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?