Roofless

Sun between the banister,
morning through the ivy,
this house with its open worlds
closes nothing to searching ghosts
or their reflections in the windows.
Her feet count the steps to a bedroom
strung with bursts of net curtain hanging
like blanched vines. They draw
in the night through their fleshless leaves.

Outside, a neighbour watches,
busy watering his dead fuchsias.



Her hands leave meanders in the dust,
and capture a butterfly in a teacup,
halfway between a streetlight heaven
and the desires she pinned on the sky,
where she’d always figured heaven flitted
away from the rain.

Snapshots don’t make memories
when the mottled  hues of music and voice
are lost with the dust between linoleum
fractures (arteries take blood to the heart)
like paint sucked into the earth.

He allows the dusty wings to rub off colour
on his wilting progeny. They are choking
on the early frost, and euthanasia sits in a flowerpot
in the shed, mixed with dust and cobwebs.

For a moment the house remembers
the feeling of rain running over its tiles,
like streams of ghostly tongues racing
in cycles back to the sky,

and she feels it too, like a choir
singing in rewind, blowing blue-grey
into dawn’s clutch of swooning mist,
while a pair of wings seep the last of their colour
into the puddles pooling on the carpets.

(Revised: 25/01/2011)

Heh...

Balloons tangle in the sky; they're red
and green, like the halves and wholes
of a voice singing to me while I’m sleeping,
with the blush of headlights combing
my duvet. Someone drew strange faces
over the curves and shadows, and I
can’t make out if they’re smiling or staring,
singing in red murmurs, or watching the olive
trees sway outside my window.

Postcard

Good morning, I hope
you are well, and the toast isn’t burnt;
I’m spattered with Mediterranean salt,
just like you promised – easing ink
through the Adriatic and its penny
promises, shining like eyes
on the seabed.
 
I’m crossing waves
with these over-the-counter postcards,
on my way back to you, while Venetian cream
threads a loose skin over my coffee.
If you were here, you’d ask me to remember
drawing faces on maps of the world

as the rain poured lingos through our smiles,
threading tie-dyed kite tails amid the contours
around your lips and eyes (hanging on tight),
and I’d tell you maps don’t have sunsets.
In these hot midnights alone, I gaze
 
over roof-top gardens gone to seed,
with Indian dyes and watercolour reflections
clutching the canals below like embroidery grass,
I spend listening to the lions who guard
each tributary with fevered eyes
 
that teach a lullaby  on the art of living
well into the swill of colours as words
in song, printing them in stone and lining
new words on my lips: caelum, non
animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt.*
 
My hair is the horizon now,
and it’s pulling at the sellotaped corners
of the universe, undoing your careful origami,
and laying it out on the sky where my words
trace their way back home, on a jet plane
resisting the air.

 *"Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt." (Those who run off across the sea change their climate but not their mind.) – Horace, Espistles

Nautical Optimism

barely awake it seems
the sun forgot to bring coffee
or a fogless breath
to her window –  
but that blue’s a fine glow,
she thinks – is it dawn
or the tread of a storm
colouring over the divide
of sea and sky?

she waits and sighs and asks
of the beasts she colours
in daylight and picks apart
when the ease of splitting weaves
where oceans cohere and forbid
an easy return,
 
if prayers count when thrown
to fishes, day after day.

The Old House

I know I was meant to do one a day . . . but yeah, I failed at that. Done . . . three. So I'll edit up the other and post is in the next couple days. This one's more of a musing than anything else, and is going straight on my 'to edit' pile. :/

The Old House

The wallpaper peels itself back,
stringing decade-old glue
like party streamers, made grey
by the rain, over the carpets
we scuffed black and blue,
and then ‘till the colour wore away
and our names were revealed,
etched into the bottom stair.

This house pretends
that ghosts play in the eaves,
weaving banners between the beams:
the children who lived here smile
and draw crayon wishes on the ceilings,
the walls, and unravel their way
to an attic where laughter
filters through the dust
like sulphurous whispers.

Unsolved

[Beware: word-vomity awfulness drizzled with a dash of eww. Trying to get back into this, 29 more poems to do in the next three weeks, hopefully it'll help - wish me luck.]

Wonderland was the name you scribed
on the patio doors, though stiffened
by fortnights of rain, and swollen at the hinges.
You’d gaze at the flat areas in the grass
until the curves of your mind spilled
like laughter down the hundred worn hooves
of a carousel as it spins, entombed  in its own
symmetry, waiting for it to spring up
between the daisies fainting against the glass
when night rises, unsmiling.

You remember my name
sometimes, and call it out loud,
as though to the cat who’s pawprints
still ghost the concrete steps, looking
for the dried-out milk I used to leave out,
while every night in this garden,
more moons look away in the sky.

Your fingers reach out to stroke my face
but pull away when splinters separate
your memories of what you always believed
happened here. The garden listens, but only speaks
when nobody is there to hear its murmurs.
The pink champagne we spilled between the blades
dried like blood in the moonlight: black.

And I thought I saw a star cry my name, before
the constellations became your witnesses.

[Sept 3rd]

Helloooooo

This is my shiny new blog as the other one never seemed to get used and I thought a change might help that, though so far it hasn't. Hopefully, thanks to a September Napo, this will be for poetry, but let's see.

Also, other poetry people - if you're using wordpress and the automatic space between line breaks annoys you (I hate it because it messes up stanzas) then [shift]+[enter] creates normal linebreaks without the space between the lines. :)

Just
like
this
:)