Friday 13 April 2012

Hey. I've moved on from blogspot, so if you want further updates, check me out at raeljamespoetry.tumblr.com or www.raeljamespoetry.co.uk. Thanks

Saturday 16 April 2011

Letter to my Mother

This is a poem, as the title suggest, that I wrote to my mother.

I feel like often we just assume the people who are dear to us know how we feel about them, but very rarely actually take the time to tell them.

My mum has had a profound effect on my life, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to let her know.

Monday 14 March 2011

I Met a Girl

I'm convinced that pretty much every song ever written is a love song. They might not all be about romantic feelings for a particular individual, but most songs involve loving something; sex, money, a sports team, autotune.

And while it might sound obvious to say, I still think that pretty much all of the most powerful pieces ever written are about romantic love. Whether that be the expression of love for a partner of fifty years, the giddy excitement of a young love, or the painful and often bitter memories of a lost love or broken relationship.

Yet I also think it's true to say that love often means different things to different people. These days, love can mean everything and nothing, and there are some who don't even believe that love exists, let alone that it can last a lifetime.

This is a piece written about the process of thinking you might be falling in love, and all the things that made me feel as I thought about living in a world that in many ways doesn't seem to believe in love any more.

Voices

I don't know about you, but I feel like we live in a world where we're constantly bombarded by voices from every side, trying to get us to buy whatever they're selling.

My response is often to try to filter those voices, and in a quest to be an individual who doesn't conform to societal norms (whatever they are) or advertisers' advances, I tend to try and block everything out.

Yet I often worry that this mentality has a really corrosive effect on my ability to listen to things that are really worthwhile, people that are really worthwhile, and that's not the person that I want to be.

I want to offer hope, faith and love to each and every person I come into contact with, and this poem is about my struggle to be more like that.

Maybe you'll be able to relate to it.

The Morning Light

Here's a piece I wrote a while back about my struggles with hay fever.

I decided to purposely exaggerate the severity of my feelings to add a humorous slant, hopefully it comes across that way, rather than becoming a self-indulgent rant that wallows in self pity!

Hope you enjoy it.