Summer

The grass looks as if it is trying to remember how to be green. So much summer I don't know what to do with it. There is a weird feeling of being exposed by the sun somehow, having to wear all these clothes because it is so hot that feel like I am dressing up as someone else. My jackets are hung up and look at me accusingly. Truth is, it is just too hot to be smart. I wish I was one of those summery girls, who change colour at this time of year, wear strappy vests, walk barefoot and wash their long hair in milk pails like that old Timotei ad. I've been looking around at big girls who walk about in white shorts with their thongs poking out the top of them and realising it isn't even all about my size. I think I'm too old fashioned somehow to be very good at the sort of strip tease that this time of year demands.

I keep expecting a storm. A few weeks ago I caught in the heavy rain, walked home in it just letting myself get wet in my stupid flip flops. But it was over so quick. Something about good weather makes me feel guilty for not being outside, or on a picnic at the coast. I wonder how many people's lives are like that so they actually use the weather that way. I am enjoying the weather in a sense, like everybodyelse, but spend about as much time looking at the sky and wondering when it will break. A few weeks ago I went camping though, it seemed the right thing to do. I had only ever been camping in a tent once before, when I was 3 and my parents took me on holiday to Scotland. I don't remember much about it, except an orange tent, and that I fell in the lake. I didn't choose never to go camping again, I just somehow never went.

I wonder how many things are decided about the kind of people we are like this, not that we chose not to be certain types of people or like certain things, just found that opportunities never occurred where we would experience these things? Then before you know it you are a 32 year old who doesn't do camping, eat lobster, can't swim, whatever. I went to the Lake District, which I had only ever been through before, and was pretty amazed by it. I watched people in little boats, walked about, sort of just let the scenery wash over me, wash me out. I couldn't sleep the first night, not used to the light and being outside,I could hear the masticating sheep, and though this didn't worry me I couldn't stop listening. When I did sleep I dreamt of a new book coming out by Kevin Cadwallender (a poet whose work I really like), called Sex with Keith Armstrong. (I've actually never met Keith Armstrong, I just know his name and have read some of his poems, but for some reason it is a name I remember.) There were posters everywhere advertising it, with the cover on, which was a photo of the author in a pair of blue y-fronts and matching socks, it was quite a comical pose. This is a very strange dream, I wonder what the point is of people trying to analyse them. I woke up and heard the sheep crunching steadily behind the nylon.

So I have tried something new, and really enjoyed it. This is the first summer I actually went out and bought some open-toed shoes, which is incredible, how something so normal is something I have never done. I usually live in denial of summer, that it will pass soon enough and I'll get by in my boots. I was shuffling like a geisha at first worrying I might be like the girl in summery shoes I saw who kicked something and watched her shoe fly into the sky and onto the road. I reckoned I was too old and not pretty enough to get away with something like that, so I must watch my step. I'm asking why I stuck to my boots even in the heat before? And I have no idea, maybe because I wanted to seem taller, maybe a fear that someone will stand on my feet- whatever it is it's too strange. But maybe it was just something that happened, that one time I had a reason for not wearing open shoes, and although I've forgot what it is this just happened, and I became someone who never wears clothes that nod at the sun.

Last week I started tying up the Marilyn poems, I thought I had maybe one more poem to do and ended up writing 5. I think I needed a space between the ones I wrote about her life and these ones, before I wrote them. I can't explain why, it is a feeling of something like loss, but also a feeling of guilt, of somehow being part of a problem by writing about it. I think I'm glad to be finishing these poems though, as it is a world I don't want to stay too long in incase I never come out.

This morning I went to the post and saw another SAE with my name on it, and knew it would be more poems being returned me with the obligatory slip. (I have started to dread my own handwritten name.) When I opened it I was very surprised that they actually want to publish one of the poems in their magazine. It was a poem I wasn't even sure about putting in, because it is one I personally like, which always tends to be one other people don't rate. It is one of the poems from the Traci sequence.

So if you are counting, I had to get 9 rejections before I had one acceptance. 1 in 10 isn't bad compared to the 1 in 30 I was originally warned. (But to be honest I'm still trying to tell myself that!)