The wind tunnels through the room
heavy and hot. Thoughts hazing my head, more
powerful than exhaustion. No force
to put me down, to let me
dream. And outside the sea rolls
crickets play their beat and the sun
rises, turning up the heat. I leave the sheets behind
sweat dripping, thoughts roaring, circling
not tired enough, not now, in this
dawn. The mountain walkers cry, their friend
a carcass, gone, that one from the night
before, burned and rotting in its cave
up yonder, at my back, inside my back, twisting
my spine. The crickets grow quiet
as I recall what I miss, potently, far from adequately
yet all too physical is this need. Wind grows, blows, burrows
through to where I perch wide eyed from
fear and knowledge. Not a kid
anymore, anxious and verging on helpless. Verging on
the verge, nerves like power lines, but the sea rolls, sits.
I watch its lines, etched blue and deep, growing
paler with the heat, colour sucked out, depleted
slowly as the goats call to one another. In the rocks
where their former friend sleeps for eternity now, they will
sing in turn for the departed, stomp hooves and send
a special being to the skies. He will dream on and alone
I will sit, scattered and tired but never
at rest. Too much is uncertain
other than love. Love is stronger
than ever. Her knees were buried in sand
as crashing consumed the moonlight. Back arched
leaning towards the water, a bridge to depths
made whole by dark eyes and a smile. Connected
to the earth and the sky
still we could no sleep. No pain or ill feeling
or sores on on our feet, only blisters, heaving
but ready to heal, when the waves, the goats and crickets, my mountain
are long gone.
I’ll remember them, as now, the morning after
the final day of the old times. Yesterday the world
was distant. In it now for ever, like the sleep
of that carcass, just as black, just as void. Wrestling forever
in the shallows as tides turn over and we fall
into that space below, the upside down, gravity
a dream like unicorns, starry, running wild, comets
at their hooves, a most potent mystery
I trick myself into. All of it comes, you come
with it and I fight, knee deep in sand, growing muddy
with my swings. And I wonder
now as I always have, but for the first time
these dreams are strides away. I sit
alone, a bitter taste in my teeth. One
that contracts anxiety once more, deepens it, bringing
my edge to the ropes, though not sharp enough. Never
sharp enough. So, ready to leap I stand but this readiness
is fiction like my solitary state. I don’t have knives or flint
or fire or claws, only a roar, so I roar and
the waves roar back.
The journey forth is my
adventure, like Indiana Jones, the one
I choose to take, that I craved in fantasy
only now there is added sickness
which cannot be culled. No magic weapons
or strong lungs, majestic creatures hidden from
all of us, the answers and the maps written on
their bellies in depths unreachable. A wall
erected by the greedy is our first trial, one that will
determine all from hence forth. ‘Do I have the bones
for this?’ and then ‘Do I have the steel for this?’
I had a friend
who was a wooden gargoyle
and he burned because his friends hated him
for being wooden and he did not have
the bones for this. I miss him every day. I think
of him every day. If he were still here, alive, he
would have fled long ago, taken me with him
to places I can’t fathom, that you
snigger in relation to. So it’s alright
that he’s dead.
Years on I question my own words, scribbled
by a kid they seem ambiguous and incorrect but
‘seem’ means nothing and I roar again. I roar for all the
things that ‘seem’ because they all ‘are.’ I teeter here
up high on a balcony that continues to sway, lines on the water
spreading to the air, a continuous band of streaks, like
visible wind or air with a way and a mind, and I concede that
I am nothing.
The crickets have resumed their audacious
contagious racket but she remains still
when I turn to her, bare in the sheets like deserts
we crossed, all white, clean and peaceful
fluttering her eyes as she dreams. I thank the stars
and the unicorn and God, just in case, that she is this way
and not like me, never to become like me, because
angels deserve to rest, deserve bones thicker than this
of compounds more that this.
A former self seems distant now, increasingly so, deftly
vacant like my roar already forgotten. The old pages are wet
and coming apart somewhere only sea horses
can read them. Heat grows. Wind wains, and I sigh
and throw new pages into the abyss only they don’t fly
they fall. They fall fast and I don’t even watch. I smoke and
I don’t even watch. Curtains fall shut and I see her
no more, feel her no more. The balcony has risen
atop a solitary tower and I am the lone
inhabitant, but there is another way.
There always is, in any story, real
or unreal, a figment or an all encompassing
odyssey. As one collapses another
will break free. Simply follow
the butterfly. Hold her hand and don’t ever let go
because she’ll keep you safe, fly or fall, she
will. A road is barren lined with rocks that were there
always, others are trembling, having tumbled
from the hills, kicked down by feet and hooves or
something else. That is what you must watch for, as
I do, that something else, a few steps byond the rocks
where there are dead things like anywhere.
I wait and
I wait and I wait
and the golden dawn
grows richer but
means no more
than it did when
it was dark and the moon
was somewhere
but not here. I cannot
see beyond
the water and the hills
and my mountain and this is
Ok, I tell
myself, ‘This is Ok.’
Hand in hand with my butterfly I wait, smiling
at the sun, a tune in my ear, growing louder, vivid, oh so
real and right, ‘Every little thing…’
And she opens her eyes and peers
at me. She grins sleepily, she roars.
