New poetry book, Alice Walks the Night, is free to read here

My new poetry book, Alice Walks the Night, is available for free here -

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V28Ot7fb25-ttcpgMZDOzjMt9W00oE7H/view?usp=drive_link

It's a collection of 119 poems. 

I own all the rights to my books, but they stopped selling in 2015, so I thought why not make it free.

I started planning it last year and put it on the backburner while being homeless, but I was sitting in a pub yesterday afternoon with my usual cup of coffee and decided to finish it off.

So here it is. Enjoy. 

A Poem a Day (672): Gusts - a handful of hay(na)ku

My dad passed away earlier this month, so I haven't felt like writing. Today it's raining. Sleek. You can hear the soft speed of cars passing through. 
 
These poems are inspired by a prompt from NaPoWriMo.net. They are not related and are meant to be read separately. Prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: a hay(na)ku consists of a three-line stanza, where the first line has one word, the second line has two words and the third line has three words. 
 
 

Gusts,

playful air,

feather-light touch.

---

 

Waiting

for moments

to land. Patience.

---

 

Hands

creep sly,

numbers eating time.

---

 

Lyrics

dancing over

tramlines of notes.

Emotions

strung, remembered,

sung, empathy won.

 

---

Doors

so invisible

you cannot seek,

 

cobwebbed handles hidden,

tomorrow expectant,

unopened.

---

 

Fancy.

Not free.

Laboured. Caged inside.

---

 

Long

is the

walk to freedom.

---

 

Heady,

the lily,

bathed in pollen.

---

 

Spaniel,

red bucket,

new best pal.

---

 

Amazon.

Delivered. Opened.

Artful cat waits.

---

 

Rose.

Lemon’s breath.

Head now snapped.

---

 

Funk.

Get out.

Mojo must rise.

---

 

Scarlet.

99 balloons

racing the wilds.

---

 

Solitary.

Smoke wisps,

curling gnarled hands.

---

 

Lashes,

no tears,

dashed with rain.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 23, 2024

Little brainstorms (2-minute poems)

If you fancy writing some fiction or poetry, or reading other people's, head over to JD Mader's website, 2minutesgo... 

Some little brainstorms... 

 
1 THE MESSENGER
 
In the gust
dust swells, panic caught,
misses a cue in the line.
 
A tumbleweed plays,
scrawls out your name
in the dirt,
 
leaves a memory
imprinted that neither one of us
wishes to recall.
 
I watch it skirt the road,
free, feeling it knows I’m right here,
just waiting for it to leave.
 
 

2 IN THE HOUR
 
Wait on pause,
take a trip,
think it out,
delay the plan,
relate the way,
time it completely wrong,
say it in song,
say it isn’t right.
 
You can choose the date
or pretend to lose.
 
We fathom the night
in the close of day.
These are the hands
that wound the clock,
and clocking out,
they forgot to pray.
 
 

3 FREEFALL
 
It’s a freefall,
endless. We are inclined
to be as we ever were,
without pretence,
No disguise.
No more than three words.
 
We are as the land wishes,
as the trees grieve,
as the ground breathes.
And nothing echoes aloud
except that which burned before,
ever here,
always now,
despite the years
flown
by.
 

 
4 MINDS
 
In the mind of the other
we are one. As we might be,
as we might see, and be here,
waiting, knowing, seeing,
as calm as a blackbird.

 
 
5 ELFIN FORESTS
 
Elfin forests,
crystal clear streams,
an endless dream of being,
where the twig-strewn ground breathes
in summer’s sway, where our feet tread,
sink into earth, just resting.
We are breath. We are here. We be.
 

 
6 THE CATCH
 
In the unsung song we hear
the passing of a thought, a treasured
heart, a memory. The thing that fell foul,
the betrayal, the slip, the echo
of the abject thing. The bird caught,
the tripwire; this endless rebegin.
And we are heard sliding.
Here, there is no catch word,
no rail, no mat.
We are falling. And we are free.
 
 

7 SINKING
 
In the morrow we will begin,
counting numbers,
drawing circles with our fingers.
This sand sinks, scuppers,
water fills. It’s a cue to bury it all,
seal it over, never
to be found.
 

 
8 THE ANCIENTS
 
The ancients stand tall,
stretch stone arms to the sky.
We are small. Astounded.
Can only stare up at the moon,
its sound rays crowning them,
the earth gathering dust.
 
 

9 SERENADE
 
A moonlight serenade
without harp or drum,
no voice, no harm, no motion.
Only quiet. And light. And devotion.
In this setting we are might,
we are ever, we are chosen.
Seated, the same. Just bones.
 

 
10 THE APPLECART
 
The applecart. Rocked. Smoked. Out.
The whodunnit. The mystery. 
Seeing all, he fans flames to the sky,
listens, draws a picture, imagines ruin.
It feeds it out, off the scale,
watches the burn.
 

 
11 LIKE BATS
 
Shadows mock the living,
line the roads for the forgotten,
the lost, the fragmented.
There once was water here.
Now there is an absence of it.
Where there was flow all is still.
In the moonlight, jagged bats flit,
avoid the cage drawing near.

 
12 REPEAT

Echoes.
In the walls.
Beneath sound.
Without a wakening.
They wander out,
forsaken.
They wander in
with a newfound thing.
Here is breath.
Without echo.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, December 10, 2023
 
 

Remembrance Sunday 2022

Some poems for Remembrance Sunday. In memory of family members and everyone else who has served or is serving in a war, at home or abroad.

Poppy seeds (WW2)
 
We rise as soldiers,
taken from our beds as youths,
stripped from the warmth of family
to lands we’ve never seen,
places never heard of before,
from conversation and cosy silences
to the roar of guns, planes, bombs,
scuff of dirt, splintered wounds.

We suffer it for the greater cause,
memories of loved ones we’ve left,
hiding in the bowels of the Underground
and hideaways not built for this.
We charge into the face of danger
not knowing if it sees us,
not knowing if it will turn its cheek
and let us return back home. 

 
Sunflowers (Ukraine)
 
We think on a thing that’s true,
talk of freedom, a reflection of the time
we cannot have, this yesterday of ours.
Boots stamp the hills of our country flat,
choke it with fire, wails and bullets,
black smoke, explosions splintering glass.
The snake rides its hide for 40 miles out,
carves a barren trench in our supple soil.
 
We hide inside our own shocked expressions.
This is not living. It’s a smothering of life,
this sharp shock to the consciousness.
He walks with death, this stickman, the usurper,
this mad dictator whose greed is his undoing.
The old women weep. They hug our hearts
to their chests. We are rag dolls. Sunflowers
nod beneath a pale blue, quaking sky.
 
Where are the saviours? Where are our rescuers?
We ask for our skies to be sheltered,
but we are pleading to the silence of fear.
People fight and people tower ever higher,
growing in magnitude to match their courage,
but we are small; the children are so small.
We ball our fists and scream into the dark,
wondering if our outrage will see us through.
 
The enemy is coming; he is close on our heels.
We can smell him through the smoldering wood
and he pretends to know our weaknesses.
But we are strong; we are united in our fight.
The sun may go down in our restless sky,
but we will never sink lower than the horizon.
We hold the sunflowers against our skin,
bathe in the golden glow they bestow.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone
 

The Sunflowers poem has been published in this collection of poetry and prose, raising money for Ukraine - https://books2read.com/StandTogetherUkraine

New release: A Poem a Day (poetry book)

I have a new book release today (the first since 2015!). It's a poetry book called A Poem a Day.

It's a collection of 446 poems, written between April 2020 and March 2021. In April 2020, I decided to try to write a poem a day on my blog, Vixie’s Stories, following prompts on NaPoWriMo.net. The following month I kept going. And I’m still trying to keep it up.

It has just published on Amazon. It's also on Smashwords (which will soon distribute it to places like Barnes & Noble).

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09B6CPVKD

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09B6CPVKD

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1095735

A Poem a Day (394): Blighted trees (4 haiku)

 

 

Thank Crunchie it’s Friday! Another weekend beckons. Let’s hope it’s sunny. 

Here are some little haiku that are about trees. Just trees. Nothing else. No deeper meaning, lol.

 

I was reading an article about writing and inspiration. Where does it come from? Very few of my poems are about myself or my life, so I often find it interestingly funny when people think they are about me. I think writing about myself would be pretty boring, unless I was writing a memoir. And that would be a rocket to the bizarre. 

 

At school, in the big school, our class was encouraged to write about ourselves, our own experiences, but do we? Do we want to? Interestingly, at infant and junior school, we were encouraged to write about anything, the more fantastic the better. 

 

When I was listing my book somewhere (while self-publishing), I was surprised to find poetry listed under non-fiction. I felt like maybe I needed to stick a 'fiction' label on the front of my book.  

 

Is poetry meant to be non-fiction? I don't think there are any rules when it comes to writing. It would be boring to stick to them. I guess some people write poetry about their lives, but I reckon a lot more are writing fiction. I guess with fictional novels, it’s obvious it’s fiction. With poetry, maybe it’s not so obvious. I’m doing a poetry course at the moment, and looking at everyone else’s poems every week, I think they’re also mainly fiction. That’s the adventure in it. 

 

I think many people write as a form of escapism, so you’re outside yourself, you’re writing whatever comes into your head in those minutes or hours about made-up characters, situations you’ve read about elsewhere, situations you imagine, snapshots of life, ideas, emotions made into scenes, people you’ve encountered, life’s mysteries, the common elements of experience. Your own life or your way of looking at things might creep in at the edges at times, but the fun of writing is that you imagine things outside yourself. Otherwise I wouldn’t find it fun. I’d be writing about facts, like a journalist, or keeping a diary.

 

I wrote a song on this subject, called If I Write a Song (it ‘ain’t gonna be about me). I went out for a walk last year in lockdown and started thinking about this subject, came home and wrote it up. My uncle came up with a melody for it and sings it. He turned it into a song, into something bigger than it was. But, anyway, enough of the natter, here we go with some trees…

 

 

Blighted trees

 

Lightning singed, limb-struck,

blackened trunks empty out of

life. Hollowed ground. Sit.

 

 

White plague creeps over

brown knobbled branches emptied

of apples. It yearns.

 

 

Hollowed out, grey self.

Once majestic, skeletal.

A woodpecker stops.

 

 

By night they walk, stalk

their forest lair. Faint spectres.

Giants with no bark.

 

 

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 26, 2021