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

[Literarily, journals are problematic. Unless you’re an astronaut, a war reporter, or an arctic explorer (and sometimes even then), there are profound limitations on the narrative merit of real life. But what about surreal life? The following is an excerpt from a collection of my dreams, recorded over the course of a year.]

Sight

The first thing is that it’s grey, sloping woods, like in every Russian war movie from the past century – a tangle of thin, gnarled grey trees stretching from grey upward into lighter grey.

The second thing is that everyone is blind.

There’s a room where people go, in ones and twos, to tell one another secrets. To pray. Whatever. It’s a few degrees cooler in this room. I’m not sure whether people take the sacredness of this room seriously, but the fact that almost no one’s ever here, even in the crushing heat, is a good indication. There’s a dartboard along one of the far walls, which seems silly. To get to this room, you cross from a wooden platform via zipline, which is really just a chunky metal chain stretching upward into oblivion, swinging downward like a very unsafe version of a Discovery Zone rope swing. Or you can just stretch and scramble your way upward onto the far platform, but this is frowned upon. The room is long, and very dark, which I suppose doesn’t matter. There’s an off-white box of a vintage PC centered against one wall, near the entrance – one of various instances of obsolesced technology as ignored decor. As I pass it, I think: This is what I’m doing here. We have to write all of this down.

This is where I go to tell Stacy I’m not blind.

“You already know what I’m going to tell you,” I say.

“Say it,” she says.

Stacy has suspected for some time. My not being blind anymore. First when I noticed one of her tattoos. Second, when she was throwing things at me to see if I could see and I sort of forgot she was doing it and dodged a little bit, something sharp probably. Third, when I was getting my own tattoo, and lodged a minor complaint, ostensibly based on having felt the error, but of course Stacy knew that was bullshit.

I didn’t want anyone to know I wasn’t blind, so I started practicing what people call one’s “beggar face.” It just means looking blind. Stacy doesn’t seem to care, but still, I don’t want anyone here to know that I can see. I haven’t been here long enough to know whether or not they kill their gods.

Purportedly, there are two other people who have sight. I haven’t met them yet. Or maybe I have, and they just have better beggar face than I do.

Road Trip/Mayflower/The Squirrels

Thomas Middleditch and I are going to repeat this vaguely coastal road trip as many times as it takes. Which is at least three.

Each time it's only slightly different, like a historical glitch, circling back on itself in fits of interruption and resumption.

And one last thing that bears noting: the squirrels in this world (Tom explains) are malicious. They're essentially what the birds are to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Later, we will hang glide over the Mayflower, the historical site where it famously crashed off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. After all, Tom remarks, there’s no safer place from squirrels than a hang glider.

Cornfield Cult Film Festival

I sit in the low-topped muscle car, just sweating, for what feels like forever. I am feeling things out, pretending to be her daughter, at this weird, cult-film-inspired festival in the middle of nowhere that appears to 100% share a guest list with the nearest comic-con.

Why her daughter? Am I that much younger looking? No; this is swiftly confirmed by the fact that people start mistaking me for her almost instantly. Is it because I’m embarrassed? Because knowing so little about a full blood sister is head-cockingly weird, whereas being a daughter implies distance, estrangement, adoption, switched babies at birth… any number of good reasons to not have known this person who shares my genes almost exactly? Yes, that’s the one.

I finally do extricate myself from that suffocating little car, picking my way across the defunct cornfield to one of a slew of concrete warehouse buildings, gutted and shelled for this momentous occasion. Inside, throngs of people who parked on the field are milling about – discussing, theorizing, arguing, reliving – this horrible little movie whose tangential excitement should have died down, culturally, about one week after it came out.

Some plaid-clad showrunner arrives and sticks me in a pair of enormous, clunky platform shoes with treaded soles, and I don’t question why (this is not necessarily weirder than other things happening concurrently). The reason becomes clear when I am led out to a slab of wet concrete in the field, evidently to execute some impoverished version of the Mann’s Chinese Theater nonsense. I am flanked by others in weird shoes, apparently from the film, who eye me with a mixture of excitement and suspicion.

The only person who leaves me alone at this thing, who doesn’t buy for a moment that that I am ¡her!, is a gal who turns out to actually be her daughter. She is round and frank and ingenuous, a sharp crop of black hair framing her pale face. She looks exactly like her. Well, like half of her.

The reason this girl (my niece/a stranger) chats me up but never supposes that I am her is because she knows that her mother is dead.

Well, of course she’s dead. I should have known that.

Heroin

Speeding down the side of a forested mountain, I should be questioning the safety of my companions, but mostly I'm kicking myself for not doing heroin before.

Within moments I am an old pro. Toggling back and forth between the two types, ingeniously labeled “brown sugar” and “white sugar,” it becomes clear that we are smuggling this shit. The police arrive, and everyone debates in hushed caws what to do.

But the answer is obvious: more heroin.

Obits

Near the border, a small, bespectacled man makes his way past hot, unruly clusters of people. He is going to the office to meet his partner. Although they could not look more physically dissimilar (the man’s partner is heavy, towering, untucked, shaped as though poured into the warped jug of his button-down shirt), they each look 100% their part. They are obit writers, a task they approach with the wry dedication befitting their profession. Through a clerical error – an intentional one, coming definitely from someone and somewhere – the small man learns that his own mother is dead. That she has been dead for three months.

Tornado Drill

As tornadoes dance in the distance, like so many snakes being charmed, the sky beneath them slurs from a rich peach to a drained antique yellow. This is the color of greyish gold that makes everything around it look greener, and there is plenty of green. For miles around, there is nothing and no one, only my friend and I as we look from newly planted tree to newly planted tree, some roadside project, for the fattest trunk or the deepest roots, something we can hug in a crisis. I am poised to make a very funny tree hugging joke, but she’s busy tugging at thick strands of grass. Thinking? Hard to say. She’s an idiot, but I’m still going to save her life if I can.

The other part of this is that we’re rehearsing a play. Today is our first rehearsal, and it’s a pro bono gig in a ramshackle little cabin, about fourteen meters from where we’re standing now. Totally senseless, no pay, and it’s the middle of nowhere, but we all love the author. You can get people to do just about anything if they love the author.

A spiral of stone-black clouds whirs overhead and moves on. We decide to head into the cabin, to check on the boys and to see if they have a basement.

Inside, the mood is best described as picnic-like, and the director is keen on rehearsing lines. The stage manager is tossing me my lines, handwritten, one at a time on ripped fragments of notebook paper. The director, lying on his side, propped on one elbow, looking like an embarrassing antique doll, questions my lack of commitment to the production. I assure him of it.

Once the director has stormed off or supernaturally vanished (who cares which), I wander to the porch and look out over this great idyllic nowhere paradise. The danger seems to have retreated, reduced to an overdramatic wind with harmless tendrils of tornadoes in the deep background. My friend suggests “running lines” but really taking cover in the closet – which she assures me is the safest place during a storm (it is not) – to make out with the boys. She’s making sense, and anyway, she likes the one I’m not crazy about, so I figure what the hell.

As we head back inside, someone announces that the storm has so completely cleared, the danger so completely passed, that there is no need to take shelter in the closet at all. Everyone is laidback and bored, passively resentful but accepting of having their time so elaborately wasted. I am quietly angry. No one is making out.

I bitterly gather my scraps of lines from the wood floor and listlessly put them in order. This tornado was a total fucking wash.

Apartment Hunting/Tree of Life

Looking from the windows to the north and south, there’s nothing but interstate wasteland, grey on grey, billboards for hundred-year-old products. But to the east and west, the windows reveal an exotic playground of green and tangled trees. Returning with the landlord to the courtyard of the apartment complex, apparently located along I-95, south of some dystopian future New York, there grows a giant, gnarled tree. Low-hanging elements that can’t quite be called fruit dip low and at odd angles. It looks as though it would be fun to climb, but you find yourself wondering: would the tree like to be climbed? I try to choose between the superior view of the second floor and the convenience of the first, for when the baby comes.

Some time later and for no reason, we cut the tree open, and inside is a gnarled wilderness of cerulean blue and vivid green, a little liquid civilization. People talk about the sensation of peaceful, maddening irrelevance beneath a star-filled sky, the individual against the universe. But they have it backward. Staring into the colorful veins of this tree, descending into some better, smaller universe, how much closer it must be to the perfection of the atom.

Capture the Flag

There’s a kind of dead that’s almost dead, but not quite. That’s the kind of dead I am when the boys come running up the hill, playing some soon-to-be-abandoned variation of Capture the Flag.

They are covering me, a noble investment in my modesty, but in covering me, they are burying me.

Shoe Shopping

We go “shoe shopping,” my new friend and I, which means filching the shoes from beneath the racks on the upper level of this nightclub in Paris. Why so many people have chosen to take their shoes off is beyond me.

I select a pair of seafoam green ankle booties, calfskin etched with delicate flowers. “You don’t know if it’s calfskin,” my friend says.

At dawn, I walk through the gardens with a small, glorified paper dixie cup of beer. We go into the museum, but there is nothing to see, except for a beautiful, subservient academic type standing watch. She doesn’t give me any trouble about the beer.

There are so many things I’ve forgotten, still knocking around just beneath the skin.

The water. The ocean or something.

drowning

     in a sea of sin

we sink

    with grim bones

we fall

     as shooting stars

Unfurl your fiery magic,

watch the naked truth

awaken in deep veins,

tears of the bloodstone

running red rivulets

in the creases of hands.

Pink frost moon blushes

crimson in facets of light,

stars sport bloodstone gem

pendants in mahogany sky.

entwined in roots of flowers,

virgin stones stained

with dark wine blood,

spiritual powers of

healing stone plucked

like grapes from

vine of life,

mending hunks of

bleeding flesh.

Shall I compare you to a winter's night?

You are more frigid and more pitiless. 

Blizzards slam into towns with all their spite,

And winter's an eternal barrenness.

At times will Jack Frost's magic flare up wild,

And oft will dregs of silver bleach the earth;

And every man and beast touched be defiled,

Claimed victims of the season new in birth. 

But your sour aura always will prevail,

Nor can your visage ever hope to smooth,

Nor for you shall e'en death desire to hail,

When I have made known to the world this truth.

            In only parting with life shall I cease,

            And only then will you and I find peace.

Tears bathe the walls

in tremulous sobbing,

tasting rooted seeds

of hovering tension.

Soul leashed

to dark floorboards,

wilting in gloom,

permeating room.

Water stained ceilings,

pungent debris,

clipped wings,

and layered skin.

Room full of silence

and eroding bones.

I’m locked up

inside of a man.

I beg to be free

I want to be me.

small moments perch

with dignity, like cardinals

their proud bleeding souls

on a half-dead branch

assimilating the cold

poised in their own particular

grief 

snowlight pierces

a pinhole in this curtain

exposes the backside

of winter

          a crack in february's wall 

a small stream of light

squints

collects in the corner

with weighted words 

a blinding blur between

grieving language

          and the poetics of birds

this darkness knows nothing

of the sun

its laboring simile of

rebirth

the soft curve

of a shadow's presence

lah  2.3.17 ©®

I fell asleep

I dreamt I had a canvas

And a palette with blobs of densely colored paint

I began painting on this canvas feverishly, feeding the canvas its food

My hand danced, stroke after stroke with a wisdom of technique I questioned possible

My brushes moved with a rhythm, too choreographed for coincidence

I was destined to paint a masterpiece

A voice, not audible, it was intuitive

Suggested I call the painting "earth"

I awoke after the last stroke of my brush was meticulously placed upon the canvas

And saw what I had created was no longer a dream, but a beautiful reality.