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.

Christmas

You find me in bed
into your arms
I feel the velvet ropes that tie me to my mast
and I hear
I hear the syren's song
let me encircle your thigh, your shin
tighter
don't let me go
skin on skin
hull to water
eels with mysterious mating rituals
are you even real or just scent and temperature
your manliness - sculptural
yet inviting, soft enough to mold into
biceps brachii, extensor, flexor, radius
I want to inventory the muscles in your arm

Why can't we be lovers?

You arrive late as if time were not irretrievable
in cool blue, momentarily scanning the room
but not believable
in your search.
As I cannot reach out for you, I pretend I have no arms. No eyes.
Yet all my cells are undercover spies
Mind zooms past conference props: chairs and people, pens and fingers, water pitchers,
chins propped on hands, sound glitches
In this madding crowd
I want to sway in your light
Undulating reed
To be seen but not seen watching, wanting
When the amplified pitch of the feedback loop triggers a whole room, you don't startle
The crowd laughs
But they could cut your profile in marble
We sit
Like two arrows at a crossroads
pointing in opposite directions
Dancing in and out of each other's invisible sections
boxers reading distance and closeness
we both get that sex is an 'It' ness
I poke your arm and you touch my face with the edge
of your palm, as you lean in for a whisper
I know my scent is trapped in that space
Yet I don't know my own scent
And I don't know what your skin smells like either
You are text written in invisible ink
I stalk the stage, I unmute myself:
Why can't we be lovers?
I am calling out to you in a roomful of people
Why can't we be lovers?

Little Venice

By Sil (7th of July 2017)

Little Venice 

Belongs to cyclists 

And city boys 

Who ping-pong their freedom away

Fake status satiety

Seek temporary safety 

In money and uniform.

In the glass theatre

A vertical, potted 

Gauche summer 

Directs a play without words;

It moves its actors in reverse 

Nature, reduced to a trimmed-back 

Farce mustache

Has no scent.

We're braving the edge 

Eyes, adrift 

On the frogskin face

Of the water 

(A prince

Left unguarded,

Unkissed even by death)

Carefully unpicking 

The stories 

We tell 

From the ones 

We don't.

Desire makes

Halfway station 

Between promise and 

Caution 

Conspicuous barge

Painted in lurid letters 

Its owners 

Are water haters.