Why do I feel compelled
To describe you as imprinted
On the bone face of my skull?
Am I in there, rattling
Around with each curt nod
When you offer me your time?
Hurled against the stretches of the mind
The head's own incubator
Some Palaeolithic cave
Where the only inexperienced scrawlings
Are your portrait
In this cave I have invented film
Starting with a rickety old Zoetrope
Of the first smile; lips bracketing
The teeth, enabling
The tongue, to churn out
The voice, your nuclear voice
Hanging my Nagaskian heart by a hair
I haven't needed irradiation
Like the hand-canter of a harp player
I have been plucking my scalp
Hardly Lilith but perhaps
Deforesting Eden
Will tempt you from Eve.
Feb 25, 2014
Feb 25, 2014 at 5:18 PM UTC
(Jenny's Granny's house. Ayr.)
Where seasonal root veg soup
Warmly journeyed our throats
Granny Jean, skin translucent as glass,
Sheer, showing tendril veins beneath
Crinkled cliff-edge lips at Jenny's budding womanhood
She knew hers lay as barren
As insignificant as the pale Mojave borderlands.
Brazen-cheeked dolls and pastel bears
Audienced my transition from slip to sundress
Back in the lucid haze of the pensioner's kitchen
Where dust particles hived like antique film grain
Sat Jenny; painted lips like crisp apple skin
Freckled cheeks hollowing atop
Her milkshake's flimsy plastic straw
Raspy, bubbly ***** filled
The kitchen; appliances groped
By the pious smite of the sun
The kind of light they say never to walk towards
Then, a weathered cough and the stiff moan of a rocking chair
Just to jest fate
Was none of our business yet; I was taken by the hand
We pass many exhibits
On the austere lilac fridge:
"Mr. & Mrs Richard D. Barclay, wed on 11th of Oct 1961"
And crayoned from her own hand, aged 10; "Me and Granny B"
A waxy glyph on lemon sugar-paper not always in memoriam
But among the moth-wing wallpaper lilies
For now
Dust dunes like mattress ghosts
Collect in mushroom clouds above Jenny's sudden weight
While I feed myself to the mirror
My frock, flesh, hair all seep
Into the totalitarian whiteness of our room
And I am happy if this is my course through life
I know I'm no one
I try on, as I shake goodbye,
Jean's hands; fire-crafted leather baseball gloves
They do not fit just yet but
When my hands no longer sheen in the virtuous sun
When I feel citrus hand soap grate into each wrinkled chasm
I promise you, gran, I will remember
Even the Mojave desert will see rainfall.
Feb 25, 2014
Feb 25, 2014 at 8:42 AM UTC