Wednesday 10 October 2012

Growing up

I stepped out of the house a while,
had children, jobs, a go at life. I put on
hats that didn’t fit and never saw
my smile in a mirror.

I stepped out of the house a while
walked odorous streets in gorgeous cities, wanted
others’ tricks and baubles, picked up hanging
threads of conversation.

I stepped out of the house and found a spring
a self-announcing, giggling gush, just mad
to rise and channel. Its prankish water
wet my lips and tongue.

I looked back at the house and noticed how
a sharper light fell, with a cutting edge,
on cobwebs, dust and window smears, and how
it met the dark inside.

Painkillers on a scale from Actually make it worse to Truly make it better

Comfort eating: trawling through the fridge
Secret, guilty, numbing short term fix

Sudoku: boxed in digits, one way’s right
Certainty, the truth in black and white

Archers: could it simply be the tune
Was played to me when I was in the womb?

Films: spill my emotions, lead them on,
Get them out and take them for a run

Friends: connections, talking, being heard
Sharing things that matter through our words

Poems: grasping something never said
From deep within me, laying it to rest

On the Beach

Nothing is here,
Though a blue sky, edge to edge,
Accompanies a mild-mannered sea,
white-capped for decoration.
Postcard-painted beach huts throw their colours to the sun. 
A hundred thousand sistered stones make shingle.

Loneliness is here.
But the sea is playful, chucking balls of spray.
So she ups her zip, while tensing,
slightly wary of catching skin.
Feels the mild discomfort of the stones
Beneath her feet. They’re slightly warm to touch,
Just slightly warming

Emptiness is here.
Complicit though, the ocean -hush, shush, hush -
denies it, plays at perfect summer’s day.
She drops a matt grey, ocean-tumbled stone
her hand has nursed. Returns it to the fellowship
 of pebbles, walks away.

San Francisco, April 2012

All those brilliant
Splintered fragments of light
Across the bay
Make a scene she can’t get hold of.
Prozac-numbed party girl
Sidles past the death of a close friend
Into a courtroom
To have an opinion
About the abuse of a child.
The juror’s out of it.

From tumbling, tearing seas
The Clipper yachts
Are racing in to find haven and
Her hand-crafted welcome parties.
They are heaving, swelling and falling,
Words and drinks flowing,
Carrying her close to and away from
The lighthouse man
Who dazzled her seas,
Projecting mirror-crazed rays.

Angry


She’s living like a gloss-painted wall
Planted, strong, inscrutable, slick
Behind the wall, she tussles with explosion,
as it jigs and punches in her open-fingered fist.

Occasionally, she roars, and is indignant
at how the air diminishes the flood
of sound to nothing, so that silence is her censor
and nothing may be said, nothing heard.

Sometimes she takes a deep and sudden bite
from her own forearm; or almost kills her girls;
or smacks her head against the steering wheel
and giggles at the horn’s small howl.

Once she was so needy that she sought
respite in churchalthough God wasn’t hers
and there she wrote down words so harsh they vanished
as she turned each page.  They couldn’t be endured.

On better days she’s bramble-torn, her arms
and legs ooze, hot with superficial wounds.
She knows, on days like these, to let the cool breeze
cool the skin, the blood, the head, the mood.

Postcards

What to do with words?
A decision I need not
Postpone. This summer,

Instead of postcards
Poems will frame messages:
Paper and pencil

Conduits for fresh
Discoveries, graphited
In two dimensions.