EMISSARY

Northern hemisphere winter:
stasis in ice
and feather-patterned windows.

Parched
alabaster skin, cracked,
numb, circulation impeded.

Nature's abandonment -
how forsaken we are!
Blue fingertips and nose. Concrete walls

disintegrating: sand regressed
to molecular rock
from warmer times I cannot reach

when sun rose high,
had warmth
and short shadows.

Lungfuls of air were painless then,
just invigorating.
Something stirs

within Earth's core -
an excitement, anticipation.
Inexplicable.

And so I
dig deep, find Creation's impulse.
Evolution's call

is in the blood
and I
am the emissary:

the tiny green shoot
that splits the rock-hard soil
to speak

of life eternal.

MOVING ON

I tore them up, being weary
of the hold those old
letters had over my emotions
every time I sat at my writing bureau.
What was that power they possessed?
Word-by-word they perpetuated
vain hopes of dreams unfulfilled
that incarcerated me in a place of torment.
I never was aloof.
I habitually gave my all: love, heart, body and Soul;
but you tired of the emotional drain of reciprocation.
Your passion paled to indifference.
So my life became defined by red bicycles
and the smudged black ink of postmarks.

The flames inside were consuming me:
touching what you'd once touched,
my fingers could imagine something else -
something warm and living.
Aah, such exquisite torture!
And that last one ever written,
still stark black on yellowing paper: Love's death warrant.
Well at least it will be safe territory now, the bureau.
At least I'll no longer be lured there daily
to be caught up in an endless loop
of grim masochism,
of clinging to a rainbow's end
while slowly drowning in the murky depths
of a long-abandoned wishing well.

So I gather up the shreds and hold them over the bin.
They are more precious than a handful of diamonds,
have long been the only lifeline
to what once was - and blindness
has been my captor, just as dumb delusion
has bred a foolish complacency.
I brought it on myself.
My foot is on the pedal now.
The lid rises and my fingers release their grip.
I watch the strips fall and come to rest
between the baked bean cans and chocolate wrappers:
futureless in refuse land,
futureless as a condemned man on death row.
And now your name is there too: shredded, discarded,

like the hopes and dreams we once shared,
so forlorn
on its nest of dross, abandoned -
yet still able to twist my guts!
Cold rain pounds the window, heightening melancholy.
My blood rages through me like fire.
Tigers are ripping the antelope of my heart to pieces.
This is how it feels - the inner tearing
of a Soul from it's mate. And the bleeding doesn't stop
with acceptance
and it's dead expression, but goes on
hurting, hurting:
paper strips telling the odours in the bin, the trash, the putrid moisture
what moving on is. It is nothing but a lie.

LADY OF THE LAKE

Restlessly I'm searching high and low -
oh why does Dozmary* draw me so?
Please, I beg you, Lady of the Lake
won't you tell me the reason for sanity's sake?
For I'm certain these things I should know.

So at pool's edge I wait straining my ears
throughout the night, overcoming fears.
I open my mind
but only to find
there's a brick wall inside.
Oh Merlyn of Camelot
is it really my lot
to thwart my own destiny tonight?

It appears not, for through Arthur's memory I'm shown
the Battle of Camlan that stole His throne.
And since then the wasteland has been upon us,
endlessly oozing spiritual pus.
Oh please Lady, finish the story tonight...

Well the visions come to me at dawn in a flash
of blood, gore and sword's clash.
Then Arthur's body being transported away
across the water to Avalon's bay,
where the Ninefold Sisterhood began healing his wounds.
And there in Otherworldly time He'll remain
until England's dire need calls Him home again.


* Dozmary Pool, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, England.

HYACINTHS

The hyacinths are over-optimistic - we are in the dead of winter.
Outside everything is white, still, frost-bound.
I am chilled to the bone, huddled here beneath my duvet,
while the cold morning light streaks the walls with pale blue.
I am diminished, have lost connection to the outside world.
My vitality languishes with my clothes in the wardrobe
and clear reasoning is lost to confusion.

My head is burning and throbbing on the pillow
like some grotesquely distorted Christmas light: flashing, flashing, feverish red.
Ridiculous brain, why do you insist on trying to function?
People keep bringing me water to drink.
They are out of focus, blurred and featureless,
constantly plumping my pillow and mumbling gibberish.
Oh I wish they would go away and leave me alone!

I am as an infant to them. They attend to my physical needs
like new mothers: fussing and constantly checking
that I am still alive. It is driving me crazy.
I just want to sleep and escape this pain and discomfort
that invading microbes have mercilessly inflicted.
Inside me a battle rages, mirroring the state of my outer life.
All the discord and disarray is finally taking it's toll.

I am a sail-less yacht adrift upon an uncharted ocean,
stubbornly clinging to a name and address back on land.
Being so infectious has robbed me of lover and friend.
Afraid and alone in a suddenly unrecognised room,
I desperately seek something familiar for reassurance.
But there is nothing, just bare walls and bland furnishings.
I have become a non-entity: a stranger's absurd dream.

But now I have these flowers. I never believed
I could be anything but emotionally barren.
Yet how euphoric I feel. You cannot imagine -
the empathy is so overwhelming it stuns you.
And they ask nothing in return, except a little earth and water.
I imagine this must be what it's like to die:
a joyous flowing back into pure Universal Love.

The hyacinths are so pink and full of life, it hurts.
Even through the gift wrap I could hear them breathing
gently, as I still can now they are fully exposed
and at the mercy of all. They have become my lost babies.
Their pinkness calls to my heart in a language
not quite understood. It responds fluently:
I would willingly die to protect such heart-rending fragility.

I was merely tolerated before. Now I am truly cared for.
The hyacinths lean towards me, and the window beyond
where each day the light floods in then fades back to darkness.
And I am a lifeless thing, caught between
the brilliance of the sun and the perfection of the hyacinths:
such an ugly thing that I want to efface myself.
Both sun and hyacinths are so beautiful in comparison.

Before they came I was coping with the influenza,
slipping in and out of consciousness without much fuss.
Then the hyacinths filled the room with their intoxicating scent.
Now the air and I are drawn to them like moths to a flame:
the air and I bewitched and enthralled.
They have captivated my attention, that before was content
to simply drift between trivia, reverie and oblivion.

Even the walls seem to be warming to pink.
The hyacinths should be reclassified as Spiritual Gurus.
They are opening up, transforming into passageways to paradise
and I am aware of being inexorably pulled in,
while sheer healing energy flows through and around my ravaged body.
The water the humans feed me once flowed through those sacred stems,
and I already feel my fever lifting...

ORACLE

Every morning you pounce on the newspaper
and thumb through it to the horoscope section - that oracle
of your aspirations, your life map, where the planets
whisper in their prophetic language of symbolism
like a Shaman's feverish mutterings. How you fear
the very thought of ignoring their promptings -
of incurring harsh retribution
should you fail to correctly interpret them.
It seems these printed prognoses have taken control.

Yet you have no need to fret so
in trying to calculate the ascendant degrees
of Saturn in Aries and it's implications for you personally. It is
no more than the Sun's gravitational pull
on fragments of rock. But you are in denial.
Saturn implies death - or at least some equally unpleasant personal disaster.
And so you vow to stay indoors, at least for the coming week.

If only you could re-frame astrology
as no more than an ingenious metaphor
plucked out of past experiences and close observation,
or out of cloud formations, or Moon phases, or tides.
Is it not a plausible possibility
that your grandparents, parents, siblings and I
just might be the true shapers of your destiny?