Christmas morning

(By Sil, 25th of December 2020

Christmas morning

The rooks sing

Dogs circle the pond

Frosted water-mint

Under a pink sky

I left you breathing

This simplest of facts

Is no longer a cliché

Christmas is a tally of a year passed

Time’s own special attaché

The last twelve months -  

Marbles

That rolled under the kitchen sink

This Christmas morning

The choirs will not sing

And we will not bless each-other

With peace

Beyond disrupted human custom

Life is perpetually at ease

The quiet valley

That grows into light

As night pulls away her heavy train

Inside me a new heart is beating - 

The ghost of future spring

Part-Time Preacher

(by Gub, 27th of December 2020)

For me

You don’t exist 

You are like a folded shadow;

A part-time preacher

promising a  sermon

That never comes

I listen for words to lighten

the dark

For some noise to deaden the echo

Of my own voice - but no chords are 

Struck.

I am feint with hunger for sound 

Unhinged by my own interminable guide track.

When will you speak.

What noise will you make, amidst the clatter of my tortured thinking.

For if you voice a thought 

What will I answer back....?

Clara’s Dream

(By Gub, 25th of December 2020)

Crystal light

A Moon beam

On ice

Flakes sifting

Down 

Onto a frozen

Pine floor

The song of the

Troika bells silenced

The dancers enfolded:

Holding 

Life still

Breath held

Forever

A cold enchantment 

Or love’s promise ?

And Timeless 

Against the glistening  

Canvas 

Of white white snow

Heart Star

(By Gub 23rd of November 2020)

Could a breath exhaled 

Reach that far?

From a faltering heart

To a newborn star...

This fluvial magma

Of  blood stills

To the tideway point

On a crimson sandbar

Beyond the mantle 

Of a darkening world

Eclipsed by silent lights 

Souls search out 

Empty atoms 

To stowaway;

Being begins it’s journey

So quiet

An unsounded 

Prayer bell

Winds unfurl

Around the flag 

Whip 

Crisp air

Into the blue reach

Of a frozen 

Mountain 

Peak

Seek out new planets

New horizons

On which to settle

 

Breathe life 

Into passing cells

A delicate unfolding 

Pulse 

Echoes

Across time and space 

An answering heartbeat ...

The ghost of Christmas future

16th of December 

I thought I'd love you

but the last lick of fire

died out 

Life crowded me out

On the screen, we age 

Our edges blur

The articulate speech of lust

Is now but a quiet slur 

At the weekend I am a crowd mistress

Surrounded by

overgrown babies who,

In their disquiet,

want to latch onto my tit

Mouths smeared in transference lipstick

I'm just a shapeless plaything 

they use

on their sojourn to Hades

to tune up their emotional strings 

I charm I laugh 

But at the end of the day 

The verdict is: 

Not enough 

Says so the 50-year-old girl 

in a pink hoodie and plats 

They're listening

I try not to breathe,

And the truth is a stillborn 

but the queen on the wicker throne

Can't say so

Beware

says the man who plays hide-and-seek 

He hides - but you'll never get to find him

You won't drown but neither will you swim

A baby grows inside you

She is the ghost of Christmas future 

Throwing a punch and a kick 

Weaving invisible threads into a mind

Immortality's magic trick

Catcall

(Silvia, 17th of June, 2017, London)

30 degrees

Candy floss air

Reflector sky

Fairy lights

Tower Bridge forgot its terror

Highly strung 

Terrier summer

Chews all labels off 

The city's face is Narcissus,
Lost in his mirror

On Black Prince Road 

Heat flows like lava

Unnamed 

I stand

In the sticky, naked 

Afterglow

In the heady brine

Of linden flowers 

And hashish 

Bystander mind arrest 

Night's catcall

Speaks one universal language 

Whether it's London, 

Or Bucharest.

The Bell Jar

(Silvia, 23rd of January 2018, Hanging Bank)

Raindrops crash into light

All this beauty

Is painted on the surface of a bell jar

Under the rainbow rim

Winter buries its sun at noon

Life’s algorithm

Plays a synthetic tune

Swoon 

Drown into someone else’s swimming-pool 

For a change. 

Wilful dyscalculia - screw the odds!

How else to play hide-and-seek 

Against mysterious Gods

If you’re the kid always too impatient to be found

All I know is 

At night 

My dreams are filled with death 

And if you allowed it, 

I’d build a moonbeam den, 
Empty a golden-pear cart

Outside your fireproof, 

Modular heart

Theshold

(Silvia, 25th of January, 2018, Leominster)

Your curiosity is inviting

And your smile too,

Yet I won’t be drawn out

There’s a dainty threshold

That designs the odd symmetry of 

Playground 

And graveyard 

Winter light is a wick

About to burn out.

In the shadows

The veins of ancient yew

Pump a poison of their own.

3pm - I suddenly don’t feel so bold

I narrow the frame

My eyes keep on flicking edgeways

Towards the gravestones

And the cellophane colony of snowdrops

In January’s Gothic theme-park

Miscast Hamlet plays at phrenology

Amidst perfect props that you can’t see

You take notes

Your face is aglow in the yellow kitchen.

I don’t trust your biology, your DNA

A better God would have given you neon irises 

That glow immortal in the dark. 

A passing train drowns out the thought

We’ve choreographed good-byes 

Down to a ‘T’

You’ve got a client to see, 

I’m left with the rain,

Wishing for once

This fizz that you call my mind 

would fizzle out

I would reboot

300 years ago

As the mute armourer

Of a hidden Bavarian Schloss.

Jerusalem Syndrome

(Silvia, 1st of February, 2018)

Hereford gulls sing to an absent sea

I write, although 

My heart ticks on bloodless, 

Unwound. 

Pilgrims to the Holly Wall

Collapse psychotic 

In front of angels

With dirty wings

Panic clings like soap-scum

I dispense reassurance 

But my hope has a broken morphology 

Only ever flies economy

Match-stick girl lights another match

Unrequited love is a corpse
Left unburied in the churchyard

My eyes were forced-open

A shared smile became a small space 

Of collapsed possibilities 
For a moment

We were both alive 

On that stage 

Two actors in an awkward embrace. 

Face

(Silvia, 24th of February 2020, Greenwich)

In the black spring 

The earth shuns the rain

Like a child who refuses to drink 

Behind glass walls

Love is a faded artefact 

At the museum 

The throat singer grunts and heaves

With such menacing eroticism

Yet I have no voice.

My thoughts are like explorers lost 

In the frozen North 

Have I replaced you with false memories 

Of hunting caribou and arctic rabbit?

Do you still have a face?

Back to naught

(Silvia, Hanging Bank, 16th of April, 2020)

We are in a world of walls

Captives

Practicing a new skill

How to move

Whilst standing still

It’s quiet

The day blinks with one tired eye

And kites circle 

Over unclaimed valleys 

Beyond the Black Mixen 

Weathered signs point to somewhere 

That feels like nowhere

I walk and walk

And dream of you

My half-forgotten path

Fading neural pattern

Loss is a gentle drying-out of the heart 

A brittle touch of aged moss

Every night the world fades black

Every morning the world goes back to naught

The Reader

The architecture of this relationship
is that of a small, airless room.
There is intimacy in such a space –
an intimacy borne out of being rammed nose to nose to another.
Nowhere to hide, and also (or possibly because of), no way to get closer.

In his story, he is addressing another - you
YOU feels startling – it invokes the tip of the arrow of Kairos.
This is directed at YOU. This is for YOU. This is about YOU.

The sleek train of logical, methodical thought is approaching its target
I feel anxious for this YOU

It is startling to suddenly find myself accompanying the mind that is minding all this.
Minding – as in looking after but also as in being rattled by.
A mind whose secrets I have often wanted to possess.
This is a mind that habitually conceals how much it minds.
Yet here I am, in the spider’s lair, watching the meticulous patterned construction at work.
Everything gets trapped in this web –
every story, every inflection, every gesture.
And it is being used to build a large, ominous structure – the TRUTH ABOUT ‘YOU’.

A mind that mines. Forensic detail.
He is not even revealing the intensity of his search,
of his frantic trying to make sense of his experience
He feigns equanimity, but he does mind – very much so.
And he confesses that he is waiting for the right ‘moment’ – to strike.

You tried to say little about yourself, but you have already said too much.
You hide behind your stories
You are Sheherezade trying to buy yourself another day.
He reconstructs you from story fragments,
Like a scientist would reconstruct DNA from the skin you shed on the bathroom floor.
You are your stories, the way you tell them.

It is unlikely that you are a good person surrounded by bad people.
Cinderella? Nobody believes that.
You know that if you had to play the part of the victim, you also learned the lines of the villain.
Like in the play of Frankenstein where Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternate between playing The Beast and The Doctor every night. You could do that.

The Seagull

The seagull floated at the edge,
Swayed by the sea's barely moving lips
He was still, sunken onto himself
A deflated beachball.
I sent the boys over with sandwich crumbs
Which he ignored
They started dancing, taunting him
I could feel the bird's heart in my own chest
As if we were two metronomes synchronizing over
a vast distance
One lame wing trailed back as the boys swooped in
The sun framed boys and returned them to me as men
Muscular backs and narrow hips
Thighs pistoning the sand -
male-grade energy channeled into childish canter
Was I watching childhood's last cruel dance?

40

(Silvia, Hanging Bank, 15th of May, 2020)

For now, you are denied 

the world

The sun rises, indifferent

Useless gold

poured

Over biblical pestilence.

In nature’s lab experiment

Freedom has a negative valence

You negotiate the cage

Gage

How long you can stand still

Unused 20-pound bills

In your pocket

You lust for freedom

Boil over

Like milk forgotten on a hot stove

Read out loud from the Book of Sleep

Fingertips trace a secret architecture

under-skin tensegrity

This spring is a gilded lady

Bone-sick

The streets are empty

It feels like you fell into a dream

A child again

Whacking at hawthorn with sticks

Scouring the black forest underbelly

Where pine-needle snow

settles in soft dunes

and firs with ghost limbs

are allowed nothing but verticality.

Crowded church spires

aspire

to new life, but only at the edges,

where light bleaches the dirt road. 

You tear up the spine of a pine-bud 

And crush it in your mouth

Inside you too is a living forest
The shape of your mind just never made sense

on its own.

Truth

(Silvia, Hanging Bank, Sunday the 17th of May, 2020) 

When we smashed the inkwell of truth

We mapped-out the vast realms of 

The Kingdom of Things That Will Never Be

Here Be Dragons  
Retreat
Save some dignity.

We hid the map in Plato’s cave

Eros granted you parrhesia,

Pinned my tongue firm to the wall.

His hungry dogs stalked

the shallows

Grew weary of their own bark

Too tame

To go

for the kill

Gentle beast – cried Psyche

If I caught up with you at the end of time

On a dustbowl red Earth – when we have long forgotten

How to breathe

If caught you 

and shone candlelight into your pale eyes

Would you lie still?

In the aftermath of truth,

I hang loose, inert

A strip of silver nitrate

Full-up on light

Sobriety seems as irreversible as

Blots of dark ink on the old pine

Of a child’s bedroom chest

Time’s cycles

launder on repeat

Weaken the dye.

Every poem

Not written

Is another

lie.