Tuesday 10 December 2013

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.

Sunday 1 December 2013

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.

Friday 29 November 2013

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.



Thursday 28 November 2013

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?

Wednesday 27 November 2013

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?

Monday 25 November 2013

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.

Saturday 23 November 2013

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.

Friday 22 November 2013

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

Thursday 21 November 2013

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.

Wednesday 20 November 2013

Dark thoughts


The tree dreams of feet
and legs.
The boy of being so tall
his head
touches clouds.

Tuesday 19 November 2013

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.

Monday 18 November 2013

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.

Thursday 14 November 2013

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.

Wednesday 13 November 2013

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.






Tuesday 12 November 2013

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.

Monday 11 November 2013

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.’

Saturday 9 November 2013

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.