Images

Construction of an image:
A meaning is doubt,
Rolling over the lip
Like froth to bubble and
disappear.
What mark is left,
Like poetry on trees;
Leaves like biscuits
Taken from an oven too late?
Water is clean and white is pure.
Yet, there can be doubt
Where none are doubtless.
I bend to the paper like
and artist to craft an
Image, an abstract made whole
Replete. There can only be
meaning in the heart's eye.
The pencil shifts and scratches,
tearing at the veil
to reveal an idea
always failed.

Lowell

It was as if a stormy hell had opened up
slowly. The deep shadows were a drop
of loose leaf pictures in the past
of a magazine. There was the last
post of a siren call and the phone
hung from its perch like a bleached bone.
My head pounded, the blood at all costs
punching. There were tears at the lost
and a driving car shone mechanical light
across the bed, through the shades. Right
then I rolled over, he rolled away: a sight
of what was to come when he left me alone
in this dark hotel room with its air-con drone.
Can love be? I asked and smoked, is it air?
I thought. Stringing the pieces with hair
wound up like the snake in the tree,
the apple seed deep within what was me.

A brace

An early Christmas present;
the bright plumes and stiff feathers,
heads hanging like sacks,
the curled feet gripping futile air.
I hung them in the shed -
it didn't matter they were dead -
and took them out some weeks later
the colours as vivid, the eyes
now hollows that recede into
dark depths - I stared they didn't.
I carried them by their feet
like old hands seeming rough
but smooth to the touch - like metal.
I laid them on the garden table
their heads lolling over the edge
beaks open a touch.
I pulled at the feathers surpirsed at
how many there were now dancing in the
December breeze and seeing - after an age
the naked skin - took the knife
not knowing where to start, the glow of
an early sunset, ginger bread noises
from kids inside: I sliced clean off
the head of one and found the
bladder for grain.
I watched as the pellets fell to the floor
I would not eat this bird!
I snipped off its wings and wrenched free
the legs and then the same for its mate
ripping and piling flesh on flesh
and flung the corpses in the trash.
Somewhere in my freezer sits a pie uneaten
Sometime soon it will go the way of all
flesh.

Dickinson

She stares aloud -
Her lips an open pout;
Wanting to speak
But the bird - trapped
I imagine her - the window
pale face looking out
over the drifts of dead -
wondering - what must it be like?
in white she drops the clothes
and is to us as all women are:
supple in corners, opened envelope.
she sits in serge to write
of birds and bees and humming bugs
of guns and death and dates with love.
all Dickinson is naked
to the eye:
a pen scratching back
the tin foil of life!
now her words fly in the face
of age and time and of woman's place;
she screws the men that write,
discards them in the bin -
not quite as they expected
as her words explode
with words on words an ear
in dark woods, folded, murder/victim.

it was like the dead

after battle in grainy pictures;
muddied boots stiff and pointing
upwards;
hands clasped, mouths open.
no shouts just whispers -
heard far off by mothers opening telegrams.
the kit strewn and useless as medals.
there are sometimes rows
covered over, only the shape
of heads.
in others caught too late
the bleached shell of the brain
eyes that stare but cannot see:
strange that the memory was
only provoked by the felling
of a field of pine trees.

Setting, conflict, resolution

And it was true that Blair had not the faintest chance of succeeding but he was determined to give it a go anyhow. His mother had prepared him well for moments like this and so he was going to go for it, for all he was worth. It was at that exact moment of thought that Blair missed his footing on the tight rope and fell ground wards, no one will ever know the last thoughts that went through his mind, perhaps he wondered about the logic of nude tight-rope walking, perhaps he simply thought "bugger" but as this is a third person narrative, it will have to remain in the imagination of those who saw his pale body fall, floundering to the floor as his shadow expanded beneath him to land with a gut-wrenching crump. Yet even they have not been given thought as the narrative boundaries have been firmly established and so the reader, if there is one, will have to put the pieces together (of the final thought, not of Blair) but that's, I suppose, what Barthes meant when he claimed that the author, not Blair, is dead.

A line to chop one's head off

That's what they said - a line to sever your head
off
to chop to slice to decapitate - to lop
Writing should provoke the will to lose one's head
to spill one's marbles, to go over the top
A line to chop one's head off
to cease to think for yourself.