I am writing occasionally in response to Dangerous Meredith‘s Advent Creativity prompts. Her latest is titled, May You Never and this quote will suffice:

“Today’s challenge is for you to cast your mind back and locate, in your memory, someone who unfairly or unhelpfully sneered at your efforts.“

I heard my daughter’s Elise’s giggle first. High-pitched and infectious. She was one. And she wasn’t laughing at me. Unlike the other person in her bedroom.

Like an undertow, I heard her mother’s laugh. Her’s was that of one looking down on the unfortunate and disparaging them. She was laughing at me.

I walked into my daughter’s bedroom. Her cupboard was open. A couple of boxes were strewn now opened on the floor. Mine.

Leah (my wife) was reading several pocket notebooks. Mine. And laughing at the contents as if I had written gibberish.

She had found my teenage poetry.

I snatched up the notebooks and returned them to the box. And hid them. And didn’t write poetry until 2011.

And this is the poem i wrote about it 1989 (Sent Away) (Instagram) 1989 (Sent Away) (WordPress).