So I’m reworking the first disc of my “You and Me and the Devil Makes Three” mix-set to be less of a randomized selection of the others’ tastes and, instead, more in line with mine… and focusing on what it is to be a changeling (child) witch. It reminded me that I wanted to post a few videos (three, in fact) that capture what my dreams/nightmares were like as a little kid. While no single of one of these videos is an exact replica, taken as a group and sort of …meshed together… you get a near-perfect representation of what they look(ed) like.
Right down to painted faces, labyrinthine city structures and old parking garages, strange dingy forgotten tenement buildings, grown-up-children, poverty, splitting wounds, blood, and disease… and a lot of very sad lonely people crying for things I couldn’t even give myself.
The earliest and most ‘proto-typical’ of these dreams that I can remember was from when I was six. Many of them are recurring. Many show up in my poetry (of which I have included some examples in this post). And they are, of course, on-going.
… When the Morrígan makes sense to you, I guess it’s because REASONS. 😉
The medieval clothes, sad smiles, strange long wooden hallways with dusty floors… so real.
I know it’s supposed to be tense by cinematic design but I literally can’t watch this one without every muscle clamping in my body. So fucking scary! And good!
This one reminds me of a figure I encountered in ‘dreams’ inspired by the song “Golden Slumbers” which used to frighten the fuck out of me as a kid… A strange painted man in a suit, surrounded by other theatrical faces fading into the night on wide & shallow concrete steps under a single street lamp telling me “Once there was a way to get back home…”
Do with all that what you will… it makes for great creative fodder.
The first among other things, makes reference to the dragon-dreams in Laurence Yep’s work “Dragonwings”… the mental image of sore shoulders after intense dreams had a huge impact on me as a kid. The other two are “simply” more narrative descriptions of specific dreams.
~ Saoirse.
PS. The featured image on this post is a photo of me that is no less unsettling in it’s original form… Sweet dreams, witchy children 😛
I have been working on categorising my poetry. I knew there were a few themes that, in general, a lot of my poetry might fall under… but I have spent the last week or so slowly charting, dating, accounting for and making sure I had back ups of my poetry and the first realisation that came out of this is that I have written over 70 poems since the beginning of 2021.
There are almost no poems before that until you travel back about 10 years.
Turns out field-working autistic burnout and shuffling personal care away from heavily medicated *misdiagnoses* brings the poet back out in a person… but I digress.
What is challenging about assigning organised and uniform categories to my poetry is that, of course, there is organic overlap. This is precisely what it is to be an archivist (i.e. why we don’t rearrange physically what we categorise intellectually) …Or if I were to try and write up a descriptive summary of each poem and derive collection schema from there… THAT would be more like the work of a rare books librarian wrangling unique/historic items into DCRM(B) and MARC-XML friendly formats.
…I digressed again.
The point is, it’s tough but I LOVE doing this sort of thing… ad infinitum, it seems.
Here is a pie chart I have constructed and colour-coded to represent the themes and distribution of my poetry as of right now. Representing 71 poems written between January 9th, 2021 and October 15th, 2024. (I’ve written a few more but for various reasons they are not included on this list.)
(Interestingly, there are a few I cannot find copies of though I know I at least have physical copies somewhere. Bad LIS-professional! No cookie!!!)
The colours are loosely significant but the important thing to absorb here is that a) poetry is one of the main ways I channel my anger… especially as an autistic who goes largely non-verbal under social/interpersonal duress and b) I actually think of the Tower Quartet and (Channeled) Anger as subsets of a larger intellectual fonds …which is called “Excavations”. You will see that title in the pie chart as pertaining to a single slice, but really you can also view “Excavations” more broadly as occupying just over 45% of the chart! …The unifying emphasis is on digging deep, getting into the chthonic, and shadow-working my shit… oh, and a little revenge poetry here and there.
The thematics in the rest equally relate to each other pretty intensely. My poetry is always devotional in nature but some poems are more direct forms of near-audible gnosis. This makes sense to me from a mythic perspective as it is (personally) derived from the function of verse, alliteration, sorcery, ‘supplication’, evocation, and so on in medieval Irish literature.
I have made “Death” green mainly to evoke a #deathpositive association – ‘verdure from void’. I could equally (and perhaps should) have made it some kind of gold colour:
“I know you’ll remember me when I’m gone
remember my stories, remember my songs
I’ll leave them on earth, sweet traces of gold
oh, they’re calling me home, they’re calling me home.”
~ “They’re Calling Me Home”, Rhiannon Giddens
I will likely include little blurbs illuminating each category on a basic level whenever I manage to post them.
At any rate, I still need to figure out how to create a poetry gallery where poems that can’t occupy a single slide might appear… Until then, here are some of the poems I’ve written in September and October (minus “Athame”… which I have posted already.)
I suppose this set is all rather on the nose, but the themes of each are as follows: Love, Excavation, Death, Anger, and Anger.
For what it’s worth, I guess.
~ Saoirse.
* Get it? Theme-attics and Scheme-attics? Because it’s a post about poetry thematics and schematics? And I have a thing for sad attics? Ba-dum-tssshhh!!! Genius at it’s finest. I kill me.
Hello there… a poem conceived ‘of an evening’ in the aftermath of a maddening supermoon in early autumn. Shall we play a game of ‘wake the dead’?
I’d say most of my poetry arises from attempting to describe the place where sensory detail and cognition meet… but please think of this however you choose!
From the Deviant Moon Tarot (Paradoxical)… this card always reminds me of Tom Waits.
~ Sorsha.
*The title is from Tom Waits lyrics to “No one knows I’m gone”.
*Deck featured in header image ~ Trionfi della Luna (Paradoxical)
