mute

the silences are what give it away. the missing sounds, of the splash of a pebble, or the rev of the engine. simon and garfunkel had it right. but you don't miss the silences, you just pour words into their gaping mouths and, while not filling them up, at least it disguises them momentarily, and allows you to forget them, ignore them. meanwhile they eat me up. those silences are the pulling of the wool, the unravelling of the scarf that is me. and you're too deaf to notice.

you do not do, you do not do. you bastard, i'm through.
things i would say to you if i had it in me to seize the chance, but which instead may languish here forgotten forever in cyber-gloom.

neruda for the soul

1
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

2
Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.

I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into the silence.
O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!

That is why when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine

the geysers flooding from deep in its vault:
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock and scald.

what's comprehensibility got to do with it anyway?

If hauntingly exquisite prose side-steps comprehension, dances on the table of confusion, whispers seductively delicious diction strung on jumbled pegs of syntax that echo without meaning through the tunnels of the mind, well then, what does comprehensibility have to do with it anyway. We shall nail such quotidian norms, demands that we 'understand', to the crucifix of wild, harsh beauty that a text ought to be. Death to the subject, the intent. Soul spring forth.

parentheses

Some philosophies fuel a belief in the self,
constructed to keep one's goods on one's own shelf.
Built well you're a strong letter I,
with the feet on the ground and the head to the sky.
Now and then you can bend,
it's okay to lean over my way.
You fear that you can't do it all,
and you're right.
Even diligent day takes relief every day
from its work making light from the night.

And when you're holding me
we make a pair of parentheses.
There's plenty space to encase
whatever weird way my mind goes,
I know I’ll be safe in these arms.

If something in the deli aisle makes you cry
you know I’ll put my arm around you
and I’ll walk you outside,
through the sliding doors,
why would I mind?

You're not a baby if you feel the world.
All of the babies can feel the world. That's why they cry.

conversations with M

space: unquantifiable except that it's the exact breadth, width and height of the person from whom you want space.
why do all women need someone to share their lives with. It's as if they need a witness to their life, without whom they can't be sure they've lived or done or seen or conquered. Woman: the schizophrenic see-er who is observed and observes simultaneously, passive and active. she needs someone there to validate her existence, to acknowledge and proclaim it to the world at large. why don't we all rather hire photographers to take pictures of us eating chocolate, walking along the promenade, watching a film...
society's reflections are spilt on us, mingled with terms of endearment, 'babe', 'sweetiepie', 'honey'. I want no more of this generic gibberish, no more of society's expectations. Take it all, i am not a generic woman.
Maya Angelou spring forth.

musings from the lost box

musing on writing and unearthed truths therein, i came to the rabbit hole and tumbled down, sinking slowly on a bubble of questions. to what extent do profound thoughts rattle around at the back of your head, unnoticed among the marbles, and then pop out of their own accord when you least expect it,as though some puppet master has pulled a string or turned a key to open a secret door behind which lurk these half-formed notions which tumble out semi-formed and disguised by pretty words and metaphors? Always my thoughts shimmer as a mirage on the horizon, while i scrabble at the gravel, striving to reach them, grab them, shake them into speaking their entire meaning to me, but only ever ending up with hands of soil and stone, empty words for which the toil was worthless and from which the meaning has turned tail and fled - a fox fleeing the hounds of inquiry, and leaving nothing but fast-fading footprints in owlet's down mingled with dust in the corridors of the mind.

glass-blower

small hand, big hand, held tightly whilst a little nose is flattened by glass watching glass being reborn; bubbling balloons of fragility blossom out of nothing to become objects of fancy, flying horses, spiders' webs drizzled with ruby dew, fish-shaped glass, distorting reflections somewhat like diction intended to dazzle which creates a non-existent self from shards of society's mirror. We are who they are. Still teetering on the cusp.

dream 2

i am late afternoon sunshine interlaced through and about the heavy magenta-flowered tendrils of bougainvillea, rocked in the cot of evening breeze. i am skipping down a sidewalk, scattered and broken like light. i turn to say something to you, to wind a flower into your hair, to spin a sweet line out of delicious nothings, but you have vanished, may never have been at all. it is a dream, a castle in the air, whose corridors echo (echo echo) with longing and stolen kisses. summer is fading bittersweetly with the day, slowly evaporating, a mist of crackling solitude. I teeter on the cusp.

dream 1

I am on a bicycle, arms spreadeagled, chin up, swirling and swaying along a sleeping street; the flower duet is ringing in my ears, a rushing waterfall of melody freewheeling and soaring through the whirring of the spokes. Dappled sunlight is sprinkled on my face, pooling light on closed eyelids, dripping down my arms, down the back of my neck from leaves of eddying autumnal yellow against a holey dove grey sky that i cannot see for eyes shut. silence. there is a dead bird in the street. i am the dead bird. i am riding a bicycle. i am in a glass globe on a sill, where leaves purl on the peripheries, left of centre.

Yet more poetry

I'm sorry, i can't seem to stop posting poetry. I didn't write this one; i wish i had.

Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

Pablo Neruda