THE SHOWER
(or: a mother's admission)
Hot icicles zip on my lap-winged shoulder blades
creating lovely painful tension
to drown and ease the undone drudging,
low key, long term stressing of my daily bread.
Invigorating hell hot steam envelopes me,
hurts and comforts me
with relaxing and effacing prickles.
My body enviable, tight, slim and white,
no childbirth grooves, and yet
I take no pleasure from it even though
I would dance or barely sit on coals to keep it.
But as essential, not for delight
or Narcissus admiration.
The mirror shows Pirelli rain-drops teasing from a nipple,
And a kite of puberty all bejewelled.
But my rubbing is sanitary, not erotic.
I am drying back to unfathered children.
Since separation ignored, crossed off by him,
and hated, loved or simply laboured for by me.
As my wet commotion fades out,
the spasmodic childish waves of the one
I have dreaded and in failed escape, fades in.
The one whose pint-sized fatherish traits
and miniaturised peeves and dwarfish whines,
whinges, wants and demands along with
frantic shrieks and body out of sync,
present perfect scaled down images
of my well-gone, very goodbye husband:
never missed but all too often not forgotten.
Dressing, each article has guilt returning.
I wear a mother’s costume and her image
But not the natural thoughts.
Out loud or to myself I cannot say
“I do not love my child”.
Remorse no less for being halved:
my heresy is just for one.
The other is the natural real recipient
of my normal variable adult love.
But this just feeds the pain of shame
By such an ugly comparison.
I could, magnanimous, superior and cruel
offer custody; but the gift refused
would brand the child an unclaimed property
and leave him with me – doubling my blame.
Cleaning up the suds and splashes,
the final drawn out lovely ritual –
before back to the purgatorial kindergarten,
I sneakily revisit that outlawed plan.
Why not risk some later harm
for such a tempting present?
Mine and his brother’s instant bliss
against a little twist or two appended to
the certainty of an already twisted future?
On the last stair bravery has gone
And, dry wiping all memory of guilt,
I am returned to habit, normality and my private hell.
TAINTED
Just when you think
it can go no higher
it doesn’t.
and just when you think
it can go no lower
it does.
The eagles who, beyond distance and above mountains,
dreamed knowingly awake and soared,
then fell
to where their own swift shadows
became defined and snow-lined
at the point of seizure,
now are vultures who tear, peck
and scrap, hysterical and blind;
and their claws
scratch, stubborn and in vain,
the stripped bones
of a recent and yet long-deceased,
half-buried, never mourned but sadly,
unforgotten carcase.
Please:
give up,
move on
and let
some dignity
survive.
SIGNALS
Tonight, imprisoned by my own taut senses,
my feelings, tired, excessive, must escape,
but are beaten back by leaded window squares.
Flesh, muscle, bones and tendons all wrapped
and badly shaped in a restraining skin
lie checked and useless, mute and with no
means to message: inside a doll’s house prison
neatly furnished with a tiny box of tricks.
My cyclic thoughts are handcuffed, manacled,
filed and forgotten, lost in the system, gone.
my jailer is a nodding metronome,
more inaccessible than customer care.
And yet wave on laser wave transmits
distorted, from my overflowing self.
My room fills faster than space can be formed.
The torrent is metamorphosed into an alien force
that de-atomises matter and can pass
through bolted doors and walls and fastened windows.
Out, as waves into the large night, widely spread
over roofs, fields, woods and silent beasts;
and then compresses to a shaft of thought
that perhaps may enter you whilst sleeping:
a dreamed up feeling, unexplained but not unwelcome.
And the overture, perhaps, to start again.
YES, THEY’RE MOBILE ALRIGHT
TOGETHER:
TWO LOVERS
SLOW WALKING
along the path of shared dreams
and secret, sacred worlds
not seen by any other:
eyes partly glazed,
lips gently parted,
expressions intense
hands fondly holding
THEIR MOBILES.
Are they phoning each other?
VIRILITY - or old westerns on the M25
The rawhide boots outsplayed,
shiny spurs, though sanded by five hundred miles of Texan dust,
a trigger squeeze on trivial metal
and
the toes point starwards:
those spurs will dull down in the desert dirt.
The old film now gone,
one click on the remote control
and the hypnotic rectangle fades to a blank
and dies.
The hand that flicked a switch
now turns a wheel,
and four more wheels spin on a tarmac’d,
not so dusty road.
Speed is wild as the west,
but effortless:
the tiniest pressure from a trainered foot
a trivial squeeze on a metal trigger
and
four discs revolve abortive in the air,
an insect on it’s back
with wheels for legs:
machine and flesh are united
in a deathly marriage.