These are a selection of poems from my book, “The Road-shaped Heart” to be published by Modern History Press 2011.
Table For One
The girl in pink wants another balloon.
Her mother cannot even lift her eyes, lost beneath her food.
A couple's conversation of defeat floats out of the window like charred paper.
The woman sighs: “There is nothing left to save.”
Resigned, her husband shakes his head full of spare parts and spears his heart with his fork – but it only drops, again.
It seems the wind has reached in through the window and snatched them like a Griffin.
Just dropped them separately on two distant tors; they have balled up like armadillos.
I draw deeply on the remaining half-inch of my cigarette and kill it like the rest.
I wonder the same yellowed thought: Is a single tendril of smoke ultimately less pained?
A beer arrives. I thank the waitress in a voice carved out by distant glaciers.
Roses Amongst A December Of Thorns
December’s thorns
Tear my hand; the crimson
Grip stains these
White-knuckle days
I will not accept this flower’s touch:
The finest china of a terrible sadness
And crushed to powder it leaves shards
Rendering palms unreadable, unbelievable.
A glide of knives on twisted stems:
Dead stars to holly-hook my flesh.
A sweet scent has turned astringent
A vase of roses left on a bedside table –
Twelve bruised eyes pool in a fractured mirror.
Glint
Oh this is quick, so steely sharp
It is a scalpel, be cautious when you wield it
Taken to our polarities
It will shave the dead wood; bone chips
Will fall away, the way your worldly costume
Coyly slides off bare shoulders and nape
and spirit slips down around your ankles.
I wore a halo of innocence –
You knocked it off in haste, it
Clattered to the floor.
White-coat knife-thrower, you should know:
This heart was not designed to be dissected
And pinned to a pitted specimen tray beside the weak
Frowned upon and poked by unskilled fingers
A disposable carcass, the fat red pump removed –
I sit on your shelf in a musty room:
A bag of nerves in a jar of alcohol.
Poseidon's Waters
Thundering sea god splits the night
his hands – claws of rain –
become familiar songs scratching
against stained panes of a glass vice.
Impaled on his trident
My ant-body
separates like oil and water
Taken to the flame
I curl like a singed strand of hair,
the fingers of conch wombs let me go,
Let me dilate in the wind.
Hot sand melts me crystal clear and the ache is gone—
My welt-red newborn memories gasp in the dark for air.
Lethe
stoned.
i awoke, cold
as slab
Just
a rustle
in the rest.
Closed.
Gothic Woman
The pregnant sky drifted slowly above us like a jellyfish
Tentacles stinging that April evening
With the early arrival of winter
blood-spots of rain dampened your long coat
From the inside out, bleeding from
the ineffable burr of sorrow that lodged itself in your throat.
I saw the sleepy red eye of your wound open slowly
You opened the door a crack
Such was the godless gale that grieved through your canyons
That it whipped you crypt-still and stinging raw
Crouched in a corner, your hands wrung out the shadows
cast by your falling chin on the hardness of Hell’s knees
A place where the taste of your angel’s desertion
remained acrid on your tongue.
From the flowering thunder of trees that forested your days
Beneath the shimmering nights’ lancets that sliced up your heart
You hung
And the endured atrocities you whispered
Hung and snapped my neck from your dark boughs
You spilt thick from my eyes, like tar down to my feet
Rooted, as one by one
Confessions, like flesh stripped from the bones of innocence
Trailed unwaveringly from you like a wolf’s aria.
Your hands reached out to me
But I too was imprisoned and unable to rescue you
Pinned amongst my own blackthorns like a shrike’s prey
I could only watch you draw in the world around you
And steadily blacker it became
An enshrouding grey season
A mist of grave-flowers in a dusk of swords.
Husk
Whipped into a corner by some gust
Torn at the edges, far below
A window, stains of dried rain like copper
A place where ragged nails taste like an obituary
A track to nowhere, lay this swan down over the sleepers
Gently does it, the palms
of summer have offered powdered bones
into the hum of power line days
Let me have your clamorous stare; the red eye
of this ember hisses into past womb-waters
I am diaphanous, a web, or just an empty
Shell.
A Sunday Afternoon
Remember that Sunday afternoon?
Cajun calamari for lunch at The Brass Bell and then
We drove all the way down to Cape Point on a whim
Listening to Cat Stevens,
His voice trailing from the open windows, our fights and tensions
Left behind for the day, replaced by your singing and my laughing
The gates of the reserve were already closed by the time we got there
"It’s okay" We agreed, "The drive was lovely enough."
The cliffs stepped out of the late spring sunlight into the ocean as we headed back, your one hand on the wheel
and the other searching for mine. Making light conversation along the way, we were keen to save the mood.
"Would you like me to stay the night?" You asked tentatively as we got back to my place.
It’s funny, I’ll always fondly remember us buying tomatoes at eight o’clock on a spring Sunday evening.
The Offering (Under Thunderwood Skies)
You have kept your heart hidden
Like a coven in the woods.
The moon, too, shrouds itself in drapes
of icy rain darts. The night is an Argus
Its starry spies are wise,
They peruse my open dream-book
when I’m naked at the alter
Bound with ropes
of self-sacrifice.
Am I not the smoke of devotion unwinding
Drifting up and out to the one I love?
And, I Will
from the bittersweet earth
of my longing
every night,
like a flower that
cannot stop opening,
nail myself to a cross
And, I will
hand you a blade
I will you to slice me open
I want you to see
how scarlet I am for you.
Burrs
Wandering around inside myself
Secrets appear – drifting passengers of hush
Fingers to their lips and stilted
Something in my blood simmers and renders my brain
a fidgety occupant of my skull
Feeling like Plath’s tulips
I bunch myself into each day
In beats, beats
Heartbeats, the heart contracts
You’d think everything I see
would be all red, but
Instead, the world I see is yellow
Like an old photograph
It is all ice to me
My hands too – sculptured ice, splitting light
into hundreds of pieces, like birds coming home
A fog of wings settling on grey stonework
In my First House, the Lord of the Oceans resides
The master magician mystifying the masses
Neptune has a soul, yet it borrows mine too
It is the base of a gas flame, all blue
And its blue face makes me itch
An itch vague and insatiable
I would like to touch dark matter
I am sure it feels like wasted stars
Countless buttons to seal my darkness –
Burrs: you little devil-smiles!
Prickle and scratch
my naked arms.
Shock, decoded
Blink stare blink
A red eye means I’m on standby
Glow, cathode-ray, decode
The equation of this laceration
And a mind of salt, a mouth of sand
Blink stare blink
in a white-out of the bends
The hard water of microframes:
Frame by frame they told me
That you’re dead, please
Don’t tell me
that
you’re
dead.
Scattering your ashes at Kalk Bay
For J.F.P
I am heavy over the rocky outcrop for the weight of my heart
But you are light in my palm and through my fingers
as though you've filtered like time through an hourglass
Lighter, now, than even the mild winter air, sky and sea
That had called us out today to blend you with it.
And what gifts has the fire left for the blue?
Your bones are powdered, mine are broken
A bag of stars and shells to replace a body
And from my hand I seem to have tethered a spirit
to Heaven’s cradle:
A scatter of distances from womb to horizon
A grief beads and drips into a rock pool at my feet –
I feel I have lost a jewel among the sea-fern and abalone;
Here we keep our silence close to our chests,
Burrowing deep within us, as heavy as God;
But you -
You are light now, lighter than even the song
"Time After Time"
Wisping from the Harbour House restaurant
as we clamber in our armour, back up
to the path yellowed by the flowering Freesias.
