There are two marionettes
Facing one another
Parts strung together
And dangling
Like mobiles over a crib.

The first has a head
And a neck
It has shoulders
Strung to fore-arms
Wrists and hands
It has the swell of hips and thighs
But only ever under fabric
It has a face
But no jaw
And only an upper lip
And no forehead.

The second marionette
Grotesque, and barely human
Has two small *******
Clinging to a sternum
Like sad droplets of water
A ribcage spanning
Like thin fingers
Across a chest
A bulbous young stomach
Hips and thighs unclothed, unappealing
Dappled flesh
Calves
Feet
Jaw
Forehead
Balanced precariously atop one another
Joined with a string.

When they step to one another
The marionettes mesh
Make a mess
And cannot escape one another
And move awkwardly
Haphazardly
Trying to conceal the Other
Trying to conceal the whole
Hoping only the string shows.

But the string is tangled
In the parts
Caught between the joints
Obscured by the puppet limbs.

Occasionally, a glimpse.

Hell sometimes can be a comforting thought
When you consider the promise
of some ire of comeuppance
some reasoned placement
of interminable exile
for the ******* who deserve to end up there.
When all is considered,mortal pain working as the ruse
for an endurance of condemnation
(Mothers still wailing in their sleep for closure two generations on)
Mortal oppressors deserve to be confronted by a special kind of fear
It makes sense
The punishment is apt
Guilt has to work both ways.

But that thought is still not a resolution for me
Particularly as the opposite does'nt attract
Given the fact that I've spent the majority of my life
Frightened of Christ.

It has its origins in my own childhood
when I remember back
To when I hurried weary past
the old imposing church
on my way into town
When I was a four-year old believing
If I was'nt quick
The whole-heaving Bulk of it
would tumble flatly
upon my fragile frame
The old road home
eventually winding its way
to my limbo of soothing distractions
that childhood’s orchestra of daydreams
so fleetingly informs.

Senior Infants Religion class did'nt help either
getting to grip with the crucifix and the like
my parents having sheltered me from the harsh realities of martyrdom
and the cold damp mass congregation on empty Sunday mornings
and the scowl of that year's teacher
who had complained that I wrote too much like a spider's web
Giving us throatfuls of original sin and the rhetoric of  Easter Monday
and my childhood innocence
exposed in the opinion spoken aloud
to a classroom of trained apatheticals
that not only did I not believe that Jesus Christ was the son of god
but that he never existed either
perhaps history disproves my claim on the latter
but the former is still full of endless possibility.
(And all this before I read anything about what really went on during the Twentieth Century-Dear accomplice,I can already hear your sweetened cackle.)

Yet still faced with that emblem of womanhood’s inheritance,I accepted my first compromise of all too humane sympathies.
Bleeding Mary Immaculate,she who suffers,she who in her suffering
silently invokes that long,unquestionable certainty of life,that jump-lead rattle of conscience
and contemplation,she whose warm moments in stony acceptance of fate’s misfortunes eventually led me down that scented path where all my troubles truly began.

Christ himself continued to present
(however loud the familial chorus
attempted to reprimand my nurtured,
after-school-scepticism)those same
tingles of spinal sensitivity,that same
epidemic-like aversion,years after I had
left that winter playground where children
splashed puddle water at each other
to make reputations,and shouted mispronounced obscenities
as a means to show they had no time whoever wanted to act adorable that day.
(The first chance they were given they realised the bluff-ladder of office mentality.)

I could never really face staring
into the eyes of the owner
of that sacred heart
for more than five seconds
He accused me of far too much
without having any notion
of who exactly I was
As I got older teachers
tried to convince me
that he really was
full of love and understanding
but those portrait-painted deepest-blue eyes
could lead to a war criminal's breakdown.

And I was’nt willing to take
the sack and ashes
for any man.

Don't ******* write about me
No, neither for me
Because there is nothing worse
Nothing so utterly despicable
Than the words
Of an infatuated man.

You are not Yeats,
I am not Gonne.
And I like to think
That Laura never died
But rather escaped
From Petrach's lines.

Do not treat what I tell you
As some great epiphany
As anything other
Than the words of a fellow idiot.

All I want
Is to rest
Without
Being called
A ******* muse
Some fuel
For your abhorrent
Creations

That is not me.
You are not Yeats.
But I am gone.

I belong to a fractured consciousness
Whose needle skips and leaps
Relentlessly
Over the cracks.

In any instance,
I can see you
And her
Lithe and writhing
In all her voluptuous vapidness.

Drive on, drive on!
Rock, and reel, and repent.
Repeat.

He's not you
But he's here.
And he lays me down
And says that I'm pretty.
For now, that's enough.

Fact is,
I can't be around you.
Forming words and/or sentences in your presence leaves me
senseless,
stammering,
stuttering,
defenceless
and petering into arbitrary points and references
facts
figures

And it figures that,
were you single to begin with
(which you are not)
And were I of a similar disposition
(which I am)
That facts would form bonds between the figures most infinite,
and timeless,
and primitive -
A joining of two.

Facts are, it doesn't matter
Because in my mind we've done
Worse and better
Richer, poorer
Sicker and sicker.
In my mind we've ****** to the cusp of boredom with each other's forms,
and figures...

Figures that you'd be inaccessible
Unavailable
No one ever really is, are they?
I know for a fact that you love a girl
Who forms her name from words borrowed elsewhere.
I figure you thought her intriguing once,
Fascinating, maybe.
Perhaps you still do.
Maybe it's an envy
Maybe I'm stepping a line but were you mine
There would be no pretense in name or otherwise
I'd be I
You, you...
...I figure.

To be frank and state a fact,
I've dreamt of you often and carved you from a rib in some form or other,
But the fact is
You're a distraction.
And nothing more.

Go figure.

When there's no use living for or against it,
What's the use at all?

We manage.

And we are so cut up inside, you and I,
That it's a wonder the outside
Keeps from caving in

(Does he hear, I wonder?
You, effing and blinding through the night,
with hands pressed and whitening?)

Our arms are our buttresses
Wincing from the weight of crosses upon steeples to bear
Held fast to one another
And shaking from the new brave storm.

We (magnificent) manage.