Difficult child

My mother told me i was difficult to love. This translated itself into my growing mind in a myriad of ways. One i was certain of was the complete lack of real understanding of what she termed 'difficult'. These thoughts would roll round in my head, arguing and debating ceaselessly over the thousand different permetations of difficult, like rowdy noises in crowded spaces. And perhaps this was the problem- nothing was ever concrete in my mind, not even language or emotions everything was fluid and changeable, if one jsut thought on it for too long. Like when a word is thought of so much the very letters cease to have any meaning and they disintergrate into the absurd.

It took a long while to reconcile myself to having a grasp of what she may have meant. I rushed through everthing so fast, i barely paused to consider or reflect that my maniacal need to for knowledge and discovery of the new may be a troublesome character trait. I was so argumentative and at times irritable with her inabitlity to immediately grasp my meaning or mood. I was often frustrated by others simply for not being able to feel what i felt and feeling incapbable of descibing it due to my mistrust of the concreteness of words to express myself. I was somewhat an arrogant youth who also felt to not feel as i did you could not possibly understand as i did.

I still yearned for some sort of communion with another. And through life have searched and routed for another soul to make me whole, which of course is extremely difficult to love. No one desires for that which longs for itself to be subsumed in another. People yearn for reflected glory but in reality in time it will become burdensome and will quickly tire of the shackles of anothers need of them.

I have also learnt over time that i struggled to feel worthy of the love i yearned for. A dark quarrelsome part of me sits like a malevolent old hag tearing apart any positive situation, negativly picking holes and smudging all to an inky darkness of no clarity. Cumbersome and constant deliberations run from her mouth, all lengthy all stuffy and pointless. And all ending in a world wearied retort 'i told you this was a fools errand'

But the other half of thatfateful phrase of my mothers puzzles me when my mind flips it over like a pebble on a river bed. Who truly loves simplicity? Difficultness is the lot of humanity. We have been born to labour through many things till death, to survive is wedded to our bones. Is love not meant to be a struggle? A battleground of hurt and disspointment. Do we not love the troublesome ones more because of the effort put in. Like a man feels pride in eating the crust he earnt by the sweat of his brow?

Am i difficult to love or is it just difficult to love?

Tonight

Tonight

Tonight i will go without the touch of your skin, or the taste of you in my mouth. I won’t feel the grate of your teeth on my cheek; you bite me so hard sometimes like Plath did to Ted Hughes-and i am reminded of the savagery of lust.

I won’t have cajoling hands pulling me closer, pressing my hips up against your desire and you will not have my hot hungry mouth with it’s desire to devour you.

I am afraid of this feral lust- too want this badly is dangerous…

Over the Border into Iraq

After several busy and hot days jam packed with meetings, discussions and documentation of the political trial in Diyarbakir, the next leg of our journey is looming up fast. We have struggled to organise a taxi driver to take us to the border and no one will do the whole journey but eventually on our last night and last meal all together as the uk delegation, perched up high at a restuarant built into the hills overlooking the Tigris; our bus driver managed to organise someone willing to take on the job and who will nurse us through the border to meet up with another driver on the Iraqi side. So it was in the relative coolness of dawn that we started our journey. I have to admit whilst sitting awkwardly and sleepily with our luggage in the hotel foyer that i didn't expect our driver to be quite as beautiful as he was. But hey he was! He had the most exquisite features and was very smartly dressed, as with most muslim men he was very polite but i have to admit i found it hard not to smile at him every time i caught his eye!

The sun was just climbing over the edge of the ragged hills and glinting off the tigris as we left Diyarbakir passing down out of the city through the Mardin gate. As we progressed the road opened up through rock blasted valleys and became a gleaming dual carriageway, newly built. It contrasted with the rough shacks which sold melons and road side refreshments, but was at this hour of the day pretty much completely empty. Except at one point a last minute screech of brakes and a loud horn resounding off the valley walls, the driver narrowly missed hitting a large rangy dog which leapt up onto the carrriageway and was trying to defend its little homestead from this great shiny beast of a car!

We drove fast through little hamlets, and up and down the mountian ranges but on reaching Mardin itself the driver took us right up and through the town centre, swerving round the build up of town traffic including overloaded mopeds, trucks, tractors and handcarts as well as swish cars on transporters heading for the Iraqi border. As we rounded the tight bends the whole of the Syrian plains opened up below us as the landscape fell away, old buildings and small houses hung onto the precarious sides and streets snaked their way down into the endless golden brown of the plain obscured by a dust and heat haze.

As we finally descended into the plains ourselves we were bordered on one side in the far distance by a brooding line of hills, these hills that are deeply battle scarred are quieter now since the PKK cease fire, and i don't feel quite the trepidation that William Dalrymple felt as he tracked this route in the early 90's. There isn't the obvious military prsence, i don't see any tanks on this Syrian border road and no burnt out cars litter its way but it is eeerily empty, shiny tarmac, yes, but the land is untilled and the Syrian border looks dilapidated as row upon row of sagging razor wire flys past my window. Occasionally bits of this border are pulled upwards as if someone has been running under the wire and marked with ragged strips of cloth but i know that between this and the stilt legged guard posts in the middle distance is a mine field and ponder how many have ever attempted to run the guantlet of the border. This plain is so desolate and empty but the soil is fertile, yet few remain to till it.

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Uk delegation to Diyarbakir

After a full night of travelling on what was possibly the hottest flight ive ever been on i spent the better part of the night trying to sleep in Istanbul airport with feet which had swelled up to the size of melons due to the extreme cabin temp from London. Not sure whether if it was hot to try to acclimatise cold Britons to turkey's heat or just to reinforce the fact that British weather in October is rubbish!

My boss and i decided that the only way forward was to consume some beers at 5 am, which as we boarded the red eye to Diyarbakir seemed to reinforce the slight weirdness of travelling through the night. The flight was full of Kurdish businessmen heading back to the city which is the focus of the current political struggle of the Kurdish people for recognition and freedom. We are flying out as part of the UK delegation to observe and monitor the mass trial of 152 Kurdish people by the Turkish state for charges of crimes against the state.

In order to have a little time to ourselves we have travelled out a day earlier, we are later travelling over the border into Kurdistan and researching business opportunities and offering our services to the KRG government, so being able to get a understanding of the Kurdish region this side of the border is a big help.

On arrival at Diyarbakir it is immediately obvious of the massive military presence in this city. The few commercial flights which land use a shared airstrip with the military and as i strode across the airstrip we are surrounded by high chain link fences with razor wire and an array of armed military personnel who are strolling giving the passengers the look over. We seek out a taxi driver to take us to our hotel which is in the newer part of Diyarbakir. Diyarbakir has seen massive economic growth in the last ten years with a massive splurge of high rise apartment blocks and suburban spread.

One of the things my nicotine lungs have been desiring is a cigarette and it is fine to smoke in the taxi, as my time in the east of turkey goes past i realise more and more that they operate a very lax approach to seat belts and road traffic rules and like my other trips east ... the horn is king. The roads' traffic is a mix of shiny new four by fours and family cars, older style taxi's and agricultural vehicles and man pushed handcarts laden with goods for sale on the roads side or in the tiny winding streets of the old town sur. Very occasionally we swerve to pass a donkey with an older Kurd in traditional dress astride seemingly oblivious to all the kafuffle behind him.

In order to avoid the main drag traffic our taxi driver runs a small detour round some back streets, small children play in the rubble strewn streets, women wash down their front steps, and beat out carpets and young Kurdish boys send footballs arcing through the spray. It is interesting to later learn that there was a project to give out a lot of footballs to young people to encourage sport playing instead of rock throwing at the Turkish military which had resulted in over 7000 youths being arrested and put in jail. Surprisingly the footballs did not really work, the young people are still angry at their lack of political freedom, a football is not going to replace a sense of justice and acknowledgement! The majority of Kurdish people live a long way below the poverty line, a lot of the residents of Diyarbakir are the children of those which were forced into the city by the government endorsed resettlement plans, and some are refugees come over the border in the the 90's fleeing Saddam's persecution. Others are simply the ethnic Kurdish population who have always resided in this area of Turkey and are yet to be given the recognition or a semblance of equal rights in their native country.

We are staying at what is one of the newer hotels in Diyarbakir, in a fairly newly built district bursting with Turkish brand shops and coffee bars and places to eat along with various bars catering to those who do drink in this district. It is incredibly hot as we disembark and rearrange ourselves in the room, but luckily we have air conditioning and i finally get feet which have returned to the actual size they should be! Our delegation is not arriving till late in the evening so we have the day to explore the city.

We head off on foot through this new district to the go within the city walls into the old town known as Sur. Walking along the streets can be a bit precarious as son much is still a building site and pavements finish and potholes arrive without any warning. Building is haphazard and seemingly occuring without much thought to planning or impact. We pass several rusty and decidedly bent scaffold system where young men shimmying up and down with no rope harness or safety systems in place. Young boys of around 7 or 8 push hand made sacks on wheels and collect rubbish from the streets, plastic bottles and such like, weaving in and out of the congested traffic and narrowly at times avoiding getting squashed by all manner of road traffic. We walk down one of the more formal boulavards and pass by a military encampment with sentries in pill boxes at each corner and rifles pointed out into the street. The military operate a very large base here, and they live the army lifestyle contained completely within base, with all their families housed in the compounds and all facilities within. They have very little to do with the city or with its residents as people other than in their military role.


We pass through one of the municipal parks, green and lush but with a slightly disused feeling, the fountains are not running and a big bronze of attaturk looks solemnly down on all within the park boundaries. Eventually we reach the walls of the old town and one of the four main gates into the city. The walls are built out of black and white stone and have been much restored over the last few years, but they still create an impressive physical barrier as well as a mental barrier.... the city inside remains little changed since medieval times with twisting tiny streets running between the houses and covered bazaars with all the traders selling their wares. They is a vast aaray of produce on display from dried fruit to nuts and the heady aroma of spices. We walk down the streets and as it is saturday people are in a playful mood, little children run and skip in the alleyways from doorway to doorway and occasionally a child will turn to say a shy hello or how are you in broken english. We pass the oldest mosque in Diyarbakir and its cylindrical stone carved muezzin tower. There are workshops for the metal working and black smithing, dark and black interiors that emit deep amber sparks and the loud crash of an industry little changed for millennia.

It has now been a tumultuous and busy few days since our arrival in the heat of Diyarbakir, The trial has attracted a lot of national press coverage but the international coverage has been muted at best and misinformed and prejudiced at best. Their are representatives from various European delegations including Sweden, Germany, France, Switzerland and representatives from the EU including several MEP's. As for the compilation of our delegation we are 2 MP's, three lawyers and human rights campaigners and one Kurdish PHD student resident in the Uk and of course little old PA me...

Our daily activities start early with the struggle to get into court each day, organisation is a chaotic, the struggle and crush around the court gate provides the perfect bottle neck so that the media can get its shots of differing people arriving each day. Family members have come down and large numbers of people gather to watch and mark their protest, their is a heavy police presence, with armed and riot geared police standing around, as well as air surveillance in the form of helicopters and snipers posted on every tall building in the vicinity.



The Italian delegation are loud in protest, colourfully demonstrating via the use of a brightly coloured banner proclaiming 'free everybody' in Turkish, Kurdish, English and Italian. They have been the most proficient at grabbing the media's attention each day. However this is to the dissent of the Turkish riot police, who eventually decide they have had enough of this flagrant media circus and show of free speech and decide to enclose and shift the protesting group away from the court entrance. They force the protest down the road to group together on the outside of the Diyarbakir town hall plaza. Eventually the protest manages to close off more then one street lane to except the growing amount of protesters.

Single child family plant

That drunken purchase,
in strip lit Tesco's at four in the morning
made me laugh as you returned with
spiky leaves and naff fake terracotta pot.
It moved houses with us
it's head stuck out of windows of vans
getting wind blasted on the motorway

Bashed and abused,
drunk students poured cider over it
and house mates ashed fag butts and spliffs
into its bare roots

It had three stalks
one taller than the other
and one wee stem
so that we named it the single child family plant

Our relationship sputtered and stuttered
and was finally stubbed out
i claimed the plant
If only cause i had somewhere
to call home
And could shift it!

It bobbed round other flats
saw lovers come and go,
and gradually sickened
leaves browning through neglect
i was terrible at watering it
and then drowned it
in over compensation

When that last hurried eviction came
and i headed west once more
Single child family plant
came with
but got relegated to parents shed
and overwintered with
garden furniture and rats for company

Life flowed onwards
Our summer festival reunion
broke down barriers
and opened new lines of communication
But our plant-
had definitely died and rotted in the shed

My mother ever the green gardener
come spring
pulled it out into the sun
and left it be
So on a recent soft rainy June day,
smoking and talking under the arbor
she pointed at its garish pot

No longer single child family plant
But a vigorous flowering bush
many stemmed
and heady with new growth
has arisen some wind carried stray seed

Out of your spontaneous alcohol fuelled
purchase
comes whole new growth
i wish you could see it bloom!

Fridge surprise!

On returning late one night,
to closeted cottage
i let the fridge light
reveal a surprise hidden tight
Chocolate from France with love
ohh it tastes just right!

(yummm yumm all gone in my tum!)

Pawn

She that lets herself be a pawn to men, will always sink and rise with the swell of fate-
We make our own lives out of the ends handed to us. Don't allow yourself to be buffeted by another's fear and inadequacy- Stand alone and strongly!