Leaving

Spin

If I’m on fire they dance around it
 and cook marshmallows.
And if I’m ice they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.

~ Anne Sexton

A bemused observer
of their game until now,
I have become a portentous player
for I am Water.

Not the cleansing hill streams of Snowdonia,
the bottled minerals of Cerist,
or the bland, reservoir-rated,
straight from the tap, ready to be lapped
from the dog’s bowl' drink.

No,
I am neither clear nor pure.
I do not quench their sand-filled throats
with the serum of their early years
or cool their ragged-flanelled fevers
as my beads burn from their foreheads.

I am torrents of snot-filled globules
bubbling in a salty cauldron,
liquid spittle unravelling before them.
I am deliquescent disorder,
drowning amid the septic sewer’s craw.

So what will become of them?

My first-born paper boy,
so many scribbled lines shared late into the night,
even when distanced by the delerium
of drunken student life.
Will his blue-scribed words bleed,
his pages turn to pulp
as his adolescent song
runs sopping through the gutters?


My rock,
my tiny pebble
who grew into a heather-faced
mountain of a man,
strong enough that I could lean on him
and feel small against his contours,
his steady drumbeat a perfect paradiddle
to my erratic metronome.
Will he plunge into the slithering river,
his rhythm faint and failing
as he sinks into the brackish silt?

And what of her,
my sharp-tongued, slippery seamstress
with her silver-fish wit and her precious metal smile,
her glinting shears swathing effortlessly
through the diaphanous dream
that she weaves around her.
Will her blades rust
beneath the deluge of my sorrow,
as the naïve loom lies abandoned
in the corner of a cobwebbed room?

No,
for I am Water.
I can be poured
back into the pitcher,
treated and filtered
until I run clean and clear,
dancing weightless and unfettered
in the myriad sparkling streams
of Mynydd Mawr
where they will lift me to their lips
in cool-cupped hands
and sup from me once more.


~ Mynydd Mawr ( Welsh for big mountain) is a mountain in Snowdonia, North Wales
 


Rock, paper, scissors

Hurricane

Couture

Affinity

You broad-shoulder me to the beach,
pillow-creased and yawning,
our winter-beaten faces
upturned to the burn.
 
Lungs gather up the onshore Sou’westerly;
its briny tang caffling in our hair
as we skim ‘ducker’ stones
and watch the storm petrels scatter.
 
Noon finds us knee-deep
in the mud-silt sand,
elbow to elbow, giggling,
digging for clams.
 
Blistering afternoon slips slowly
down the cool throat of the sky
and as we trickle our way home
something resembling peace
hovers.

Affinity

We woke early the day spoons fell from the sky,
rubbed gritty eyes, sleepily unaware of incoming metal,
left home to muddle through the mundane.

Early March, dark by six when we returned,
seconds through the door when the shower started,
startling the air with ring and rasp.

I barely recognised her voice

The first hit me blunt, brought me to my knees,
freeze-framed millisecond before the second hit
bit into my scalp, pinned me to the ground

while silver rained around. You dragged me
from the deluge, covered my head.
I fled, bled, remember running the stairs,

aware of the screams, dead dead dead
beneath the clatter, hammered-mettle matter
that left me bludgeoned and bleeding,

surrounded by steel that scooped me hollow,
left me to wallow in double-dense days,
weighed down by the hebetate chemical daze.

Narcosis that left me scrabbling for sharps,
searching in drawers for whetted knives,
anything to feel the edge of the blade.


Blunt

Lain beneath the filigreed dust
of a spattered mackerel sky, the
snaggle-toothed black matted mongrel,
 
wet tongue lolling over spracked
slack lips, its sickly damp dog smell,
blood-bloated fetid breath,
 
embraces easy slumber, rattlesnake
snores and lumbers light,
beneath the adipose surface,
 
its conscience unencumbered.
On Canicular days I would poke 
with a stick or slick-sharped blade,
 
bid him wake to rake my face
with rancorous claws; but not today.
The dog days are long past, now
 
rapture fasts while winter feasts.
Let the lying canine sleep,
I choose to bury the baying beast.

Dog Days

Messy jam session by Jordan's new band Luxy.  Cover of Living Colour's Love Rears Its Ugly Head

Love Rears Its Ugly Head

Piano ~ Liam Watkins
Vocals ~ Julie Watkins

caryspoet

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