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Alan Parry He/Him

@alanparrywriter.co.uk

3.9K followers 2.5K following 3.9K posts

Independent Writer Spoken-Word Artist EiC @thebrokenspine.co.uk Workshop Facilitator Podcast & Events Host Lecturer in SEND #PromoteIndieLit https://shorturl.at/gxRbM

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · May 24

My debut novella #PeelingApples is out now with @darkwinterlitmag.bsky.social
A tender, unflinching bildungsroman tracing boyhood, loss, and becoming—
Order your copy: amzn.eu/d/angSgVq
I’d love to hear what it stirs in you.

Cover of Peeling Apples by Alan Parry. The title is handwritten in black on a textured pale blue background, partially torn to reveal layered photographs underneath. Images include red apples on a wooden board, a cracked mug holding a cactus, a netted bowl of marbles on a lace doily, and a vintage photo of a young boy holding a football. The author’s name appears at the bottom in the same handwritten font.

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 11h

‘nothing’s more fatal to a dream than those who do not believe in it’ — devastating clarity. You turn longing into elegy.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

lichtbringer @saintghost.bsky.social · 23h

For #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe ✨

for @thebrokenspine.co.uk
& @alanparrywriter.co.uk

I apologize for the ungodly length and extend my sincerest gratitude to everyone who still endeavors to read it. Thank you.

$Mirror, Mirror A spell gone wrong. The fairy godmother quit, left the fire for a cigarette break. My dress is as chintzy as lollipop shivers, as cheap as no-fucks-given first love and even that I could never afford. A broom dressed in a rag, owl-grown on eyelash wishes. A wish is something my heart makes when you sing about how the light weeps through the gauze of the leaves when it falls, like a prayer through stained glass, or a girl’s head through the open mouth of her mother’s medicine cabinet. We all know that things are purified by their falling, by how low they can go before they snap. A wish is the insistence to fall like this just a little bit longer, to sweeten the pulp of my ruin once I collapse into smoke. A dream, however, is a different beast: A dream is something tenebrous that lives in the fractures and marrows, that comes for me like a gorge of gray wolves, ubiquitous and bigger than a life, or a couldn’t, or a death. It makes me think about your teeth, how they tear a signature of grief into my wrist, how I mistook a maw for a sparrow’s beak, and blood for godly devotion. You ask what has touched me without leaving a bruise. Nothing. The brittle hair brown as the mud- crested belly of a fox, hunted, tangled in lilac and bramble, keeping watch over what remains of us and what doesn’t when no one is looking too close. Rings of salt around my eyes where at midnight the crows come and pick apart the waning embers until things lose their focus and become mercurial rivulets of maybe and fever. The olanzapine body, fed too sad on gingerbread and delusions; the one that I carry like a coffin or that in turn shoulders me like a cross, because it has to, because it knows no other way. The flesh-simmering hunger to be not only seen but felt. That deaf violent resistance to any threat or touch of disenchantment.$

And there it is,
the seam that is always giving, where the doctor did
his stitches like someone drunk on the moon. Touch it:
It tells a cicatrized story, one that the sortilege of speaking
could not. I am not only an imperfection but a curse, baptized
in a river’s edge that knows neither map nor ending.
Lids and lips dusted with a summoning of need the color
of last year’s rotten apples; as if there was a ballroom I was going to
instead of a padded cell, as if I had lost a shoe of glass
instead of my agency and sense of self.

All this sorcery, just for that one moment.

Because you promised me an elsewhere and another
time, where truth was untrue and real was only a word
that held as much weight as a twig. Where I could go
and be not prophecy but promise; peach, plum, and palms unread
but understood in the unutterable language of fate.
Where I could be held by a world that does not ask of me
to prove it. But you just made me up, didn’t you, divined my name
in some lapse of reason amidst seal-skinned sirens and antlered
hares. Something to rain away the hours, insubstantial and hidden
behind the veil of absurdity. I come alive in your glimpse only,
in that one wisp of splintered impossibility
and just as soon as you close your eyes, all my fake
bones shatter and crumble.

Looking back, I will then be made to wonder
if I have ever been really here at all.
Did I die or did I vanish
or did you just forget to continue to have faith
in my fabled existence, in the frailty of my
mythology?

Because nothing’s more fatal to a dream
than those who do not believe in it.

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 11h

‘Pretty was a mask that pinched’ You turn beauty into burden here, all ache and honesty beneath the gloss.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Tracie Renee (she/her) @tracierenee.bsky.social · 1d

For an October #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe, it only seemed right to revisit (tweak again) this piece.

@thebrokenspine.co.uk
@alanparrywriter.co.uk

Thank you, @epistemiclit.bsky.social, for including this poem in issue 4!

Audio: epistemiclit.com/past-issues/...

Print copy: is.gd/epistemiclit...

Listen to the audio of Halloween Masks, a poem by Tracie Renee at: https://epistemiclit.com/past-issues/issue-four/halloween-masks

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘my words just baubles, cheap décor hung of the weeping limbs of a dead, dry christmas pine’ — brutal and brilliant. You lay bare our collective self-doubt with genuine theatrical grace.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Ross McDermott @beyondtheonions.bsky.social · 1d

#PoemsAbout #poem #poetry #writing #writingcommunity #writing #amwriting #struggles
Thanks to @thebrokenspine.co.uk and @alanparrywriter.co.uk
* This is an older piece I wrote quite some time ago... it fits well with the prompt #ImperfectMe -- as I'm sure it does convey.

~baubles~

my words just baubles, cheap décor hung of the weeping limbs of a dead, dry christmas pine.
crumbling brittle thorns, needles fall in showers to the linoleum – dusty tears from the tormented heart of a poet, squeezed like a lemon, lamenting for eternity.
follow Willy’s weeping words and “strut and fret the hour,” the one that never comes and is always banished when it does…
is all the light a manic mirage, a grand deception of that tortured chamber?
to question is enough, to wonder is divine.
I relish in that wonder and let the query swim, refusing to relent an answer, with an equal air of divinity.
“strut and fret” indeed! not this...
...not this tortured heart.

a poem by Ross McDermott, Beyond the Onions

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘Like thunder, in a rusted can’ — that simile rattles perfectly between humour and weariness.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Bernard Pearson @bernp.bsky.social · 1d

corrected a couple of bloopers! huge thanks to @alanparrywriter.co.uk and @thebrokenspine.co.uk for hosting #PoemsAbout #imperfectme

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘the man with cracks that crawl across his myriad of masks’ — haunting and exact. You capture self-recognition as horror and reckoning.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Quill of Mnemosyne @sonnetsmith.bsky.social · 1d

My contribution to #poemsabout #imperfectme
It's a piece that I've been meaning to write for a few weeks but never got round to it, so thank you
@alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk
For the push.

This is

Cracks In the Mirror

#poetry #blueskypoet #poem #mirror #identity #lost

It stares at me, from the other side of an empty room,
A face familiar, but still unrecognizable.
Silvered glass, which was not cracked last time I looked upon it
Now shattered into fragments, in each one an impostor.

A thousand faces trapped within; not one is whom I seek,
It stares at me, from the other side of an empty room
And I stare back, wondering who this man before me is
The man with cracks that crawl across his myriad of masks.

I know him not; I never have, but somehow he knows me
His crooked smiles, and weary eyes drill deep into my soul
He stares at me, from the other side of an empty room
From in between the cracks; a man I thought I used to know.

Once upon a time I saw my own face in the mirror
A bright and beaming smile; that was who I'd always be,
But somehow I cant see him in the faces of the beast
That stares at me, from the other side of this still empty room.

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘hurt person buries themselves in graves of shame’ — this week, I feel seen. You name the aftermath of harm with such steady honesty. Kudos!
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Mizz Whozza Whazzit @mwplovesmusic.bsky.social · 1d

I did a second poem for #poemsabout because I wasn’t totally in love with the first one #poetry #domesticviokenceawareness

@alanparrywriter.co.uk

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘to scaffold the edifice of my ramshackle sense of self’ — that line builds beautifully on its own irony. You display wit & vulnerability like a tightrope act.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

John Adlam 🌈🌍 @johnadlam.bsky.social · 1d

For #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe on #worldmentalhealthday, here's one of mine posted here earlier this year 🤜🤛
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
@alanparrywriter.co.uk

$Insecurity alert We can argue the toss over separations and losses, but this much is for sure – I am insecurely attached. Mostly I depend upon your warmth and acclaim to scaffold the edifice of my ramshackle sense of self. But hey – no pressure! It's not like you owe me any special consideration – no need, as such, to frack my mudrock offerings for depth or distinction. I'm not proud – I can do naked and abandoned in the void every bit as easily.$

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘I play with words and let them drop to fall and rest’ — that rhythm feels deliberate. You catch creation in a hopeful mess.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

David Birch @davidbirch.bsky.social · 1d

Thanks again @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk for an excellent #PoemsAbout prompt #ImperfectMe. Here's a poem about the imperfection of yielding to hope over experience

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘And for the first time in an age I could relax among my people’ — that closing lands like a fist disguised as peace. You turn belonging into its bleakest truth.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Peter J. King @rock-rex.bsky.social · 1d

"Ties That Bind".

(Written in 2015.)

#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #poemsabout #imperfectme

I walked in dust and sunlight
through a village stricken by disease;
the dead lay still and fly blown,
and the dying reached out hopelessly for help.
They weren’t my people, though,
and so I carried on and didn’t stop.

Coming to a town I saw a football ground;
a crowd were on their knees,
down on the parched and cracking earth.
Their captors set to work to slaughter them
with rifles and machetes —
but they were not my people,
so I carried on and didn’t stop.

At last I reached a city; avenues and boulevards
led down between tall buildings
to a harbour and a modern port.
The buildings, though, were pockmarked
and their windows smashed; the roads
were littered with the burnt out wrecks of cars,
and bodies lay on pavements and in doorways.
As they weren’t my people, though,
I carried on and didn’t stop.

I found a ship about to sail, and bartered
with the captain for a berth. The voyage
lasted days, and as they passed I felt the air
change, smelt familiar taints upon the wind,
until we made our landfall.
Finally I walked among a crowd who had
no interest in my life, my pains and joys,
who passed me in the street as though I wasn’t there.
And for the first time in an age
I could relax among my people.

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘Even a shattered prism shows a rainbow cavalcade’ A gorgeous turn, finding grace in what’s broken. You let light slip through the cracks with hope.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Lin Hart @poetry-with-hart.bsky.social · 1d

A piece from my would-be manuscript (probably now a zine series because I'm now a zine-obsessed twaffle) "Behind the Mirror". A bit more simplistic than my usual fair, but it's got a hopeful side to it that you may appreciate. Enjoy 🤗

@alanparrywriter.co.uk

#poemsabout #imperfectme #poem #poetry

Behind the mirror
sits the woman
I hope to become

So much more a sister
a daughter, a partner, a friend
so much more than the sum

of all my pieces
once jagged now soft
from trying to put me together again.

Even a shattered prism
shows a rainbow cavalcade
when put to the light.

Behind the mirror
sits the woman
I hope to become

From this shade
of past folly
a paragon of future promise

-Lin Hart

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘debris of stars’ — love how that phrase collapses the cosmic into the human. This sits somewhere between humility and awe, small yet infinite.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Jane Dougherty @janedougherty47.bsky.social · 1d

I wasn't going to do this #PoemsAbout until ten minutes ago. #imperfectme seems so self-evident. So that's what I said.
@alanparrywriter.co.uk
@thebrokenspine.co.uk

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘a dim bulb in a sea of flowers’ — that contrast glows with resignation. You catch the self-doubt without drowning in it, all restraint and truth.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Reposted by Alan Parry He/Him

Francesca L Rolle @francesca-laura.bsky.social · 1d

From 2011, sharing for #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe. Always enlightening to read old poems and see how you've changed or not... Thanks as always to @alanparrywriter.co.uk and @thebrokenspine.co.uk for hosting 🖤

A poem titled 'Stand Down' by Francesca L Rolle:
Never darker than the night,
Never brighter than the day,
Just a dim bulb in a sea of flowers,
Swamped with the past,
Too shallow for change,
And not ready,
Too afraid, to step up to the game.

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Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 12h

‘faces in the stones’ — that image holds such magic, the human need to find meaning in matter. This moves like a prayer half-remembered.
#KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe