Vaginas are all shapes & sizes
Not many vary from the fold
there are very few surprises
Seems nature's gone & set it's mould

But the ****** has such allure
A pull on man to lesbian alike
A calling so strong and pure
Enough to turn a straight girl ****

Is it the promise of warmth & touch
A memory of a time inside
The scent of our matriarch's crotch
Draws us to those legs held wide?

It was nature's way of ensuring
The human race continues on
So that our presence here's enduring
Never ceasing. On & on

Instinct has been subject to a ploy
To harbour this hypnotic power
Sell it back, a high class toy
Put to work this delicate flower

Control the basic urge of man
The essential need to drink & eat
Once you create the ultimate fan
Then the surplus you do deplete

Until it feels that a simple look
Purchased, from a few feet away
Is as good as one hard ****
Copulation they do delay

And so vaginas became a mystery
Sold back to all who do desire
Remember to look back in history
The vaginas are for more than hire

for Jennie in gratitude*

For days afterwards he was preoccupied by what he’d collected into himself from the gallery viewing. He could say it was just painting, but there was a variety of media present in the many surrounding images and artefacts. Certainly there were all kinds of objects: found and gathered, captured and brought into a frame, some filling transparent boxes on a window ledge or simply hung frameless on the wall; sand, fixed foam, paper sea-water stained, a beaten sheet of aluminium; a significant stone standing on a mantelpiece, strange warped pieces of metal with no clue to what they were or had been, a sketchbook with brooding pencilled drawings made fast and thick, filling the page, colour like an echo, and yes, paintings.
 
Three paintings had surprised him; they did not seem to fit until (and this was sometime later) their form and content, their working, had very gradually begun to make a sort of sense.  Possible interpretations – though tenuous – surreptitiously intervened. There were words scrawled across each canvas summoning the viewer into emotional space, a space where suggestions of marks and colour floated on a white surface. These scrawled words were like writing in seaside sand with a finger: the following bird and hiraeth. He couldn’t remember the third exactly. He had a feeling about it – a date or description. But he had forgotten. And this following bird? One of Coleridge’s birds of the Ancient Mariner perhaps? Hiraeth he knew was a difficult Welsh word similar to saudade. It meant variously longing, sometimes passionate (was longing ever not passionate?), a home-sickness, the physical pain of nostalgia. It was said that a well-loved location in conjunction with a point in time could cause such feelings. This small exhibition seemed full of longing, full of something beyond the place and the time and the variousness of colour and texture, of elements captured, collected and represented. And as the distance in time and memory from his experience of the show in a small provincial gallery increased, so did his own thoughts of and about the nature of longing become more acute.
 
He knew he was fortunate to have had the special experience of being alone with ‘the work’ just prior to the gallery opening. His partner was also showing and he had accompanied her as a friendly presence, someone to talk to when the throng of viewers might deplete. But he knew he was surplus to requirements as she’d also brought along a girlfriend making a short film on this emerging, soon to be successful artist. So he’d wandered into the adjoining spaces and without expectation had come upon this very different show: just the title Four Tides to guide him in and around the small white space in which the art work had been distributed. Even the striking miniature catalogue, solely photographs, no text, did little to betray the hand and eye that had brought together what was being shown. Beyond the artist’s name there were only faint traces – a phone number and an email address, no voluminous self-congratulatory CV, no list of previous exhibitions, awards or academic provenance. A light blue bicycle figured in some of her catalogue photographs and on her contact card. One photo in particular had caught the artist very distant, cycling along the curve of a beach. It was this photo that helped him to identify the location – because for twenty years he had passed across this meeting of land and water on a railway journey. This place she had chosen for the coming and going of four tides he had viewed from a train window. The aspect down the estuary guarded by mountains had been a highpoint of a six-hour journey he had once taken several times a year, occasionally and gratefully with his children for whom crossing the long, low wooden bridge across the estuary remained into their teens an adventure, always something telling.
 
He found himself wishing this work into a studio setting, the artist’s studio. It seemed too stark placed on white walls, above the stripped pine floor and the punctuation of reflective glass of two windows facing onto a wet street. Yes, a studio would be good because the pictures, the paintings, the assemblages might relate to what daily surrounded the artist and thus describe her. He had thought at first he was looking at the work of a young woman, perhaps mid-thirties at most. The self-curation was not wholly assured: it held a temporary nature. It was as if she hadn’t finished with the subject and or done with its experience. It was either on-going and promised more, or represented a stage she would put aside (but with love and affection) on her journey as an artist. She wouldn’t milk it for more than it was. And it was full of longing.
 
There was a heaviness, a weight, an inconclusiveness, an echo of reverence about what had been brought together ‘to show’. Had he thought about these aspects more closely, he would not have been so surprised to discovered the artist was closer to his own age, in her fifties. She in turn had been surprised by his attention, by his carefully written comment in her guest book. She seemed pleased to talk intimately and openly, to tell her story of the work. She didn’t need to do this because it was there in the room to be read. It was apparent; it was not oblique or difficult, but caught the viewer in a questioning loop. Was this estuary location somehow at the core of her longing-centred self?  She had admitted that, working in her home or studio, she would find herself facing westward and into the distance both in place and time?
 
On the following day he made time to write, to look through this artist’s window on a creative engagement with a place he was familiar. The experience of viewing her work had affected him. He was not sure yet whether it was the representation of the place or the artist’s engagement with it. In writing about it he might find out. It seemed so deeply personal. It was perhaps better not to know but to imagine. So he imagined her making the journey, possibly by train, finding a place to stay the night – a cheerful B & B - and cycling early in the morning across the long bridge to her previously chosen spot on the estuary: to catch the first of the tides. He already understood from his own experience how an artist can enter trance-like into an environment, absorb its particularness, respond to the uncertainty of its weather, feel surrounded by its elements and textures, and most of all be governed by the continuous and ever-complex play of light.
 
He knew all about longing for a place. For nearly twenty years a similar longing had grown and all but consumed him: his cottage on a mountain overlooking the sea. It had become a place where he had regularly faced up to his created and invented thoughts, his soon-to-be-music and more recently possible poetry and prose. He had done so in silence and solitude.
 
But now he was experiencing a different longing, a longing born from an intensity of love for a young woman, an intensity that circled him about. Her physical self had become a rich landscape to explore and celebrate in gaze, and stroke and caress. It seemed extraordinary that a single person could hold to herself such a habitat of wonder, a rich geography of desire to know and understand. For so many years his longing was bound to the memory of walking cliff paths and empty beaches, the hypnotic viewing of seascaped horizons and the persistent chaos of the sea and wild weather. But gradually this longing for a coming together of land, sea and sky had migrated to settle on a woman who graced his daily, hourly thoughts; who was able to touch and caress him as rain and wind and sun can act upon the body in ever-changing ways. So when he was apart from her it was with such a longing that he found himself weighed down, filled brimfull.
 
In writing, in attempting to consider longing as a something the creative spirit might address, he felt profoundly grateful to the artist on the light blue bicycle whose her observations and invention had kept open a door he felt was closing on him. She had faced her own longing by bringing it into form, and through form into colour and texture, and then into a very particular play: an arrangement of objects and images for the mind to engage with – or not. He dared to feel an affinity with this artist because, like his own work, it did not seem wholly confident. It contained flaws of a most subtle kind, flaws that lent it a conviction and strength that he warmed to. It had not been massaged into correctness. The images and the textures, the directness of it, flowed through him back and forward just like the tides she had come far to observe on just a single day. He remembered then, when looking closely at the unprotected pieces on the walls, how his hand had moved to just touch its surfaces in exactly the way he would bring his fingers close to the body of the woman he loved so much, adored beyond any poetry, and longed for with all his heart and mind.

From the ashes I descend,
Rising among the flames,
As shades of red.
Orange and yellow,
Blend within the explosion,
Of my rebirth,
Claiming my life force once more.

My deep hazel eyes,
Drenched in golden brown,
Surrounded by a burst of jade,
Speckled with dark green,
Reveal my humility,
Compassion and genuine kindness,
Allowing you to behold,
The window to my soul.

The vessel,
Containing my spirit,
Conflicts with the feminine demeanor,
Exposing sincerity,
Comforting hands of a care-giver,
The voice of loyalty,
Gently escaping lips,
Tears of empathy,
Seeping with understanding,
Kisses of affection,
As soft spoken words,
Depict desires,
Hopes and the warmth,
Of pure love.

Mystery envelops my origin,
Becoming a mystical being,
With the ability to heal,
The potential to inspire,
Living proof of an alleged myth,
Yielding in protection,
As my plethora of feathers,
Shield the individuals I adore,
From darkness,
Attempting to swallow the light,
We yearn to discover.

Blind Thoughts of denial,
Shall forsake your eyes,
If you pass judgment,
Upon me,
For my cloak of skin,
Concealing my true beauty.

As a Phoenix,
I refuse to watch,
The children of diversity,
Suffer degradation,
Living in fear of discrimination,
Stifling the right to love another,
To dress in garments,
That correlate the body with the mind.

I shall rage to cease,
The hands of violence leaving bruises,
Ignorance stripping,
Breaths of air from a pair of lungs,
As homophobia,
Transphobia, and intolerance,
Deplete individuality from a heart,
Deserving liberty,
The pursuit of happiness,
A chance to survive.

The Earth returns my soul,
To reap the love,
Concealed in assumptions,
And sow acceptance into,
The fields of society,
As I continue,
To soar into a cerulean sky.

They live in huge houses, drive fancy cars
Most know poverty only secondhand
So how can they fix a problem... They don't really understand

Given the role of a leader
However, I'm convinced they are confused
We live in worlds too far apart...
How can they lead with similar views

Their children go to private schools
Only the finest and elite
Their children will never need public education
So they allow funding to deplete
Their children will succeed
I believe it's part of their plan
To ensure that high society
Will forever lead the average man

The evidence is no secret
They don't seem to care if we agree
They know they hold this power
So it doesn't matter if we see

Our taxes keep going up
Unemployment is at an all time high
Life keeps getting harder for those just scrapping by
The people making these decisions
Of course they find it easy enough to do
They're not deciding for themselves
They decide for me and you

The truth of the matter is...
This country is ruled by hypocrisy
They disguise this, however, very cleverly
Today it's what we know as Democracy

"A political government run by 'The People' through 'Selected' officials"... Democracy defined
Compare it to the way it was truly designed

Sure we get to 'select the official'
But the one thing they seem to neglect
They pick the people
Many, that corruptive politics help select

You must look back upon our time together and smile. I know it's going to hurt, some days it's going to feel like your heart is ripping to shreds and tearing you apart from the inside out. I'm not saying that living without me is going to be easy, for I know it will not be. But whatever you do, do not let this loss deplete the warmth your smile holds or the joy your laughter spreads. Remember that in order to feel so much sadness, you once had to have experienced an equal amount of happiness. So, when the tears well up in your eyes and your throat hurts from the sobs you are choking back, I beg of you, remember me with a smile.