Haadi

Based on a dream I had about two years ago I just found the notes I wrote down the morning after. Spent about 15 minutes turning them into this so really it's a flash poem for friday afternoon fun: 

All true. 

I'm not a backpacker anymore, but an official person in a place I hadn't expected to stay. It's a trickier process than I expected, logistically and psychologically. 

I wrote this for my friend's blog. He wanted perspectives on travel and the search for self. Subsequently I have returned to New Zealand and am making it my home. The temporal happiness of 'then' is bigger and richer than the day-to-day of now, but I had to come back and see. It reinforces the knowledge that "travel" is not real life. Still, New Zealand ain't bad. 

Left-Behinds started as a flash about new beginnings. I've been encouraged to keep working on it, perhaps testing it as a poem. This is my first poem since I was a tortured teenager. Actually, it's two poems. But they came from one piece of prose. 

Exercise: 100 words on a bed you slept in as a child. The key is; keep it simple, evocative, think of using all your senses, not trying to be 'writerly' about it, rather instinctive 

This was an opening to something that never really went anywhere, and I am wondering about picking it up again. 

Written for the theatre programme for a play, Red on Black, by Andrew Bridgmont . Meant to be about incursion. Criticised for try to be too clever, consequently might be souless....