Author: iainthomas

If you hold a heart that sings secret songs

closely to your ear,

you can hear the words your parents spoke

when your father drew your mother near.

 

If you hold the hand that took too long,

the one that seems too far,

you can tell who loves you, who does not

and who you really are.

 

If you hold your mind at arm’s length –

away from your shaking chest,

you can speak a single word of strength

and say,

“In me alone is my love created and so, it is blessed.”

As a child

My father’s body was always so heavy

When he fell out of the wheelchair

I tried to pick him up and I believed

I would find the strength somewhere inside

Because I watched too many cartoons in the 80’s

There was always some magic moment

When your raised a ring or a sword to the sky

 

And music played and you become something bigger than you were

 

And then you were someone new

And then you had the strength to do anything

But I never could lift him off the floor

And when I carried the casket with his body in it

Through the church, with my brother and my uncles

I knew how much the casket should weigh

And how much his body should weigh

And it was heavier than it should’ve been

My father was trying to help his whole life

 

To make himself lighter than he was

 

 

And I only knew when I carried his casket.

I saved up a little today
Because I know I’ll need it
I was sad a moment today, when I had no right to be
Because I need something for later
I know a moment will come when I’m weak
When the nostalgia gun pushes against my lips
But I’ll open the one happy moment I saved today
And live to see tomorrow.

That’s the question I’m asking with my new book, I Am Incomplete Without You. 

I’m often sent poetry in response to the things that I write, incredibly charged stuff that people have clearly put a lot of time and heart into and if I’m honest, I’m never, ever sure what to do with it. Do I start a conversation entirely in poetry? That doesn’t work. Maybe in movies but not hear in the far more cynical and grey world where your poem might reach me as I am picking up the dog poop in the backyard or wondering why I can’t sleep (and if I’ve actually written enough today to justify my existence).

So I Am Incomplete Without You is half of a conversation. It’s also a kind of springboard into writing some prose, even if you’ve never really thought about writing prose yourself. Every poem I write (I speak only for myself) starts with a sentence, or a picture, or a thought, or a pattern. And so I’ve created a book with incomplete sentences, descriptions of pictures, thoughts, and patterns that can be continued. Like a literary drum circle between two people (making it technically a drum line).

I wrote it mostly in coffee shops in and around Cape Town, I repeated myself a lot because the same questions kept popping up (then I edited brutally), I created instructions because instructions seem like a way of asking questions (will you actually do what I ask you to do?) and I thought about leaves, the sea, living and dying and the questions that form connections between all those different points.

It’s a spiderweb.

There’s space at the front for your name next to mine and you can preorder it right now on Amazon by clicking here, which will mean you’ll get it in February, hopefully in time for Valentine’s Day.

I’ll write more about it closer to the time but right now I need to go clean up the backyard.

 

If only, after every terrible thing that happened, the news anchor wouldn’t sigh slightly as she repeated, again, how many people died, where they died and how they died.

If only every bomb and bullet and knife was engraved with the words, “I hate you but I am different from everyone else who looks like me, so please understand, and goodbye.”

If only we actually spoke to each other, instead of posting articles and memes and clever pictures and snide tweets and quotes, designed to make you feel stupid and let you know exactly where you and I stand on the “us” vs “them” debate and as a way to avoid directly confronting the monsters inside each of us.

If only you could run out of sentences and just stop when you didn’t know what everything you felt meant.

If only we responded with love and care and concern and took a moment to breath before we started yelling at each other about how our grief was wrong or where our grief could be better spent or what our grief says about us as people.  

If only we could wrap the anger and hate in blankets until it went out like a fire.

If only, just once, the terrible thing that happened, wasn’t just the start of more terrible things to come.  

If only we’d known each other as children.

If only.

When did our hands become old.
Where are we in bright white light.
How do our screams become whispers.
Who did we think we were, to be good.

[Edit: The book is no longer available I’m afraid but is due for publication in mid-2016.]

Since I started writing I Wrote This For You in 2007, all I ever wanted was a chance to take what Jon and I were doing on the blog into the real world and turn it into something physical, something that could live next to someone’s bed or at the back of a bag, something that could be dog-eared and underlined and be given and received. Something that could be touched and loved.

At the end of 2011, that became a reality. I Wrote This For You, the book, has been and continues to be a remarkable success. Since then, we’ve done another two I Wrote This For You books, I Wrote This For You: Just The Words and I Wrote This For You And Only You. I wrote a science fiction novel called Intentional Dissonance, a short collection of poetry about the NSA and just this weekend, as you may know, a new collection of poetry and short stories that didn’t fit inside I Wrote This For You called How To Be Happy.

So, to say thank you for supporting me and for buying my books over the years, for sticking with me when I had a nervous breakdown and stopped writing, for just being you – I’m giving away a small book that I’ve had lurking around at the back of my hard drive for a while but only for the next 24 hours.

It’s called 300 Things and it’s a collection of things that I hope. Click here to download a free .pdf copy of it.

Thank you for your time. I know it’s valuable and I, again, sincerely thank you for choosing to spend it with me.

– Me

How to be Happy is collection of short stories, prose and poems that I’ve written over the years that don’t fit inside I Wrote This For You, contained within a novel about being asked to write a book about, well, How To Be Happy.

It’s a book about a book about how to be happy, and a collection of short stories and poems.

I am the main character in it and it’s both completely true and utterly fiction.

You can read it to find out more about me. You can read it because you like my poems and short stories. You can read it to learn what I think the secret to happiness is.

Or you can read it to discover something else, which is what I was trying to do in the first place.

You can click here to buy it right now in print on or kindle.

God fell and broke his body on the mountains
and little pieces of him fell into some of us.
It’s either some part of God
or something wrong with my brain
that I’m trying to get out
and I think you either get it out
or you die
and it rises with your soul to the sky
where God is trying to put his body
back together.