Sunday, 7 December 2014

2 more in the Pinocchio series.

I've posted these 2 together. The first makes sense with the 2nd and the 2nd leads to future references about P's heart being a stone.



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 waves
crashed upon the shore
in darkness with hope

they 
fucked 
themselves

into a future 
they both wished for
and secretly feared





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 edit 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
as 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.


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