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22:50, 4 Aug 2016
Shattered on the inside.

How ice, at its purest, seems to me:
external surfaces, a delphined wake,
as silent, cracking fissures tear the core.

When old glass, flowing downward,
obscures the truest view.
And fractals piece together what remains.

Of haunted, whitened forests
soft footsteps pressing in,
the glacier, unhindered, calves again.

When snow, packed underfoot,
creaks with weighted stress,
my heart constricts, and shudders
with a loss to end all ends.

Skin tinged blue may yet regain
the bloom of life
within this perfect cave.

All whiteness blinds away the pain
those stress-cracks hold such beauty
as beyond compare.

Delicate destruction, a promise of threat.
All along the fracture
sings a sacred ache.

I am broken and forsaken
though a saviour may be near:
as winter rolls around again
to refreeze my hurt and fear.

22:49, 4 Aug 2016
Inside a star.


The fleeting, yes, my heart's desire
the barely-there, a wraith
Ephemera, whispers on the wind,
impermanence my faith.

I tremble before the eternal,
faced with nature's stand
Beneath a soaring mountain
being scoured and withered to sand.

In the shadow of mighty forever
I tremble before the abyss
Toes inching and sending down trickles,
the landslides remind me of this.

I sleep in perfect hollows,
and cut my teeth on bone
The glory of calcification
rolls in my mouth, I am home!

Cascading the ones gone before me,
throughout my own blood by their dust
Absorbing a lifetime in seconds
turning my fillings to rust.

Temporal consumption thus rendered,
my heart winds to stillness sublime
How quickly we flash to our endings
how rapid the animal time.

22:44, 4 Aug 2016
Spirit Lab.


Breathing in the dark,
Chemicals cloudy
Aged and coloured,
By the breaking down
Of skin, soft tissues
And dreams.

Animals dream, too,
Here in tubular palaces
Captured and floating.
Each footfall vibrates
On singing parquet
And they stir,
Timed by my movement.

Breathing in the dark,
Heart settling to a rhythm
Swaying in time,
With these spells of ages
And a Blackbird caws
At the centre of my brain.

In dim-lit netherworld
Songbirds feast
On plastic berry Bacchanalia,
And the owl eyes a mouse
Who has yet to discover
His second death.

A fox cub
Infinitely curling about herself,
Shows a varnished bacon tongue.
Cutesy and hot-headed in her starring light.

And I…
I stand as still as they.
Suspended in this spirit lab.
A player just as beastly,
Mentally reanimating
Every twitching nose,
Lightless eye
And curious, scratching paw.

22:44, 4 Aug 2016
Blood in the Fire.


The smell of the foundry surrounds you
abounds and wreaths around you.
A man of ore, born of the earth

I thought of you as Roman.
Alive, shuddering with the stress
and exertions
of recent war

The thrill of hardship
fresh upon you,
made ever-stronger by violent work
your fibres stretch then relax
to gather in quiet, resting power

Glittered in sweat,
you have raced through history
to arrive, tattered and magnificent,
heaving, and worn like a mountain

I have melted into you -
piston thighs greased with excitement!
As your black-ringed fingers
chase a whitened path,
through my pebbled steam

Our minerals mix:
salt and blood, tears and love
and the hooves of legion drum in my ears,
outpacing a gathering storm
as little death overwhelms me

You are home,
hanging suspended in a grief-cloud above me.
And I invite you, with a succession of imagined dilations,
to rain down.

22:41, 4 Aug 2016
In these dangerous, uncertain times, some things persist as immoveable mountains of truth and certainty. Here’s what’s been on my mind this evening:

My sister and I: a brace of ‘same difference’ cleaved from DNA that means both of us will cry just as easily at a You Tube video of a baby elephant trying to get out of a paddling pool, as at news footage showing the bodies of tiny innocents washing up like flotsam on Mediterranean beaches.

My mirror, the yardstick by which I measure the foolhardiness of all my flaky schemes and plans, and the one for whom I wish ultimate safety in the solace and comfort of true love: would there be one to deserve her and man enough to attempt the climb.

She’s incisive, decisive and totally logical. I love talking to her, about anything under the sun. I’m equally just at home sitting in a room with her and saying nothing for hours on end.

My mother: shot through with luminous, trembling care, she reminds me, always, that to be kind is the greatest of virtues. A humanitarian to the core, she bears the marks of stresses woven into herself like an heirloom quilt under which she keeps us all warm. She’s the bravest one of all, and the most beautiful.

The woman is also utterly maddening with her habit of asking a question, then talking straight through the answer, only to re-ask the same question five minutes later and do precisely the same thing. I only state this fact to remind myself that this habit will, in time, come for me, too.

My brother: he ticks like a vintage wristwatch. All matters of history and science wreathing together, bursting fragments of bent and dented philosophy skywards, eager to see where the pieces fall. He picks, crane-like, through dusty knowledge, feathering his phantasmagorical mind with layer after layer of abstraction (to the exclusion of all but the most pressing domestic elements, and sometimes not even so).

My father: if my brother is the wristwatch, my father is the mantle clock. Presiding quietly, ready to sound with a gentle chime should any of us veer too far into perceived assumption. He squirrels away all worry and doubt into psychic crevasses as deep as any in his beloved Les Trois Vallées where, undoubtedly, he retreats whenever we all start hollering over one another.

Of course, he also loves to make his own noise. The difference being, he’ll do it using Led Zeppelin at decibels Environmental Health deem completely unacceptable.

My husband: An almost-decade has done nothing to tamp down my curiosity for him. He’s very proper, a stickler for the rules, but it hardly ever prevents him from shrugging off the shackles of responsibility in favour of throwing caution from a great height if he believes the risk worth taking.

And, should caution shatter like a frozen pigeon on the cobbles of utter folly below, what then? With the confidence of one who knows that legends are made out of vulnerable men, he’ll start the following day as though disappointment had never visited him at all.

My family: irreplaceable, irreverent, enduringly fascinating and the ones with whom I like to be with most of all.