Living with Irlen pt.2

I went for the first bike ride since I was about 12 yesterday (Something about summer and being healthy... apparently). It's moments like this that I get frustrated. It was about 6 pm, the sun was just under the tree tops, I was riding up and down hills through the back streets of my village, dodging dog walkers and pot holes down country lanes. It was gorgeous; or at least the bits I could see were gorgeous. With the sun pocking it's head out of every other tree I was caught in moments of blindness or a horrendous shooting pain in my eyes.
   The debate in my head was do I close my eyes, loose my balance (I'm an awful rider) and go straight into a car OR put up with it until I get home and sit in the dark for an hour? I carried on. Mainly because I'm stubborn and partly because I didn't want to get run over on a country lane. It really is times like these that I realise how little we know about the brain. When we say Irlen people automatically assume reading, it's coupled with dyslexia, it effects our learning. It effects my life.
      The world changes colour when this happens by the way. Grey gravel turns to pitch black, green trees turn bright yellow, even the sky, famously blue can change from a deep purple to a crimson. The eternal debate about how we each see colours is answered by the way! We don't. My theory is that we give names to shades and on the whole we agree. I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy *VERY funny... a little sexist* and I'm still adamant that Bautista's character Drax is BLUE with red scarification... my boyfriend and the friends we went with tell me he's grey. How crazy is this world? In the most wonderful way.

    This is my life and I shouldn't need to put a paragraph here to justify my descriptions of it but I will. There is so little out there about Irlen from a person perspective that something like this feels necessary.

Oh! I also found a video about how Irlen looks on paper. It's very interesting and helped my family understand when I was first diagnosed. Plus grand music!

So We Start Again...

Do you remember when I organised the bookshelves? 

Well, since then I've moved back in with my mum... More about that saga later. (It's also the reason it's been so quiet up in here!) 

Let the organisation begin. How do you sort yours?

- yes I'm in my jammies at quarter to 4 pm. 

People + Poetry

'People just don't read poetry'

'Poetry is hard'

'Poetry is dead'

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. About people who find poetry. People who ignore poetry. About people mainly and their interaction with poetry.

'People don't read poetry' in the last day or so I've been exploring Cardiff and Aberdare. As is necessary I've wandered into 6/7 book selling places, out of these 2 sold poetry. Mostly it was a poor effort. Mainly anthologies with names like The Nations Love Poems or The Poems You Can't Remember. A lot of effort goes into them I'm sure but I'm hardly ever given the opportunity to experience new names or even non-romantic poets! Maybe people aren't being given the means to experience poetry; particularly in small towns. Even worse, they are being put off by the archaic, 

unrelatable poetry that was rammed down their parched throats in school!

'Poetry is hard' lets go here next. Poetry IS hard. It's also easy, it's unrelenting, it's romantic and selfish and giving. Poetry is anything you want it to be; and it's all around us, all the time. Your twitter rants rammed into 140 characters or whatever is poetry and flash fiction (you know the type)! Road signs and shorthand; it's all there. I see poetry as your ability to come to terms with the language around you, and within you. So yes; poetry is hard but it's necessary and it's yours.

it's alive and kicking

You

straight in the lips.

Crack

ing your skin 

and your teeth

as you take a big old bite.

Doesn't the syrup just bite back?