In Our Shoes
posted 1st August 2024
when yours are worn, wear mine
Today I sat on a moving train
I looked at the living inside
I looked at the dead
Tomorrow I might find that
I want to climb off
I hope not
If you see me stand,
Won't you snatch at my scarf?
today I sat
yes . sometimes the light goes out
Let me see if I can write
I said
To put a smoke signal very high
And maybe you
on the other side
Would note the fluorescent green
and the way swallows circled in and out
A psycho-something murmuration
Confirming my spelling
If I spelt out a letter to you
A love from my heart
A day a letter
Spelt
Spilled it out
A starting line that didn't line up, to the eye
– messy as sploshed soup –
but lined up so straight with what you felt
That you caught a swallow with your teeth
The one at the side; flying like a Red Arrow
Nothing out of line, nothing out of time
An intended victim
So you swept in and caught my message from across the sky
And mixed it with your spittle
And then spat free
the swallow
It's how it all was meant
Though to watch it like some pantomime
one would believe it was delicious farce
Our lives are like this.
See far, beautiful eyes
See how far-out-seeing eyes reach
to forever the possibility
of understanding another
Close over the dread and swallow
in redemption the pale organ
Make it throb
Like a tambourine leading tambourines
in a turmeric-coloured bizarre
of criss-crossed pattern
Where all colour is quantified
Each an elemental constitution
As literal as biology
As metaphysical as theology
You cannot say you never saw
that colour run
a river past your seating place
Where you ate with your hand
Other hand on chest
Resting the world's cares on your doorstep
Carrying a skeleton
deep like a depth of your eyes
at the beginning of any life there are only small steps to be made
Always, every time, and wherever I stop,
follows the birds’ world’s singing
breaking my heart; taking the numb away,
especially the little high-and-low
of the tender robin; robbing me
from within its psuche complexity
of all my own within resolve
to be on ice or anaesthetised;
to bear, to bide - bare, despised -
to buffer, to be resigned.
The song-longing stalks; it appoints
itself an emotional bodyguard
and bellows hard so with an acoustic jolt to get to start my
self-dulled and disintegrating heart.
Each
Each one has still to
Carry their bones
Bear their beating heart
Say hello or clear off
To the day’s rising sun
And the eyes are to be
Opened after however
Many hours
Even many hours
And the mouth eventually
Must speak
A thought will put out its neck
Art itself says that
It is not an option to be mute
Visits will be made
Even in the shade of the past
Days’ format … the dark days
Visits resume and new
Memories forge their
Way into old minds
And communal awareness
Push out bushes and off-shoots
The garden grows
The bonds show
They can tear, twist, stretch
They likely will take
Their fresh shape
both good and bad boomerangs
August or Decree Nisi
on pruning the Cape Plumbago
crisped crushed
bits of
bits of
leaves, lives
were lived
weren’t done
but
winter came.
jagged
splinters
in shades of
brown
from black
frost
come early
come hard.
wisps whipped
on the air.
carried.
gone.
absent
abetted by
the weather.
severe
dust
dancing in
negative
space.
splints and spears
where there
was
(foliage)
jutting
quiet
empty. ear
provoking
empty
soundless
stagnant air
where
little green
fish
played on
live-wire stems
they
never thought the
day
would
come.
you can
He leapt and fell and turned and ran
and everywhere they came and came
In twos in threes in groups of ten
on every side came heinous men
To stop to block to thwart the way
where hope ’d first leapt, transformed to prey
Where hope now stood the way was dark
surrounded thus, in head, in heart
The Death of Hope
don't send a smile away on its own ... or a frown