Today I attended my first New Zealand Authors Society Roadshow. It was great to be amongst a group of people with some similarities and many differences to me. One the workshops I attended was very hands on. One of the exercises involved writing for 5 minutes and then pulling out some term words and phrases. So far, so easy…and then we passed our sheets of paper to the right. The new words in front of us were the raw materials for a poem we had ten minutes to write.
This is the result of that first exercise. It’s called Fake Veneer.
Fake veneer Have you ever felt both sparse and full at the same time? Like dining alone at Valentines*? So little to say yet words flow with a life of their own, We build a vision built on the fake veneer of home- Wooden walls that hold us together- Our bodies become sore but on life goes, I can be warm here, I suppose.
*Valentines was a “Sizzler” style buffet restaurant that had franchises all over New Zealand in the late 1990s.
Angele Toomey Poetry 