Sorry I Don’T Have the Time: Poems About Modern Life

By Micheline Mason

Sorry I Don't Have The Time is a poetry collection for a modern and socially aware reader. Micheline covers everything from the last General Election in Britain in Inviting The Thieves Back In to more efficient ways of fruit peeling in The Other End of the Banana. She is not scared to make you angry, though she is happy to make you laugh.

Through the difficulties of growing up 'different' in the 1950s Micheline has found a way to use her insightful words as weapons against injustice, prejudice and social exclusion.

Despite potential emotional reactions to her work, Micheline mostly strives to make you think - think about your life, the world around you, and the challenges facing every corner of the planet. If you gain only one insight from Sorry I Don't Have the Time may it be this: that you open your eyes, see the collective troubles surrounding you and find ways to fight back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426962622

Micheline Mason

Micheline Mason was born in the 1950s—disabled and a member of the working class. She grew up to become a campaigner, speaker, painter, writer, and performance poet. Mason’s poems have previously been used in training courses and published on websites. She currently lives in London.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Early Poems (1970 – 1978)

After Tearing Up All the Others

Summer Birth with Joy and Sorrow

Come Out From the Shadows

Set My Idle Hands to Work

(Untitled)

Naked

Late Summer

My Spring Poem

Later Poems (2003 – 2011)

The World Stepped Back

Let Me Cry

In Praise of Subjectivity

The Other End of the Banana

The Café on the Common

In Her Own Time

Did I Ever Thank You Dad?

Forms of Torture

Let’s Pretend

Me, Sparrows and the Meaning of Life

Ma Petite Isle de Maurice

More is Less

Now We Are All Middle Class

They Do It To Us Twice

I’ve Got To Work Work Work

Self Doubt

Sorry, I Don’t Have the Time

When Language Becomes a Tool of Oppression

Things I Don’t Need

Your Computer Doesn’t Love You

The Myth of Choice

The Harmonica Man

Paper Jam

Lili Marlene Sings Back

Beware the Baubles

Get Better for Mummy

The Spa School Blues

The Waiting Game

Uppity Downs

Not Dead Yet

Get It Right

Birds for Life

The Small Pleasures

They Lift Us Up

The Rehabilitation Ward

Be Nice to Children and Save the World

Inviting the Thieves Back In

Introduction

I started writing poetry when I was about twenty. I was still living at home, had just walked out of art college without completing my course or getting any useful qualifications. I was unemployed, angry at life, longing to escape out into the big wide world but held back by not having a clue as to what I wanted to do or how to do it.. I had few close friends and had learned early in my life to ‘keep my own counsel’. Because of this I never showed my writing to anyone.

The first few poems in this collection come from that time. Most need little explanation which is lucky because my memory does not allow me to be certain just why I wrote these words, or who it was I was writing about.. Two poems might however be helped by a little explanation. ‘Summer Birth with Joy and Sorrow’ was written shortly after leaving home for the first time and living in a ‘Bed Sit’ just a mile away from my family home. The piece here is an extract from a much longer poem that, unfortunately is far too embarrassing to publish in its entirety. The second is ‘Set My Idle Hands to Work’ which is something between a poem and a prayer. It was written during what seemed like an unending period of unemployment. I was raised Catholic and the legacy of this is still very apparent in the poem although I had stopped going to church as soon as I left my special boarding school at 17 where my church attendance had been compulsory.

Somewhere around the age of 25 I discovered a form of peer counselling founded by a working class man with revolutionary tendencies whom I greatly admired. Probably because I then had the safety and living people to listen to both my thinking and my ‘feelings’, the need to write poetry to myself seemed to fade, and then stopped for many years.

Despite many new friendships and gaining a direction and a voice in the world, my old habits of keeping many of my inner thoughts private remained with me into my fifties. A particularly close relationship helped me to break out of this, rediscovering the route into my own inner world. Poems again sprang to the surface and had to be written. They were different this time, not so tortured and introspective, and with more to say. Again many are self explanatory, but a few will probably have more meaning if their background is understood.

‘The World Stepped Back’ is the best