OUT OF DARKNESS

From bleak expanse of Bodmin Moor
to forbidding grey hulk of Jail,
the very air is infused with dread.
Uneasy stillness. No birds singing. This could be
the seventeen-seventies, eighteen-eighties - any century.
Time itself appears suspended within these sinister walls
that loom so menacingly over surrounding houses.
There is something rotten to the core here, you can feel it.

Crossing the threshold. Pitched into a twilight world
where vestiges of a gruesome past
still linger,
where the Souls of long-deceased prisoners
continue to wander in utter torment:
hazy faces glimpsed gazing from barred windows
and spine-tingling moans
that you hope and pray are mere trick of the wind.

Such collusion of mulish impressions,
emotionally draining to the point of exhaustion.
Two-hundred-and-forty years
and fifty-five executions - fifty-one of them public.
The intense anxiety
of the condemned convict's final walk to scaffold can barely be imagined,
neither can the macabre glee of the onlookers.
Ah, the rank inhumanity of en masse sadism!

No pathetic prisoner now within
this decaying cell where once Selina languished.
Just a faint echo of her desperate sobbing,
pathetic and guilt-ridden. What is it
that survives to grieve so
for a young son, murdered
to appease a false lover? The Soul's
harrowing lament infiltrates the emotions

until you're forced to close down awareness.
A child - a labour of love - and that love destroyed
for the likes of him. Oh unworthy one,
who abandoned her here in this sepulchre. She died
clutching a white handkerchief. Her final words,
"Lord deliver me from this miserable world."
Then the executioner pulled the lever
and sent her plummeting into eternity.

Oh Selina,
I can feel in this dank and claustrophobic cell
your suffering and your anguish, impregnated
within this restless darkness.
And through you naive innocence have learned,
and so finally understand with such empathy.
Poor Selina, how your abject terror of being alone
drove you to the unthinkable act of infanticide.
Mute, these walls are screaming "REMORSE! REMORSE!"

I WANT...

I want a little respect: beyond
this blonde hair is an absence of dumbness.
I am not a Barbie doll
to be played with and then
packed away in her box until required again.
I feel, sometimes more than is good for me.
Compassion can be Soul-destroying.

I want to be taken less for granted.
I am not an item of furniture,
or a puppet dancing to everyone else's tune.
I would love to be loved
for who I am, rather than
for what I can give.
An absence of maternal love
has cursed me with a vulnerability

that draws users to me like a magnet.
I want to cease being an emotional cripple:
want to learn to rely on me,
rather than hanging on for grim death
to tantalizing promises
that somehow never materialize.
Oh surely my life is worth more than this? Well,
maybe it will be...tomorrow.

HOLDING ON

This morning
I burnt all the old photos
of you and I. Catharsis:
I feel lighter now. The White Horse
is no longer out of bounds. I am free
to return there, only now without you.

Memories fighting for supremacy. Mentally
I'm shutting them out. I say no
to nostalgia - it is the ultimate torturer.

I can see the heaps of rubble from here
on the back road. It's like
your apartment block never existed. Yet it did.
At least they'll erect something new in it's place.
But every midsummer
my mind will dance there - a ghost out of time.
I feel like crying - and laughing: you and I
attending the Summer Ball in all our finery...



My ball gown, moldering in the closet:
decades of neglect.
I catch myself wishing
I could donate it to charity.
It is the last tangible connection.

I know I ought just to do it.
So why, oh why, can I not?

THE ARTIST

Painting is an enigma to me. But Austin, all serious,
stands back frowning and mumbling to himself
as though he equates each finished piece with self-worth.
He is fully immersed in his latest endeavour, brush
flitting from palette to canvas, canvas to palette;
perfecting highlight, shading, skintone, eyes.
Anticipation of the final hanging
spurs him on - but not too quickly
for the pleasure of the completed masterpiece,
all beauty and sensuality, is well worth waiting for
with it's vibrant life in every brush stroke.

Where does the compulsion originate I wonder -
to be so fanatical a perfectionist
instead of just a regular man? He is a visionary,
a colour blender, a master craftsman,
an illusion maker and so on and so on.
From handmade frame to position on wall
he is sole creator, my multi talented
other half, my constantly distracted Soul Mate.

The brush moves in patterns I can't quite fathom:
long strokes, short strokes, feathering, blending,
faster than the eye can follow, leaving me breathless.
He's oblivious to everything around him. I could be
a million miles away, or not even exist at all.

His present inspiration is abstract: the product
of an incredibly fertile mind - and an insular lifestyle
of missed assignations and unopened mail.
It never ceases to amaze me
how the original barely there sketch
grows moment-by-moment into something
infinitely greater than the sum total
of it's components. Every atom of his being
is poured into each individual labour of love.

I can't get my head around artistic talent,
but it is undoubtedly a form of genius
when you think about it - creative imagination
transformed into something so visually arresting.
I guess the real beauty is in the translation:
the individual significance, depending upon each beholder's
interpretation of lines, spaces, patterns and symmetry.

Strange to observe those weathered hands
with their rough patches and pronounced veins
as they perform their delicate and precise motions
over hours, over days, over weeks and months.
It is asking too much, I know,
to hold his attention for any longer
than five minutes in a day.
Ah...such is the life of an Artist's wife!