Joyful Flails

The next section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Joy. This might seem an odd segue from Anger, but I promise it makes sense. For a start, many of the same neurochemicals are released in a burst of happiness as from rage, which may account for the sense of intoxication that either bring. But to choose to experience joy is a powerful statement about your ownership of your life, and can take some practice, especially in Interesting Times like these.

You’ll doubtless be entirely unshocked to hear that the joys depicted in the book are rarely simple, and they’re often mixed in with something a little bitter, to leaven the potentially cloying nature of the section. Appropriately enough (though rather to my own surprise when compiling this), a fair number of the pieces are centred around food, and how that facilitates connections between people, demonstrates our common humanity. Many of them are quite short, but that means more happy poems in order to fill roughly the same number of pages.

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

Except that, at the time of writing this, we were still debating about the one above and the one below:

I knew from quite early on that I wanted to show the “flapping” stim that people use when the happy feelings breach all containment and you just have to jiggle. By the time the book has gone to press, we’ll have decided which one brings a more apt sensation of movement on the printed page…