Bones To Bury

The poetics of desire embody life as we know it.  A subtle and sublime codependent network of motivations operating at every level of our thought.  And the world we experience see-saws the mechanisms and tips the scales and winds the gears.  A self-justifying, self-instantiating narrative positioning of ourselves as the main character, complete with the ironies of contrivance.  The experience of the real substantiates the poetics of desire.

They are flight attendants.  They are Japanese schoolgirls.  Wistful fantasies and over optimistic future-plans foot-firsting into a dreamworld of plenty and ever satiated sexual abandon.

I promise her a delicious dinner.  Vegan, lactose free.  An orchestra of roast vegetables.  We talk she draws fantastically colourful pictures with pencils with names like Sailors Jumper Blue, and Carmine Red.

They send him a package.  Birthday cake.  Powerpuff girls with all the sucrose pink a boy could want.  Customs is scared of eggs, and blows it up.

When some barely loyal formless void earns frequent flier miles, the ocean daydreams.

The go board - a bohemian chess board.

The stack expands past the arithmetic ditch.

The bias persists behind the lyric.

“Why — won’t an antique bounce?”

———————————

The breeze plays russet curls against a rosy cheek. A wistful daydreamer adventuring into the Autumn fireworks of multicoloured leaves.  An upcurled smile above a woollen knitted sweater.

————————–

I was packing my bag with the things that I’d found.  A thick hardback book called “The observed” that would be valuable where I was going.  My companion was looking at a loose book of notes and sketches I’d made that would help me remember also.  And as I packed my rucksack, it seemed that I had a growing amount of important things that I needed to take with me, and that I might not be able to fit it all.  But finally I realized I could delay no longer, and we both started hiking to our destination far off.

A few minutes earlier I’d been passing through the city to meet her, knowing that it was my last time.  A gave myself the luxury of extended glances at the gorgeous Gothic architecture of this ever darkened city.  The churches with their bizarre intersecting rods, joining in a halo above the roof and continuing slightly on - each thick with ornate stone carving.  The corridors between buildings in this amazing city being almost an optical illusion of intersecting flying buttress supports.  Then I came to building on the left that was more simply decorated.  A flat wall building that could have been some Hotel de Ville.  It’s most significant decoration had been a larger than life size religious figure or angel attached quite high on the wall and overlooking the street, but when I came to it the angel lay detached and fallen on the ground.  I stopped for a moment in curiosity at this new interest, but then realised these buildings were no longer sturdy/safe, and on seeing my path ahead flanked by more of these types of buildings with accompanying angelic decorations I started running at the fear of the building crumbling on top of me.

I met her just behind the station where I’d lost her and the others when arriving to the city.  I remember we’d just left the train (she’d just made the generous concession of paying for my journey, as I was a stranger and was struggling to pay, and this was a life-or-death type necessity to travel).  The doors were just closing when I was reminded I should scan my passport as I got off.   I didn’t even know if I had one, but when I checked and realized I did, I made the mad dash back to the doors of the train and got it scanned just in time.  The atmosphere of the train had been claustrophobic.  Knowing that one was effectively trapped in this metal box, in a fascist, controlling world that you weren’t supposed to be in made one paranoid and on edge.  I was glad to be out. but as headed back up the steps to the railway bridge to find my companions I did not see them, and they had disappeared down some unknown path, and i had been left hopelessly lost.

He tapped his knarled fingers on the wood of the table. The right hand shifted: Now handling a large mug of rum, now stroking his auburn beard. His hand, his body, the stool, desk and entire cabin wheeled languidly starboard with a creak, as the lamp overhead swung to port, then all begun to swap orientations. The swinging of the lamp pulled shadows from wall to opposite wall. Light danced on the canvas treasure map below. Light danced across the buckles and rings of his clothes. Light danced in his eyes.

trying to remember what was in that direction, he jettisoned his slack, lack-lustre libido, and picked up a parched leather suitcase fit for the road. Nothing left to turn his back on, striding fist-pawed into the sunset with a bent cigarette hanging from his bottom lip.

“Shazam!” the explosion hadn’t come, and now he was left with a morbid fear of the Everyday. Kitchens and children’s parties and Sunday newspapers. He kept his cool and watched through dark sunglasses, whilst sweat trickled conspicuously down his temples. The Big Corporations; he was supposed to be at the top of all this. These worlds formed out of empty McDonald’s containers and Coke cans and whathaveyou. He could snipe from the lofty heights of penthouse apartments, but this was all street-fight. It was dirty and pleasant and emotional and screaming and what Christmas is all about.

Someone was waiting to meet you.
You met them but didn’t get on.
Your heart was broken quite quickly,
by a girl of whom you’d grown fond.

An exciting sub-plot was ventured,
but this someone was waiting once more.
You’d grown so much as  a person,
you forgot what you’d disliked them for.

And perhaps dénouement was coming,
the climax a sweet memory,
but plenty more time together,
in a house by a lake and a tree.

The End

“Clansmen, my brothers: We can build something here, on this sacred land.  make dwellings on this ground and reclaim this ancient isle as it’s true owners!”

“We could, but you’ve sold all the bricks!”

They were each given a suckable lozenge as recompense.

“Suck it up!”

Cover your walls with little white tiles that allow you to clean them with bleach.

—

I think mess can be good. As children we played, and made mudcakes and groped about,
to the reproach of the grown-up responsible people who generally think all things out.

(This love affair’s likely to end in mess - one of us is sure to get hurt).
So we took off our clothes to keep them from
the blood and the cum and the dirt.

fitting perfectly and splitting into a thousand splinters in all directions like light through a prism.  The splinters shook the walls, knocked dust from ledges, and finally penetrated the wallpaper and plaster and floorboards until the room was nothing more than a filigree lattice open to the sky.   Baring naked the timber frames, monumentally carved into a tendril canopy of vines branches leaves roots.  Back to the forest.

What a room this was. Not covered and convoluted but set free to move with the wind and drink up the rain.    A womb of still motion.  An auditorium for the stars.

…in the sea and I floated and the wind took me somewhere, I didn’t know where, but I felt its power motivating me across a great distance. This great ocean. And I felt that the ocean was existence, and that I was floating on top of it, and I looked down when the sun shone a radiance that opened up the crystal depths to me, and showed the life and drama and colour and movement of this world like a spotlight.

And I imagined the places that maybe I’d reach were I heading in this way or that. Glorious beaches on deserted islands, or cosmopolitan far-off cities, or arrive at the shore of the Easter Isle and be greeted with sombre stone faces.

regarding a worm in an apple

“the girl didn’t protest for she’d heard said in jest,
to ingest half a worm is quite bad,
so if a bite of an apple one has one should hope,
all the worm’s in the piece one still had”

another fish inspired thing… unfinished

Lenny the Sturgeon was a medical Surgeon
who worked with the greatest of skill,
though his feet on the ground, as it were;
after hours he would knock back some beers with the krill.

and each patient he lost was test’ment against
those folks who would often maintain,
that it’s fine to eat fish
of the sea for you see they simply do not feel pain.