anxious, shaking
self-mutilation
sighing open and surrendering
but there
in the darkness
the man wiping my cheeks dry
he said
"look at me, lovely creature
everything was going to be all right."
I first discovered cut out poetry through Bee, many years ago on her beautiful blog Vivatramp, and it was through Bee that I was introduced to it again, this time via her Patreon. I've been a Patron of Bee for well over a year now and I always look forward to the latest creative post hitting my email inbox.
A few months ago I took one of my dearest friends to the local seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare. There we proceeded to explore vintage shops and spiritual shops, we played badminton on the windy beach, he wrote 'send nudes' in the sand in giant letters and we sat for a while on the pier listening and witnessing everyone's reaction to it. We also visited many a charity shop. D purchased a vintage Scrabble set and I spent a while discussing the idea of cut out poetry with the manager. Together we flicked through books, pondering which would hold the vastest range of phrases and words that I could cut out and fit together into something new. I walked away with a copy of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach and a mind full of tentative inspiration.
I took an evening for myself, painted some rectangles of watercolour paper with various colour palettes and spent several hours reading the first several chapters of the book, cutting out anything that tugged at my inspiration. The first few lines fell together fairly quickly, and after a while of playing around with ideas and themes and layout, I had a clear view of what this poem was going to be.
I'm very happy with how it turned out. It means a lot to me personally, and I like that no matter how hard I try to stray to something new, my own experiences always find their own way of leaking out of me. I dedicate this poem to my boyfriend, for being the man who wipes my own cheeks dry. x
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