Urgent Information for All Women

Nadine Dorries MP begins a campaign to restrict abortion for women in the Chamber of the UK Houses of Parliament on Tuesday 31st October.

If the right to an abortion is decreased or removed from women in the UK, (as it is elsewhere across the globe), how will that be a step forward?

What misogynist hatred is this? You would condemn a woman to 9 months carrying an unwanted child, to which she must give birth? She will then be forced to raise the child, be expected to care for it, provide for it and educate it, until he/she can fend for him/herself? All the while the mother will be aware that she did not want this child, and that a 'civilized society' forced her to spend her life this way. We do not give life prison sentences to some rapists, but instead would force the 'victim' of rape to endure a life caring for any resulting child?

And the children? Babies born to unwilling mothers are put at greater risk of physical and mental distress. When a child keeps you awake screaming for nights on end with toothache, and you did not want that child, what likely outcome is there? Is this what 'society' wants?

The reason behind this thinking is that life is somehow sanctified. A foetus has miraculously been created (by some Higher Power) and who are we to deny it life? What just God would allow this poisonous logic? When we deliberately breed cattle for the table, do God-fearing Christians take up arms against our intention to create life? If a woman takes medication for a life-threatening condition and suffers an early-term miscarriage, is she to become a murderer? Women do not schedule abortions thoughtlessly. They are a necessary medical procedure made to protect womens' health, mental well-being and genetic vulnerability.

Life is what we make it. Every day, many spontaneous and planned actions result in the conception of a child or children. Many of these will naturally miscarry undetected. Others may be lost during pregnancy. Others may grow full-term and be born. There is no mysticism in this. We have an over-populated planet, and many common dangers affect the balance of human beings on this planet. But I, for one, have no desire to make mothers out of unwilling women for the sake of religious or theological argument.

Please contact your MP and give him/her short shrift if you agree.

I'll get off my soapbox now and return to inane blogging shortly.
Penny Clark Lapenna, mother of 3 daughters and 2 miscarried foetuses, who fervently believes in a woman's right to a safe abortion.

Things that I am afraid of

Is our fear of the Dark really a fear of that unknown disease lurking within, the unforeseen malevolent attacker, the unguessable moment of our own death?

What wakes you in the night in a cold sweat? Are adult fears just extensions of those childhood worries – is that a vampire, a witch, a lecherous neighbour? Does that translate into - will I amount to anything? Will I be found deficient in social graces and die alone? Will I achieve a significant something? Will I ever escape the daily threat of poverty?

Studying our human fears displays the underbelly of society, which most of us prefer remains hidden. And yet within the nugget of what torments us most is a core that hints at our best qualities – kindness to overcome fears, gentility in the face of man’s inhumanity, optimism that our best will be good enough if we believe it to be so.

Just a thought. Aren't we all supposed to face our own fears?

From womb to room

After they exit the parasitical inhabitance of your body, they take up residence upstairs. At night you think about them, in a way that is not possible when they are awake; demanding, provoking, embellishing your own existence with extraneous de-railing thoughts and feelings.

They are.... CHILDREN.

Progeny you have spawned, often started from a moments inattention to detail, like that pill, that condom, that retraction you meant to make... Now expanding the global domination of the planet by raucous humanity, they define your every waking moment differently - no longer a solo adventurer tip-toeing a fragile way. Instead, your family spread around you like wanton proof of illicit urges you didn't curb. This seething mass of growing flesh mutates its six arms, three heads, three mouths into three angelic expressions of delight unconfined. Who would not wish to share in the anarchy of irrepressible glee that is a pillowfight fuelled by late night rations of jammy toast?

Beware. Thats how they get you.

Legoland
The freshly beaten ragrug shucks up from her mini trainers.

Light from the tall window
illuminates sides of yellow bricks, red squares, green cubes
on the cobbled base board.
She places toys that don’t fit
- a horse, lopsided Tigger, a lions head with open jaws
his plastic orange chin resting on the purely rational board -
using her three years of experience.

The outsize bricks would hurt my hand.
It’s insistence on exact longitudes and latitudes would irk.
But in my garden
I would revel in unmatched colours
and sprouting tessellations of Gaudiesque proportions
that bloom forever unwatered.

I peer through her shielded eyes
- from optic nerve along neural pathways to the brain where I must be refused entry -
with my eyes, some thirty nine summers older
my hands craggy beside her vitality of thigh, her buoyancy of cheek
her darkly penetrating gaze under fringe.

Cats can’t do lego, as she removes the tower from a pit of fur,
but I can.

July 2006 with Tabitha

...Are we Human Starfish?

Starfish

The bed, a profundity, probed by toes

Immeasurable in grades of softness

Since toe tips lack subtlety

Of form; texture.

I lie indistinct as the lurk of Ophelia’s father

In wait - a lady in waiting

Spread-eagled for my Othello

Tell Iago I lie in the arms of Morpheus

If it should hasten him to my bed

Where, displayed

By retreating surf, the duvet

Uncovers my five-pronged

Opulence.

...Dr Seuss meets Margaret Atwood

I have now submitted books to two publishers via online submissions. That's www.transita.co.uk and www.librosinternational.com - the former publishes great new fiction by women, the latter is a new venture based here in Spain.

It's been a strange journey, even to get this far... from my first disastrous effort at a novel (called Subliminals - Sex and Death !! I may resuscussitate it one day but for now lets say it was a 'juvenile work' written at 21, freshly dropped out of university), to the current head count of 2 completed novels, 2 unfinished novels, 2 published articles in Canada, some music reviews and interviews for indie magazines in the UK, couple of articles on the web (not including my blog) one novella for 10 year olds, a box of short stories for small children, and two overflowing crates of poems. Oh, and I didn't include that poem published in Puffin Post when I was 13 and 3/4's...

It's hard to get GOOD feedback. I go to a writers group (Jalon Valley Writers, based in Alcalali) and distribute snippets of work to friends, but I kinda hoped this blog would generate feedback. Course it doesn't...yet. Not competing with the 6 million other regular bloggers in the UK. So if you're out there in Lapland trying to get your first novel published, or write regularly for a Mexican poetry 'n' porn magazine, or whatever, do drop in and say hi... its kinda lonely without you.

Coming soon...
An idea for a screenplay based on a future where America has become Hollywoodia in the south, and the Canadian Atheists in the north, and one huge bible belt encircles the globe. What happens when a god-fearing lass falls in love with an exiled atheist, who is fighting the global power of the Media...