An ode to sleeplessness and pain.

Your

suicide
dial
reports
soars
digging deep
into
petal sharp
flex
of
inverted
pride.
scoring
soft
flesh
you say
drains
thought
poppies thought
too
sickly weak
to
salve
numb
fumbling
regrets
of
past
pressed
days.

still.

fidgetting
with courage
you
continue
to name
marauding
nights
touched
distantly
in said
blood clots.
you
scratch
to grip
to
gulp too

tap
tap
tap.

fingering
your sayings
tap, tap
moves we
to call and response
Water
Sister?
No, not that
and pushing
down
preciously
down upon
your plastic teat

you

trickle
sweet saltings of sweat you
imbibe wounds until
they hatch
in overwhelming
whelps of weep-ful-ness
while
in otherness
aches and strains
invite us both
to once again
card-board chew through
battle fallow fields
to warp the walk
from
ego stress.

till
till
tilling
un-
countable
fillings of
past soiled
future
sores
intimate
groans
and
sleepless ness
distanced
becomings
re-erect themselves
in this now
upon
hoarding pillars both
bile and blue
spent and
deformed
with these new
warming
spirits despaired
and passed
between us
in momentary
fragmented
truth

rest awhile

my broken flower

yes

you

my fullness of
stiff regret
breathe and stretch and
profess
movements to soften
further
varicose spills of
forty per-cent
night-time
armistice

you of this
new hope-ful-ness
wishing to
ward off
immersed
confusions of chemical lash
burning yearnings that
crisp the crust, that
deadens dawning grief
in low familiar
yawning dusk
flow slow from
those darkening swills
that translucent soak
so melting here the
salted cubes this
fleshed disbelief
may dis-

appearing again ‘for Christ’s sake,’ you say

‘surely,’

you pause to re-orientate to re-find your currently wearing face within this worn out journal stock:

‘surely, this time, I’ll re-find relief and solid ground within this rolling reef, this ice bound rock.’

and

watching
as you regather
as your precious life
leaves in my lap such

absurdly poetic

stuttering words

of

thanks

I wonder at your strength

I ponder over your wisdom-filled beauty 

Shall we see
shall share again these un-
speakable, most legible most
tenderful privileges of groundings
grown deep within
these suffering joys, these
witnessings of transforming pain.

Whoever is willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to herself, that person is a pleasant shelter…It is enough to recognise one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself, like a child…

St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), aka: ‘The Little Flower.’

(Quoted from Richard Rohr: Eager to Love p.111 & 114).

 

Burning in the choppy seas of desire

Pondering on the news that a massive tanker (The Sanchi)

is ablaze and may explode after colliding with a cargo ship 300 kms from Shanghai

An odourless colourless

poisonous threat

prepares to explode

within my flat screen

state of the art

TV set.

And so:

I press the pause button

to make more tea

and cut a slice more cake

as one million barrels

boil and burn and smoke most

thickly

in some indistinct

East China sea.

Tis but a tiny drop

a mere tanker-load

to invisibly

decimate

Korean fish stock and

Shanghai landscape.

A mere monumental blip

to the sailing of the seas

to satiate this first world grip

of post festive need

for us to drive the last mile

to pile up 50% off

bargain bucket guff

from city centre shops, themselves, poor things

struggling to conceive

new ways to re-package

old shit and to sell more

ever more

to those ever ready

to be completely

overstuffed with overheated

greed.

And while our thwarted desires

burn endlessly in some far off

China sea

online search engines

continue to earn invisible billions

by filling hundreds of thousands

or maybe millions of brown boxes

with polystyrene chips and tiny

incidental gifts

automatically sent

while we are otherwise engaged

by the underperforming underpaid

self-employed diesel waged

carriers

who once more

fly poste-haste

to drop tomorrows ‘hot’

unwanted waste

outside our neighbours closed front door.

Staining the Graveyard black

After and during

reading and inadvertently bleeding ink upon

‘A Gentle Breeze, Graveyard, Dulcimer  (Soyokaze, Hakaba Darushima)’

by Shuntaro Tanikawa

 

Inspired to chime

with a Tanikawa signed

prose gem to hand

and

with fountain pen poised gently

in the other

my so suddenly ham fisted

unthinking sneeze

covered and twisted jet-black ink

upon

a preciousness of Graveyard Breeze

to darkly spit and yet to dream

such aimless scrawl upon Dulcet face

confirms to me once and for all

my

lowly grovelling snivelling place

within Shuntaro’s sweet neat world

of

simplicity, immediacy and poetic grace.

If not me

Oh

wood pigeon you deep throat

cry me to mate.

Neck ballooning with longing

you resonate

above these slates

this mist, that

diesel track to Weston.

The roof top between us

is hiding my presence.

Acting the beat box.

What have you in store for me?

What desires drive your calling

to chimneyed horizons?

How far do you fly

your bare twigs

to nest hopes on

this city bird table.

Prepare to entice me

To your perch

and if not me, then

Who, who, who?

Who, who, who?

Threading Life-lines in Time

 

I notice my glistening

hands undried

in the silver

of a new wash.

Am I absent mindedly

hoping not to grow

further into

these life lines? 

Presumably

they are similar

to the ones

held in youthfulness

by a SoothSayer 

who professed three

long marriages

seemingly barren but

loving,  while

further foretelling a

long-life-cut-short

Relatively,

by a forward push

down dark and

steeply set stairs

and stares, aged 90

apparently.

So far all is so

thankfully wrong

and yet

despite 27 years

spent loving just

the one

when I fret

I need deep breath

to feel heart

in chest

and carefully

stop life

and spend Time

to keep every

single step

in line.

 

Off with the Odd and on with the new.

 

BS Johnson

you past fiery elephant, you

avant-garde

grave-yard, you

long gone icon

you were my first

dead cert

third rate

box inserting

Joycean echo or, more like,

merely a bloke who chose to think and drink

and wade about in such wastage and excess

your spirit drowned on praise too slight

and the tastes of bile regurgitated

on spectacular non-success.

for even when, I safely re-bathe

in tomes of your frail egoic light

I cherish more your distinctive

scrawl of ink green

on the last page of Poems Two

than all that’s raked and faked by you

in the pages in between.

 

And now off with odd and on with a new

unexpected Autumnal ache

that leaves me tender-full within the tendrils of

Anthony Hecht’s delicious text

just discovered in the second hand

Oxfam ‘Joy of Poetry Fact and Fiction’ section

and so:

with dictionary in one hand and

with Millions of Strange ancestral skeins

Shadowing the very means of my understanding

I am deliciously dropped

bit by bit, into his wonderful past penmanship

his death eulogy for Somebody’s Life

his Greek mythologies sifting with ease beneath

The Music of the Night

A Voice, never seen,

breathes in me new life, indeed

from The Cost to The Lull through Swan Dive

and soft Epistles Green

I Feast on Stephen, and the Coming Home

to Gladness for his subtle splendid genius brimming in-between.