Type bug

you told me to write something
i think you want to right something
in my head
i can't write, i just type
endless typos and troubles with keys
the m key is broke
mmmmmhhhgggszzd
see, it won't work, not properly anyway
the page is blank,
the light grows old
my screensaver's appeared, 'use me'
use me and lose me
say something to me
but, please
just don't write it down.

Loss in a Cold Climate

The contents of my head lies
in a fruity pulp by the curbside.
It seeps through nooks and fractures,
into empty depths bound by concrete.
I watch from above,
Breathing slowly so that arching plumes of air
might stifle the sad little words
that hang so dismally around.
They are like flies-
Humming bulbs that hover above the mess...
My mess-
of loss and
clumsiness.

Camels

On the 29 again,

Past the building with the corridors

and huge great door that belches out small figures

Onto the street by my windowseat.

Waifs and wonder-whys loom about,

Like bleached sails all puffed up and dancing in the wind-

Soon bent double in the driving rain,

Jerking up then down again.

Their battle rages on,

Summoning all power lost and nearly

- but not quite won,

Flickers of amber light make mockery of

eyes, wide and dull like dirty coppers.

Wretched pools of water form around creped soles-

sooty muck ponds sucking up the smoke

To stop them choking on their own syrupy nothingness.

Overhead, birds wheel

this way and that, cooing, cooing…

‘Smokers outside the hospital doors,

The saddest thing I ever saw.’

Unblackberrying

j

A blackberry lies quite whole in the flowerbed,

Wrenched from its stem by some unknowing force,

It is a fallen fruit, a berry stricken.

As yet unsullied by dank soil surrounding,

'Tis a mass of polyps purplish-black,

A minute cluster of burnished orbs fused

by sunlight and the nip of the wind.

A bush of unripe amaranth

obscures a lost portion of its crop,
From the tentative fingers of passers-by.

And so our berry lies unpunctured,

Whilst beneath its barbed surface,

Caustic juices are brimming silently.

But this one is not to be savoured.

Miserable juices ebb away...

Yet below its cobwebby film,

The earth is moistened once again.

The Human Anachronism

I do not fit a time, nor place.

I am suspended,

A haunting face.

I think not of my future years,

Far better wallowing in the tears

of yesterday.

Some say, 'an anachronism',

I follow not this human rhythm

as I ought.

I am a woman out of sync,

Forever on the brink

of being lost - tossed into oblivion...

These queer notions shall be stowed away,

All boxed up, eternal grey.

I belong to ne'er time nor place,

To be forgotten,

A nameless face.

Washing Lines

The past is not a foreign place,
But a washing line of pegged-up memories - a blur
of polaroids undated,
Rising in roseate hues and sinking in yellow candlelight
that was and was not there.

A silent gathering of wind shakes the images cruelly,
And rattling, rattling, one is pushed so far to the side of my head,
It seeps out like steam through my eyes and ears.
And then it envelops me
in a nauseous shroud of angst quelled, and love heightened
by time.

We stand before me now,
Unobserved,
On the edge of a wooded path,
The June air is so hot it stings my infant nose and ears,
and scorches the shingles to an angry dust cloud
of itch and grit.

You suck in breath over sharp teeth,
Bending terse on one knee to thumb
away the dirty droplets that streak like spiders' legs
down cheeks.
My cheeks,
Free from the slap of modernity,
Not knowing liqueur from lemonade.

That age of innocence will dissipate,
But there now,
Our blotting eyes show no sign of the future
and there is no past as yet to speak of.

Let it always be like this,
Just being, being
Daddy and me.

Driving at Night

j

The sky is almost fully dark now,
tinged with greyey-blue.
But the banks and bridges and trees
are silhouettes yet-
skeletal branches grasp and groan against the sky,
clinging to the last of the light
as the flailing arms of the damned did in the River Styx.
Black, doomed and black.
Void of flesh and blood and bones,
they are just shadows,
foretold beneath our eyes.