I feel mean and nasty.
I cuss out everyone I talk to behind their backs, saying
                                  'That *******!'
Or,
      'What a *****!'

For no reason but that the caffeine wears me thin.

My only child-friend is Bubba the dog, who gives me those eyes,
      'I've never tried watermelon  before, please Jilly can I try it!?'

And, of course I say yes.

Dogs love you even when their food comes late.

He's a pit bull. I feel someone of importance when I walk down the street with him, you know,
       'Move it, coming through with my friend the tan pitbull with the sad eyes! We don't have all day! We have to eat watermelon!'

He lays in the sun and I think of things.

'Why is he afraid of water?

Why does he step so daintily over obstructions in his path?

What does he really think of those
cats he chases...does he want them to sit down and eat watermelon with us?'

I want someone to eat watermelon with us.

Danny is at work, and the sun is high in the powder blue backdrop it calls home.

We want a watermelon friend.

1
 
Grey sky greyer sea
a litter of rocks balance
coat bright hat blue mittens striped
as on these November steps
you collect the gifts of the ebb tide
 
2
Glint green this living tapestry echoes
Jilly’s field with tractor not Devon
but salt-flats rocky revetments moorland rising
a map crossed by a chiromatic line
our destiny marked out on this concrete wall?
 
3
Beached clinkered double-ender
a bay-courser sjekte strand-crunched
fit once for Viking raiders two abreast
now daubed with tin ends of patriotic paint
a sea-steed hobbled ******* the shore
 
4
Bow faced a sea helmet thrice rope strapped
slow moulded over the boat builder’s ribbanded jig
a spanglehelm of wood
curved sheer straked plank bilged a tuck stern
raising its proud head seaward
 
5
Viewed from the air a map rolls out
north to the tilted curve of the horizon’s rim
cloud scattered mountained red
betwixt seas sun chalked wine-stained a volcanic isthmus
provokes desert the western waste land of  a brooding city
 
6
Oh face of ropes knot eyed!
you blue cheeked wide smiler
wild wild your  head of hair
beachcombed and splayed
wrapped on the sternest post
 
7
She sewed sugar kelp on the sea shore
a sporophyte with sheltered frond​
strap-like stem stiff and smooth
of the species saccharina a spring-tide
stalk set among substrates shells and stones
 
8
I the camera turned and caressed
by her slight fingers (the pinky raised)
my viewfinder close to her blue grey eye / I
focus on this kelp-needled novelty feel her breath
wait for the thumb press the electronic click
 
9
Here is the beach walked in darkness
the fishermen shadows against the moonstruck ebb
fingers laced the sea’s breath in our ears
wave upon wave un-folding on the sand and  later
we unfold then draw back in love’s relentlessness

Four Poems on the Tapestry Art of Jilly Edwards*

Yellow is the New Blue

From the train window
that yellow of summer
****-bright, and almost aromatic,
not a field colour in a fifties childhood
so we grew up without it you and I,
first curious at its occasional occurrence,
then somewhat overwhelmed
by its presence where pasture green
or golden wheat once was, and now this,
more than lemon and lemon-sharp too,
wonderfully colliding with any blue day
when the sky rests against a wolding sweep
of this crop the colour of daffodil.


Follow the Path to the Heart

Altar piece? But no, too small,
and there’s no God hiding there
under the table: this is on the wall.

Anyway, look at the panels here,
blue at the far end, surprising
but necessary, a clear

sea depth folding into itself a bare
surrounding whiteness of peace,
of supplication, a contemplative sampler

free from improving verse
or repetitious decoration.
It is all it is, even less.


Woolly Pictures and Plastic Boxes

I don’t do woolly pictures on the wall,
She said, and her son had smiled
in agreement. Long narrow strips instead,
She continued, rolled up to fit in a box
with tail-like braids sneaking out
and around and across and down
falling from a shelf or a window sill.

And those plastic (partitioned) boxes,
oohh! – I bought fifty wholesale from
Muji,  she exclaimed. I fill them
with moments, with evidence
of my journeying: always a railway ticket,
sometimes a torn wrapper stitched to mend,
then a tiny tapestry woven to fill one frame,
inevitably, a large-lettered cautionary word.

Standing on their sides my boxes
become rows of open windows,
a transparent gathering of memory,
a railway carriage of memorabilia.  
You can take them out, she said,
and put them back in a different way.
Memory is like that, the same trip
but the ordering altered:
there and back, back and there.


Ma

It’s a state of mind
Agnes talks about
and draws without a ruler,
a grid empty of everything
except the line, except a colour
all across and down
on *washi paper.

It’s space, you know,
a gap, a pause, an interval
or a consciousness of place,
a simultaneous awareness
of form and non-form,
an intensification of vision.

There it is on the wall.
This one, she points,
more blues than a lonely blue
ma gives shape to the whole,
my tapestry of negative space.

When I look at the sea
it’s all ma out there,
in the sparkle of reflections
on the cut-glass water,

where there is too much form
to hold against the heart,
where space is substance.

Grief is a silly thing.

Just when I think I’m safe, it hits me.
Over and over again.
Like waves relentlessly crashing over the shore. Inevitable. Powerful.

And just like those waves, it fluctuates.
Undulates.

At times the waves of grief seem to crescendo. Peak after peak, bombarding the shore without ceasing. Only growing.
And other times, the shore lies calm for a second, with just the occasional small reminder that life is different now and will be forever.
That’s the silly thing about grief.

Everyone always called you silly.

Silly Jilly

From the first time I met you at a basketball camp when I was 16.
You were small but boy, were you mighty. Going into the scrap with the bigs without hesitation. In the midst of the competition, you still led with kindness above all else (a lesson I’m still working to learn all these years later).
And though through the inevitable distance that grew between things like graduation and college, I’ve enjoyed every unexpected encounter. I would give anything to run into you one more time.

You never let yourself be defined by a singular interest. I admire that. You’re one of 3 people who knew me in real life that has read my poetry. I don’t think I’m ready to share that with others yet, but I’m working on it. Writing seemed like the only fitting way I knew to say goodbye.

You moved through this world with such grace and power, leaving waves of light wherever you landed. Those of us who were lucky enough to have shared your light are left better for it.

And now we are all left with the remnants of that light you so graciously gave to all. It seems to be fading through the lenses of grief. But that light is still there, strong as ever, just shadowed behind the current clouds.

The thing about storms is that they never go away. The waves keep coming without warning. But we become masters at navigating the seas, stumbling blindly towards the light you left behind.

21 years was not enough and nothing can change that. We are all so grateful for the time that we had.

whereas there might be some "other" day...
any bilingual might complicate the mutter-zunge
of the natives: perhaps "just so"...
but here i am...
          drinking a little - if not leonard cohen,
then some bee-bop big diddly dylan....
or what's left crispy... with a blue valentine
akin to... whoever sang about...
ancient egyptian pyramids...
loosening to team up
with Chinese hieroglyphs...
that they retain and precursor
x-ray vision.... that they do that they are
a skelettanzen...

these fortnight once in a blue moon
bulldozer events...
  i, completely, mesmerised...
some gravity toward constellations...
the ugly punch of lacking verbiage...
i said clouds: no... i didn't say clouds...
i "said" cutting into a clarity of night
and the leftover gleaming pebble
of Mauritania...

       fastened like something done up
with... a goo of glue...
says i'm comfy...
but in the grand architecture of
cauliflowers a "sputnik" of eyes that see me,,
that will leave me riddled
akin to the names
like: very much furniture -esque:

     Adam Smith....
          Jean Paul... and a Sartre...
placebo solipsists... i imagine...

yes, these cauliflower floaters of sky,
being obstructed... some hue of blue
in a lineage of... Monet's Marseille...
  
clouds my hyped-up cauliflowers...
what's the difference between
Dublin and Edinburgh...
well... everything that's what's Paris
or... Loon'dough.... of... donned... piercing...
scissor fighting like
metaphor for *****... scissors... *****...
it wasn't exactly "fighting"...
just... a quest for establishing disparity...

cauliflowers in the sky...
extending masks into contortions of smile-lee...
pour some red wine over my wait for
a grave...

poverty stricken metaphors: like like...
time just yawns...
when incremental details of space are allowed
to do what space does....
metaphor like, like this, like that...


wouldn't i ever, wouldn't i ever be one for
one of those
philanthropic romances
of detailing life by every face i would ever
see when cycling toward st. paul's...
and how gravity contorts
these faces... tell-tale signs of physiognomy...
that physiognomy is not, truant...
perhaps i should polish up my
punctuation...
        on some faces a signature: life-is-elsewhere...
perhaps some syntise onym of Heidegger's
dasein...
                my own investment in
hiersein left me with structure to see
how subjectivity will be undermined
because: some clerical baron of...
no, not stoicism... of some leech purr
negativity starts making stark demands
against uniqueness etc.
of all that's true in that...
heavily invested in subjectivity...
i can't see a balance of placing an order
on everything "shience" **** me:
alles großartig!
             no... but i don't need a parasite
of an ego of the other... concretely
the other within the confines
of an oozing membrane of authority
akin to journalism...
to think that melancholy does not have
viral essential, components - res extensa
manoeuvering dittos and other wriggly bits
of out-of-focus "thinking"...
more like labouring with a hammer
in a... forest of nails!

   always this bilingual "curse": something
older than this acquired Ęglish...
          a history as known only via etymological
study...
   notably a "concern" for nouns...
in my native zunge (not that anyone should,
care)...

       1: and when i count...
                      raz, dwa... trzy...
otherwise...
when i don't count and the number reaches
a pronoun status...
jeden... dwa...
              no innovations in grammar...
no ******* revolution...
just one obstruction after another...
or akin to, the metaphor of an iron
egg-shell... i.e. when you crack it
open for a fwyed (a velsh) fried egg...
the yoke tease puncture and spills
and you're left with nothing doing
the runny runny runner: woe...

alert the superiority complex(ed)
unlike those with delusion of grandiosity...
not teasing solipsism, although:
it could be alternatively written as...

mit ein hammer im ein nägelwald...
          who needs a vector, coordinate / preposition
akin to of - relateabl... although...
could be compounded... to... nailforest...
although... in english, english being english...
no diacritical markers... it plain *** rhombus ugly
to put nailforest together...
forest of nails...
        not who's the pwetty face 'ere on in?

"jedynka":
otherwise what's "missing" in the english
zunge?
the dimunitive suffixation...
and all the plethora of gender inclusive
nouns...
wholly complicated stuff...

dwójka, trójka... czwórka...
     piątka:
                   pięść....
    pięć... five-set...
                      six-set... fo-ur!
it's not like there's
a... a...                           (щь)
      dość...                 enough!
otherwise, yes...
  sh-ch...
                       szczerość - truthfulness...
in lingua franca...
an angry english skin-'ed
might shout a remark as
i... bicycle cycle wound and wound
looking for a trill in the R
in something / -where as remote
as Rales...

teasing katakana: no...
syllables weren't enough...
"they" went beseeching architecture... etc.
i came back with some punctures (lettering)...
my stomach shrunk...
my ego fizzled out...
my thought became my oughts

while the equation... if it can be called an equation
(at best)
is more of a question...

'how', or rather, 'why', is it...
that... ц
cz't...
           no...

    how does it go again?
hard sign soft sign etc.
i can tell you "how" i.e.:
             х

i am disgruntled by the sound encoding...
i guess i lean toward too many
tongues and ask for esque Barmitzvah...

bad internet connection:
somehow satellites are
governed by... earthen-work
of worms...
          
   ж(ъ) - *******' worth of a riddle...
here's to from havering-atte-bower
toward, lady in waiting...
my neu fwend... chalky why-ite-ite...
i.e. ж(ъ) should not exist...
unless... gli-mm-er...
is aesthetically proof of condescending
non-essential Lithuanian sprechs / spresch...
tighten the reigns on a hu-SH...
and don half a crown of a crown...
you'll get the acute

   it's already included...
   unless...
                   зъ = ж
         hard, signature...
more, sounds than a peacock's digress...
since                 зь does = ź
to hide diacritical markers
by way of creating "new" letters....
hardly letters more: digressing
graphemes... shortcuts...
apostrophes... supposed surds...
cult of compound hyphenation
in...

   noun contra noun contra:
etymology as: me toy... truancy...
and here: hey presto...
some snippet of history...

3 days said; shared spared "******"....
what's my...racial slirring
at the bottom of the vex / wax mobile...
impromptu: forward thinking...
a H without an F....

   racial slurr...
chalky white... someone i used to...
the demonic king of *****....
toying for tongue over
the already broken egg shells...
next time we meet...
sure as **** there will be, meat...

cucked...gloryhole... "avant garde"...
           as if i were the father...
as if fathering implied ownership...
let the ****** nad tha trapazees get
away with: oh much more than...
this...

concerning the coercive structure
of peer... pressures...
peer pressure...
without any fundamental...
yes the walking abortions...
    unbelievable "pun-and-play-truant"
   punctuation marks....

mea... culpa...
mea culpa... tu-ah...
                    this tired bone
of the same new bite of youth...
          nothing cleaving... toward...
moon heading toward closures...
of... reversing mirrors...
        
i'd sooner turn to ****-******
literature than
study: ****-wit...
Belgravia manual...
******* load of expectation...

      no, clearly i'm Copenghagen "safe":
children are nice...
at leasgg when not
having to invest in them...
from some darwinistic predominant...
squat.... sire...
most cleaving to the crown...

horrible tides of ashen...
the tails of non-existent streets of Holborn...
b'wing heave  nuanced h'american....
boyish... boy-told...
same round of *******...

i say crease a ****** for a, paul-lack....
i hear you say...
i own \ tiresome...
i say crease a ****** to crisp up
a ******... i say... mine ******* bounty
that's hardly passing Irish... you...
******* mummified thumb and
a... m.o.p.e.

          most offended people ever?
i guess i must be tired of lying down,
being pressed down,
estimating that... squat?!
is best what red hot chilli peppers were
circa 1999... and a garage an uncle
and a porsche... was... what Ilford was...

here's my handicap score... scrooge...
what, the, ****?
here's looking up for "better"...
seeing how the natives perform a better: less
than the ingested scrutiny of:
welcome...
here's me living in Kenya...
here's me... past for past's worth
currency: displaced...
hier ist mich!

           X X - like the Spaniards version
of ****... jack... jilly... i.e. Ha... Ha...
imagine how bleak, paradoxically auburn
and albino i must have appeared to appear
WWI shell-shocked... entrenched....
in some aum-of-mud...

these... walking abortions of a kindred of
mine... men... somehow...
laxing in contemplating devoid(s)...

        here's a letter or two, towing,
tied:
make a gimmick... pillow fighting...
moth-mouth (mottemund)...
elder english i.e. german -
some byway of etymological:
von ost...

           kommen sie (der) sonnenaufgang...
cauliflowers in the sky...
eyes that... ripple...
clued in death summarise....

i might ask...
  i probably will wilt sooner...
here's a spoon
and here is:

         зъ = ж (ż)
soft-sign... acute...
      źrenica (pupil)...
it's female... it's tow-tied...
it's leash prone... too...

             зь = ź

wouldn't i ever, wouldn't i ever be one for
one of those
philanthropic romances
of detailing life by every face i would ever
see when cycling toward st. paul's...
and how gravity contorts
these faces... tell-tale signs of physiognomy...
that physiognomy is not, truant...
perhaps i should polish up my
punctuation...
        on some faces a signature: life-is-elsewhere...
perhaps some synonym of Heidegger's
dasein...
                my own investment in
hiersein left me with structure to see
how subjectivity will be undermined
because: some clerical baron of...
no, not stoicism... of some leech purr
negativity starts making stark demands
against uniqueness etc.
of all that's true in that...
heavily invested in subjectivity...
i can't see a balance of placing an order
on everything "shience" **** me:
alles großartig!
             no... but i don't need a parasite
of an ego of the other... concretely
the other within the confines
of an oozing membrane of authority
akin to journalism...
to think that melancholy does not have
viral essential, components - res extensa
manoeuvering dittos and other wriggly bits
of out-of-focus "thinking"...
more like labouring with a hammer
in a... forest of nails!

   always this bilingual "curse": something
older than this acquired Ęglish...
          a history as known only via etymological
study...
   notably a "concern" for nouns...
in my native zunge (not that anyone should,
care)...

       1: and when i count...
                      raz, dwa... trzy...
otherwise...
when i don't count and the number reaches
a pronoun status...
jeden... dwa...
              no innovations in grammar...
no ******* revolution...
just one obstruction after another...
or akin to, the metaphor of an iron
egg-shell... i.e. when you crack it
open for a fwyed (a velsh) fried egg...
the yoke tease puncture and spills
and you're left with nothing doing
the runny runny runner: woe...

alert the superiority complex(ed)
unlike those with delusion of grandiosity...
not teasing solipsism, although:
it could be alternatively written as...

mit ein hammer im ein nägelwald...
          who needs a vector, coordinate / preposition
akin to of - relateabl... although...
could be compounded... to... nailforest...
although... in english, english being english...
no diacritical markers... it plain *** rhombus ugly
to put nailforest together...
forest of nails...
        not who's the pwetty face 'ere on in?

"jedynka":
otherwise what's "missing" in the english
zunge?
the dimunitive suffixation...
and all the plethora of gender inclusive
nouns...
wholly complicated stuff...

dwójka, trójka... czwórka...
     piątka:
                   pięść....
    pięć... five-set...
                      six-set... fo-ur!
it's not like there's
a... a...                           (щь)
      dość...                 enough!
otherwise, yes...
  sh-ch...
                       szczerość - truthfulness...
in lingua franca...
an angry english skin-'ed
might shout a remark as
i... bicycle cycle wound and wound
looking for a trill in the R
in something / -where as remote
as Rales...

teasing katakana: no...
syllables weren't enough...
"they" went beseeching architecture... etc.
i came back with some punctures (lettering)...
my stomach shrunk...
my ego fizzled out...
my thought became my oughts

while the equation... if it can be called an equation
(at best)
is more of a question...

'how', or rather, 'why', is it...
that... ц
cz't...
           no...

    how does it go again?
hard sign soft sign etc.
i can tell you "how" i.e.:
             х

i am disgruntled by the sound encoding...
i guess i lean toward too many
tongues and ask for esque Barmitzvah...

bad internet connection:
somehow satellites are
governed by... earthen-work
of worms...
          
   ж(ъ) - *******' worth of a riddle...
here's to from havering-atte-bower
toward, lady in waiting...
my neu fwend... chalky why-ite-ite...
i.e. ж(ъ) should not exist...
unless... gli-mm-er...
is aesthetically proof of condescending
non-essential Lithuanian sprechs / spresch...
tighten the reigns on a hu-SH...
and don half a crown of a crown...
you'll get the acute

   it's already included...
   unless...
                   зъ = ж
         hard, signature...
more, sounds than a peacock's digress...
since                 зь does = ź
to hide diacritical markers
by way of creating "new" letters....
hardly letters more: digressing
graphemes... shortcuts...
apostrophes... supposed surds...
cult of compound hyphenation
in...

   noun contra noun contra:
etymology as: me toy... truancy...
and here: hey presto...
some snippet of history...

3 days said; shared spared "******"....
what's my...racial slirring
at the bottom of the vex / wax mobile...
impromptu: forward thinking...
a H without an F....

   racial slurr...
chalky white... someone i used to...
the demonic king of *****....
toying for tongue over
the already broken egg shells...
next time we meet...
sure as **** there will be, meat...

cucked...gloryhole... "avant garde"...
           as if i were the father...
as if fathering implied ownership...
let the ****** nad tha trapazees get
away with: oh much more than...
this...

concerning the coercive structure
of peer... pressures...
peer pressure...
without any fundamental...
yes the walking abortions...
    unbelievable "pun-and-play-truant"
   punctuation marks....

mea... culpa...
mea culpa... tu-ah...
                    this tired bone
of the same new bite of youth...
          nothing cleaving... toward...
moon heading toward closures...
of... reversing mirrors...
        
i'd sooner turn to ****-******
literature than
study: ****-wit...
Belgravia manual...
******* load of expectation...

      no, clearly i'm Copenghagen "safe":
children are nice...
at leasgg when not
having to invest in them...
from some darwinistic predominant...
squat.... sire...
most cleaving to the crown...

horrible tides of ashen...
the tails of non-existent streets of Holborn...
b'wing heave  nuanced h'american....
boyish... boy-told...
same round of *******...

i say crease a ****** for a, paul-lack....
i hear you say...
i own \ tiresome...
i say crease a ****** to crisp up
a ******... i say... mine fuckibng bounty
that's hardly passing Irish... you...
******* mummified thumb and
a... m.o.p.e.

leftover wonders:
   dream of the Faroe Islands...
my cat-**** snippet of a "reconquista"
and some, boring h'arab of barking & kin...
did his pakistani trick-easy...
a malcolm x mythological blonde
summary...
the spider suckles the fly...
life gravitates toward a
membrane of juggling **** and a...
pyramidic persitance of: give a ****...
less that i do...

while the red wine flows... and flows....
crab bucket destructor...

such are the joys of white liberal...
****...
magic carpet... what not...
here's a walking abortion...
here's monkey lingo-linguo
                  Otto the next Urban... once
Islam was to be agitated...
forever: *******!

my... unwinding under the scrutiny of
reading into... spine.