My Vellum

Alluring and demure
In your virginity
Never yet
Creased nor crumpled
Your tight young corners
Remain stiff and pert
In their newness
Your long lithe sides
Tense for my careful touch
Lest blood be spilt

My gold nib
I dip
In midnight ink
Piercing its surface skin
And lift

It drips
One

Two

Black
Secrets
Back to their bottle

My hand is poised
Over your pristine smoothness
And with calm precision
I carve broad majuscules
That twist and cut
To hairlines of breathtaking
Intimate intricacy

Quick teasing serifs
Long lingering descenders
Strokes of tactile
Joy

Then stand back

Empty
In wonder at
Your calligraphic beauty

I figured where we fit on this little journey:
     In the middle of the start just as it’s about to end.
     Hire a gun! Hire Gun! Ah’a but can’t we be one?
     Fixed- the fickle have a sickly sweet dream to spend.
     Let them follow breadcrumbs all the way to the sun.
And as the 'fat whites' are watching, we too watch them burn.
    The woken dead poets sleep as we owe them it.
    But yet I feel disgrace as I chase their tongues wit.

   Fright learns a lesson when he hears himself gurn’.  
   Now he’s pouring himself sourly across this page.
   Disgrace! Disgrace! can’t you fit each word in its place.
   Foul taste! Foul taste! my words are forgotten,
         with his forgotten waste.
   But time as it takes, takes my breath slowly with it.  
   Till my last word is winded for another tongue to spin it.

Most of the time,
I find it difficult to harvest
the proper words from the curve of my neck
where the skin dips down
and shakes hands with my chest.  
The fine hairs raise and fall,
the color of wheat,
exhaling what others want and inhaling what I need.
In,
out,
in,
out.
Using my primitive tools,
I rip
the necessary parts of speech
from my throat
and use the so called precious arterial mud
that is equatable to manure
to fertilize my lungs
so that although I am dead,
my voice
is
not.

Sometimes,
I can pluck
proper phrases
from my eyebrows;
I can hunt them
through the tall grass that sits
upon my livid plains.
I imagine my pencil
is a spear
and try not to look
when the graphite
pierces their pure bodies,
killing the meaning
as yet another mediocre artist
paints them upon the lines of his notebook,
wounding
the effect words have on the world
because if they are used too often,
they mean nothing at all.

Occasionally,
my ink pen
forms a circle of deep blue
into which I can cast my line
and retrieve the perfect letter from a sea of ephemeral pieces.
I am merely part
of a larger industry
that traps
the delicate curves
of spines
and sharp points
of serifs
nestled between ascenders
and shoulders
into nets
made from blue lines on bleached paper.  
I desperately cling
to the descenders
that hang past the edge of the cliff
because by God I will not die
even if it means shooting something as beautiful as that
which I rely on to keep me afloat.

However,
there are times,
when that is too much effort -
too much exertion required of my small, inadequate equipment,
I am left
to abandon the ink-laden sea,
to discard my fields of words and phrases
in search
of a way
to pull the plug
at the bottom of the bathtub in my brain
and watch as the opaque,
grimy,
filth-ridden water circles
around
and
around,
exposing things
I never knew were there.  
In those milliseconds
where the contaminants drain away
and there is complete transparency,
I find what I am looking for
before I am even certain
what I needed in the first place.

Mrs. Parr made us write letters
to the hammering man that lived
in the radiators of those cold
Beechfield elementary rooms.

He got a lot of mail that winter - '70 to '71,
and we scratched our gratitudes
on the four line papers, certain
to keep our ascenders and descenders
in time and in tune with the peals
of iron and steam.

It wasn't until '77 that I got a grip
on thermodynamics and realized
there was no man in the heat
of those cold Beechfield rooms,

No giving hand with a maul
to pound away the nails of frost
and loose the stiff knuckles
of a chattering hand.

But back in '71, when mercury
pressed against iron, too young
to formulate disbelief,
we gave our penciled thanks
to the hammering man
that once had wrought relief.

Metaphorically, of course,
I sometimes trample
on a decent poem just by reading it!

My voice, my inflection,
my intonation,
my lack of rise and fall
my now softer ‘half crown’,
more southern counties accent
than the ‘built in’ Yorkshire of my birth
or the adopted Brummie of my youth…

These things conspire to
make the strung words:
a nonsense of the pile of ascenders,
descenders, serifs
and punctuation marks.
They’re irredeemable in that pile by the door.

It’ll take more than a Pritt Stick
to re-assemble them into the
voice I once had or want to have
Not needed on the voyage…