Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Dénouement

I am not made for sadness
Or playing my typewriter like a piano
I don’t want to lose myself in the cave of words
I want the light to shine down
I am not the girl you imagine
My heart is sore
I drown for days on the kitchen floor
One day lost in the mirror
Another caught up in the wind
Like some frail and flimsy thing
I broke before they could fix me
Fucking darkness from the soiled stem of my soul
Scratching at the margins
Colouring myself into corners
There is nothing beautiful here
You can move along
The show is done
The song is sung

Being

Love
I walk gently on these egg shells
the labyrinth of your fingers
weave me together in a knot
and I am lost to you
quietly and gently
I sail the loss in your eyes, my oars dipping deep
in that still night with the stars like fireflies
twinkling in the sky
and tomorrow a promise kept
I would rather not hold you to it
In this I ask for nothing
demand no more or less of you
expectation cannot exist
It is what it is
I wish I'd learned that I long time ago
all those cuts and bruises
all those sad goodbyes
I fold myself into the pit of your dis(arm)ing smile
this is the life
this is

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Stowaway

We would meet
In a hundred year old cottage
Framed with roses
Beyond the prying eyes of the city
That cottage with its wooden beams
And lost histories
Bore witness to our great passions
Wrote us hero’s in her chipped paint skin
Nestled in the creases of ourselves
I tore from you a fine form of flesh
And with my teeth carved out the future
Paved as I had hoped in gold
Dick Whittington’s London streets had nothing on my own
For our indiscretion we were rewarded the bitter fruits of
Love lost
And through our painted intimacies
Art lost herself to scrutiny.
We were our imagined selves come undone in that stone home
Lost to the bed
Like stowaways on a shipwrecked boat
We maneuvered rocks with deft hands
And fought silence back into her shell.
Raised again complete
You restored yourself in clothes
While I lay adrift
Lost in the water
with no hope of rescue.

Fisherman

You framed your guilt so finely
Pressed against your reflection
It became a weapon
A tool of wrath
Which you executed with ease over me.
You had nothing to hide
Your dalliances with me were out in the open
Polished like that first red apple
Eden was a long way from here
As was God.
We reveled in this sanctum
Caught on the cusp of a new beginning
With a woman/child who looked up to you with questioning eyes
Who captured your best side
In portraits of poetry and pent-up passion
I reminded you of your one true love
You let her go
Catch and release your favourite game
Till I became that glassy-eyed gagging fish
Whom you pulled from the recess
Of that black ocean
The hook of your love lost to my skin
Blood made transparent
In salt water
Sharks circling just off the reef.

Dumbstruck

It was your custom to be angry.
When all else failed you left me a piece of silence
Silence that tore itself open
Silence that buried into me
Maggot infested, festering silence
Punishment meted out.
A month would pass and I would hear no word from you
Scrawling your name in cigarette stubs
I imagined you
Somehow better off without me
My scabby heart a tarnished jewel amongst all your treasure caskets
In silence I was rendered mute
Slave to the dial tone
Waiting for release,
You cast me off in that wasteland
Forgot my hiding place
Without apology or reason
This dumb wreck at your bidding.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Return

Bring back the day
I found you
Wrapped in my own smile
The sheets nothing but cloth
The words cut from light and love
None of these sickly, sweet sentiments
None of those
I told you so’s
That crunch like broken teeth under my feet
Bring back the day
I loved you
Through the rock of my heart
That splintered like glass
At the hope of your touch
At the frailty of your mouth
Pressed to the open wound of my own
Whispering without word
To the heart of my bone.

Love

It is a small reprieve
- a benediction
when kindness is lost
You had merely to say the words
and then those gauze butterflies
could fly away -
burning like bits of paper
in the chalky sky

You had only to ask
and it would come -
like the greedy tide
making love to the shore
swallowing stones for kisses
spitting out shells like teeth

It would be what it had to be
because the decision was made
like snow, like sun

It is a small reprieve
absolution not for the asking
we die by our own hands
small deaths that go unseen
that fold in and look back at themselves
like old lovers
rendered pillars of salt.

Grief

The knot of grief comes undone
like shoe laces
on his scuffed, school shoes
and the wound tightening, throbs
through scabbed knees
and summers long since gone
-and beyond the river beds
the lost dew of morning's tears
still remain in this undoing undone.

Grief
Pebbles drumming in tin buckets that cannot contain
the world in his smile
his hopeful heart
his paper thin skin
Unravels itself through sinew
speaks of Northern lights and frozen tundra
with the mouth
- a wound unhealed
and
the heart -
a crumpled sheet of paper
writing itself letters no-one can read
words etched through blood
From cuts that can’t bleed.