Forget her personality and remember your humanity. Feel her vulnerability and let her go. Let go of your urges and think about how your 5 minute is going to change her entire life. How it's going to change her mindset. You really want to kill a soul just because of pleasure? Look in her eyes and see her vulnerability. For the moment you ignore her "NO" is the moment you become the villain. For you are meant to be her guardian not the person she fears. Look deep in yourself and see the monster you've become!

1. The days of my youth have become the days of my old age.

2. Once I was naive. This has not changed.

3. I now know the things I can live without are the things I once thought I could not live without.

4. There is a deep silence in my life caused by knowing I will never again hear the sweet voices of people who have stepped off the edge of this earth and entered whatever lies beyond the last day of life.

5. I believe the most valuable gift I can give is to lay my judgmental mind to rest so my compassionate heart can receive and hear your words

I do not need forget-me-nots, he loves me, he loves me not.

Forget? Forget my first lov, I will not.

Winter storms may have sunk the sun, succumbing beneath the surface of a particularly suffocating snow, but that same buried beam shone upon my parents on the day that I was born.

Except it was not they who were the lucky ones.

The lucky one was me.

There was no greed, no jealousy, no lies, no deceit, that blossomed on that dismal day, for the pollen had distributed already, there upon us three, a new-made family.

Love would now bloom in our hearts, forever and a day.

And that will always be my first love, for all I am was crafted then, and all because of they.

#fiction #fantasy #prose

Blog - Hannahvernon.co.uk

The first time my name was taken from me, I was eight years old. It was second grade, and my peers were perfecting the stage of cognitive development to make comparisons and contrasts, yet could not overcome the difficulty in telling me apart from my twin.

“Pair up with one of the twins.” the teacher would say, when someone needed a partner and my sister and I were still waiting to be picked.

“Hey twin.” A classmate would say, to get my attention. I tried to assert myself, ask why they couldn’t call me by my real name. They defended their actions — they couldn’t tell us apart. Three years into grade school, at third grade now, and they could not decipher us? I was a twin….not a classmate. I was not a peer. Not one of them. Not human. Some other thing. Not Natalie, not me. I was not known for me. I did not have defining characteristics to be enjoyed by others in friendship. I was just a unit.

“The twins.”

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The second time my name was taken, was at home.

“Come here dipsit!” my father would yell at me, trying to get my attention to clean something or watch him teach me a process.

“Whatever, dork.” He’d reply to most of my pleas for kindness.

“Quit pissing around, idiot.” - was a common phrase I heard when I was bored at home, with parents who didn’t put my sisters and I in some sort of sport or program so we wouldn’t be “pissing” around.

Living under that roof was as humiliating as walking through the hallways, mute and shy to everyone chattering to each other in their free time around me. “Twin” soon became replaced with the characteristics they did see in me, such as “midget”, in celebration of my short stature. I did not stray from the limits assigned to me.

My classmates needed a female to be at the bottom rung. They needed me.

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The third time I had my name taken from me, was the last time. I was eighteen, and I was leaving my parent’s home for college. Whatever pet name that slipped out that day has been long forgotten by now.

I would come around in the summers, but it was different this time. The distance helped lessen any tension and blame I placed on them for my lack of cultivated talent or connections I could bring to campus, and shifted the paradigm in that I was more of a guest in their home. I was no longer physically reprimanded for a mistake I made — mistakes that are better learned from with discussion and explanation than the way that they were handled. I was not sure if I was respected, but I was no longer treated like an animal. I was human. I wanted to learn all I could about the world; about others. I wanted to learn a skill - to dance, to write, to volunteer, to succeed.

I was Natalie.

Hey everyone!

Long time no post. I’ve been absolutely slammed but while I have a minute or two, I thought I’d check in and let you know what I’ve been up to and let you all know about some exciting opportunities.

Some of you will remember the Letters from Prison Portal here, where Paul and I would visit prison, teach writing workshops, and post their pieces here. This is where PoetsIN was born. Paul and I realised that writing was a form of therapy and the prisoners were reporting astounding results.

After parting ways with Prose, we tailored our groups further with an emphasis on rehabilitation, mental illness, and suicide prevention. We began to measure the outcomes of each session, and over a set period of time had evidence that what we do worked with 99% of the service users. To put this into perspective, CBT in the UK via the NHS works in 48% of the cases they work with. If CBT doesn’t work, the service user is given no other therapy. Talking therapy such as counselling is no longer provided on the NHS because that was only successful 29% of the time, which is way below the threshold of success the NHS will work with.

With our 99% success rate we went to the UK Charity Commission. Wrote our governing document, recruited 5 trustees, filled in a ridiculously long application form to register as a charity, and submitted it. Then we waited.

Whilst we sat thinking of all the things we could’ve included in our application but didn’t, and worrying about all the things we may have done wrong, we carried on with our groups. Expanding them and trialling new techniques and measures of capturing data to ensure maximum impact. We got such good feedback from the prison directors that we were offered a grant from a trust for $50k - before we were even a charity - which is unheard of. Visit www.poetsin.com/testimonials to see what people have been saying about what we do.

Four months passed and we finally received our answer. We’d done it! We were a charity.

Since then we have won three awards. We were named Mental Health Heroes 2017 alongside Talia Bennington, Mental health workshop provider of the year 2018, and Nonprofit of the Year 2018. We have also employed some faces you may recognise. The lovely Karen, who used to design Prose images, the badass Lish, and we’ve just hired a wonderful fundraiser, Pippa. MilesNowhere and Amanda Cary have also joined the family and have been vital to PoetsIN, and my own personal sanity.

We are now a week away from launching online writing therapy groups that people can access from wherever they’re located, along with in-community groups external to prisons across certain parts of the UK to begin with.

We also have a growing Facebook Group (www.facebook.com/groups/poetsin) that is full of old faces from here and new faces from beyond, along with a website that has mental health and writing blogs galore.

We’ve opened our own publishing company, PoetsIN Publishing, that offers the best royalties EVER and any royalties taken by PoetsIN Publishing are all ploughed back into the charity to reach more people who need our help. The best thing about the publishing company is that we want to publish poetry. Many traditional publishers don’t. We do. We are publishing print and eBooks, and have already accepted submissions that will be released this year.

We have a current challenge running for an anthology. Our first anthology open submission call was a huge success and will be published within the next month - we’re just putting the final touches to it. The current submission call is on the topic of addiction, and you are all more than welcome to submit! The more the merrier. Visit this link to submit https://buff.ly/2EdHxwe

Those of you in the UK should come down to our huge all day fundraising event in Camden, London 28th July. It is being held at the iconic Nambucca venue that has housed Oasis, Blur, and many more. We have a full day of amazing lineups from spoken word poets, comedians, and acoustic and indie music. All acts are donating their talents and time to us for free along with many companies who have donated prizes that we will raffle and auction off at the event. We also have a Skydive coming up in September, more details about that can be found on our social networks.

There have been people that doubted Paul and I - along with our mission - but our determination, skills, and experience have served us well, built our confidence, and given a much-needed lifeline to those that truly needed keeping safe.

Setting up a charity is far harder than setting up a business, and if we can do that, you guys can do anything. One word, one poem, one story at a time.

Paul and I both hope you’ll join us elsewhere on the interwebs but in the meantime, write on!

#PoetsIN #PoetsINPrison #Charity #NPO #Publishing #WritingContests #GetPublished #Poetry #InsideOut

My heart might truly combust. 

SO MUCH LOVE for a dead man. 

Nowhere for it to go but throughout every nook, and cranny of the universe. 

Currently spending my nights under the rooftop of both his life, and his death. 

How does one cope? 

Tell me, how in the hell does one cope?

I Loved him with every inch of me, and absolutely nothing less to the point, that when I think of even his corpse.. 

body parts of mine get worked up that if I were to name, make me feel like I am wrong in every sense of every way. 

And now I'm looking over my shoulder. 

Now I'm looking over my shoulder. 

I screamed his name out in a parking lot today. 

One that we fucked in too many times before too ever quite count. 

I did it thinking that it might ease the pain with some damage control. 

The price of an echo.

The price of my echo.

Worthless.

I opened up my email today to find a lovely surprise: my poem "Daybreak" that I submitted to Coffee With Underhill was read during their podcast five days ago. A little happy dance. 

Here is the link to copy and paste:

https://soundcloud.com/user-557255780/coffee-with-underhill-03-20-2017

Today wasn't all bad at all. :)