"funnelling" poems
Hot on the tail of that wily, elusive beast
named ‘inspiration’, I travelled north.
North, where colours mute
and transformative shadow
bends in darklight,
revealing the world as it really is,
as it once was.
Hundreds of years pass,
rolling back time, boiling clouds
rushing over peaks in reverse,
a tiny tornado ***** in on itself,
and hundreds become thousands.
Rain blackens the babies of volcanoes,
engorges forces with greater purpose
and cleanses every shred of vision
from my grasping, desperate mind.
Thousands become millions
And I am stripped of incentive to try.
There is no ruination, here.
No furious nor frantic need
to imagine past lives
in this manicured, managed place.
High-vis’d toilers scuttle on mountainsides
carefully placing and re-placing rocks,
funnelling feet and discovery
on a prescribed and sensible path.
Only the rain
wreathing a secretive misted ribbon,
creeping in glacial cut-throughs,
is possessed of fanciful virtue.
Nothing shatters but the slate
and the landscape does not turn inward
to eat itself
in gnawing, atavistic need.
It says more about me,
than it does of the Lake District
that I would wrench out and offer
my super-heated heart
to see the mountains fall.
Aug 24, 2015
Aug 24, 2015 at 8:53 AM UTC
Does she know the silver chain wrapping
Around her ankle is terminal and deep
As a trans-Atlantic cable connecting the island
And here.
That a single full-breasted pull
On a summer cigarette was
Life altering.
Her body was beach-burned, her hands
Sifted grains of sand
Funnelling beneath her thread-bare towel.
Our silver natal thread contracted
As the blue smoke rose,
Magnifying the August moon.
Three hundred moons have dimmed.
We walked in step from the Village
Through the park with the slack chain
Dragging, scraping on cement.
I have often polished that chain,
Used muriatic acid to untarnish.
We didn't know our brains would
Become onions behind our eyes;
We didn't know towels would become
Patchworks stitched over bones.
I didn't know a chain of being could snap.
May 26, 2014
May 26, 2014 at 9:51 AM UTC