Between spending all of her cash on Yazoo and working in a book-shop as a picture framer, Meg Slade writes poems about all the things around her – oh also she helps out a school teaching kids to write stories, which is awesome ‘until you meet the one kid who doesn’t take criticism well and calls you a durr brain, yeah that insult still exists.’ She tells us, ‘poet wise I think Emily Dickinson was my first inspiration when I started taking writing seriously,’ but as of late Meg finds more inspiration in the Victorian illustrator Louis Wain, ‘who draws these crazy pictures of cats, every time I see one I just want to write a little story underneath, he’s brilliant!’  Meg’s favourite thing to do is go to aquariums where they let you touch the stingray, she asked us to make something up because ‘that sounds a bit gay’ but we didn’t. Stay posted for more of Meg’s writings.

Thank you’s and Hand Claps.

Look up and smile
To the fires
In the sky
Thank your freezing hands
Whilst they help you discover
An elixir to nervous breakdowns
And attacks of anxiety

Thank your mother
For finding ABBA gold
And helping you relate to every single Abba song to have ever existed.

Thank all the drunken kisses
And all the broken hearts which may follow
Which help you to apprehend the pain which will last
Until you inhale integrity in its finest form.

Thank god, that you found that remaining king skin,
You stored for emergencies.

A Devotion to Literature.

And for you, I will take acid
I will blow my mind away
with imagination and bad trips

I will sit quietly, in my nicotine infused breaks
and read over and over the same lines, like coating them in cheap
PVA glue.
I will smile widely at these metaphors, and be sad that I can never write anything as good.
I am an oxymoron in its entirety.

I will spend nights out, in bathtubs and friends beds
At stupid o clock, pages between my fingers
savouring every last word.

I will dream of moving to Japan
Somewhere in between mountains and nightclubs
Where I’d dance and drink, then retreat to my beautiful home
Which Murakami will quietly describe to me
under the covers.

Then I will wake up. Spill tea on the pages. Flick ash over the letters.
And be overjoyed by the snow.

words Megan Slade.

This entry was tagged as emily dickinson, japan, king skin, louis wain, megan slade, murakami, poetry.