Poetry - Lynn White

Aftermath How can it be that someone I don't see, only think  about sometimes, but never contact, or try to, leaves such a gap, in their final leaving. My life has not been changed. All is the same. So why the difference now that you're really in the past, when you were already part of my past and not of my future. Nothing has changed for me, not really, not in reality. So why do you occupy my thoughts in a different way. Why does my future feel different now you cannot be part of it, even though you never would be and I knew it. Perhaps because I can no longer dream you there. But why not when you could never be there and I knew it the same then, as I know now. Why is it different, now even to dream? http://www.withpaintedwords.com/view_submission.php?news_id=926

There’ll Be Ice Cream After If they hadn’t asked her to smell the nice scent. If she hadn’t remembered the scent from before. There would have been no screams, no stamping up and down on the trolley. The nurse would still have her cap on and the doctor would have no fist or feet marks on his white coat, no red hand mark on his pale cheek. There would have been no shock, horror reports to those who had put away Red Riding Hood and were waiting anxiously for news of their little girl. But they did ask her. They did ask her. The scent wasn’t nice. She knew it. And there was no ice cream afterwards either. They’d lied about that as well. A disappointing day. (first published in Calliope 2015) https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/therell-be-ice-cream-after-poem-by-lynn-white-my-sweet-word-series/

Through the Glass Alice saw herself in her looking glass and walked through into a topsy turvy world where everything was back to front and inside out. She drifted into a dreamscape of madness and unreality, without breaking the glass. Uncut by the shards of her mirror or the place she entered into. She had only to wake to make things the right way round again. But walking through a clear glass, a transparent window, it would have been different. Her reflection would float towards a place where everything seemed the right way round. Where everything made sense and added up sweet with reason. A place without madness, which looked easy to enter and had no sharp edges. Apparently. But this glass forms an invisible barrier to the other side and the life that seduces and entices her. And to get through she has to break the glass, whose sharp edges cut her and propel her crazily into a place where she cannot wake. A jagged, topsy turvy place where everything spin...

Doll My little princess. My china doll with your peachy skin and golden hair.  In pink frills I dressed you up, combed you and curled you. Made you into my special pet, my little angel, to be loved and cherished. My creation. My little girl. But all the time you were making up yourself, getting ready to  smash the porcelain, and break out to become  the creation you had already made up even before you painted  and inked your pearly skin, combed your hair straight, and gelled it  into jagged spikes with a pink splash. Shockingly, piercing the past, you broke out into your future. For you were never a princess, never a doll, and most of all, little girl, you were never mine, never mine to mould. https://thankyouforswallowing.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/doll/

Which Way I’m on the edge of the horizon looking back. There’s no looking forwards. Looking up I can see the sky, blue or grey like the sea. Reflected sunlight, clouds rippling like waves making shapes in the sand. Wave shapes on the land. Sometimes it’s so bright I can’t tell the blue from the grey, the cloud from the clear, the sky from the sea. The light blinds me. It’s too bright for my eyes and leaves me confused on the edge of the horizon, on a thin line with only one way to go. First published in Calliope, October 2015 http://www.calliopemagazine.com/