meaning

i can hear my name being called out but i have no idea where the sound of the word i have known for so long originates.

this would bewilder me, normally. but i know when the morning rises and shines i will not remember this little moment. bewilderment isn't always so bad anyway; they say.

The upright position

She lifts up the carpets, one by one while humming an intensely disturbing lullaby. Those around her sit in the upright position and veil their disquiet by concentrating on the ceiling beneath them.

No-one talks about the fact that they are becoming dizzy. The growing disorientation reminds each of them of being at sea (even those within their number that have never left dry land.) They fear for their lives, and for all of the broken up meanings that this word holds within its handful of letters.

Everything that was once upside down is now being bared.

They all begin to shiver in the evening’s unadorned barrenness.

lists of collective nouns for birds

the crow watches her with a suspicion that does not acknowledge boundaries. in his mind he plays out scenes in which they marry, he sings to her and then feeds her to the sparrows. He views her as a threat to his kingdom; he holds her as close as a bird must hold their enemies in days such as these ones.
he lip reads her unspoken thoughts and is momentarily scared by their shared daydreams; this girl must be kept within a very tight rein.

unpacking the boxes

the wooden floor is the boat that discovered that the earth is not flat.
it is the night sky (its slats are irregular galaxies-interspersed with bright and oh so beautiful stars; their twinkling makes her weep.)
the floor holds secrets inside the boxes of its soul. it has known the real meaning of darkness.
its wood has lived life after life after life after life. and it has died and left its trail of mourning.
she cradles the wooden floor and as it sighs she feels the world grieve.

chickens

i remember you from a time long past
me by.

you held your hands over my ears
in a market place
where men wrung
chickens' necks
in a
foreign language.

as if
they were telling one another
the time/
discussing the price of saffron;
their unfamiliar vocabulary
falls outside of my dictionary.


when we first met
you talked to me of
the spice trail in
centuries long,
long
ago;

and
i remembered your chivalry.

a type of crown

i stand with your head on a stick.
it brings me no joy and yet i cannot seem to
remove your severed body part
from my delicate tree branch.

i deserve all the feathers in the land,
placed upon my head in ceremony.

shepherd's delight; reflections in red

the sky is tinged red
and she is upside down.

I, in contrast, inhabit the correct standpoint. This unnerves the sky- she holds her breath and twiddles her flame locks. Fear proffers her an air of self-consciousness, she hides coyly in behind her clouds. If I were the old me she would be more at ease, contented in our shared chaos; protected by her lack of solitude.But the sky knows I am no longer her; that girl has passed beyond. From now on the sky will choose to gaze instead upon my discarded ghost as she walks alone along the castle’s walls. On those nights, the sky will feel less alone in her bewilderment; more serene. But the ghost I once was will never know this; mirrored images mean nought to her.

a beautiful form to see

He was born in Jedburgh, an obscure country town in the midst of the Scottish lowlands. The day was the 11th of December, 1781. He had been a child prodigy and constructed a telescope when he was only ten years old. He started his adult life learning to become a minister at the University of Edinburgh. And it was there that this graceful journey took flight. He read about the science of light, spell-bound. How Herculean a decision to make, abandoning all else to live his life exploring the splendor of light. Light in all its loveliness. He became an expert in its polarization (the linear and planar properties of light) and its absorption. He spent years pondering its refraction and dispersion. Then he stumbled upon its reflection.

Reflective symmetry has been around since time began. The ancient Greeks, including the mathematician Ptolemy, had documented the magical effects of abutting myriads of mirrors centuries and centuries ago. It was not as if he had been in unchartered waters. Legend claims that ancient Egyptians placed slabs of limestone together at assorted angles and gazed fascinated as mandalas were formed by human dancers.

But he had taken all this and hidden it inside a little tube so that you don’t need mathematicians, dancers or a land of pyramids. She read that the mirrors of the instrument are at its heart. This delicate dance happens inside when the mirrors look at one another. And she knows that this breath-taking, swirling beauty is the way that love will feel.

[published by The Sectret attic, winter 2008]

remembering the 'aeneid'

i wake up trying to wake up
memories resonate within
like a ukulele being tuned in a wake house.
my ghosts speak of the gift that came here.
ekphrasis in a bed of jumping fleas.

light generally travels in a straight line

bokeh landscapes
cover my light up globe.
i fall
over into darkness.

the building grows an attic and a mad woman stalks me therein.
time tricks me and laughs out loud. i am climbing the walls without movement;
clinging to the edge of a crumbling street that i used to know- once.

my grandfather has lost all pride in me.

my insecurities do not recognise themselves through tinted lenses.

semi quavers

i hear bells.
jing jang jangling in my head.
and a whistling of an old, old tune.
its melody haunts me,
like a ghost that stares into a looking-glass
and finds a shadow of a life half lived;
half spent.

word games

1. i nearly lost Sir David Brewster in the early evening
2. there is a window that lets you see the wind howling with the lights out.
3. wolves make the best companions of an evening

she is in the woods and she is
wearing red.
she twirls inside of the connotations;
she bakes her own story into a pie.
in the morning she will spell it out for her valentine
on an old vintage scrabble board;

' I love you big wolf. Lots of love, the little wolf.'

brown paper

I am pushing you around
in
a
wheelbarrow.

the world
slides
into
oblivion,

and the
leaves smell
the way that
ancient mistakes smell-

after you have
learned
the lesson which
they seek to pass on.

precious/
damp/
philosophical/
burnt.

we will build treehouses to raise our babies in.

The 15.56

I don’t know how or why it happened. It is as terrifying now, whilst writing this as it was when it happened. I am scared to even put the words on paper. But I know that you need to hear this. I have an obligation. I have to do this.

I don’t know why I was chosen as the first. Maybe I am not the first. Maybe any that came before me just couldn’t bear the weight of it all on their shoulders. Or possibly I wasn’t ‘chosen’. Maybe it was all random (that is the scariest part, really.)

I wish it hadn’t happened. But it did. It has happened.

It was a dark February afternoon. Snow had been forecast for weeks beforehand but its downfall was heavier, faster, than had even been thought possible.
And then the moment came. I was walking along a dirt road and somehow it morphed into a train- track. The approaching train was completely silent. I didn’t stand a chance.

After it happened I watched them all gathered around dimly lit rooms. They whispered those words that should never be uttered about someone so young. One said maybe my foot had caught in the metal, trying desperately to find a call register recording me phoning for aid on a phone that had never existed. But it was neither suicide nor a fatal accident.

I just forgot.
I forgot that I had ever been born.

I tried to remember. With each day that passed I grew more and more afraid. I willed myself to recollect, to dredge up any fleeting memory of my life and the spaces in between birth and my reality but I couldn’t do it. I forgot, afresh, each and every day.

One night you will have a bad dream. You will think you have woken up from it. But then you will pinch your hand and your hand will feel nothing. And thus you will be at that dirt road. At that moment you will have lost all memories associated with birth; origins, beginnings and foundations erased from your personal memoirs.

I don’t know if it will be February. Maybe it will. Maybe it will not. I don’t know if all of you will have the snow. All I know is that it will happen. And when it does you will all cry tears; a kind that you will remember having cried once before. And you will feel the same coldness. That unbearable coldness.