Strokes of moonlight smother the inflorescent whispers of the smoke bush –
fighting, but wavering against twilight’s ghostly dreams, it drapes the water, pondering depth and death,
and, whereupon streaks of my childhood run wildly ‘til they bleed into the perfect pink wash – disrupted only briefly by daubs of my more morbid notions –
a thousand indigo butterflies dotted like inky death become pinned to the eerie flatness of still water and life –
finally, my drowning memories are absorbed by stagnant fluid – the whispers are hushed in the black, dead air where mosquitoes live instead, and for the first time, I begin to thrive.
Words tremble and form on my lips. In the middle of nowhere, on an old, abandoned field’s icy, quiet calm – I can see those words as frosted air, palpable, almost real. Almost. The memory of ecstasy ripples vehemently in rifts, saying, ‘don’t let go – don’t let go of the moment, the tenderness and the journey that has begun – don’t let go of the time invested and the heart’s own life span,’ – I clap my mitts together hard. I need to hear another voice in the heavy, thick dullness of meaningless, inside this bitterly cold wilderness – an expansion of existence. Inside this perfect ring of O, caution and doubt is excluded by the wintry tourniquet and deep seated bleakness. Within this rink of fire, I have found a plan; idly scraped into the dense snow’s virgin white territory are thoughts and decision making – a bittersweet means to an end. I exhale and words reverberate – detached. Let loose, they do their own thing. I believe that trust is its own reward, and love is a consequence of that very airing – so, I let them breathe. My lips tremble from more words, although I can’t hear them, they spill and the cold lets them sit there. Sat on the snow, memories cosy up to them, of when tears made me choke and lies made me half blind – now they both thaw like a discarded ice lolly bleeding into the impacted prisms hidden in this pristine foundation. I rub my insulated woollen hand over the small pond’s glass to see a lifetime spent asking why amid my mind’s sighs to half answered questions and doubts, and painful bouts of inertia. I find a heavy rock, and listening only to the whispers between my thighs’ nylon energy, I smash it into a face in the ice – all of those things are finally released and surface through the shards of their confinement – roaming prisoners cut loose to set me free, to crawl out onto the debris. Wading knee deep I try to remember what was instilled in me; I was taught to swim and love, and trust in rewards, I was loved and I am loved, a consequence of not sinking – swim freely. The temperature plummets within, and still knee deep, I am caught in the ice of limbo like a reluctant, unbaptised infant who already knows its own mind. Today, it is not as simple; revisited once again, by dark clouds that come to smother me with their words – they take their place in the queue in this time lapse of a snowy day where whiter clouds come and go, but like my words they are seldom realised, and so I have to withdraw into a quiet blackness – the Narnia sheen of glistening reason is too bright, too stark, too vivid when shouts scream from it. The pool of unhurried water is a starkly black dilation – of a welcoming eye – the pupil inside this giant O. I fall into its gaze, and like yours it swallows me up.
The souls of all those aching fools
are mulched with the broken bonds of glory
and cacophony of undeliverable
goods: swept up wings
of beautiful angels or sultry virgins waiting
in paradise for suicides blown to kingdom come –
the only kingdom deep in the depths of righteousness
under ashen beads of sweat.
They cry beneath their toil when all have left
them forgotten in dank, gritted dirt,
Graves roll over like fond heather
when purple prayers are laid to rest
along with all signs of peace.
Time and again they pour themselves
into the ground hoping rotten weeds
will allow them breathing room
‘til their passage, but slithering tongues
try to lick them clean while both crawl
on bellies over and through
withered twig fingers still wedded
to propaganda’s grenades and its rusted
rings. Lifeless, hollow, frigid eyes
desperately seek out the light
among a scurry of morbid shadows.
Cold pitiful screams muffled by cold clay
means in the end, there is no glory
or kingdom, vineyards and exquisite drinks
dripped by virgins in a life ever after – all bets
are off.
Tapping rain becomes the omen,
blackbirds pecked once here before,
feeding at your safety harness
before the window cut through your shade
and more; crumpled, slain, within your own
reflection, you are shattered glass singing
shrill and bleakly, before quietly resting,
as confetti floor.
Smother my pulse
in timeless grains of sand,
let its broken glass bedeck
my wrists
where stranded pearls, no longer wise,
once worshiped summer’s heroes.
My lilac demise
is well hidden from winter,
long gone without me –
time is all that is left.
As it Comes 