Sunday 24 April 2011

The Little Sections that Relieve Me

Bending gently the small twig that made up mankind, I sit at that bench and wait for the 63 bus, in sunny hue underneath park trees.

She mellows her hands in tepid little waterfalls, rinsing the porcelain platters made of her grandmother’s bones, and if she turns the right tap two and a half times, it sings out alone, alone, alone.

He says a sneeze carries one percent of the soul, its fleeting particles dismember you into the travelling winds; and as he sneezes onto her that is when she knows, that is when she knows she will be sleeping with the stars tonight.

She seemed delighted when you experimented with submerging your ears beneath the shadowy waters of the darkly blue pool to see if the day would collapse any differently. Twenty-three years have washed and you remain breathing into the waters by the eroded banks; fleetingly through our eroded days. If only you could remember her name -

You drop your hair long, long on the same earth the lilies sprang from and you smile like you’re used to being told that you’re trouble…

They waved their hands in time; in time to see the waves come back; in time to see her skirt’s quite short; in time to see the waves had gone again, and then it wasn’t amusing anymore.

Remember the day you remembered you never really spoke to your father, but by then you were too large to ask the silly thing you thought of that summer when the last soap bubble kissed the grass.

In the Attic

The boy speaks in tongues
and sometimes it is hard,
it is hard sometimes, to relate -
if he will grow up
what is the point.
If he will grow out of his toys,
if he should grow up
what is the point of there being a boy?

Under the skylight he sits and spatters,
he listens intensely to bits and matters -
crackling the spine of his phases,
caressing the eyars. Brushes his cheek
on old wood pine pages,
and flicks, twitches, picks and splatters,
and dims, switches and licks his lips faster -

the sun shines through his wood pine hair.
He likes the warmth, and sits and looks
lightly, light binding his boyish stare;
for it glares too brightly, for it is forever there.
So he lays on old wood pine and shades
his little face, hands and girly nails,
as he rolls and grunts, tries to whistle and slumps,
and scratches and picks the earth
in his nails and licks, just to see what
earth tastes like; and he does as he does
because he knows nobody knows.

And he does as he does because he knows an awful lot -
alas, as suspected, just as he thought!
It tasted of bubbles and mud, wars and chicken like
spud. And he sits where he sits, the sun is his enemy,
but the stuff is still stuffy, his hands getting clammy -
so he rubs and he pulls and he coughs and he tugs, and
he stops to think maybe he does not know all that much.
But one scowls at the rubbish – it is hard sometimes,
as his palms shower down in thundry drums and he
hums and he hums and he hums and he hums.
Such delightful rhythm but speaking in tongues;
his language is daring, his eyes domineering,
and all the while he imagines Peter Pan peering -

badoom, badoom the glory of noise!
Badoom who would have thought he was coy.
His mother will love him more than he does -
but what is the point of getting there first.
Little drummer he is, stardust his toy.
If he hummed in a man’s world,
no one would hear this little boy