“The chute should have shot out immediately, but nothing.”
Tag Archive | Prison Arts
Dumb Luck
“This guy’s like the Angel of Death. He’s big time. The End.”
I wrote Dumb Luck as a sort of modern retelling of an old religious story I heard about a man who sees the Angel of Death in Jerusalem and fears he is going to die so he flees all the way to Damascus in an attempt to cheat death. The only problem is, death doesn’t just work by chance. Does he?
You can read my story in my Prose section.
Seasonal Revelations
“Only hope stays above ground.”
I very rarely plan to write poetry in a particular form. I usually just start and the form either finds itself or it all becomes a piece of free verse. That’s something I hope to change this year. I want to write in as many different forms as possible. To experiment. To see what I like.
Seasonal Revelations are a set of Haiku (or Haiku No Renga), based upon the biblical nature of the seasons and the year. I originally wrote them for a creative writing class at HMP Frankland and I must admit that I don’t like the form all that much, but they still hold meaning for me as each year blurs into the next and time leaves me behind.
You can have a read of the full set in my Poetry section.
It’s You
My love is a pure white rose
with a single shining thorn.
It’s You is a poem I wrote years ago. I had just met The Woman with Eyes of Fire (see my story The Fire and the Sea for details) and was struggling to get my head around my feelings for her, especially given our situation. Then I read some poetry by Robert Burns and decided to start a poem from one of his lines and work into what I really wanted to say from there. I never gave this poem to her as such, but a couple of years after I wrote it she did happen to read it (along with most of my poems) when she got hold of my notebook. She didn’t have a clue it was about her until we got back in contact just last year.
You can read the full poem in my Poetry Section.
Hide My Pain
This drawing started out as a simple sketch but it has actually been changed a number of times since then. The funny thing is that I don’t even feel like it was me who changed it. I knew it wasn’t complete (until it finally was) and I searched for what was missing, but I don’t really feel like I thought of it. I simply put it down on paper. The idea behind it already existed. It was always going to be what it eventually became. I just didn’t know it until I saw it there in front of me.
I’m fully aware that that probably sounds completely nuts to everyone but me, but there it is. Like most of my drawings it is full of symbolism and hidden meaning (beyond the obvious), I’ll leave you to judge and interpret for yourselves.
The Fire and the Sea
“Nothing mattered more to him than the woman’s happiness, and he would gladly embrace any pain or sorrow if he could save her from the same.”