Why do you tell me it’s better this way
Better than dying just after a prayer
It’s only my skin and there’s nothing to say
Life is a wave and it comes every day
Dreams of great beauty , the lessons are clear
Why do you tell me it’s better this way?
You used to like saying, wanna get laid?
But when we grow older these feelings grow rare
You were biting my skin and there’s lots I might say
I liked that some people thought I was staid
When I’d do whatever, if it was a dare
Why do you wonder ,is it better this way?
Skin is so fragile, we touch our dismay
The in and the out are nearer by far
It’s my only skin and that’s all I ‘ll say
Sand in my eyes and smoke in my hair
You are the wolf who keeps his own lair
Why do you tell me it’s better this way?
We’re thinner than skin but there’s nothing to say
Stan was in the conservatory re-watering the cacti and sweeping the ceiling with a new broom.Mary his wife,[or so she claimed],was in the kitchen making cheese scones and bread for their afternoon tea.Their daughter Laura was taking a bath to wash all the blue raindrops from her hair.A peaceful Saturday scene in the Midland town of Knittingham.
Out of the blue,the doorbell rang.It was Annie their widowed next door neighbour.She was wearing a long blue satin dress with a built in train.”I’m off to London now” she simpered.”Can I give Lyra a lift in my train?”
“I believe unless I have strong disconfirmatory evidence, that my daughter is still in the bath.”Stan said defiantly.
Anne entered the house and ran upstairs.There she saw Lyra wrapped in a large blue towel like object.
“Is this a towel?” Lyra asked pertly
.”I have no evidence either way.”Annie announced.
“Where did you get it from?”
“That big blue window”replied the rosy cheeked girl ironically.”It may be a curtain”
“Oh,dear.Have I erred?” she pondered.
“No,you look very clean to me,though one can never be absolutely certain.” Anne said thoughtlessly as she was aware viruses are not black
“I suppose all one can do is to keep the dirt between certain parameters that each must decide for themselves.The Tudors only bathed once a year. And King Henry Vlllth founded the Church of England just so he could get a divorce from himself,not to mention a little gold too.”
Lyra worked for a publisher in Oxford Street,They were always on the look out for new titles and for money.
“Would you ever consider writing a new self help book,Anne?”
“You can make a good deal of money that way.Self help is in vogue now. I was thinking of:How to divorce yourself in three easy stages using self hypnosis.
We already have :How to found your own Church.” and “How to steal somebody else’s Church in three steps.”
Anne was keen to get an interest as since killing her husband for his money,she was feeling lonely,remote and schizoid, and her affair with Stan was proving a bit slower to take off than she had narcissistically expected.
“I am already a unqualified hypnotist.”she lied agreeably
Just then they heard a strange crash.Stan had been standing on his Habitat chair trying to eavesdrop on the women’s conversation,and it had fallen apart under the weight of his hiking boots.He lay on the carpet looking pale with blood running down his aged head.”Can you ring 999 please ?” he yelped .
Lyra looked at the chair.”No,Dad it’s o.k.I can fix this with some U.H.U glue.I have some in my purple tote under all my medication.
She whispered saucily to Anne,”I’ll text you tomorrow,my darling angel.Love the dress.”Lyra was a trans sexual lesbian paramedic you see,as well as a publisher‘s clerk and also did not have other intriguing money making jobs into the bargainas the English say now and then.
Mary was in the kitchen finishing off her baking.She lived in a world of her own mainly focussed on her second hand Raleigh small wheeled shopper bicycle and its wicker basket that she bought in East Anglia or, to be exact,in Wells-next-the sea.It was now grey but still functional like many other towns in Britain and their inhabitants.She put the cheese scones and butter onto a large elliptical plate and went into the dining room followed by Emile her cat ,who was partial to a knob of butter on a Sunday teatime.
Where was his sister Emily, he wondered blankly? Shouldd feline siblings be separated?It seems very unfair
I can look inside my arm now and it’s red
The blood is glowing like a brilliant jewel
Oh, better being red than being dead
By this blood the body parts are fed
So it’s full of love, it is not cruel
I look inside my arm now and it’s red
Luckily it’s not on my big head
I might feel I was a holy fool
Oh, better being red than being dead
My brain feel full and heavy ,is it lead?
No longer can I study poetry school
I look inside my arm now and it’s red
Once a cure for ills was being bled
It killed more people than a manic mule
Oh, better being red than being dead
I wonder if I broke our Nature’s rule
Improvising with no proper tools
I can look inside my arm now; it is red
When it’s white I’ll know that I am dead
I don’t really know, and don’t care if I ever find out. Originally, I wrote mysteries, but then a short story just came to me so I wrote it out and ended up publishing it in an obscure Canadian feminist journal. Later, it was selected to be in The Best American Short Stories. My second and third stories were in Story and The New Yorker, so I was successful in continuing to publish. I had the needed equipment: a typewriter. I didn’t have an MFA (Master of Fine Arts), but if you look over the last 400 years, most of the good writers didn’t, either.
How old were your children when you started to write?
They were 8 and 10, and my oldest son was grown. When I started, I wrote late at night, after they were in bed. I could do that and get away with it because I’m not much of a housekeeper and I didn’t need much sleep. I liked my kids and didn’t care much about my house, so it worked.
From a practical standpoint, how has being a mother affected your writing?
Initially, there was nothing convenient about writing for me, and there were points when writing even interfered. I’d be in the middle of a sentence and someone needed to go to mall for new shoes, so the sentence would be lost, but I felt my primary, most important job was to raise my kids. I did the writing if I had the time, and if I didn’t, I would come back to it. My attitude was: “Sooner or later, I will get this page right.”
“I wouldn’t be the person I am if I weren’t a mother. I would be very different without children. I would still write, but not in the same way.”
If I had to do it again, though, I’d try not to work full time. In the beginning, I had a lot of energy and a belief in writing, so I could do it, but I’ve never had unlimited time to just write. There were always limits and deadlines, but it’s what pays the bills. “
,……..the idea that semicolons should be avoided has been fully absorbed into popular writing culture. It is an idea pervasive enough that I have had students in my writing classes ask about it: How do I feel about semicolons? They’d heard somewhere (as an aside, the paradoxical mark of any maxim’s influence and reach is anonymity, the loss of the original source) that they shouldn’t use them. To paraphrase Edwin Starr, semicolons—and rules about semicolons—what are they good for?
As we know, semicolons connect two independent clauses without a conjunction. I personally tend to use em dashes in many of these spots, but only when there is some degree of causality, with the clause after the em typically elaborating in some way on the clause before it, idiosyncratic wonkery I discussed in this essay. Semicolons are useful when two thoughts are related, independent yet interdependent, and more or less equally weighted. They could exist as discrete sentences, and yet something would be lost if they were, an important cognitive rhythm. Consider this example by William James:
I sit at the table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish and eating them. My dinner properly is over, and in the heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what I do; but the perception of the fruit, and the fleeting notion that I may eat it, seem fatally to bring the act about.
The semicolon is crucial here in getting the thought across. Prose of the highest order is mimetic, emulating the narrator or main character’s speech and thought patterns. The semicolon conveys James’s mild bewilderment at the interconnection of act (eating the raisins) and thought (awareness he may eat the raisins) with a delicacy that would be lost with a period, and even a comma—a comma would create a deceptively smooth cognitive flow, and we would lose the arresting pause in which we can imagine James realizing he is eating, and realizing that somehow an awareness of this undergirds the act.”
How my heart sings 