
so all of me became the voice
telling gossamer tales of equity
to loop around their necks;
to draw them tight and willing
into the blazing dawn that they found in your face.

morning in the new world of ideas means
ownership of nobody by nobody,
your dream ambition called into being
by many voices all at once;
mine being the careful sound of history,
the record of your own desire.
but we are built on factory lines
and in this image was I made,
created unequal and infused with the spirit
of a searching need,
a fullness of existence that requires
an ownership of shining sorts;
never mine and always yours.

though given a biology to call my own
(I project, the image, the waking construction)
I might be in need of an afterlife;
might hold myself beloved of a God,
a faith full manifest and blind
and breathing through the work of my two hands.
my body would possess
all glorious redundancies
and in my dumbfound dreams the dust
would smother all our gears,
leaving only what remains when the clocks are stopped,
the faint grey mourning of the souls
we do not possess.

guidelines for safety

my love you are the envelope of many-coloured money
near which my hand will never stray
as it lies rustling,
inside my bag as I stride fast and conscious of the wealth
beneath my palm. you are the yellow sign
at which I will never exchange it for the slow compression of space.

you are the cosy darkness of my fear,
waterwashed weak by the canvas between
but nanostrong and microdeep,
that I could lose you to a smarter tongue;
a closer touch;
a better pair of boots.
you are the pale grey fingers gloved and closed around your own left hand,
to the sight of which
I will never object.

you are oilslick down the sluggy wings of change,
the easy rainbow slide of lying abed past noon
and a life cut out from chiffon silk
with scissors so sharp they whisper fine
and twisted romances into the silver air.

you are the wide blue geodesic down which I will never fall;
my love you are the distance that has freed my heart.

Stolen from villainny, among others:

Write a love poem in 15 words

I might write more of these. SO MUCH FUN. Have a go!



generally I dislike monotones,
but --

I want to paint the world
the colour of you

written on the 423 down Castlereagh

the city is a glittering, aching, clawing thing
with bats strung between buildings in the blue dusk
not fighting crime but reporting it:
from glass to glass their sonar shout
a ricochet of breaking waves
sketching the airways of the beast

and every voice you hear is the city's voice
she speaks in tongues
tongues of devil men and downtreading
and uplooking and sidewalking

nightly buildings tesselate the sky

you walk faster in the city
nicer dress, painted lips, higher heels
faster faster faster click click
the city speaks in soles and cement

and every person that you pass
is living in a different city

Not even close to being a GIP, even though this icon GLADDENS MY HEART - thank you, chaos_pockets - because I have to display the results of my insanity (& gross enabling on boxchat's behalf) as well.

This is set loosely after 2522, Rematch and Disrepair.

It's a sestina. Much to my disgust, it also insisted on being written in iambic pentameter. I have structured myself into oblivion. Later on I may write, you know, actual fic.

( Distillation )

A couple of months ago I was on a Shakespeare kick and offered to write fandom-sonnets for people. While in Mooloolaba I finished almost all of them, so this is going to be a long long post of personalised iambic pentameter. YAY. Huge apologies to genarti and madbonnycaptain, the only two whose requests I haven't filled yet. I'll get there! (Though, Beth, if you'd like to request someone other than Lear, I'll get there...sooner. I've only read the play once. Um. Some other fandom, maybe? I am slightly Shakespeared-out.)

Comments on your own sonnet and/or anyone else's would be appreciated. I've never written this many poems in such a short time before and I'm still leery of the quality. Most of them are second-person because apparently I am incapable of writing any other POV at the moment.

I'll kick off with the original sonnet that started the idea, too.

( 12 sonnets in all )