Peace

The leaf leaves without a word,
lets loose the grip and falls.
Father went the way of the leaf.

He told me casually, months before the fall,

‘It gets easier the closer you get,
a thing I never expected,
it gets easier the closer you get.’

I reached out to touch his arm,
noticed his skin had become speckled,
as if he was returning to the egg
after all the time spent in the sun.

His hand rested palm upwards,
the fingers gave a slight tremble,
and I was reminded
of a poem by Seamus Heaney;
dad had grown tired of holding us.

I watched each moment
hatch in his chest
until the next moment never came.

It was like
an ocean without waves
or the sun without light.

He fought at the end despite
his words. I wept…but water
cannot erase the truth.

Clearing their names

 

It was on Faraday Street that

Fox and Wolf came to me.

They could see the fearful way my feet

trod the steps towards school where

ideas buzzed about in the forest of unbroken voices,

ignorance stinging my mind

as if the beaks of springtime woodpecker

sought blind answers..

In the years since

both have been treated harshly,

painted as miscreants

who lead me asunder.

Truth is, Fox and Wolf understood

my dilemma,  pulled me out

of the maelstrom of school,

took me to the island

where it was said a cure might be found.

Man-time scared me, the swift urgent current

of action, of movement, more terrifying

than lightning; life in flesh resembles

a forest fire. The ability of legs, in recompense,

seems miserly.

The Island was a deceit

but Wolf and Fox

were always kind while around me

the world spun out of kilter.

In the craziness of those Island days

I lost contact with them both -

it is an easy thing for me to do,

forced as I am to pinpoint everything down

to single moments laid side by side by side.

Construction

There are quiet days when I sit

in a room's comforting corner,

study moving joints that permit

knee, ankle, thumb and finger.

The leap for a cell to acquire

complex structure is almost enough

to make me believe but desire

and truth are not the same language.

In The Whale's Stomach

                        I

In the darkness

I remember the time before

Ocean.

Before the spluttering candle

we save by burning

only at odd moments –

we have seven matches left

after that the darkness will become

Eternal -

If only the Leviathan

yawned when it rose

to the surface.

Does it dream?

Are its dreams as small

as the krill it swallows in the millions?

And we, merely accidents along the way –

do we impinge upon its thoughts

in the slightest?

The boat Geppetto travelled in

holds up well in the ebb and flow

of life within a stomach.

My wooden legs rot, flesh

does have distinct advantages – even Geppetto’s feet,

at their age, fare better.

                        II

In the stillness

between waves of saltwater

I close my eyes; imagine

the morning sunlight covering

the dusty mountains

of home - night’s galloping shadow

races before the rays,

flowers turn towards the light,

in the distance

the sound of rugs being beaten

by village women

and the squeals of children

in bare feet, their knees

scabby, their noses running,

play soccer with the bladder

of a dead cat in the street.

                        III

Geppetto often holds my hands

and explains how he carved each digit,

shaped the half moon nails,

crafted the elbow and wrist sockets

for movement.

At night

after his lips have blown out the candle

and the sound of the sea

fills the dark cavern

in rhythmic sympathy

he likes to explain

how it feels to have a chest

that within a heart beats.

I know I have missed out

and cannot bring myself to believe

my wooden torso can contain

a soul. I do no pray

for rescue, only for a break

in the monotony.

I wish I could see

the light of the fairy’s wand

and believe again for a moment

that anything is possible.

Nan and her Bin, my grandfather: An edit.

Nan and her Bin, my grandfather:
(and their truly missing knuckles)

I have this memory, conjured from photos,
the finger tapping the side of my head like the magician's wand,
or, perhaps the memory is real, a dove
with wings to carry it from past to present,
of that day in the cemetery
when they buried Nan’s old Bin, my grandfather.

Nan’s hand, the skin wrinkled and spotted, from sun
and no rest, the third finger missing to the first knuckle, lingers
heavily upon the casket, as she waits
for the twin green straps to be withdrawn,
lowering, therefore, the casket
and within, the still body of Nan’s beloved Bin.

I can hear her thoughts in my mind (the years, a funnel
expressing the hidden moments we miss at the time) - she wonders,
with faded, crisp leaves rustling words along
the cracked and pitted paths,
how she might explain (even as her thoughts are disrupted
by the bunched-up cars on the grass beside the gravestones,
humming their eagerness to repel the day and be on their way)
to the grandchildren lost in phones and fancies
that inside the casket,
his right hand, wrinkled and spotted too,
has the third finger missing to the same first knuckle?

How to explain, she thinks, I think, that she
misses that missing finger of his,
as much as anything can be missed
that is no longer there?

How to explain, she whispers to ears that can no longer listen,
that being alone matters
because what is gone never leaves?

Inside the wail

Geppetto waited for God’s breath

to set him free

from the fish memories of the tree.

He carved into his son

and listened to the waves

beat against the Leviathan’s breast.

When Pinnochio arrived with breakfast

The old man was crest-fallen, God 

would never save what the fairy had created.

A mariner’s love

  Ploughed flesh, forearms
  the runners of a steam ship.
  Cock, blunt rudder replaced endlessly.
  Heart matches the heat;
  sand warmed through the years -
  
  the grains trickle
  into need;
  coals feed
  the furnace -
  each a coil of mortality.
  
  Beneath hard twists and turns
  sand moves, tiny scales of serpent flesh,  
  unshaken, untouched by imprints, hold form  
  until weakest wind  
  or smallest ripple
  annihilates.
  
  The shore recedes; sea-green  
  hermit crabs sink  
  into depths beneath words.
  
  As I leave rolling sea
  it is all I can do not to turn and see  
  who enters behind me.  

Hidden facts

The hand held the wood

Like a father hold the babe

From crown to arse

Tenderly shaved away

The previous existence

With a sharp blade

Do babes bring any history with them?

Do we strip them clean

Polish them with our love

No mater how faulty it might be?

His eyes were carved first

So that he might see the face

Of his father

His mouth carved last

For words create a distance

Between the hearts of those

We love

The fingers were terrible

To master

The nose was not endowed with grace

Perhaps that is why it is remembered

The thing never mentioned is the genitalia

Did the wooden boy pee?

The goodbye

In front of the black Chinese screen

with bird scene – white crane stands in blue

water, its dark beak open, ready to pluck

a fish. Beside the crane, a bare cherry

tree; at the roots or afloat on the water

circling crane legs, the fallen blossom -  

she reclines upon the aquamarine

couch I always moved when she vacuumed.

Her neck, the underside of a white

Calla Lilly, exposed as if offered

in brutish irony to my open lips -

though this fish has escaped

into places my mouth cannot reach.

A bluish vein moves to dispose

the perfect symmetry

of that neck as an insect works

on the parting words she prepares.

I hear a clack of beak, a ruffle

of feathers, a distant flap

of flight –  there are places

I will never venture.

Her hand waves, languid as death.

Her hooded eyes, distant as a crane,

stare into depths - my hand

rubs my forearm, checks for scales.

Closing the wooden door

I spent a weekend stripping

and polishing with beeswax, I hear

her coffee voice utter a gentle reminder

to place her key in the green letter box

after I pass beyond the click of her gate.

Geppetto finds the stone

Even a lonely man who has never married,
whose only fragrant memory ended in Venice,
suffers the need to bury his loved ones.

Geppetto’s sister drowned in her lover’s arms,
and while he held and wept in caricature,
it was Geppetto who dug the grave and buried her bones.

It was while digging, his tears weakening the soil,
letting the spade slide in like a lover, that Geppetto
found the stone; a single stone amidst the grit of earth.

Once a mountain or a comet?
A tear, perhaps,
from a lost Goddess?

Geppetto reached out his hand and lifted free the stone,
defyied gravity,
disregarded the strange stares of his sister’s lover
and her gathered friends.

After he studied the stone for a moment,
While the crowd murmured and fidgeted,
he plopped it into his white shirt pocket;
felt the weight of it match his heart.

He kept the stone as company, through evenings
and days, a marker to his sister’s memory, not knowing
that its proximity to his sadness instigated change.

The stone began to believe it was a seed
and waited with the patience of rock
for the log to give it birth.

Let fishing villages lie

I came down into the town along wrinkled streets, 

past slumped houses. Outside old men, 

salt-blue hats stealing past crisp, white hairs,

sat on stools, whittled driftwood into memory.

The deserted dockyards dominated the heavy coastline, 

ribbed bones. Once Schooners and Brigantines

were the mainstay of the village until the evening 

when fishermen dragged themselves up to the shore.

Silence casts about the town now, dust settles 

old scores, the world turns a straight back 

to a finished existence. Fish swim in distant waters 

as ripples bring sadness into tarred hearts.

I came down into the town in search 

of an easy boat to brave the sea – possessed 

by a dream that my father the wood carver 

was trapped inside the sea’s moaning darkness.

I sought the prodigal path across waves 

and storms to bring my father, the candle, home – 

I was haunted by a mad belief  that skin 

and bone would not serve as well as wood.

I was already a cast out boy and wanted 

at this late date to be a tree again. A tree

can  sail oceans; each leaf can hear prayers 

whispered in darkness. I was made flesh.

Wendy Leaves.

Beneath the rusted oak she

pushes back her cloak

of hair, black as the shadows

underneath the tree’s limbs, reveals

green, watered eyes - sealed

as she gestures the end

of it all with a firm, brisk shake of her head.

Leaves fall under the weight

of sunlight.

A rainfall of oranges, reds and he,

still as autumn’s breath – feels

yellow, old and lost

before her departure.

Leaves in his hair, in

his heart, in his ears, his mouth –

his senses clogged with the past.

In the middle of a mound

he suffocates.

Stars fall into the abyss.

The heat of death, of lost thoughts - a lost

boy, arms spread yet

unable to leave the earth.

In autumn’s fragile light, the blight

of leaves, and Wendy’s straight back, smites

as she moves away in farewell.

The statue behind, lips pursed, hands cup

an acorn for a heart. Passers-by pay it

no heed - another familiar object

gathers moss in their busy dreams.

Wendy leaves - shards fall; a curtain call.

Everything must end, the knowledge, like autumn,

comes in cycles. First we forget, then we believe -

and throughout the months and days

and horrible moments, Wendy leaves.

Photosynthesis

Each leaf

can feel the teeth

of the myriad plant eaters

that cheat

by taking the energy we capture

and digest it into their fleshy lives.

They think movement

is the greatest achievement.

Great Read/Christmas Present

Kevin Burgemeestre's first Youth fiction novel - a ripper yard!

Kate

New Publisher?

Satalyte Publishing are sending me a contract for Catalina.

A conversation with Nietzsche

 

I was not always a maker of puppets

carving out loneliness in smiling faces –

nor, too, always this old man,

round spectacles perched halfway down

a Roman nose. My grey hair was once thick,

springy and as black as any witch’s cat.

Some cold nights before the fire I watch

red and blue flames flicker - life twists

and turns also, licks this log and then that.

I lost Loretta in Venice to a Gondolier.

She lives there still, beside the rising tears

of the Canałasso, with three sons

and a married daughter named Geppetina.

I misplaced God somewhere between Venice

and Sicily; on the road, beneath the stars –

He should have come close to me, instead,

like a shooting star, I felt the dearth of Him.

For a time the pain of His exit left me breathless

and fearful of each emerging, impermanent, night.

It was His loss that gave me the courage to fashion,

pretending I was part of a burgeoning family.

Pinocchio was the forty-fifth, the only one with a heart

and whose eyes I found beneath riddled bark; a son

who appeared to move even as the wood was being carved.

The Leaves Of Hamlyn

The plans that explained how the tree

fathered a child

were lifted by a wind

and carried past the swaying curtain and open window

into the streets built as prostrate towers of Babel.

The plans remembered when they were bark,

imitated the behaviour of crisp leaves

and danced the secret shadowy tales

watched by bare trees

that silently stood as audience,

mute, blind

yet able to understand the craft,

the man.

The leaves lead him into another winter,

the golden dance turned to putrid carcass.

Trees scarecrow the fears villagers

suppress by building bonfires

to pass anxieties through.

Pinocchio buried his son yesterday
while the leaves
gathered like children at a concert,

sad
and pleased they were not the only fallen.

That night
wind pushed thoughts hard against his mind,

as if it were a transparent pane onto that other plane

where he could hear again
the  child’s remembered voice.

It sounded liked a leaf
scraping across the concrete footpath if only he

had the ears to hear.

In the morning Pinocchio raked, burnt the leaves,

watched the smoke rise above the houses,

felt the ache beneath his left ribcage

as if his heart
was a leaf preparing to depart.

Dark thoughts

The tree dreams of feet

and legs.

The boy of being so tall

his head

touches clouds.

Beginnings.

 

In the arc of thought…

when light turns to flesh and words

attach themselves to ideas;

he falls back to the beginning -

to unhinged gates, to sharp, wire fences and cut grass

wet as a child’s first gargoyle sounds;

his unlined lips a perfect ‘o’ and the lizard tongue

touching the white teeth between.

It was there, in that tumbling-over time of effort

for less reward than for the joy

of feeling the heart beat,

the blood caper,

and the light as it sprung past the curtained window

to light his mind

brighter than any holy fool.

It was there the poet unclasped, uncurled,

removed his thumb from forming lips

and first set rhythm to breath; there he

felt the world was a scattered puzzle whose pieces

could fit

in all manner of turnings.

It was there,

before the cake had set,

or the spoon been licked,

that the first poems were captured

and set to stand for a time until sometimes,

in the cocooned darkness of intimate night,

they pop out… cooked.

Things Not Meant To Be (an edit)

To the attuned ear,

the saddest sound is formed

when wooden lips, that cannot be pursed

further than the gouge has them frozen at, collide

across the string divide; wooden heads held back,

legs unable to lean forward, hands open,

always searching for a clasp that cannot be.

Stromboli laughed at me,

a foolish puppet

mimicking the grandest acts

of life when I held the puppet girl close

and tried to press my lips to hers. He wept

at wood that cannot illustrate passion

except as a caricature.

Mangiafuoco was more kind;

set me free

with coins and a sad shake of his head

when he heard the tale

of two puppets kissing. He asked me

if the touch of my wooden lips to hers sufficed.

I told him I could not forget the sound

as our lips thumped together

to the tune

of earth hitting a coffin lid.

When my wood turned to skin

I sought her out again; discovered 

she had been devoured by the fire.

There was nothing left

but my memory of that time in the corner

of the tent, her arms akimbo,

legs askew, her strings

tangled, and she never said a word

as I pressed close.

I recall the texture

of  her wooded chest to mine

and in my ears I hear

the sound of  death, like that released

in a wooden club as it connects

to the small head of a fur seal pup.

Dada's Seed

Before dada first did me harm
he sat on my bed and stroked
my right leg, the one he would soon ruin.

I watched his Adam's apple heft the axe
and split his thoughts into sounds.
He let loose hardwood splinters.

They slid beneath my love, attached themselves
to my heart, buried themselves deep,
formed black lumps so that in later life,
whenever I was hugged, a splinter shaped
the responses that escaped my mouth.


'My heart,' dada began, 'you see, or soon will
if you do not already, or if, sadly, your mother
has failed to warn you, is as black as the inside
of a coffin with the thick lid nailed shut;
made that way when my da took revenge in the night
for the things done to him, over an apple, long ago.'

A single tear clung to the thick lashes
of his left eye – a mountaineer poised on the cusp
before the advancing avalanche. 'I have to warn you,'
he continued, 'that I am unable to love properly,
I find the touch of your mother's lips intolerable.'

His nails scratched the skin
beneath my shoulder blades raw while dada
continued talking. 'Unlike you, my da
made me sleep in a Hessian sack, would you believe,
and, with nuncle Pat as his side-kick, threatened
to throw me in a river if I forgot myself and fell asleep.

I'll do no such thing to you,' he said, 'but must
release the hellhounds that gnaw my organs
in a fashion that allows me to keep breathing.
So in fairness and in warning, my scion, and to ease
the hammer that thunked the flesh inside my chest,
in three days time, I shall begin to hurt you.'

Dada wept several tears. I watched them
slide down his cheeks and lost them in the stubble
and shadow of his chin and throat.

He said, 'I would like
to be brave but find it easier to send
you down into the darkness
than to make the difficult journey myself.'

Three days I waited.
I felt walls crouch close
and nip at the air before it passed my lips.

Three days I waited.
I forced myself to sleep with an eye open
and my hands placed firmly between my legs.

Three days later he began on my leg.
He manacled my arms to the bed,
pulled back the sheet and took hold of the leg
where it stuck out of my pajama pants.

His left hand held it firm. His right hand
grasped the arch of my foot.
As he sung Goodnight Irene he began to twist
until first the ankle cracked and then the knee was ruined.

He revisited that leg every night for forty nights.
I fought, sought pity, thrashed - a fish
trapped in a plastic bucket, swimming in pain -
the bones crushed and re-crushed
until marrow escaped, muscle fled and the leg, from
the knee and all below, flopped and puddled
beneath the thigh, the colour and consistency of porridge.

Next he fed me the flesh carved from the back of mother.
He cut the meat into thin strips, sautéed in peanut butter,
skewered and fed to me with bowls of Basmati rice
and gentle green tea. If I vomited
he returned to the kitchen. I heard my mother's screams
and then he brought me a fresh batch of meat.
To hold her meat down I bit the pillowslip.

Mother came to me every morning.
Gingerly, she lifted her shirt
and showed me the flesh missing in patches across her back
beneath the tight horizontal strap of her black brassiere.

My teens were spent in dada's cellar,
fearful of his visits where he would whisper
his love
and pound my spine or pluck single hairs
from my head
or bite the knuckle of my thumb
until it bled.

One night, with pliers, he snipped off
my left hand's little finger.

He told me about a brother I should have had
if dada had let him live. 'That one,' he whispered, his hot breath
forced into my right ear, 'sleeps at the bottom of a river.
I had to, don't you see, rid myself
of the fear of that damn Hessian sack.'

I wet my mattress at night. During the day I dried it
with the heat that emanated from my frail body.
I coughed up the best years
of my adolescence and spent myself time over
on the soiled, spoiled sheets of that prison bed.

At 21 dada released me.
Mother kissed me. She touched my forehead
with her hand and handed me a crutch
to hobble with.

As a final gesture, dada pushed me out the door
and shoved me down the steps. He laughed
as I fell and put a front tooth
through the flesh of my bottom lip.

I found a job sitting beside a beach
polishing hermit shells I stole off the crabs
as they wandered the shoreline
beneath the lapping light of the half- moon.
I sold the shells to children, told them
it was not the ocean they could hear
but the cries of crabs lost upon the ocean's dark floor,
seeking their mothers' familiar claws
or fearful of the snip if they encountered their fathers'.

I found a wife and brought her home
to meet the family. Was shocked
when dada seduced her; he forced
my mother and I to watch
while he coupled her.

She, I forgave,
but blood should not be forged into a weapon.
I plucked out my eyes
and threw them at dada.
He never paused but rushed onwards, faster
than a breached dam.

The dogs barked as he rutted
and when she cried out part of me went missing forever.

I left that place, took my wife,
or let her take me, rather,
but soon lost her and never sought
to discover if she went to that home,
to his bed
where I was first brought into existence.

Eventually, months and years diminished
my revulsion and I was drawn north to south.
I slithered over the back fence
and took up residence in the back shed, fed
by my mother in secret. Blind in the darkness, heartless,
I listened to the dull leather sound as dada
beat my mother. I offered no solace
when she brought me food in the morning.

Finally I left the shack
and discovered, like others before me,
that the road back is harder still
than the slide into the darkness.

I found a new woman who had three children,
lived with her beside a river,
ate apples every day
and planted their seeds at night. I watered them
with my tears and the gentle stories
I told her children.

My ears heard the laughter
as water scampered across tickling rocks
or the joyful squeals of her children
as she chased them, pretending to be a monster.

I unearthed a large boulder and placed it
upon my own monster. I know
a seed cannot grow without light.

I discovered, one winter, a son that she gave me
and bit my tongue off while I held him; smelt
the skull that had captured sunshine
and the scent of the deep blue wings of a butterfly.

She stood beside me, her hand
around my shoulder, her lips
painting, with breath, the hairs
of my ears and I thought of my mother
and the apple trees blossomed
and shed their petals
as gently as death
or love
or snow.

Pinocchio’s evolution

 

It started with the aglet of the lace

painted upon the left black shoe

on the foot of his carved leg.

After an unknown interval

an entire shoelace turned real,

moved  to an intrusive breeze.

The strings were still there

when behind a knot of wood

his heart began to beat.

The right eye moistened first,

saw the crease of flesh

and a single blue vein underneath.

One day the finger nail

of his right thumb

started to grow and curl.

A strand of blue-black hair

at the back of his head stirred;  

a lash of his eye fell free, fluttered,

landed upon his wooden cheek.

The right foot bent, returned.

His left hand made its first fist.

His ears filled with wax

weeks before his bottom and top lips

cracked and split

and a full year, at least,

before the tongue, like a debutant,

shyly poked between.

It was a sunny day

when he first began to think;

rained heavily the afternoon

all his wood was finally skin,

yet the tale is easier told when,

with the wave of a wand,

and a hoarse whisper of a spell,

the puppet can speak.

Things not meant to be

The saddest sound

is made

when wooden lips collide

across the string divide.

 

Stomboli laughed

at foolish puppets

mimicking the grandest acts

of life.

 

Mangiafuoco was more kind;

set me free

with coins and a sad shake of his head

when he heard the tale

of two puppets kissing -

wooden lips bump

to the sound

of earth hitting a coffin lid.

 

When my wood turned to skin

I sought her out.

She had been devoured by the fire;

there was nothing left

but memory: the texture

of wood on my lips –

the sound of a wooden club

as it connects to the small head

of a fur seal pup.

Farewelling Geppetto

The old man hardly dents the bed;

chest sinks into a sea-green song's depths.

The candle light flickers, casts shadows

upon the ceiling and wall as if friends

have gathered. The middle of the night

meets the dawn with a fork –

fool's choice offered at the last.

Pinocchio holds the withered hand

that once gently held him; strokes

the knuckles and nails, feels pain as his wood

atomically realigns into flesh - regrets

choices made along the way.

He removes his shoes and socks 

so that his feet touch the floorboards beneath, 

feels a comfort in the wood, in the memories

contact with the past can bring.

Looks at his joints, elbow and knee, 

ankle and wrist; regrets that he is supported 

by gravity and nothing else.

'Strings force steps

but at least they offer

an uncomplicated path,' he whispers 

as he stares at the chest

of Geppetto - it seeks the distant shore.

'Existence is easy as a tree

or a log to be burnt,'

he whispers at three

in the morning. The old man's chest

creaks like an old galley ship

then moves no more.

Pinocchio knows no prayers to say over the body,

cannot see the spirit leave the flesh, feels

tears slide down cheeks that once sprouted 

leaves instead; cries into the dark

'Geppetto is dead!

Now I understand what it is to be alive,

Geppetto is dead!’ 

The boy who was a tree 

feels his toes wriggle, understands their desire 

to break past the floorboards and enter the earth – 

their need to seek sustenance

in a connection to everything abandoned.

Into a time the colour of Hamlet.

Adieu defeated light, farewell dangerous leaves;
let silent foes night-dream, let them clatter
to fill the vacuum, as distant stars defeat hope.

Clouds drift, a hand trails across the bed,
the way a leaf slides along concrete,
outside the drawn, quartered, window
old men and women, water precise gardens,
sleep in little rows neat as Noddy’s street.

An empty page flutters for redemption
a voice utters hoarse recital; moon hears not 

the plea, Muse sleeps in thorny bower,
Trickster shadows play at inspiration, cause nib 

to scratch at white paper - as useful

as childhood hands at summer’s mosquito bites.

Voices, faces, December memories -
carnival of lights glittering ‘Jesus Saves!’ -
knowing he does no such thing, 

not in these moments, not to these words.

Weight, waves, sounds, ripples, gratuitous music;

scared bodies make whoopee - churn milk into rancid butter.

Sleep, a net, particles of skin, the fish,
redemption, a cell’s unique ability
to reinvent itself so that every seven years
we pretend to be someone different.

The Plunge:

It was not until real hair began to grow, pushing through holes, 

once the gaps in bark, now the windows of this organ called flesh, 

that I began to miss with my thrumming heart-stone life as a tree. 

Nothing can compare to the feel of a breeze through fresh leaf, 

its veins taut with captured sunlight and the serrated edges 

sensing directions skin cannot understand, or the exquisite release 

when wind moves branches stuck between days like estranged lovers 

whose hearts have twisted through bleak regret to brooding hate.

I found the screaming sea by accidental steps. 

It was the sympathetic loneliness of the distant cliff

that drew me to stand at the world's edge. I felt the currents 

buffet me until I became jealous of the common gulls

that allowed the thermals to lift them higher than thought.

The cliff was as close as I could come to returning home.

The unrelenting, unnerving life of Pinocchio

Pinocchio’s warm hand, the white nails curved

to match the crescent moon that he has always believed

was the moon of his seed’s bursting, rests

upon his creator’s cool brow, a sailor

standing at the prow, searching for the sight of land.

Pinocchio wonders if the carver of his form,

taking him from tree trunk to  adolescent boy,

ever foresaw the consequences in his creation.

Pinocchio wants to ask the face that is falling into depths

even whales cannot go,  wants the answer

before the chest stills, a lake suddenly emptied,

if Geppetto ever thought his son would be different

in ways even a maker cannot foresee until

hindsight carries them beyond the original intention.

Pinocchio leans close to Geppetto’s left ear,

stares at the tuffs of white hair that protrude

from the conch shell of flesh, as if a deep sea plant

had found anchorage, and whispers, ‘I  want to tell you, papa,

I took the apple alone, went to the island alone, did not mean

to end up with you in the whale’s stomach. Papa,

I want to tell you that unrelenting life unnerves me.’

The accumulation of me

Hanging from the scaffold

drifting back to the tree

from tree to seed; the seed

takes me to the earth, to ferns

chomped by giant reptiles

and eventually

the sea.

When they cut

me down

they wanted me to believe

the blue fairy

had saved me.

I stood firm -

felt my feet in the earth

of a million years ago,

the remains of the sea

in the tears that welled -

I am not a product of her wand.

Life did not come cheaply,

not for the seed

nor the tree:

Not for the plankton

nor the first single cell.

All steps on the journey

to the point

where I am able to claim

my own two feet.

Nan and her Bin, my grandfather:

(and their truly missing knuckles)

I have this memory, conjured from photos,
or, perhaps, real, of that day in the cemetery
when they buried Nan’s old Bin, my grandfather.

Nan’s hand, wrinkled like a washed sheet,
the third finger missing to the first knuckle, rests
heavily upon the casket as she waits
for the twin green straps (slow as a lizard’s blue tongue
tasting air) to be withdrawn, lowering, therefore, the casket
and within, the still body of Nan’s beloved Bin.

I can hear her thoughts in my mind (the years, a funnel
expressing the hidden moments we miss at the time) - How to explain,
with faded, crisp leaves rustling words along
the cracked and pitted path and bunched-up cars
humming eager to repel the day,
to the grandchildren lost in phones and fancies
that inside the casket,
his right hand, wrinkled, too, a matching washed sheet,
has the third finger missing to the same first knuckle?

How to explain, she thinks, I think, that she misses that missing finger
of his,
as much as anything can be missed
that is no longer there?

How to explain that being alone matters
because what is gone never leaves?

Into a time the colour of Hamlet.

Adieu defeated light, farewell dangerous leaves;
let silent foes night-dream, let them clatter
to fill the vacuum, as distant stars defeat hope.

Clouds drift, a hand trails across the bed,
the way a leaf slides along concrete,
outside the drawn, quartered, window
old men and women, water precise gardens,
sleep in little rows neat as Noddy’s street.

An empty page flutters for redemption
a voice utters hoarse recital; moon hears

not the plea. Muse sleeps in thorny bower,
Trickster shadows play at inspiration, cause nib 

to scratch at white paper - as useful

as childhood hands at summer’s mosquito bites.

Voices, faces, December memories - carnival of lights
glittering ‘Jesus Saves!’ - knowing he does no such thing,
not in these moments, not to these words.

Weight, waves, sounds, ripples,

gratuitous music; scared bodies make whoopee -

churn milk into rancid butter.

Sleep, a net, particles of skin, the fish, redemption, 

a cell’s unique ability to reinvent itself so that 

every seven years we pretend to be someone different.

The miner carves out a niche

 

Each scrape of the shovel,

every dug out notch

or carved tunnel

feeds the ache

that is carried in hands

permanently blackened and a heart

lost in the timelessness of day

to day searches

and the demands

never able to be met;

like the puppet that walked,

it amazes everyone

he rises each day, dresses

in the same worn clothes,

finds his boots beneath the bed

and sets forth to work in the mines

where he excavates through the hours.

His mind

distantly remembers

that time in sunlight and blue skies,

sunbathing, his wife in red bathers

running towards the waves,

her white thighs

yet to show the purple veins

hated as much as those he digs

every day.

At night they sat together -

he whittled,

they spoke of children

and, as the distant dance of the sea

crashed upon the shore,

in darkness, with hope,

they carried themselves

into a future

they both wished for

and secretly feared.