Tag: Poetry

Hollow Love

You told me once that you’ve never loved;
not even the woman you chose as a wife.

Amusing then that when the artifice crumbled
your desperate first words to her were these:

‘I love you’.

Please.

Yet, fuck me, it worked
and back she came crawling.

She doesn’t love you.
She messaged me and said it.
But a life lived in fancy
is more pleasant than truth.

So neither of you really likes the other
but in friendless times I guess you have to make do.

There’ll be dates and there’ll be kisses and all the grand gestures;
and the sweat of the skin and the lick of the tongue.
So the scene you’re directing is another act to your play
but I’ll tell you what I suspect and I hope that I’m right:

That a part of your soul dies

each
time
that
you
fuck
her

Posted on by nelsonandemma 0

He Says

He’d say:
I know we’re just friends but I need you right now
as his fingers traced patterns across my bemused brow.
He’d say:
I know we’ll have sex and I know we’ll be good
as he lay by my side like I knew that he would.
He’d say:
Let me take you away for your soon to be birthday,
We’ll go to Dalat, – would that be okay?
He’d say:
You mean the world to me; I’m going to miss you when you go,
You don’t need to worry; there’s no need to feel low.
He’d say:
Come stay with me at my place in Limoges,
I want to see you once more; let’s just see how this goes.

But you see, there’s a problem with all this and the problem was this:

He’d say:
She’s just a friend, I help her out just a bit
as he’d dive out the door for five minutes or more.
He’d say:
Those souvenirs you saw in her flat all last night?
Just presents for her kid, you don’t need worry about that.
He’d say:
I don’t find her attractive, interesting, desirable at all
I’m with you right now, what’s your problem with that?
He’d say:
So you think I would cheat?
I can’t believe you’d think that.

Yet here we all are in our own private misery –
6000 miles lying between us.
It’s no longer his voice that I hear; just the tap of his keys
as he writes and he says:
‘I can’t face you again; I’m cutting contact from now.’
So I guess now it’s out
I’m not needed by him
because he’s got work now to do:
to say things in her ear like he’d say to me,
so he can coax her back in cos he’s feeling lonely.

You see, he said all of that
but as I lie here alone,
I find myself saying words I don’t think I could mean:
‘say something to me – I’m loathing this dream’.

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Bright Star

A homage to Keats and somebody else…

Bright star, remain by me stedfast
and fixed to my loving thoughts.
Refrain from flitting and cease hovering watchfully
aloft on waves of circumspection.
When I think of those eyes of yours
they are as like an iridescent dragonfly that
in the past I would have caught.
But, what use is a dragonfly dead in a jar
sacrificed and still upon a diamond pin?
The dragonfly that shimmers and glints in the air
sparkles hues like the shades of all our humours.
So no. Better to be you with all your fitful ways
and feel excitement, exasperation, evasion
than to be my static ceremonial occasion.

 

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Blue

In the half-light of the dawn
an eye of cerulean
breaks the bleakness of the hour
and as I pour myself into its glittering depths
a daydream emerges of diving in
to wade again through memories of
midnight blue lilyponds where lovers embrace
and swimming pool waters of sludgy night black
where you spin me round the stars
before coming back to rest again on this;
our shared space of soft cotton threads.
Awake now we trace our journey on skin
and for me, all others flake and drift away
and time, it comes to a shuddering halt.

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Tsaatan Teepee

This summer I spent three weeks in Mongolia and discovered a wonderful country where the people seem genuinely connected to the land and their animals. My friend and I travelled for three days to stay with the Tsaatan near the Russian border; they still live in teepees and they still ride reindeer. It was one of the most magical experiences I have had. I’m so glad that some of them have been willing to allow visitors to stay with them. 

I was here before them.
Witness to frozen wastelands;
when hoar frosts spun tight fitting webs
and swathes of moody clouds cast dark shapes
over pristine snow that only betrayed life from
the light imprints of Wolf, Ibex and Sable.

I was here when those chilling months
shifted to let the first weak rays of a low sun
cause the flakes to retreat and perish;
when the borders changed and Mongolia
yawned to swallow them back in.

It was with soft step they traversed the miles
astride their gentle reindeer
whose nodding antlers
and wistful dark eyes
paved a new way through
the marsh and the swamp.
They cast aside impenetrable branches,
creating an indelible print
that then pointed a way to what had lain secret
by these shallow streams for centuries.

Hacked from the womb of a boreal forest
I stretched up to the empyrean
and locked heads with the others who stood tall
to be draped in the scratchy, oily skins of the ones
who had trod majestic across the Taiga.

I watched as light would ebb away into the void of the steppe
and produce from it a formidable shadow;
a crepuscular scarecrow;
a shapeshifter arranged
under a headdress of faded feathers that
foundered under the weight of a thousand spirits
who crept under our eaves to answer their questions
before evaporating under the beat of a drum.

Over time we learned to bend under aggressive winds
and sudden storms; to become gradually desiccated
and cadaverous under an unforgiving sun
before being carefully laid to a strange hibernation
nestled amongst the cotton grass and lichen
when they left for a solstice honoured elsewhere.

I know they’ll return when the clouds roll back
and the beetles awake to creep from the grass.
I’ll see their silhouettes pushing ahead
and I’ll know to await my reincarnation
when once again I’m pulled from the earth
to tower beside this mountain pass.

 

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From Pokhara

Dusty swathes of chaotic rubble lead to Kathmandu
as Annapurna blinks its goodbye through wafts of clouds
ribbons of white mince heavily on waters
that run alongside this world weary road.
The stepped hills patterned in khaki
pray to a portentous sky that bends over
huts of people who watch the world
alone with defensive, cynical eyes.

Nepal is a jewel hidden in a crystallised rock.

The landscape falls away as we round on a wake
of Vultures tearing into carrion flesh;
twisting sinew and bloody entrails seep
onto the road replenishing colour
to decaying shacks and filthy prayer flags
that flutter half-heartedly in torpid draughts
while the pale faces look on,
indolent in hammocks or up against
skeletal shards of shattered brick walls.

A tiny figure lies supine on the kerb of the bridge up ahead.
His ashen shoes split; his blackened toes are budding.
Drugged, he drowses replete on the roadside
where his pillows are empties and his coverlet the sun.
Eking out existence next to rocks on a highway
tourists look past him from their safe metal tins
at the churning, convulsing Seti Gandaki below.

Scrabbling survival like this makes me think:
here in Nepal potential’s forced dormant,
locked neatly away by needs such as
food, sleep and gods.
Talent’s the privilege of the rich
with time on their hands
and macs on their laps.

The bus moves on and I look behind
to see if the man has stirred
but he lies inert as the Vultures launch up
ascending quick to the skies
to frame this scene with their sated beaks
and their dripping, bloodied claws.

Later, a blind man outside the Boudha Stupa
looks right through me and the bridge comes to mind
so I press rupees into his rough blackened palms
and his hands close around them like dying petals
as the sun sets on Nepal once more.

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Oubliette

I sometimes think you are every bit
as wicked as Germaine says you are.
From those first clawing aches
and heavy clots
that kissed farewell to childish thoughts

to immature scares in the early days
when it was easy to think
using you… was a foregone conclusion.

Was I right to block you out with
pills and latex and fervent prayers?

Gertrude was right when she said
I have more control over my writing
than I do over you.
Yet you are mine;
my flesh, my burden to bear,
I do feel your mystery heavy inside me;
I’ve never seen you and I never will.

Nizar Qabbani says man comes forth from the womb;
it’s nothing to do with ribs
so why do I feel this lack of control?
Of course the irony now is that
as I hurtle towards my middle age
I feel your urgency more than ever
and now, now I can’t answer you and the question,
the question that circulates in my mind
like a constant white noise
is that when I finally need you…
will you yield?

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Finality

Another milestone was reached today. When you break up with somebody significant, it doesn’t matter how many years go by; when you realise they’ve moved on properly (and in this case asked somebody else to marry them) it still has the power to sting. KB was someone I was with for 10 years – all through my twenties and nobody since (and I doubt ever) will be able to match how I felt about him. I wish them both well and hope one day I find somebody else too.

We were but saplings then,
tentatively growing together
with fragile leaves and soft sprouting buds;
slowly winding a disorderly history.

Ten years that should perhaps have been five
saw us gnarling and grating.
Me, I was a heavy weight pressing you down
on roots you weren’t ready to bear.

So you slashed us apart
and drifted elsewhere
but you always seemed to be in view;
a skyline tainted with my love for you

People have been and plucked at my boughs
but the fruits are so bitter they don’t stick around.
With each passing year I seem to wither and sag;
a little bit more, a little bit more.

An Old Garden Rose, she entwined herself easily,
softened you slowly,
glittered in the roots that I’d cracked so well
and around her broke forth those heady blooms
and you suddenly seemed to glimmer.

I found out today you will be together forever.
So the whorls in your imprint will be hers and not mine.
It seems only fair.
She brings you the colour I sapped away.

The orchard I stand in withers and dies,
drying up barren; it’s scorched and hopeless
hemmed in as it is by a raging rusting fence.
Wanted. Not wanted enough.

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Poppy

My dearest friend Zoe has a two year old named Poppy and it was a pleasure to spend the weekend with them recently. Young children don’t really feature in my life so it was a real novelty to play with her and witness her growing (and expansive) imagination. This is dedicated to her.

We stride through parklands of Living Room

Out to where balls can be thrown up, up to the clouds.

And the decking outside is a sandy dune

where we jump from the pier to the sea.

We swim through the treacherous high waves that is grass

and ponder the weeds that are jellyfish.

Dodging crab-like splodges of mud underfoot

We wade our way back to the front,

where rocking horse carriages wait us

so we can travel round roundabout circular roundabouts.

Later at night I sit mindless,

Popped back to reality by phones, crying and diaries,

But in your mind the play still comes like a flooding

Gabbling tales of giants up ladders

and mice sitting on top of your knee.

There’s a dolly that needs fed in her buggy

and a snack that she’d like to be aubergine.

And all of this comes from Poppy’s young head,

I wonder what dreams are like when she’s asleep in her bed!

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The Clock of the Long Now

I’ve recently headed back to London to meet up with old friends and spend time with my family. Two of my oldest friends, Lois whom I met when I was 7 at the Church my family attended in West London and Rebecca, whom I’ve known since my first day at grammar school, met me at the Science Museum for a day. We all love Space and spent a considerable amount of time in the ‘Exploring Space’ hall where ‘The Clock of the Long Now’, also called the 10,000-year clock, is kept. This is a proposed mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years and the two-meter prototype is on display at the Science Museum in London.

August brought us together;
colliding microcosms in the Hall of the Cosmos,
South Kensington.

As Hebe pokes buttons with sticky fingers
I remember the one in the pews
and the other in an icy school annexe.

Time’s hands tick tricks on us all;
as I find myself questioning  those childhood beliefs
and I still have to learn to look at an empty sky
and no longer believe in trees filled with angels.

Can God really stay constant?

The Museum looks different from how I remember it
and our bodies tell tales of 105 years of living.
‘The Clock of the Long Now’ stands unmoving before us
but in those milliseconds we have changed again
and somewhere in the universe another path has been walked
another fate has been dealt
and what comforts me in moments like this

is that change can be hard and unforgiving

but what remains constant is me, you and you.

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