For Now

The day begins and I twitch to Do.
I wish those whips that flay me on
Would relax their leather
And be gone.
Let me sink my toes into the sand of the morning
My ankles tickled by the gentle incoming tide.

I look outside.

The swing set steams in the cold air
Like a fire newly extinguished.
The crocus trumpets sing their delight to have escaped the earth.
Tufts of green
Like sleeping baby hedgehogs
Line the path.
An old man walks a puppy.
The primroses impossibly yellow.

And I decide.

I am not at home today to anyone.
I let myself be and with just me I am home, alone.
And the dust can settle.
The washing can wait because the snowdrops must be admired.
It is only polite.
They’ve taken great pains to creep up under my window.
You can almost hear them yawn and stretch.

This day forgives.
And celebrates the nothing.
The morning thaws.
I pause and scold my mind into stillness.

One moment of blissful attention.
My lungs rejoice as I notice their tireless pumping.
The toast forms a golden puddle on the plate.
Butter buttresses me in its bright river.
Mellifluous ooze squeezes the snooze out of me.

There are sapphires of peace to be found in the dunghill of doing.
Shed the “musts” and “shoulds” like crumbs from an old coat.
Summon up the silence, deep from within.

Bloom

Dredge up the wrecks of who you thought you’d be
Limpet licked and blurred with moss
Toss them on the fire
Watch the fumes spiral up towards the moon
Your seabed fresh and clean
Ready to be seen for all that it is.
All that you are.

Sit in the sun.
Sit in the glow of the sun through the grimy window
the world thumps and wheezes and spins.
And you like it where the world is not.
Where the stained carpet speaks
Of old selves faded away
But still in the trunk
In the bark
Of you.

Would I change any of it?
Useless to wish for another self.
Spit out the pips of bitterness.
That fruit is not for you.
Taste instead a lip-licking love.
That hollow word that sings of the longing and the lost.
Which speaks to all the things yet to be understood.
And

Best of all

The never to be understood.

Cultivate and admire the tree of you, the forest of you.
Gnarled and lumpen and wind-wounded.
You’ll still bloom in the spring.

Swallows

A sparkling sea day
Before innocence left us.
A cottage
Saved from gloom by fresh white wash.
Blue fish nets and
Lobster pots litter the yard.

We venture in.

Musk of crusted sea-salt
Softens dark corners.
Walls not warmed by human sleep in over sixty years.
Up rotting stairs
Into afternoon light
Beaming through dollhouse windows.
At first glance hundreds
But probably twenty red faces
Darting to and fro.
Their deep blue bodies bright against white stone.
Smaller than we’d ever imagined.

Flown off course.
Desperate to rejoin their caravan
To warmer shores.
Frantic wings on the glass
A wordless scream.
Our small hands tried to catch them.
We only saved a few
But left the cottage open
Hoping they could stop and see
Their freedom lay close by.
The width of an eye.

The following week;
The floor of the house strewn
With deep blue twig-footed
dead.

Bedbind

You lie
scrunched up in bed
newspaper grey
dead-fished with dread.
Inertia
that ancient dragon
has charred you black.
But I can see the flames of you
where you only see the embers.
And I know you’re coming back
once you remember that you want to.

And I know
Too
How it feels.
That self-erasing sorrow.
The world is slipping out from under you and your skin feels too loose and your muscles feel too tight and sounds hurt and lights blind and pierce and how has this become my life?
I know that wish
To never have been
To never have soiled the worlds’ sheets with your muck.
Lock me up in a forest of thorns and let me sleep for a hundred years.
Raw
Like a whimpering baby rat left out in the rain.
And I want to
Need to
Hold you
It’s not your fault
Sssh
Ssssshhhh
It’s not your fault.
But like a frog
My fingers burn your skin
You flinch away
further in
And no
Open Sesame
Is going to let me through
Only you can hack your way
Out of that cave
Where the spiders cackle in the corner
And you want to burn up the world for refusing your wish to leave.
How it pains me that
I can no more show you the way
Than reason with light.
All I can say is
Wait
Wait
Be patient and wait
Knowing how futile words are when
Oblivion
Has poured ink in your eyes.

The day will come when
The glue will loosen and you will emerge from your
Pillowy prison.

And then, of course, the real work begins.

Pigeon

Malevolence hangs over the street.
The people never speak to each other
Though they share the same walls and their shit
Goes down the same pipes.
Animals with the arrogance of Greek gods.
That’s all us homo saps are.

A middle aged man, the face dripping off him
Drags himself up the street head first.
A woman mutters
Quietly deranged by disappointment.
The children feed the pigeons because they have not yet leant how to hate or mistrust.
An opaque window guards an empty, famished room
Aching for a body’s warmth.
Spit and piss colour the paths.
Held together with
Hate and boredom.
Those two plagues
Which rip the peace from summer days.
This whole sorry block should be

BANG

CRACK

Pestled into the dust of the city.

The pigeon blinks.
Just as I need to blink.
It’s eyes are orange and yellow
Like a more noble bird
A hawk maybe.
The more I stare the more beautiful it seems
In spite of its filth, it’s mangled foot.
A sparkle of aquamarine flashes from inside its coat
Maybe if polished it might be searing bright all over.
Underneath the dirt it could shine.

Night Swimming

Our limbs lie in the dark
Moon-yellowed.
Armies of rain
Batter my window
But entwined with you
I hear only breathing.

Open up your sea to me.
Let me swim in you and rub your salt on my wounds.
Your shy fish rush back to the rocks.
I hope they’ll get used to me
Come out and kiss my skin if I stay still enough.
As you breathe so the seaweed breathes with you
And I am rocked in your gentle tide.
Touching nothing.
Only wishing to see.

I cast a shadow on your reef
And cannot linger.
I do not wish your fish to die
Nor your corals wilt.
I’ll float to the surface.

You are an ocean
Not yet named.
I touch your sleeping face.

Other Shores

Wind-drunk boats
Lumber round the bay.
Fine lace of timid waves
Neatly trims the beach.
Sand
Varnished smooth by a storm
Soon to feel the lash of the incoming tide.
“Beware”
The sea lilts
Though it snoozes for now.
Ravaged jelly-fish,
Landlocked, forlorn,
Bubble and heave their silent death rattles.

Other sands
see much more
than my quiet cove.
People
flung
ashore
fleeing battles
of tangled origin.
Children who have never seen a beach before
take their first sandy steps
On hostile land.
Batman t-shirts sand-sodden and torn.
No caped crusader to save them.
Only sighs and tuts
from distant heaving tables
where the daily news is borne.

This is what we cannot mourn.
Beached babies and salt-choked sobs.
Evolutionary empathies remain
Static.
We go about our days, our jobs
Pragmatic.

And so I sigh and wish things that can never be.
Turning back to the sorrow-sunk sea.

Body Beautiful

I am with you

My Body

Though I pummel and curse you
Though I pinch with disgust
Though I leave you to rust.

I am mistaken.
My hips are not scars of fat
Wrought through years of
Blameless eating
But immovable
Unshrinkable
Bone.

Deep-rooted flesh-fear
-Garden-variety
Callous and stubborn-
Grips me in
False hope
And cruel expectation.

Though loathing boomerangs
Through cracks on
Rainy mornings

  I summon

With every mirror-glance flinch

  I summon

That unthinking child-delight
The feel of toes in grass
And tickled bellies

   I summon

That Pre-Edenic bliss
To shake off
The yoke of the strict silhouette
Now
In the summer of my life.

I cup my stomach with love
Tap my hip bone
Neat under my soft skin
My talisman for reality
Switch my lens from fashion
And fit-as-virtue formulae
To compassion
For my own
Personal
Symmetry.

Please know that I am with you.

My Body Beautiful.

I am trying.

Ocean Phosphorescence

My hands join moon and water
Summoning your glow.
I am a Sorceress
Astonished at my powers.
I do not speak.
I dare not banish you
Leaving me alone
In black water.

Planktonic forms
Algae
Dinoflagellates –
In the tongue of the ancients –
Whirling small whips.
My fingers feels the tingle
As I float through
This burst of physics.

No mined diamond
Could light the night
As your fierce sparkle.
Precious in your briefness.
Unclutchable.
Gently coveted.
Your absence leaves no sorrow.
Replete with pleasure,
I smile and go.

The joy we cannot own
Beats deeper in our blood.

There is some wonder left
In the tired world.

November

November
Starts it’s brewing
In August’s free safe glow.
Like a poisoned
Festive pudding
It stews
And grows cunning,
Knows it’s purpose;
To strike
Small steady blows
At the centre
Of me.
To pour
Paint stripper
On any colour
In my life.
The bottom’s fallen out
Of me.
Head full of tar.
I curl and wait for Christmas.
Wait for the new light
When my cells might
Calm
Settle
And my eyes
Unglazed
Can see
At last
What’s true.