poem accepted for - when language fails, exhibition in Norwich
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A Bronte Gothic : Performed recently at Ilkley Literature Festival and Kendall Poetry Festival 2018 The Veil and the Wheel: For Jane Eyre My strength, My resolve is beyond all bounds. All Celtic curiosity Bent Concertinaed Up in my chest Crumpled Stamped Down Hard And almost absolutely. How did I arise? Where is the horizon I wished so ardently for? Again it telescopes in and in And lands up On my doorstep The compass is redirected true pole Magnetic North. Revolves not around a distant ice-cap But burning white hot Around this man This son of Adam This mirage, this distorting heat haze. Scintillating around his soul Making him imperceptible, opaquely glimpsed. Indistinct As though through fog. Do we ever truly see each other? First passion is a myopia, a veil. Wrought on a loom of steel, weaving a cloth of milk thistle Not easily torn in the first heat of knowing. The second is a...
Dream Poem 103: The Knives A Bronze Age village near the sea Round low houses with high pitched thatch. Inside peaty smoke, prismatic blacks Long shadows. Red light from the fire pit rising up blue light from the sky, slanting down in a shaft through the smoke hole. A curdling of smouldering curls make paisley patterns of the air. I am the chief’s daughter eleven years old. This is my house All my relatives and family live here together. Vikings from over the sea live in the next village. They come and steal from us. I have two knives, One is a special dagger, the other one is an everyday blade. I must hide them so they are not taken from us. I am small and insignificant wrapping the knives in a skin I push it into my clothes and hide. The Vikings come shove around my brothers scare my mother. Make nuisances of themselves fall down drunk in a tent next to where I’m hiding. I wriggle out and manage to find...
Children of Lir Where you come in at is where you stay The children of Lir are mute as they fly over lakes and see swans reflected in their obsidian depths. The world doesn’t turn on a pin Decades have passed in silent gliding. The hated King in the coffin at the front Will always be there. The daughter silently kissing the coffin Is a Greek tragedy And we are the chorus. As she spins her yarn of dandelion clocks, weaves and sews shirts in voiceless vow. Her promise, to make good the transformation at the predestined time. Speaking not a word in the face of accusation As her own children are stolen. The stake and pyre are banked up A whole day and evening has passed now. Five men in gossamer shirts walk from the funeral with their sister singing The Green and Red of Mayo quietly to themselves putting out the singed hem of her gown. The child with one good arm and one swan’...
Wish Bone This is not going to work if you don’t open up she thought Shame. Let me in, but you shake your head - no. This is really not going to happen if you keep closing your lips into an invisible hard line Fold me your arms like the gathering of white sheets on laundry day Crisp paper folds in the midsummer scorch. A dancer’s wrist A Robin’s tarsometatarsus dressed in fine silver bangles Snapped across your turkey wish bone Little fingers wrapped Winning, winning, winning… Then crack, Hollow bone tear in ragged, needle sharp filaments. Close yourself up Lock yourself inside a bear trap, Laid in A well deeply Dug by a young boy In a dark forest Covered in bracken. No one knows Or comprehends what is going on in your special head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryno8zBVDa4 - wishbone Rag Image wiki commons - Wish Bone Rag 1909 composed by Charlotte Blake
The Academia Game Caught into the whirlpool of Abstract Mode. She was writing abstracts for work, for admission to conferences for competitions and exhibitions. Became so abstracted that she became very good at writing these paragraph length bite size chunks of research concentrated information. She forgot how to write deep, how to write long and how to write wide. She is in the research zone but so far away from a conclusion of any kind, a standing up stance of any sort or a side to come down on. She is with it but running to catch up collecting seeds of information all useful stuff and gathering it into her research basket, only to throw it away over her shoulder as she moves on to other seeds. Jumping to catch a glimpse over a tall crowd of authors and thinkers She thinks she is getting it but is it just the foot of an elephant? image: wiki commons , the Walk of Ideas Berlin.
Dream poem 115; Knife dream She perpetrator and victim of her own actions. Horror and anguish, pain and fear spring from her deeds. She is the sharp instrument of her own sorrow. She Tool of utility Mechanism of symbolism, Contrivance of ritual, Medium of ceremony, Agent of threat. She Expression of her own exasperation Her inner strength deflects the double edged blade Her resolve keeps her from flinching.
Dream Poem 101: Tight With Grips The pen has fallen between the twin-beds. she rolls over and fishes her arm down between them feeling for it. The sun is so bright through the window Winter bright Low Far Cold sun light. The beds are covered in a pale blue nylon counterpane with a gauzy nylon flounce very 1970’s. Her black hair has been swizzled up at the sides Tight with grips. Se has a ballet class to go to. In a shop looking for an outfit for ballet class her clothes aren’t suitable. In the girl-teen section children are eyeing her suspiciously. She has to go But gets into an argument with a man on the way out. He is a Show-Room car actor. From above the controller peers through one way mirrors In the control room observing groups of people Down below Power games Factions. The rule is you must meet your girlfriend on school reunion day Within the city limits of a Derbyshire village. He is be...
Fried Kudzu All the trees are dressed Pelaw and Fellgate pass in a flurry of blossoms and verdant fields, lush hedgerows and a sudden green overwhelming of street lights with foliage. In the Carolinas the kudzu at this time of year would wantonly climb pylons snaking out onto electric wires like tightrope walkers in their desperation to reach and strive upwards and onwards. Self-destructing strangle-vines. The very thing they are best at asphyxiating has ended up being the petard by which they are hung. Unstoppable in their headlong shoot to doom. Path to annihilation. Perhaps they hope to take out the whole of Marvin or Waxhaw with their last strangling gasp before they are fried and frazzled by Duke Electric. Images wiki commons: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Divisio n 1980 tepegraph poles 1922 Newberry south carolina ca. 1922 - ca. 1953) Title Newb...
Niagara in the 90’s; After James Richards, Raking Light 2014, Digital Video with stereo sound. Safely seated in a small darkened space In the 1990’s rooms of the Tate Here to see Inventory’s DaDa reflection on social housing. London trains and busses have exhausted me. Onscreen a series of obscure and abstract images Until Niagara appears. And now two films are running, the one on screen and the one in my memory. Niagara Falls in December, the nineties have just begun like a new love affair. Niagara Falls in deep love Of crashing foam. A woman in a yellow trench coat that her mother bought from a shop that doesn’t exist anymore, Headscarf and red lipstick. She waits at the top for her photo to be taken. Pose like Marilyn. But there are no colours Everything is blank faced, locked up Frozen solid, danger zone. The petrified falls and thickly Iced, icey, walk-ways are A hazard Impassable. Like this fake marriage...
Breast Diaries 4 Why is she going for counselling? Anger Grief Moving on Permission to let it go Waiting for the clog to drop Waiting for a meltdown. To freefall To turn herself inside out. And then will she stop being afraid? She have a hole in me that she has obsessively and compulsively filled with chocolate, alcohol, smoking, God, working, making my life so full she can’t think, food, keep fit, dancing, dieting, running, writing, making art, not in that order and some consecutively and some at the same time. She is gurning and grinding and consuming life like a great cement mixer. Stop being afraid? No that plague rat is her friend. Like an old sock in the basket, she has been turned and turned again. Theseus has visited her and tied his red string around her little finger, there will be no free-falling. Chemically induced menopause is sizzling her softly but melting is for butter in a pan. That clog has been dropped down a shaft, i...
Babel The story goes, once we all had a common language and spoke the same mother tongue and all was harmony. The people said to themselves let us make a tower so we can be as tall as God and maybe we can be as great as he is or greater, and so they built together, gathering materials, and they made it strong and they made it high. Stained glass windows, columns of pure gold, mosaics of turquoise and cobalt, staircases of marble, it was a marvel to behold, nothing compared either before or after the skill and craft that went in to the tower of Babel. They reached as high as the first layer of cumulus and the atmosphere started to get thin and become cold. They were wondering how to continue. But God reached in his basket and pulled out coloured birds by the handful and threw them up free into to air, each one different and varied, each one with a different song. The birds flew down to the builders of the tower, like a rainbow shower. The birds sang so beautifully, so ...
Breast Diaries 3 It just keeps floating to the visible Top of my consciousness Beethoven symphony 7 Second movement That’s the kind of gloomy I feel. Les Misrables was great! I cried all the way through, fabulous release I can feel a bout of over eating coming on Just anything to numb the pain. Seven hours of solid paperwork Just anything to completely absorb myself in Food Pinterest Weepy movie Work. Anything so I don’t have to think About this left breast Numb Absorb Deaden Suffocate Stuff down Suppress Stamp down Tamp Insulate. All these things I’m cotton-wooling my mind I’m bubble wrapping my emotions Because it is weird, it is hard and it is so, so scary. All the ifs and buts and two whole weeks to wait Am I fine? Am I ok? No I’m not ok I’m starting arguments I’m hypercritical I’m prickly I’m lashing out I will be gone, they will continue I have to keep saying that to myself b...
Breast Diaries 2 Mortality. Death. I will go, They will continue. I will die, They will remain. Lashing out for no good reason. Hogging the conversation. Being a downer to people – the doom bearer. I am being a pain in the ass. It is so distracting. images : Ring of Brogdar Orkney, satelite map https://archaeologistsinresidence.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/kirkwall-grammar-school-s1-rapid-counter-mapping-of-the-ring-of-brodgar/ Ring of Brogdar, http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/stone-circles/orcadian/article_brodgar.htm
Breast Diaries 1 Ultrasound excavations back-lit landscape night-time outlook moon-lit scene. On screen In black and white The insides of my breast in greyscale. The enormous wooden TV dad bought in 1974 Watching the horses and horse and horses Jump fences at Aintree Like nothing I had ever seen Every horse and rider a crackling, fizzing, silhouette. This arial view of the countryside with blobs and strings, patterns and sub patterns Rings of Mercury And strange un-named planets Is my interior taskscape. Turn away Hide from Fear worse than anything else what? images, Stone Henge and Norfolk archaeological site.
Dream poem 113: Bauhaus in the Halls of Versailles She fumbles putting on an earring it is a complicated piece of jewellery in separate elements the Bauhaus symbols of, square, triangle, circle. They lock together to create a single sculptural piece in the style of the Russian Constructivist, El Lissitzky. It is the final test She is feeling uncomfortable. Working in groups, it has been a three day test. In their team is a bully and a misogynist. It is just like the halls of Versailles. image 1: The Hall of Mirrors, Gallerie des Glaces, Versailles Image 2: El Lissitzky, Proun A-2