A crowd gathers
It is watched
by a couple
standing apart.
They feel the energy,
the air stirring
and are repelled.
Others pass them
pulled to the
crowd’s edge.
They disappear.
They become the crowd.
They become the ecstasy.
The couple walk on
but keep looking back,
feeling that in their presence
they have missed something.
Now the pines are gone,
cashed in;
the land lies splintered,
a plinth for dead matter,
all chip and shard.
Where we thought we strolled
alone with the sacred whisper
of the filtered breeze,
we find now
the truth of solitude.
It is a shrunken world,
exposed to the harsh light
of practicality,
all space for dreams
dragged out to waiting
timber trucks.
Only the facts can be seen,
laid out in mundane angles
to the city horizon.
the other Day
i was rEading
some Critical Essays.
they made the Point
that Text has
no Inside or
Outside
but must be
conceived
as autoNomous reality.
Literature, it seems
Is to be found
in the Vacuum
that Exists beSide the text.
Her face was drained of all decoration,
reduced to unadorned lines of function
to the bare bones of her dutiful world.
Its mobile expressiveness was a kind
of heroism – love’s survival
amidst a desolation of lost hope.
She knew the worst of her man – not sheltered
from the ugliness of fist and drunken
flailing. But she chose still to love. She saw
his need, and his kind of strange innocence.
She knew how to walk her world, how to give
their children hope for possibilities
she had long since surrendered. She sheltered
them from all their father’s shameful dramas
by rooting herself, stuck in her smallness
but drawing food from depths I could not see.
I was too enamoured by the distant
view across the mountains to be sustained
by the triumphs of routine’s imminence.
So she tolerated my earnestness,
my youth, my endeavour – all seen before –
and forgave me my incomprehension.
He was old at 55.
38 years of imprisonment
had marked him, drained him of sunlight,
and arrested him in the self loathing
self consciousness of youth.
He saw a world that understood,
whilst he was lost and confused.
the slag heap drew him where he could,
unobserved, unjudged, scavenge
scraps of coal to warm his family –
the illusion of employment.
His whole life had skulked behind illusion –
his unreachable dream of worth
where he could read,
where he had skills and pride,
where he could hold his crying babies
and endure their loving appraisal –
His dream was impossible
so he reached out for the pretence
of manhood, where his distress
was smothered by drink, where strength
was hammed up into violence,
where thieving was ‘to feed his family’.
He would be safe in prison,
safe to maintain the pretence,
perhaps even to be an absent hero.
He would be released to the truth,
to where he was naked before his failings,
where shame drowned him,
where the damp coals smouldered coldly.
I walked up the path to the woods
again. But the natural rhythms
of growth, death and decay
were drowned out by machines.
A wounded hillside lay
bare and broken. Dying
trees no longer leant on neighbours.
Brambles curled like barbed wire,
bracken rusted the devastation.
The sky’s dead stare shrank
the woodland to a space devoid
of imagination, replacing the dance
of light through a green canopy,
with the simple facts of supply and demand.
Walking on, a murder sprang from the path
and flew, cackling with rage,
up and away, and I saw in the dank
light of Winter, the corpse feast –
the bones abandoned by flesh,
the moist stench of rot,
the red watery slime
shivering with maggots.
Here was no mild-eyed sob,
no moody stare into a lost horizon,
no righteous anger,
no monument of good works.
Here were the nauseous facts,
the impregnation of flesh,
the mindless madness
of lost balance, the endless
appetite of death for brutality.
And the wood circled me
with its catch of lovers and loners,
roots and tentacles in their own language
waiting for the ooze of protein
to seep through the dead leaves.
Slumped by the fridge, shivering
in the sunlight’s interrogation, pinned
to the soiled tiles by its pitiless
exposure, he talked to the wind.
But words were blown away
before they could cohere.
My questions cut through the river
of his consciousness like a knife
and dissolved.
He dodged shafts of dark matter
forged in the blundering strife
of lost loves. Alone, he babbled.
His plan, to escape the restless
untamed energy of his mind,
took him at midnight to the still
water of the canal, where he clutched
oblivion’s smothering embrace,
and let his thoughts float with the waste.
Then threatened by the judgment
of dawn, he crept home
to his unstained cocoon and hid.
But now, the hopeless urge
to live, threw him shaking
to where he seemed beyond reach.
His fear burrowed into me
and in comradeship, it took
us both to find help.
