Words

 

that linger like a perfume,

Old songs on repeat,

What's that on the flip-side -

Are the lyrics bittersweet ?

Is Not

 

Writing's not a comfy chair

Alan Bennett said 

And I thought 

A person's not a house

Character's not clothes

Love is not a bunch of roses

A cloud really is a cloud

When is it not

And rain is just the rain until

The future forms

A flooded land

Whereupon we'll wade

Or swim while waiting

for a miracle 

to come 

Salvation on arrival is

Strong arms pulling me

from the wreckage pile,

A hero's heart who put to sea

in raging storms to rescue 

those in peril running scared,

Gentle hands who guided 

and is not 

immune to fear 

but more attuned to care

The writer's brain has blocked

Old pain, unspoken things,

The writer’s chair is hard 

and without wings,

 

No soft upholstered air borne 

shipping crate with covered up 

supportive springs.

I'm scared to go there

and sit, cat-like, looking 

askance at the crate. 

I can't fear what I don't know

Schrödinger's ghost rocks the plane

and I am shivering again.  

 

We learn to point it's strange

Baby thinks the toy is gone

But it's just behind a book,

Take the other from under your hat

See the joy in baby's look

What does she think of that ?

If you take the book away,

Baby now can see there's two,

What will baby learn to say ?

Is that the world or is that you ?

It's just a game, 

That's fun to play,

Does it somehow shape a brain ?

Or will babies always have 

Their own individual way

Of thinking 

About Time

Time

A song

Which or whom came first in all the every 

things like eggs and chicks and stuff and dust and 

When did people start to feel so empty 

sensing life is running away like sand

A notion in a dream once showed it’s self 

And asked what if the stuff of life could be 

undone like all the letters on a shelf 

Just swept away and we like birds were free 

to fly with songs upon our newborn wings  

and carry twigs like words away to make

Some other worldly home where sadness brings

Its bags upon its weary back to break 

the cycle of destruction so to bring

A steady state of joy where birds can sing.

Dichotomy2

                                                    Dicho                                                tomy

                                              two parts                                                       cutting

                                                                      The beautiful mystery

                                                                       that leads to growth.

                                                                      A division of parts;


                               branching                                   and                                            branching.



                               The one that cannot be                                                                  the other,

                                                                            or part of it.

                              The essential nature                                                                           of life.


                              Not Yin Yang,                                                                   more the moon in

                              its first quarter,                                                              then its third quarter.


                             The one that                         complements                                       the other.

                             The dance of a couple                                                  where neither touches.

                             The one place here                                                     and the other one there.

                             The never the twain                                                                shall ever meet.

                               Unless the universe reveals its other laws to us and growth takes on

                                          an                                                                               other



                                                                                 p
                             a                                                  t                                                                   t
e                                                                               r                                                                               n

Snapshot

 

In the veggie cafe,

He sits  infront of her,

Telling her like it all is,

Like she doesn't  know.

He thinks she looks revolutionary,

Kindred spirit, with 

Newly cropped hair,

Big Doc Marten boots, but

She's just getting ready to jump.

A dice with death let's say.

What do you want she asks

Smash the government, he replies

fist demonstrates his depth of feeling.

They both need healing,

Something to change. 

Next week sees him running round

Knocking on doors and shouting

For someone to join him,

Help him

She's in the back of a landrover

on the way to an airfield

where she'll see the sunset,

Four thousand miles up. 

*

Be Here Now

Being Here

It’s ghia here in Kelter

There’s nothing to filter  

It’s clear that here

is wild and pure 

And Nobody owns her

No need to protect her 

We all learn to love her 

You’ll find your kilter 

When you come to Kelter

You won't ever leave her 

cos she'll always be with you 

Unpolished

 

The Ocean

Throws up a stone,

Flattish, nearly round,

Found by a child,

Who feels it,

The rasping nick,

It's nearly a heart.

Salt water laps at their feet,

Hungry for the stone back,

It's incomplete

The child skims the stone,

It bounces along 

Waves trying to catch it

Hearing their name called,

Child, 

Looks back to the land,

Each wave draws the stones back,

The sand slows our child's progress

towards the sound,

Loving each step,

The depth of the course, grey sand

pulls down like quicksand,

A lovely sinking feeling

Lulling

The little sojourner performs a strange

slow dance

when laughter from the voice

beckons

Come on you,

It's time,

Race you back 

Wishes - a thought experiment on grief

You must be specific with wishes. 

A genie has already spent one hour paying close attention to the details of a special teddy bear whose fur must be a certain shade of pink, whose smell be a specific kind of sweet and whose voice be an absolute replica of a deeply loved one. 

The child, though only six years old, knows not to ask for the loved one to be returned in full, having fully understood the concept of death because of experiencing it first hand. 

People cannot be wished back to life. That's something fully understood by the child who has prayed and wished for this over and over again and been held in her despair by others who dearly love her but not, perhaps as dearly as the one the child has wished for. 

The child who knows what happens in life when a dearly loved one dies, loses hope but gains experience and understanding which goes very deep into their soul. 

When the genie has granted the child's three wishes, the colour, the smell, the voice, the teddy bear itself is the gift from the genie, encompassing the three wishes, after which, the genie has little time or patience to listen to the wishy washy vaguely articulated wonts of the ones who come begging after. 

It'll wear off, or at least fade no doubt. Genies have a job to do. Genie will return to work and pay more attention, but perhaps with a little diminished enthusiasm. Which is totally understandable. 

                                                          **

                                 

Bee

 

Everyone has at least one moment in the sun.  Iaso was enjoying one of hers sitting outside on a hot afternoon during a particularly warm summer.   I am a solar panel she mused, storing up this warmth and energy for the dark days to come.    Just then, a buzzing sound approached her and as she began to open one eye, the heavy black buzzing thing landed on her cheek bone and she felt it pierce the skin there. 

WOAH !!!! Iaso's moment ended just as she leapt up and swatted the thing from her. It flew away lazily, the largest, blackest bee-type creature she'd never encountered before. 

Infront of the mirror, Iaso took some tweezers and pulled it's sting from her cheek, but with insufficient care in her panic, so leaving some of it embedded. 

                                                            *

She moved through the hospital's atrium as if through a dream. The Four Tops were playing I'll Be There somewhere up in the higher eschalons of the tall building, her mind logging it for later,  for now she must make her way to the accident department. 

                                                             *

 Yet it was not an accident.  Iaso has time to think as she sits upright, eyes closed, waiting for the medic to assess her throbbing cheek.   Something had come to attack me. In the midst of my moment in the sun.

                       

                                                             *

  Years later, Iaso draws the black, fuzzy being in her notebook, writes carefully, in pencil, so it reads like a whisper;  some things come from the outside,  some from within,  and some come from within to the outside and come again until we recognise them.  And Iaso gives the sketch the title ;   Bee.  -  Messenger. 

                                                            *

We are Memory

 

How far back can we remember ? 

One hundred years ?

I wasn't around in 1925 and my family talked about the Second World War all the time, but nothing about before because they were all born in the twenties, except my grandmother, who was born in 1901 but she didn't talk very much about the past, not even to join in with stories about the Second World War. I was told that her whole family had been killed when a bomb struck their home in the Liverpool blitz while she was in Formby with two of her children, my mother and her brother. They'd been evacuated to the nearby coast before the blitz. She was happy and loving and jovial when I was a small child, often singing in a high, sweet voice. A big fan of Bessie Smith. She recalled Paul Robeson singing to the workers in the Albert Dock in Liverpool. It's possible she was actually present since she worked at Tate and Lyle warehouse sewing sugar bags for a time during the war. In her later years, when Dad had managed to get a mortgage for a house over the Mersey and moved me, Mum and my brother out, Nana stopped talking. She would sit in silence, unable to walk unaided due to arthritis, undoubtedly in pain physically and mentally and unable or unwilling to enjoy life any more despite my uncle getting them a council house not too far from us so that Mum and I could visit every Sunday.  It saddened me that even the cup of tea cake I liked to bake for her couldn't bring a smile to her lips, me, the little girl she used to call Queen and sing You Always Hurt the One You Love and other plaintive songs to. 

No, my only link with ' before '  was a strange and wonderful contraption shaped like a cross-bow called a stereoscope which came with lots of postcards that you put in a slot at the end behind the lenses so that when you looked through them, the image was 3D, so magical for a child to look through and I became familiar with the beautiful and exotic images of Victorian people at the seaside, in glass houses, perambulating around a park or riding in horse drawn carriages or stood proudly in front of beautiful buildings. 

Not my memories, nor the ones of my family.  My father would tell of failing his school certificate and being allowed to stay on to re-take it, only to fail it again. Despite this, he eventually got a good job at Ford's new plant in Speke. My mother left school at 14 to go into training as a nanny. When I passed the eleven plus to go to grammar school, Dad's muttered, resentful comment was that he wished my brother had too, yet he found me a piano, abandoned in some school playground and somehow got it home for me and helped me paint it white and everyone, even the next door neighbours, let me play without discouragement, never telling me to shut up once. 

I once asked my Dad what he would like to have been if he could have been anything in the world and he said a concert pianist.

His own father died when he was 15 months old. Mum's father died when she was 10.

Mum died at 58 when I was 28. Dad at 69 when I was 39. 

They got me on the road from Speke to Yorkshire, out of the clutches of the poverty they were born into, but never quite far enough away for me to feel relaxed. My tendency to hoard the good stuff is testimony to that.  

                                                                *

But of history and memory, I know this;  

that my earliest memory is the sound of the greyhound, Mari, running up and down the stairs and my brother screeching with laughter and shouting  ' send her up again Nana ' 

yet this can't be my memory, it must be a story told me later because I don't remember Mari, the poor old worn out greyhound rescued by my uncle who worked looking after the dogs who raced at Anfield stadium,

still, sometimes at that liminal point when falling into the pit of sleep, these sounds clatter and echo and I wake with a jolt, sometimes sweating, feeling sorrow and pity for the dog, the darkness of those times and the loneliness of falling asleep. 

                                                               *