Advice from Freuchen , the explorer

When Arctic blizzards blow
in Northern Greenland
and your supplies are low
and dwindling
the best advice is build an igloo
and wait out the storm.

And when you hear the wolves
howling with hunger
and prowling on your igloo roof
it’s best to go outside
and sing - only occasionally
though you will fight to be heard
above the judder of the wind.

Inside the igloo will be problematic
the walls seem to close in
as claustrophobic days proceed
it’s not an illusion
but a fact
each breath freezes moisture in the walls
and breath by breath they thicken
spaces close around your body
breathing yourself in a coffin of ice.

There’s no instrument of death
devised by man to so terrify
as being locked in space and time
each breath reminding you
of that closeness to that final loss
of breath and an icy Arctic death.

Lazy days and choppy waves
Upon a copper sea,
A breezy, warming westerly
Is blowing down on me.

Sunlight striking wavelets
Below clouds of cotton cool
And seagulls hang in squadron lines
Aloft from oyster pool.

Road signs judder in the breeze
Ripples weave amongst long grass,
Mangroves bend in unison
And asphalt bakes in molten glass.

A parasol of brilliant blue
A picnic basket brimming high
With lemonade and icy beer
Whilst sausages and onions fry.

Two barking dogs cavort with joy
Chasing ******* sandy beach,
Leaping high in summer air
Running, fetching, ***** to each.

The lazy summer saunters in
Engulfing us with solar heat,
The pretty girls wear tiny shorts
Which breathless boys find such a treat.

Pohutukawa’s bursting forth
In waves of rich and scarlet red
Which juxtapose dark olive greens
Of leafage midst each flower bed.

A sky of brilliant powder blue
With salt spray aura in the air
As swimmers splash in gales of fun
Hot sunlight baubles kiss their hair.


Marshalg
Port Waikato beach
15 November 2011

© 2011 Marshal Gebbie

Sky is pitch and crystal cloud
Wild figures languor on the dusty ground.
Eight pairs of darken haloed eyes
Strike the blue to blacken.

Bring the night.
And bring the work
The work by voice and light
Work with reddened hands
And verbal glance at a
Smaller place that must
Be walked: a faster pace
To lose the mortal race.
Mellow hours decay with gracelessness
That cannot be dreamed

On April nights no one in the road
Can be exempt. Nothing is exempt
At the stroke of the hour.

A step cracks in the deep
In those woods with painted fronts
A step that eats a flower
Sending up devotions.
****** rocks the riverbed
Hums a note in the still.
White shoes in black line
Mechanical clarity, footfalls.
Frissons from foreshadowing
A judder and a burial.
A burial in white.

It reeks of adrenaline, God's own ketamine,
Is sundered somewhat by a Sunday.
Sunday suit and six strong suitors
Following suit to the spot

No one could say. Still, the air
Is too hot with electricity to suffer it.
Tomorrow we can say
That we all knew the night's dread
Export, but for tonight we pray
Our lambs are all a-bed
And not a one of them
Is dead.

No one taught Ophelia to swim.
The hateful eating orange of dawn
Mocks her slow and stymied progress.

Standing in a corner
Back turn towards the light.
Focused on the rhythmic judder.
Not of the heart, or of the soul.
For what I am feels soulless.

Hands held close to my body
My breath beats back onto my face
I'm shut in so close
To the total recess of what
My life has been reduced to.

Eyes slowly open and close
While my head dips down again.
Rises up, I stare off, and down again.
Habitually poised in shame.
Always in the end left with some sardonic understanding.

What I'm trying to say is

I want that     jolt

that sudden   judder
   of something

you'll give me
without thinking

I want to feel it
throb in every   bone   of my body

I want to be     blown
backwards

   as if kissed   by lightning

I’ll see you
   but want to see you
again   and   again

like a sunrise on a cool morning

   your face being the     sun

what is this life?
what is this gelatinous mess?
what has been done
has been done
willingly or reluctantly
   - I know the moments
that have seen me
judder the gearstick the wrong way
that have seen my bones
rattle with a dreadful calcium clatter
my lungs like sandwich bags
flimsy against my heart
which throbs as some malformed peach
when a white chocolate blonde goes by
it reminds me of ice-cream
the chilly fuzz inside my skull
my nerves anesthetised
gone blue gone slow
   - names clamour over one another
until I can’t separate the letters
the worth keeping
the junk mail
a train spewing passengers outside
I am knocked all over as a conker
bruises blossoming into pools of Ribena
where is the asphyxiate button?
that would wipe this page clean right?
   - here is what I offer
passion by the bushel
and while I have not fired Cupid’s bow
or slurred my way through a Taylor song
I can make it work
I can learn to drive
and stop being a moth toward the light
flapping my epileptic wings till they burn
   - I will scrub the soil from my skin
latch onto you and be the best possible me
float within your ripples
swig the air as if it’s lemonade
just taken from the fridge
say I am not who I was before
I am new I am fresh I am sparkling clean
like a toddler as they wobble
to make their first step

the sleeper...

riled in slumber
         her face fevered
     cussed about the terrain
                                     of a floral breeding
  bedding patterns and the print
                                        bunched in struggles
in smudges
                     an amateur trial with sisters makeup
     primal cosmetics
            make a mock
                    daubed
                                ceremony for slumber

dusty and museum are her dollworks
        an amphitheatre audience
                                 overlooming her berth
    flaunting the gallery shelves
                sustained expressionist menace
Roman eyes and Victorian ridicule
stuffed suffering with Ugly Duckling down
****** sawdust and your sullied label
they bray and they brawl
         and they sluice their gull gall
    a sick drizzle
       over the sleepers form

   from the exterior
  wild wails the weather
its being
     drubbing
  peers fragile
at the windowpane
a raid on this vulnerable sleeper
impounded in bedroom aloft
raised to meet the jet stream

she is fumbled in dreams...

  abraded adolescent swells
judder out figments
  a bleed of vandals
     siling her muted childhood
       parading the playground
          berating old
         once loved playthings
       adopting no sympathy
    adapting in favour
      of the wild riding will
        of the direful pre familiar

into the woods...

a ***** charmed breath
       dressed smartly as boy
stoppers her pathway
       insisting a gentleman's assistance
frustrates her recitations
      of grandmothers doting
           stern teachings
         like fragile pottery
            come to harm
         broken into teeth
the quick blood beating
       this nocturnal forest
     busy in heat
      bonding death
       to refract the hustling moon

a company of wolves
    fill out the clearing
not a spell too soon
their howls reverberate
             jeering
mocking their new glut
sifting followers
      from the raggle-taggle array of fools
the foolish dreamers
          rounded up
amongst them she stands
red dressed and nervous
one hand clasping
                  and sexing the other

fortified
a great jaw operates here
an excited irresponsible mastication
committed to this fairytale

...agitation in her sleep

I have an emotion of desperation at the moment, missing love and desiring it but at the same time rejecting it and wishing it not exist around me, a conflict within myself like a caterpillar in its cage of a cocoon.
And I must get out.
I feel held back by strong intangible arms that are relentlessly squeezing the life out of me. Oh, help me god. But Its roper around my neck isn’t dropping me, rather dangling me with enough life to torture me with the feeling of emptiness, a feeling of no love gained yet none to be lost in the first place. Ironically, I can’t die from the misery and can’t escape long enough for my blinks to bring me back to the hopes of an alternative reality.
Every girl I pass by has a feeling of gymniphoria, but for what? I couldn’t imagine even if I wanted to, and yet it’s merely an attempt of my soul to gather the remainder of my dignity and ****** it toward my brain in a way to flaunt it enough for me to feel it sink into my brain that I am strong enough to fight the feelings and live past it so that I can thrive once again on my former levels.
But I can’t get on this level like Kevin Gates, I had to work down and back up but down once more, and here I saunter godforsaken. My voice in a constant crescendo as I yell to the heavens for their attention once more. Hear my ******* pleas, hear the small voice as it raises and sends mountains into a judder as my wounded roar reaches its ****** and shouts passed heaven directly into the space inhabited by my thoughts.

I stood at the doorway and swayed. “‘I’m cold”, I declared, to no one. The sky was the colour of mustard and blood, as it had been every day since December. I wondered what chemicals I might be ******* in, and watched as my hot breath escaped like the life leaving a corpse. The horrible thought made my mouth twist, and I rubbed my arms.

I had plenty of layers on, and it was as much for the uncertainty and loneliness as the brisk chill. I know exactly where to look next, I lied to myself. A fragile veneer of confidence held everything together. It was born not of bravery, but necessity. I had to find her, beyond the threshold, beyond this dark veil. A step. A wobble. A curse.

It wasn’t long before I saw the first of them, rotting by the side of the road. I felt pity, then loathing, then immediate remorse. I waited, breath captive, for movement, for howls. Betrayer! Why did you live, as we died? I pulled my hood down in shame and started to run. I knew that they were merely motionless corpses, the unfortunate ones who had died that day. They were dead, every one of them gone. One thing kept me going: Iris.

I hadn’t seen another living creature for two months, but I sensed her constantly. Every corner I turned, every flickering shadow, even the moans of the wind. She was always there and always absent. I slowed to a walk by the park, and everything fell still. There was no sound at all, not even the whispers of ghosts. I looked at the button at the crossing. Press, it read. I pressed.

The traffic lights silently changed to amber, and then red. No cars were there. No cars stopped. No Iris. I realised I was ravenous. The crossing started to beep. I gasped. The green man appeared. I looked at him, then down, left to right; nothing. An empty road. The beeping continued. “Thank you”, I said to the green man. He did not reply. As I approached the shop, I heard her, heard her call. I cursed myself even as I turned. The grass and the trees on the hill in the park. A mocking wind whipping at my sides.

Most of the bread and fresh produce had rotted away. In habit I looked over the newspapers and magazines opposite the entrance. They hadn’t changed, of course. December’s magazines, papers from the 12th. I noticed that the lights were still on. How long would they keep going with no one in the power stations? I shook my head. Why was I thinking about this? I might care later, but I didn’t right now. I found a ring-pull tin and ate, and blinked for a moment. I found one for Iris too, her favourite. I thanked the empty store, and eventually willed myself back out again.

She loved being outside. Her delight at it was marvellous. I was sure that if she had the choice she would be out here during the day. I stopped like a statue on the pavement, eyes wide. All this time searching, I had never considered that she might be searching for me too. Where would she look for me? I turned it around in my mind. Of all our old haunts, I had been looking in her favourite places: the park, the old quarry. Which were my favourite places? I tried to focus. By the lakes, of course, but that was too far on foot. The canal. The canal.

My heart began to beat so furiously that I had to gasp to breathe. Automatically, I started to walk. My feet carried me lightly. I didn’t see the bodies. I didn’t feel the cold. My rituals of normalcy were forgotten as I traversed the noiseless roads. Everything was washed out by something in my heart, in my guts. Two things, actually. A burning hope. And a repetitive, repetitive dread.

As I took the second of the steps downward, my stomach sank. I could see the canal path and I realised that I half-expected her to just be there, looking up at me. She wasn’t, of course. This was too much to take, and I didn’t know which was worse, the hope or the dread. I walked down five or six steps, trying to focus on the smell of the bramble. It didn’t smell of anything. I couldn’t hear anything. I tried to picture her face, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see it. I let out a soft sob, sat down, and began to cry.

Almost immediately, something inside shook me and stood me up. There was no coming back from that one-way street. I felt a knee judder, and I looked down to see my legs continuing down the steps once more. As the last step gave way to wet, brown leaves on the path, I called out, again and again. Nothing. I wiped my nose, and breathed, softly. Slowly. And closed my eyes.

Time passed. How long? I don't know. Raindrops dabbed at my hood. I tried to picture her again, and this time, I could see her. I could smell her. Suddenly, something big and heavy hit me hard in the chest and threw me backward. Shocked, I flailed my arms in horror, and I felt my head barely graze the edge of the bottom stone step. A wet weight pressed down on my ribcage, and it was warm. I tried to open my eyes, and to my surprise, found out they were open. And there she was, Iris, muddy but happy, her tail going crazy as she licked my face.

There once was a tiny dragon,
No larger than the palm of my hand.
She burned no village, stole no princess,
Her name not spoken in fear throughout the land.
She hoarded not gold, not jewels,
Cared not for such frivolous things.
It was memories she kept in her miniscule cave
She guarded with flickering fire and scrap wings.

I went to her cave in the mountains.
Stumbled on it, by mistake;
As I lay down my head at the roots of a tree,
By an obscure and secluded lake.
She emerged in her miniature splendour,
From beneath a nearby rock.
She let out a yawn of fire;
And I froze: in awe, in shock.
She grinned a needlepoint grin,
Beckoned with one curved claw
Into her miniscule cave,
I followed: in shock, in awe.

I peered through the half-hidden opening,
Only inches larger than my head.
The dragon spoke soft but thunderous,
And this is what was said:
“This is my hoard, young human.
This is all I hold dear in the world.”
And she handed to me a birthday card -
Some edges singed, some curled.

It had writing in a swirling foreign script
That seemed to be etched, not written.
“This is the love of my first ever crush,
In the days when we were still smitten.”
“Is this all?” I scoffed, “Just pieces of paper,
and wrappers and old useless things?”
Her doll-sized body began to shudder
With a judder of claws and a flutter of wings.

No larger than my littlest finger,
She was a smaller version of herself;
But still I froze as she perched on my nose,
To her, a sizeable shelf.
“You hold no value to memories?
Then why don’t you leave yours behind?
Since they strike you as being so useless,
I’m certain you wouldn’t mind.”

Now all my memories are scraps,
Shadows of what they once were.
I wonder if she kept them somewhere,
In that diminutive cave with her.
Notes from a wife I think I had:
About the shopping, the kids? The car?
A card from my parents, a gift from a friend,
A reason for this faint lip scar.
I try to keep letters, tickets, receipts,
Compulsively, I feel I must.
But whenever I reach for that link to my past,
It is nothing but ash, but dust.

I know what its like to have your heart heave, wrack, and judder with its broken dreams
and I know what its like to sing, dance, and be free as a bird
But mostly I know what its like to be unthankful for days where hardly nothing happens at all.

Cures for a broken heart are painful
- its all in the letting go

Sometimes bit by bit
- and at others in full flood

Your heart can heave, wrack, and judder
- with its broken dreams.

You know, something always bugged me about love.
I always assumed it was having someone there for you,
someone for you to care for and someone to care for you.
A star in a dark sky to show you the direction you were going,
the moon on your back lighting the way to somewhere warmer.
It was always an ember to me, something small but bright,
how it tricked your eye into being mesmerised by it,
how it danced on invisible winds and flowed like the air was water.
Sometimes it would happen little by little and other times all at once,
and when it was gone, it would make you beg for more,
have you scraping at the burning log to make more little embers.
I suppose there’s a beauty in that somehow, the subtlety of movement,
a staccato as a new breeze entered the ember’s airspace,
and how that little ember would judder in the air but still it would burn.

But years go by as they so often do, without warning or permission,
and you inevitably see things differently from a more mature viewpoint.
You have so much more to look back on, so much more to comprehend,
how everything you’ve ever done up to this point all fits together.
I don’t see love as one of those spritely little embers anymore,
love to me is so much more, a force of magic that binds souls together,
the universe, once thought so unforgiving, actually there to support you,
to guide you through the twilit marsh of existence, to heal the hurt.
I have experienced that magic firsthand, and I know it happens to everyone,
but so often we either look the other way or we can’t fathom what we see,
until it’s too late that is, when memories become cloudy with age,
when all that you had ever hoped to come true has been replaced by nothing,
but that too is magic, my friends, because magic knows nothing of time,
it transcends the very fabric of the universe that binds us.
Magic flows through the connections, seeps through the cracks,
and that is where love resides, not in the intimacy of no distance,
not in the warm embrace of someone who takes you for granted.
It’s in the very fibre of your being, you are composed of love,
of magic and the beautiful light show on display every waking moment.
Dance to the rhythm the universe provides, you are its melody.

This moment, this juddering dread.
Its purely circumstantial
and it will pass
One explosive act, drunk on adrenaline I chose to be strong
for once
and Now I look where it has got me
“you did the honorable thing” they will say.
And they will be right
“for the first time in living memory”
They will add.

Scooping up the layers of ugly truths that coat this place
these walls, today, this life
like so much finely powdered snow
like so much asbestos...
easy to ignore. But never forgetten.

I wash them out out of my eyes each morning
And start my day.
Dismissing them as mere dirt.
I empty my pockets and find them there,
They are under my fingernails.
A taste in my mouth.
The parts per million build up inexorably .
I will sicken and die.
You are kind. You try to help.

But you are wrong.
Soon you are contaminated. Sickened.
This failure to do what's right
provides the background white noise to waking life
The scratching and chittering of the conscience
Like rattling pipes, Like rats in the walls
disturb sleep
you see the powdered snow
Innocently.
Trying to clear it up
hands cracked
Thinner, weary
Uncomprehending and trance-like. You have felt the sunlight dim.
You have gazed into the abyss to long…

“It's time to talk about this” you say
I resist, deny all knowledge, stare out with detatched wonder
at the swirling blizzard
of toxic flakes
That blows in through the open window.
You begin to talk about this

I cough out a weak joke,
splutter some excuses. Polluting the air with benign untruths.
Which settle in heaps about the place like finely powdered snow.
Your face it streaked with tears.
I scoop up the snow, now discolored by age and filth,
Compress it, hard like a diamond
Your face is streaked with tears
Your eyes, your ears, your pores are open,
At least you are brave enough to feel something.
You face is streaked with tears.
Your eyes bright with the still-hot fire of life, are desperate to meet mine.

Downcast, I shrink from them
Merely distracted, not happy, not sad
Solemnly kneading the crystals of poison snow in my palms...
Bent Double, wrenched inwards  in an agony of unfeeling calculation.
The task is beyond my Jellied spine.
You are pleading for me.
The man, the ******* man
To make the decision.

Somewhere beneath the layers of carcinogens an old voice, rendered unfamiliar by time is crying out.
I listen.

Unsteady. Drunk on adrenaline. I take aim.
Doubled up. Wincing. God only knows what how you felt when it hit.
When the full weight of these months of accumulated deliberation
and guilt
and truth
made contact, with the face I have kissed a thousands times before.
And now here a quiver, judder
a lame and broken invalid
I first time I made a decision.
“You did the right thing” they will say.
I pray that it's the last time.

Slow-going wheels roll further
Slow men walk the earth chewing french fries
Slow night diminish slow, with an embarked illusion
Slow me, drinking slow, from the bottle that no shining fear dive deep down
With ******* my life dangles, my hands weak and wildered
With somebody in my mind, I slowly, subconciously **** myself
Somebody betrays somebody, denies her name, or his
Denies the carnaval-looking blur of a dreadful pain
Carnavals, haven’t been to carnavals for years, but I know how they dismay
I’m aware of myself at some degree, it satisfies me for I can look up and stray
I’m aware of the passion of my source of pain, yet I don’t know
It makes me shiver like an aimless stone
Pain walks upon the geography

Slow rhymes mask my voice through an unwalked scenery
Slow songs hit my soul like the smell of gasoline, each night, tonight
Tonight I struggle to find my bed in guilt of missing one more day, being loss of control on one more chance
One more glance, I prayed my dandy days to be, yet I don’t believe
And I don’t trust in anything that I admire, that I’ve never had, tonight especially
My abilities burn, burn, burn to a crimson coldness, I can neither get cold nor freeze
Every dismal day has something to teach, but I’m stone deaf and blind since the birth of my criminal being
Said that I’m one old tryer, one slow man that died earlier, living via senses
I’m breathing for nothing, as I sensed, at least that’s a good thing I guess
Tonight, I’m breathing my own graceless dirt, I’m breathing someone that will become me of some other kind
Pain barks its all greed

I was told of slow massacres of liberty, and I saw it with my bare eyes
I was told of slow tensions that could shape an affair from my fears of love, but I didn’t mind until the time I got clipsed to the iron bars as I tossed to someone’s wall
I got clipsed to myself all along the snipers’ castles where the mushrooms just fix to die, the point I always teased myself
There’s always been slow approachings to a mind’s eye felony
There’s always been a slow matter of time to catch the agony of others’ existence, even when I appreciated with someone that didn’t mean to mean good, or meant to be fine
Decades sewed blisters on my elbows, knees, my manhood, my ******* manhood
And my functional sides started not to make a beneficial man out of me, it’s clear tonight
I see a barroom right across the buildings in front, it boils with such huge river of crowds, but I don’t really want to walk there because of pain
It pours my skin down to the ground like as an axe shaving me off me
The air’s already blue now, blue as a kidnapped kid’s wishes from the little circle of life
I’m blue but I can’t get mixed up to the airwaves as long as I try to sharpen myself
I try to sharpen myself with the most lobed piece of stick, and this causes everything I abandoned to be a nightmare in my sleep, and my daytime ramblings, and it causes a killing pain
Pain disregards

Slow strings of reality judder this up that down, clang all the faith one man has once althrough his wasted life
Slow links of chain drags the cruelty from the claws of a cryptic eastward state
There’s no boundries through from everything I know to nothing I don’t know
Idols and spooned clowns look the same, sleeves of lies put them onto an act and they resurrect on my small buzzing TV
Everything can make a man commit suicide, as far as all I’ve learned from life
As far as I can teach, amountless glasses of whiskey solves that if someone looks for an easy way out
To get away from the streetlamps that targeted you, to brick up some brand new shelter against the interrogations, to be on the lam, to run, slowly
To leave the other sycophants on the midway, to break some glasses, to craft some endless rebellion, are the other options I guess
To bless someone that don’t even care, and then the lifelong heart attacks...
I don’t pay to much to my custody of survival, I have my own property on this sphere
I can pull out some dignity, as I have it on my mind, and this just gives men like me pain
Pain doesn’t tell much these days, it just attacks and attaches and grabs me by taking firm steps towards my bones
The unbreakable threads of my shadows push me to same pathetic nosedives, tonight I feel it intensively, befriending with pain
Pain, it speaks my eulogy
Slow pain, it wrecks my fantasies

Over a year, close to two.
I am passing through for work
and to see a friend,
our communication meagre,
reduced to pixels on a screen.

Rue Sigefroi, one of the city’s arteries.
Clotted cream buildings,
concrete mugs clogged with flowers.
I see French, German,
the country’s own compote of the two,
umlauts sprinkled like confetti.

He has invited me for coffee.
There is a gangly embrace,
smiles blooming on our faces.
Wine bottles, maybe empty
tickle the top shelf,
books half-blotto behind the sofa
where I sit as he orders, my face in the mirror,
all wiry hair and pips of stubble.

The cup comes accompanied
by a dice of brown sugar.
Immediately he invites me for dinner.
A gasp hurdles out of me, stupidly.
I accept. He tells me this is excellent news.
We fill in the spaces
of our ever-growing crossword puzzles.
As you do, a lot is glossed over,
metaphorically kicked under the carpet.
He has no intention of moving back
but his father, he says, is unwell.
His image cabasa-rattles to the front of my mind,
the man who introduced me to Prufrock.

- The meal this evening is pleasant.
His wife plonks a quetschentaart before me,
galaxy of singed plums,
a star in Van Gogh’s view over the Rhone.
An occasional judder of laughter between us.
The evening begins its routine for sleep,
the sky embarrassed with clouds
over the Alzette, our stomachs content,
our friendship granite-solid.

The world is a machine
Everyday running on human tasks
7 billion of us just the same
All wearing our Covid masks
It judder's to a start when we first arise
We stretch
We yawn
And work until its time for beddybyes
Now if that one person tells you they're not
A part of this operation all working as one
Then my friend they cannot see,
That they are its final component
In this megalithic device
For they are just,
a cog.

JJB