Words
make my heart pitch, tip from its ledge,
warm meals of
paper and ink and plastic dustcovers.
We’ll be lifelong friends, swear it.
Without you I am muted,
feelings decay in my throat’s
dark chute.
Try to weave words, drop stitches,
turn the chalky silence of pages
to life.
I write until streetlights blink on,
shape you to dispel shadow, let in the sunlight
regurgitate
sadness and beauty.
Friends of ink and paper,
when the story trips, cuts open
its knees
and the words I fill you with
die out,
you leave.
Writing suffuses my mind with life’s
tackle,
drips from me, open wounded.
I’ll knit a daisy chain of letters, breathe clearer.
You are timorous soldiers,
dislocated from your homes and
herded away in emails,
disfigured by rejection and glory.
I crank the dials, try to brew
magic, medicine,
till fingertips ache, go numb.
I neglect the world for the misshapen
scraps of ideas,
the inklings which leak from
my head’s crevasses.
Vowel sounds and
grammatical placeholders,
embryonic and
delicate as snapped twigs.
To breach physical definitions,
my pen is never unpoised.
The writer in me
never turns off her light,
nor lays her head on the desk.
Isabelle Lloydd St Mary’s College, Auckland
From the author:
The poem “Scribbler” examines my relationship to writing and to language itself. It seeks to articulate the emotional bond between writer and fruit, and the fixating pull of this expressive form. The poem’s name suggests the idea that my writing is always unfinished, imperfect, for constantly I learn and change.
