Extract from The Frontier

There was no moon in the sky when Kacey woke, no sun either, and the air was too thick with ice to see through, though she could touch it; feel it drain her heat. Beneath her two blankets, in her nightshirt and socks, it had been cold anyway. And she was awake now so she rose in the darkness, hearing where her step-father and mother slept twelve feet away; their low snoring a mysterious sediment that ingrained the soundless air. Her siblings were invisible to her left and right, and she couldn’t hear a sound from them.

She stood up, lifting her blankets with her and walked towards the door – or where she thought it was. She reached out and found the handle immediately, intuitively, and pulled the door inwards. Fresh air hurried in and replaced the stale smell of mixed sweat. Her boots waited for her outside.

She shut the door behind her, hearing the latch click into place, and sat on the edge of the porch where she pulled her boots on. Her eyes were adjusting now, or maybe the stars were bright enough to see her breath issuing from her mouth. It was as cold as Montana could get, but it was a refreshing temperature; one that made Kacey want to breathe it in and hold it, to nourish her lungs. She imagined the ends of her hair crystallising as it hung across her face.

Once her boots were on she stood up and wrapped the blankets around her, wondered what to do. But she knew what she was going to do all along, ever since her eyes opened.

Above her, the hill rose, and in turn that hill rose to meet another. A path led up to the top, a ten minute walk tops. And from there, on the first day, they had seen for miles down the Boulder valley that looked as though it had been perfectly cut away by the swing of a pendulum. And the only colour to be seen was green, grasslands of unending green. Green, green, green; from dark to light; unmarred by any other colour except maybe that of a transparent rainbow looking like the bow of that pendulum.

She wanted to see it again.

She was drawn by my will, I led her. I protected her from the carnivorous mammals. She felt safe, though she didn’t know why. And eventually she was there, sitting on an outcrop and staring down at a dark valley, her arms around her legs, hands tucked under the hem of the blanket that wrapped her. She shivered, but only half from the cold: the other half was from expectation. Her affinity for nature had grown, as it had for the others. Now she was sitting in anticipation of the moment of sunrise, as if nothing else at all existed in the whole of the world. Just her on that outcrop.

On that first day there had been only green, but now she saw every colour imaginable as the top of the sun filtered over the summit of the mountain and filled the valley with warmth, spreading rays of gold and silver, of bronze and copper and tainted zinc; the spectacle reminding her of a science lesson; of magnesium burning and I could see the distinction she made – in her mind, the sparks casting colours that exploded out 360 degrees, for an instant lighting the room and the heads of all present, before vanishing to a dull opaqueness. It was as if she hadn’t seen colour before that moment, and upon seeing it now it would never be the same again. That feeling held onto only momentarily and then lost again in a surge of happiness to sadness, enlightenment to dumbness.

The shadows in the valley gradually receded, revealing elk and deer like dots whose heads could be seen rising from the nutritious grass as warmth found their backs. Here is the new day, they thought, before returning to graze. But they saw it everyday, Kacey didn’t. The cold still lent out to touch her, and her spine shivered and shuddered her crouching body. She was crying. The cold poked its fingers into her eyes and if not for the blinking, would maybe have crystallised her tears before they had even left their source. As it was, they streamed over her cheeks and dribbled off her chin, but she didn’t wipe them away. She wasn’t self-conscious enough to even realise she was crying. Or if she was, she figured it was because of the sudden blinding of the sun.

Down the valley, groups of honeylocusts were rooted to the spot by the spectacle; they drank the sunlight like the specks of two brown bears were lapping from a mountain-side stream. Further down the valley, though unknown to Kacey, was the Crow reservation, the only place now for a Crow Indian to live if he wanted to remain true to his roots. Not many mule deer around there, most been hunted down for food, as they were allowed to be. That’s all this view needs, she thought, a group of Indians with actual real tepees with smoke coming out the top, camped down there in a circle. I wanted to tell her that wasn’t possible, that her government had starved them all out from hunting legislations, over a hundred years ago. But I couldn’t. Her mind soon wondered away from that thought anyway, and onto the cliff faces marked with deep black caves where anything, for all she knew, could be sleeping away in there.

A bald eagle set flight from a family of scotch pines, emerging into the new day and rising, spreading its wings and soaring, floating on the air’s currents around and around in circles, flying as high as Kacey was sitting, and sometimes as close as a muskrat dared to near a weasel. She watched it, with a perpetual smile, for ten minutes, before it disappeared over into the next valley.

By the time she left, she had no idea how long she had been there, and her limbs had stiffened and her skin nearly frozen. But it had been worth it. Once in a lifetime, she thought. She didn’t want to spoil it and wake up to that every day and dispel the magic. No, she would see it once more, and once more only. Just she wouldn’t be alone next time.

Vision Labs Tonight

drawn faces
pushing down aisles trolleys of trays

transparent as the lenses inside
all strengths of sphere and prism

the weakest
nearest twenty-twenty
slow vanish

curvatures on others
small smiles
scintillate under the focimeter

i step into the microscope
the strength reads
-0.00 -0.00
vacant cataracts

coating department next in the production line
raised on cinders

i spin
as lasers fire substances
make me ultraclear
impervious

tinting room bypassed

in despatch
scratch resistant
i'm pushing trolleys places

they rest in piles of plastic sheeting
into which I disappear

in reflection

my nose presses against the glass

all the light reveals

are two lumps beneath bedsheets

I've Been Waiting Ages

The rain is angry, thudding concrete
and pavement, affect-less against it
and the rushing footsteps bolting to cover.

Others wait with me; 'Hello, friends,' I think,
faux-friends, they're waiting for the rain to stop
and I'm waiting for her to come.

I could be waiting awhile, but maybe she’s quick
to the crescendo; stupid grin hits my face,
my inner humour a quick dimwit.

Bus stop time glares, red LEDs static torture,
a man steps in and anoints me with his umbrella
waste-off, the appointment passes by.

Last time this happened her excuse was valid;
her phone had eaten her dog and the dog
had to go through the phone's digestion, or something.

Should've agreed to meet inside - there are empty seats,
all bases forethought and prepared army-style precision,
not that she'd be here because of that.

Great. Rain, like a trenchcoat over my failings,
ugly and old and unattractive,
even sun and shine couldn't doll me up.

Hoards hoof off, clomping mini masterpiece-craters
of dirty water; rivulets slalom; streams sting necks;
the phone beeps in my pocket: here we go.

"I've been waiting ages," glares angrily on screen,
causing me to search all coverings, and there;
dripping, hair like strands of wet silk, she's here.

On Christmas Morning

I wake Christmas morning
to find a
ribbon
around you,
and I untie the bow of your mouth
with my tongue,
devouring your silk
and opening my present.

Your festive skin
is a scented candle
from the night before;
in peeling it away
I see your heart
and thank you –
just what I wanted.

Flooding Out The Sin

From yonder Eden spread the world;
the roots of peace and harmony
spun rotting webs beneath the earth
and poisoned soil, crops and lakes.

Good Noah bathed in water of the sky,
ate the flesh of healthy herds
and walked on holy lands of grass
in valleys ripe with rainbow arcs.

Elsewhere, the brothels bulged with sex
and men who drank water from the lakes
walking in fields of debauched crops,
their blood diseased with stink of sin.

An enwombed seed spurted to life
and brought a child to bear upon the world.
At age of four in all that joy
she splished and splashed in puddling rain.

She splished and splashed some more
until her feet were off the floor.
Her hands were tied by the hands of God
and she splished and splashed no more.

Good Noah, the one and only,
sailed by her floating corpse,
hooked her in his fishing net
and fed her to his bears,

so in pairs of beds of diseased trees,
in twos and twos their sighs rang out,
the brothel-Ark shook from side to side,
a whorehouse of burning hides.

Forced Home

The box of fluorescent memories
stands a little flushed,
where flowers have flowered,
and branches have branched
to broach the open doorway
- a ribbon around the wrapping
of festive ruminations.

I untie the fading hair of memory,
unwrap my crinkling skin,
to find inside a burning hearth,
enflaming the sight of withered wood
around the riddled doorway,
and the patterned carpet, paper thin
dust sprinkled over everything;

the tiny Christmas tree table,
the ornaments of lifeless porcelain,
the clock on the mantle still stuck
at 1 since childhood,
its tiny door forever locked,
the key a charm on your necklace,
you, asleep, in the cold armchair.

Once Upon A Time I Found God...

http://sunrisebedtimes.blogspot.com

Once upon a time I found God,
he was sitting cross-legged
on a playschool playmat pushing cars around
the make-believe roads,
rolling his tongue to make the sound
of the engines
and going BOOM! as two cars collided.
Then his mother came to pick him up,
lifting him up from the armpits
so two cars tumbled down the lego mountainside
causing mayhem.
Life on the mat remained static,
with headlights on high and engines idling;
waiting for god to reappear.

Accidental Constellation

I drank you in
like an illicit starshine;
an elixir full of sea-wet hair
and sandy galaxies on your face,
your forehead glittering
with our unique constellations,
your eyes hiding the Milky Way
at your tear ducts,
and our universe inside.

I was a lost star-traveller,
devoid of air and thought;
you sensed the vacuum
that opened within me,
and gave me your breath,
all fire and fuel
and lappings of salt,
to remind me I had lungs
that could ebb with the shore.

The cessations shushed around us,
its unparalleled composition
binding our rhythm,
as though the sand and sea
breathed for us,
and we were merely vessels
that conjoined its parts;
a conspiracy of the moon
and the darkness in-between.

Our new universe breathed:
Your mouth trembled in my ear
and tremors sped like comets
between our breathless bones,
and I could almost see new stars
making new galaxies, even then,
in your opening eyes,
and in the taste of the sea
on your tongue.

Wyre Forest

Underfoot, stone age stones
the colour of bone
and splintered from the earth,
crack and scuttle

over dirt;
a dislocation of sounds
and senses overwhelm
the superfluous,

as the wrists of trees
wave in the wind;
dismembered fingers
run through the brittle hair

of the hedges and undergrowth,
feeling for bald patches
where radiation
has irradiated

the intimated seed;
but none is found, not here,
where ochre leaves fall and sit,
more like a hat than a bandage.

The Garden

Pictures of the garden when we moved in
sit with previous memories in the tin box,
bundles of photographs elasticated together;
of Dad holding me by the Christmas tree,
my baby blue eyes pierced with red-eye,
and Mum with brown hair sitting in the armchair,
one of my brothers cradled in her arms.

A thin film of sunlight glows from them,
those photographs, and from the ones of the garden;
a patch of descending earth ending at a fence,
bedspread rumpled brown and grey;
this bed unmade by now-gone JCB’s.
Lumps of potential mill like sleeping hills
dreaming of the pull of the shovel’s curtains.

Time passed and peeled the foundations sheets,
or to be more accurate, time’s hands were Dad’s;
on my digital camera, the sunlight auto-dimmed,
the RGB pixels reveal the colours of flowers
found blooming for the bees in season,
arranged in beds with brick bases and sides,
on mattresses of clay moulded by man.

Dad’s conjuration has torn the sheet of soil
from the table of the industrial mess.
Hadron sparks flew and found fish in the pond,
fish evolved to its size, spectators of red
and purple loom, lounging lizzies circling,
first a figment, then a seed, then a breathing thing,
the proof of will performing its magic.

Years of blindness can pass by, darkness of soul,
of cloudy insight, and then like your first pair of glasses,
you can forget how clear the world can be;
a birdhouse of bamboo is attached at the far end
to the wooden-slat fence Dad erected,
and its lines draw thoughts of the Orient;
slanted roof, deep shadows and design.

From his mind to the page to the fence,
and onwards drawing eyes as well as birds,
instant and sudden, my pupils dilate;
here are the hands Mum holds and loves,
the designs of etchings like paintings
on the inner wall of his palm,
all marble, soft stone and devotion.

The Chamber

There were two smiles like something bright
in the dark of our pairing parts,
an horizon glittering glorious in starlight
of wolf-eyes drifting slowly apart
till twilight blinded our hearts,
and in the confines of our castle walls,
fell deflated, stalled in pools of bloody bricks.

It was because your smile crooked left
while the signpost at my intersection pointed right,
bereft of reins; that our roads left
and acquiesced under assaulted sites
of eye-patch heights,
a-crumbling, teetering, my battlement failing
against the torture of your misting upturned lips.

I fell from light to the torture chamber,
a basement of abasements and cruel machinery,
blood-rust vices framed my heavy heart's harbour,
and as your melody span scents and imagery
from our life's menagerie,
they squeezed the salent sponge of all its pain
which drip drip dripped to the gutter of my hips.

While your melody plays its devil dance
the vice will continue its stubborn stance;
there is no beat in which I can move,
no breath, no life or day-lit love;
You must stop your tunes mystique
for a staircase slanted high,
for breath inside my lungs, so that I can ride away.

November's Three Faces

November, November, the nth of November,
slow burning bales aren't all I remember;
the phosphorous lights exploding up high,
that mirrored the show set deep in my eyes,
deeper, still, than in my star-dark mind,
through vessels oxygenating sparks of flies,
beneath my heart and trembling diaphragm,
rising tsunamis on the cardiogram.

Patterns in the above shape irises of roses,
I dilate at the smiles of their flourescent poses,
and cascade like willow at their taunting shapes;
triangles where there should be day-bright drapes
and pyramids where there should be eyes,
instead in pinpricks I see him, and her, and I.

November, November, the nth of November,
the strangest month I may ever remember;
the fire burns to tempering embers,
one final folly that falsely renders
what whirls like Catherine in my gut,
for her, for after and in infinite glut.

Sunrise

http://sunrisebedtimes.blogspot.com

Once upon a time there were twins
who felt it was the social convention
to live like a pair of aces in a deck
of multicultural faces;
they wore the same clothes
and had all the same mannerisms,
and were so similar that sometimes
people forgot they were two different people.
Even their spouses
secretly loved them both.
And then one day one moved to a different country,
and for the first time in their life
knew what it was to be in half.

Secret Whispers

Secret whispers, like secret fires,
sizzle in the deep shadows of the room;
a wandering stillness creeps across the ceiling
above our shared insanity of longing,
and lust flicks its fingers around the edges
of the eclipsed curtains,
drawn across the eyes of peering peers.

In check, tentative, hands hold hands
hold each other, stroke skin, lace fingers;
new scents oscillate the hairs of our senses
dowsed limp by heat irradiating from me,
at some point some slow equilibrium
calming our mid-night temperatures

– until morning we face our faces
in cool concordance;
just a few more minutes as though
they’re the last of the last,
but it’s so hard to get up from each other,
until one relents – or resists – and leaves the other,
drawing back the curtains of reality.

Sunrise...

Once upon a time there was a funeral director

who had words spoken about him behind his back.

“He’s 73” “Never married” “Like a robot”

were some of them.

“Just once it would be good to see him show something...

Anything” was another.

But he faced his duties with a stony gaze –

a dry cinder block.

Only at night did he erupt –

tears for his never-wife and never-children,

asking himself why his fear to love

had led him to mourn them anyway.