Welcome from Planet Merthyr! See, I'm really getting into this Blogosphere thing. Well, gratifying to note that three people read my last one, that's two more than attended one of my poetry readings, at Llantarnam Grange. Apart from the organisers, one woman turned up and she was there for the 'pottery'!

Thanks Dave Lewis! And to think I believed 'tweeting' was performed by birds. My son ( who amazingly set up this website in half a day) is soon to educate me into the mysterious rituals of Facebook and Twitter, so I'll be able to launch myself into the outer limits of virtual reality.

This week I've been tackling a short story:redrafting it and wondering why I bothered. Thomas Hardy once stated his best friend was his 'waste-paper basket'. When I've repeated that in schools, I've always had strange looks. But he may have been right in the case of this story.It's in Merthyr dialect, has a lot of different voices and could be an utter disaster. Poems are easier to abandon : I write so many that losing a few along the way doesn't seem to matter. But fiction? Stories are an arduous process for me, especially at the start. They take so much toil, I'm reluctant to accept failure.

But on the poetry front, a simple one based on my wife's memory stick, which went missing, only to end up........not in the expected places, such as the fridge or the drain outside our back door.......but, the very depths of her handbag, where a black hole lies. All of which brings us back to Planet Merthyr.

                                          THE MEMORY STICK

She lost her memory stick.
She forgot where she put it.

In the days of floppies
they'd have been at the bottom
of her large bag
under numerous folders
(either that, or used as frisbies
in the school yard).

But this was another matter.
On it was most of her data:
reports,plans and worksheets.
It was like a huge hammer
had struck her head
and her brain had exploded.

What she really needed
was a softer version
to slot into her veins,
with a comforting glow emanating.

Her memory stick could be anywhere:
the car-park, under her desk,
in the corner of the car
where all the wrappers collected
like a convention of waste.

She felt like a file
removed to the bin,
a text never answered,
an e-mail constantly bouncing back.

She lost her memory stick,
no long-tailed mouse could find it.
 

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