This Girl Unravelled

Day Twenty-Eight #PoemADayFeb

Hi. Sorry I couldn’t finish #poemadayfeb but, this.

So much this.

How often do we do this? Leave out the parts of ourselves we feel are unworthy and unloveable. Cross out the words we fear will turn people away from us; the ones we fear are both our too much and not enough.

February pushed me to the edge of my limits; despite all good intentions to finish poemadayfeb with glorious resonance, I just couldn’t make it happen. I messaged @laura and @paul last night, apologised for letting them down. They were, of course, full of love and understanding and grace; two people with hearts of pure gold who reminded me I have nothing to apologise for.

Sometimes life happens. It’s okay. We take a deep breath and try again tomorrow. Go gentle. Whatever you have today is enough. We weren’t made to achieve; merely to live. The road is often winding.

I’ve really loved writing the poems I have this month! Thank you to everyone who jumped on board and wrote along with us, your words and enthusiasm have been an inspiration to me. And thanks to Laura and Paul for being such kick arse co-hosts. See you all next Feb! In the meantime, keep writing x

Words courtesy of Alicia Cook 💗

New Spoken Word Poem Uploaded!

So, February has been crazy busy and part of that for me has been revamping my YouTube channel and recording some new spoken word poems as well as re-recording a few older ones in my swanky new studio setup, thanks to my firstborn, William Parker – Youtube – who, with over 100k views on one of his YouTube tutorial videos, is far more savvy than I’ll ever be.

Today I wanted to share my most recent poem, performed for the first time this weekend at the Paroxysm Press Showcase Series. It’s a reflection on the journey I have been on recently; the struggle to dismantle the strongholds of our survival and understand that allowing ourselves to become soft doesn’t mean we become weak; yet how tightly we cling to what we have always known.

For those of you who are new to my channel make sure you check out the other videos while you’re there – I’ll be putting some more up in the next while but for now I’m also many days behind in #poemadayfeb so have some catching up to do there first!

Much love x

Day Twenty-Two #PoemADayFeb – Sun

And when we couldn’t turn the page
we burned the book;
yet isn’t this the truth of love:
that we would rather
fill our houses with ashes
than promises;
that we would rather
curse the sun for drought
than believe for the coming rains.

©️ Kathy Parker 2019

Day Twenty-Two #PoemADayFeb – Sun

Day Eighteen #PoemADayFeb – Tanka (form)

Rain beats like Morse code
taps the letters of your name
on tin roof pages
drenches my skin with wanting
still I wait for you.

Day Eighteen #PoemADayFeb – Tanka (form)

The Japanese tanka is a thirty-one syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line. Tanka translates as “short song” and is better known in its five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form. Tanka poems are usually written about nature, love, sadness, and other strong emotions.

Day Sixteen and Seventeen #PoemADayFeb – Cusp and Unveil

And this is where we will meet;
this place in-between, where
we will shed our clothes and
watch all we have been fall to
the floor; unspoken promise
heavy beneath our tongue.
Your lips will taste of warm soil,
my skin of summer rain;
tear-stained earth, sweat-stained
sheets, thirst-stained promise.
We will write new stories on each
other’s bodies, volumes of words
we have longed to say, but couldn’t –
unveiling flesh, unveiling desire.
Yes, this is where we will meet,
my love, on the cusp of what
we once were, eager hands
grasping for what we now become.

Day Sixteen and Seventeen #PoemADayFeb – Cusp and Unveil (missed yesterday so throwing two in for today!)

Day Fifteen #PoemADayFeb – Assumption

So, It’s V-Day and All That…

Here’s the deal, guys:

I was born smack-bang on the cusp of Gemini and Cancer, which leaves me existing in a kind of constant state of ambivalence, swinging between the emotional heart of a Cancer and the intellectual mind of a Gemini.

Which means even though I have this big, sloppy romantic heart of a poet inside of me, I also flatly refuse to buy into the ridiculous, over-commercialised notion that is V-Day, and all the shizza that goes with it.

Because even though I may have had to learn about love the hard way, here’s what I do know:

Love cannot be bought with flowers and chocolate and wine; even less so on the one day of the year consumerism tells us it can. The only exception to this rule is gin. Love can be bought with gin.

When Jesus said to love thy neighbour as thyself, the dude was seriously onto something. Because if we cannot love ourselves first and foremost with every measure of love we deserve, we will never be able to love another the way they deserve. Loving others can only come from the overflow of love we give to ourselves first; to expect another to fill our well only ever leads to disappointment.

If we cannot love ourselves with this measure of love we deserve, we’ll spend our whole lives settling for those who do not love us that way either. How much we value our worth is how high we set the bar for the love we accept. Keep it high. Those who deserve to be in our lives won’t be afraid to climb. Or at the very least, buy a ladder.

Unconditional love transforms people. Like, the most incredible magic trick you’ll ever see. Love someone like that today and watch them change before your eyes.

Love does not look like abuse. The moment it does, leave and never look back. You do not destroy the people you love. Period.

Love is a decision. You will not always want to love the person you wake beside every morning. You either choose love, or you don’t. One of those choices is easy. The other is worth it.

For those actually celebrating Valentine’s Day today, I promise not to judge you. At least, not too much. It’s not that I take issue with celebrating love, or showing a loved one what they mean through grand gestures of overpriced flowers and chocolate. Love is glorious. It should be celebrated. Every day. And this is the point. I don’t want to reduce love to a once-a-year gesture, but remember to celebrate each day this force of nature that resonates through every part of our lives and makes it worth living.

K x

Day Thirteen #PoemADayFeb – Change

I tell him I will write a poem where the letters of his name
are woven through every line; that I will not place him
in the spaces between, where I hide meaning inside
of metaphor.
I do not tell him of the way this terrifies me; to write
of such pure things, as friendship, as him,
when my native tongue is fluent in the language
of sorrow,
and his name does not belong in such dark places.
Someone once said all you need is twenty seconds of
insane courage for something great to happen
and it made me think of coins in the air;
the way we hold a lifetime of hope inside our lungs
as fate is decided, except it’s probably not a lifetime,
or even twenty seconds, but is courage just the same.
Snowboarding while listening to My Chemical Romance,
he tweets, and I have listened to them on repeat
for an entire year and I want to grab hold of this moment
of kinship
but there are wounds on my fingers still trying to heal and
bloodstains never looked good on new beginnings
and I still have not told him
how he was my twenty seconds that day;
how we spend our lives afraid
to throw our coins in the air; so unsure which way
they will fall, until we soon become tired of pockets full
of loose change weighing us down.

Day Thirteen #PoemADayFeb – Change

Day Twelve #PoemADayFeb – Summer

And this is how it happens;
months of half-descended skies
dampen our gaze and like greedy children
we clamber to see the first yellow vein
touch the surface of fleshy cloud; we drench
our shadowed bodies with light, careless
to heed the warnings of our youth –
eager gaze prolonged, cells of retina
bleached by sun’s bitter kiss.
Black spots, blind spots.
In a dream,
sky above scorches flesh
while ground below holds frozen
and the air hangs thick with a metaphor
I cannot see, blinded by beams of him
coming through the doorway of my winter.
Black spots, blind spots.
He does not notice how taut my arms
become from holding up the sky for him.
I do not notice how razor-edged the ice
against my flesh until I bleed.
Black spots, blind spots.
Blistered eyelids force my gaze away
from that which I once hungered
and I see what I did not before:
love is only born of the soft soil
beneath our feet.
The scales fall from my eyes.
I am the rain.
And he is so last summer.

Day Twelve #PoemADayFeb – Summer

Upcoming Event News!

Ridiculously excited to announce I’ll be performing at The Showcase Series by Paroxysm Press as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival. Come and see me and five other amazing performers take the stage with a cracking night of spoken word, to be held at Broadcast Bar, Saturday 23rd February.

“Over 3 huge nights, we present 18 of the best underground authors, artists and spoken word performers. Their work comes to the stage tight, slick and hard hitting with a stubborn desire to entertain. New work, Paroxysm favourites, and a few surprises, it is the best value entertainment in the Fringe. If poetry has a punk scene, you’ll find it here”

More details and tickets to this show, as well as the two other shows in this series, at www.adelaidefringe.com.au

See you theeeeere!