I am reading The Collected Dorothy Parker at the moment and yesterday while enjoying some of her poems I came across a couple that where just lovely.

August
When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.

That's my favourite.

I Love Books!

Books have always meant so much to me, when I was a child they were my favourite toys. It started with the images and the feelings they gave me, its particularly the darker feelings that I remember. Books like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and its mysterious boy locked up in his room ill and crying, The Peppermint Pig by Nina Bawden and the urge for violence that became dominant near the end, The Crystal Prison by Robin Jarvis and its mysteries but also the slightly intense young love between two of the mice(!). More recently, Five Quarters Of The Orange by Joanne Harris almost exactly captured that queer dark mysterious feeling that used to intrigue me so much as a child.
As I have got older, books have moved with me. There have been books for all feelings of my growing up. Judy Blume was there to help me when I started to feel the confusions of just pre-teen changes, even music books were bibles to my actual teenage years. Much as I loved Nirvana and The Doors, Come As You Are by Michael Azerad and No-one Here Gets Out Alive by Daniel Sugerman were almost more important to me. Niall Griffiths and Irvine Welsh were there, among others, to help me through my self-destructive early twenties when nothing about me made sense to myself until my intensity levels settled down.
Now books show me that I can do what I like, like The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. They show me that its most important to be who you are. Books with depth and revelationary clarity like anything by Virginia Woolf, beautiful language that makes my heart ache like Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, a good intense love story like Jane Eyre, Rebecca or again, The Fountainhead.
I've learnt so much from books about patience and writing patiently, detail and how beautiful it makes a story, how important it is to know your characters as absolute real people, that its good to write originally and as myself but not be too proud to learn the tricks of your craft.
I've seen beautiful landscapes like in Forster's A Passage To India, spent cosy twilit afternoons like in Muriel Spark's The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, learnt how to be yourself at all costs in Jane Eyre, how to be open to any way of life in The Poisonwood Bible.

For me, reading is living, or it helps me to live, encourages me to live and learn and love and what is more important than that?

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The wind was whistling around the house and through the little cracks and loose window panes. A spider hung mornfully in its web in the corner of the  little sitting room keeping an eye on the crackling fire in the fireplace and an eye on the cat asleep on the tatty blue rug in front of it; the cat had made a play for the spider more than once but was slow and old and unsuccessful.

Imogen picked up her empty cracked tea cup and gathering her old crochet blanket closer around herself, she went through the bare wooden dining room and into the tiny leaky kitchen. Rain water was trickling down the inside of the right side of the window over the large cracked porcelain sink and into the plants growing wildly on the window sill. The tap groaned out some spluttering water to rinse the cup and she set it down on the side. A huge gust of wind suddenly embraced the house aggresively, rattling the very walls, attacking the roof, the windows, the doors with its harsh rasping breath. Imogen shuddered and hurried back to the sitting room, the fire and the spider.

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I thought I heard a noise, just a tiny little noise coming from a very small corner on the other side of the house. I froze as still as an icicle with my hands in my pockets gripping the fluff so it wouldn't give me away. I was all alone and I didn't know the house well. It was wide and open and wooden and old and creaked with the wind and cracked with the night. But this wasn't a creaking cracking noise, it was a tinkling tiny metal bell like noise but so very small it was hard to be sure.

I held my breath so the sound of it wouldn't get in the way of my hearing and I slowly crouched down to the floor. There! I heard it again, I'm sure I was sure this time. What could be tinkling so tinily in this house? What could be hiding but moving in such a quietly noisy way? I decided to creep. I put my hands and knees on the floor and moved as silently as a person might towards the tinkling twinkling corner of the wooden house.

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I went outside and wept. It was hard, hearing it like that and I didn't want anyone else to see me. If it had been you, you'd have done the same. When your face goes rosy pink and your throat feels like it might burst, your eyes start to go water blind, there's no stopping it coming out. I knew it was going to happen but I didn't want to hear it that way.

As I stood outside, I thought about all the time I'd had to get in there first. As the wind blew harshly into my tears and made trees shout my news across the rest of the city I just wanted to shout with them.

All that time I'd wasted, all those people I'd never let myself be and they'd slipped away, dying their own deaths as I'd forgotten them one at a time and slogged on. How many of them could have been real? How many of them could have been me?

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Moon Light

I wish I had said how much it meant to me that you sat with me that night. You could have just left and gone home, you could have just given me a kiss and got the hell away but you stayed and took it all like a man. You dried my eyes and put your arm around my shoulders and said nice things to make it seem brighter, a little shiny and round and smooth like the moon that was full that night shining in through your window. Maybe the moon will tell you because she knew, she could see it in the way I smiled at you and in the way I touched your arm. She could see how much it meant and it was all you needed to know how much you had made a difference. If I had just told you maybe it would have made you shine too and then we could shine together in the dark blue night, but I just left the next morning with a shy smile and I haven't seen you since.

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Knitting Club

"That looks lovely all in one colour, you can see the natural cross running through the middle of it."

"Well I'm doing it in peach because we have a peach three piece suite at home which is getting a bit tatty so rather than buy new furniture, I'm just crocheting peach rugs to cover the chairs."

" Where did you get your sofa, Clare?"

"Well, my mum's best friend's husband, Mike, had an elderly gentleman friend who bought the peach three piece suite and an antique dark wood corner cabinet, but then he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and had to more or less go straight into a nursing home, and just before he died he told Mike that he hadn't had the opportunity to use the sofa and chairs, or the corner cabinet, and would like him to have them if he could find a use for them."
"Then, just after the gentleman died, my husband Michael and I moved into our first unfurnished rented house and Mike offered us the furniture left to him by his friend, and we still have it."

Sara sat staring at me...

"Oh my God, I thought you were just going to say DFS or something and I was going to compare sofa stories with you and tell you about my large furniture company problems! That story was amazing!"

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