Come on a summer walk with me, I’ll show you places.
There’s a broken caravan slumped in a field, on top of a bank
with curtains rent and lichened sides.
I have us living there where you like the sound of the rain
roof battering , louder, harsher than it really is.
We’ll keep hens and I will ride a pony into town
her hot flanks and sweet breath making me stronger than I really am.
Words come, complete and rounded in the open while
back home they spill belligerently onto the page
like eggs cracked in a pan; spitting
yellow domes as clear turns to white and something quite different.
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I open my drafts like drawers and rummage around dissatisfied at the cloying sickly sweet retches of my own sentimentality. I attempt to do urbane and cool and hard edged but really I crave for spoons, not knives. Let me scoop and savour rather than cut and thrust. I am tired of combat.
Yesterday, after work, a man shouted at me. ” You stupid cow ” he roared, greasy behind a steering wheel, engorged by an engine. I’d parked my car to pick up the shop sign but there was plenty room for him to pass. His ferocity shocked me and it was then I realised how fragile I’ve become. I had no angry retort , instead I felt as if his venom was the last drop of poison I could take.
I no longer crave company but rather seek open space. I walked to the cricket ground at the top of the world and then some. Up higher into moorland until my biggest view was sky, until the houses were specks and the roads were threads. Everything was still apart from the wind and quiet apart from the thrum of the moor and I thought I am so glad I don’t live in a city for I think I would forget to breathe.
.
.
” You have to understand “
she spilled, over coffee
as they sat beside sticky tables
her eyes brimful and hushed
in early morning traffic and people rush -
” It’s his words, as they leave his mouth,
I can see them parading. ”
Tears welled tracing freckle and drip
collecting; salted and tragic.
” They wear the jacket of his voice
and my urge is to catch them,
right there by his lip -
to take them into my mouth
to swallow whole or savour slow.”
She stared beyond her friend and
tongue retrieved her sorrow
drops as the traffic fumed past.
The grey skies were fading
and the clouds rushed, billowing
while she struggled-sobbed
to keep everything else in, fast.
.
.
He never asked her to marry him
And now it’s too late,
The children are already born and grown
And soon they will be gone.
The thrust of his finger doesn’t
Beckon honey drips, instead it
Rams accusing and bent
While at night she dreams of flight.
.
I’ve been reading a backness of my own words, slipping down time as if I’m falling down a ladder. Until memories meld with fiction and imagined and happened merge to make a better place.
It’s 6.42 on a pale summer morning and the birds have almost finished their conversations . They are muttering to the trees and behind everything is a sadness. It will be hot – today. So hot that I should be lying in fields with a green ring on my finger sucking the sweetness out of grass ends and cloud watching. Instead I’ll be shop stuck and indebted.
Last night I dreamed of The American Dream. It was everything, all the time.
I dreamt of kissing mouths as words came out and tasting them . Sweet . Sour . Musky. New words.
We’ll always have Paris ,he smiled
and I sighed, forgetting it was a line.
But the kisses I remembered them all,
soft down my back they made me tilt
for more while memories were born.
Apart from the facts and different than the truth
in time they picked up new layers
until they became an allegory.
Speak to me in french and hurt me in love .
I constructed you from growling lust
and wet streets and at night you came unbidden.
So thick that I clutched in darkness
as if I were blinded, grappling
for those intangible moments
where love is so short and forgetting is so long.
*The Saddest Poem. Pablo Neruda
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