THE VIRGIN

To be honest
perhaps she does need love in her life,
in spite of all the brash denial.
She stands gazing wistfully out across the sea
as if willing it's liquid depths
to fill an empty heart
with something it has never known,
that only lovers can know.
Men are enigmas,
distorted mirrors that intrigue
with eyes full of the promise
of ecstasy's explosion -
whilst here is she on the verge of madness
from living so solitary a life
of pent-up frustration...

Or maybe she wasn't destined to love at all,
not that kind, anyway.
Yet there is an acute awareness
of something awakening deep inside her:
it's in the way the gulls
sing of secret pleasures;
the way they caress the air
with sensual wings;
in their erotic dance with the ocean waves;
how they playfully tease the earth;
and the way they flirt with the sun
so carnally...

And, suddenly,
she knows he is out there somewhere,
and that he is on a collision course with with her life.
It is inevitable.

BOUTIQUE MANNEQUIN

Such perfection is bizarre
when there is no life within

those artificial boundaries
of plate glass and pretty lace.

Endless Moons cannot age her,
nor bless her with fertility.

And yet she has an aura -
a spell within her smile

that snares the eye and mind:
you have to pause and look...

and how easily you're swayed
by this rigor mortis babe

into picturing yourself
standing there in her place,

transformed by over-priced attire
into a Goddess, flawless as she.

Harsh midday Sun
highlights a sculptural face

that betrays not the slightest hint
of wrinkle nor expression line.

Oh to step beyond the glass
into this glamorous world

of the make-believe beauty
dressed for a summer ball...

who can never play with a mobile phone;
enjoy an Indian takeaway;

go swimming on a Saturday;
or know how it feels to love.



An unearthly stillness envelopes you then,
as you notice her soulless eyes

and the dust that's begun to gather
on immobile corpse-like limbs.

Now wearing shimmering satin
has suddenly lost it's appeal,

for it brings to mind a burial shroud,
colourless, like a ghost.


Just sufficient battery to post this...will get back to you all on Monday!
Have a great weekend. :)

WHITEOUT

I ceased wearing white long ago.
But that day in Oulu, your birthday,
I wished I'd kept my wedding dress.
It would have blended perfectly into the snow,
unlike my deep red hat and coat.

Then, unobserved, I could have openly watched
you and she: your shared passion, such intimacy
as we never had - not even in the beginning.
With us, something fundamental was missing.
We were lopsided, awkward, a three-legged polar bear.

You embraced her there on the railway platform,
but all I could see were tatters
of precious satin slashed, bleeding white,
spanning the tracks to where my heart also bled profusely
into the snow behind the station house.

As the two of you boarded the train and I watched it leave,
your final words resurfaced to haunt me: "I'm sorry."
The ice cut deeper than it did back then,
when I considered black lace a cure-all.
Oh that last tumble in a metre of snow...

Then before I knew it, you were gone.
Not even those letters I found made sense.
I was in denial - it was all a bad joke.
"You are my husband," I screamed into the void you left behind.
But my words were swallowed by the endless white.



I will be around until Saturday, then I will be away for a week or so in a place without electricity.
I will miss you all...:(
So until my return...have a fabulous week xxx

THE CURSE OF THE TWIN

In shape and size, colouring and feature,
identical we grew.
So everyone, including our teacher,
never quite knew who was who.
Even our mother couldn't tell
the two of us apart:
"Are you coming shopping, Annabel?"
she'd ask my counterpart.

And then one day I hatched a plan
to sneak a day off school
by pretending to be Marianne
on her trip to the swimming pool.
Well, predictably she was aggrieved
and reported what I'd done,
but no-one was sure who could be believed
and so it seemed I'd won.

But my victory proved to be rather Pyrrhic,
for Marianne by vengeful design
claimed that each and every lyric
of my love song was hers, not mine.
Then after she'd sung it (while posing as me)
to my boyfriend on Valentine's Day,
I simply couldn't make him see
that I was his true fiancee.

So two years later on my wedding day
it was Marianne he wed,
while I racked my brain to find a way
to be with him instead.
For it was so unfair what she'd done to me -
had stolen my future away
by having everyone believe that she was me.
Oh my life was in such disarray.

I begged and pleaded, grovelled and implored,
but she refused to budge an inch
and so for years and years we warred
but no agreement could we clinch.
And to make matters worse my ex believed
his "sister-in-law" unhinged to be -
a notion by Marianne preconceived.
So like the plague he avoided me.

Well eventually I had to concede defeat
and build another life.
Oh how I regretted being a cheat -
hadn't dreamed it would cause such strife.
And now I'm compelled to live a lie
for the rest of my days on Earth
until it is my time to die
with no chance the truth to unearth.

So if ever you hear that often told tale
that twins are closer than close,
well that is no more than a fairy tale -
a fantasy most grandiose.
A case in point is Marianne and I:
we've been rivals to the core
ever since we were both knee-high
and will remain so for evermore!

ANDROGYNOUS

I plucked this photograph from the general memorabilia
of that age of mass trauma and shared history.
You in your Captain's uniform. Sombre, visibly apprehensive.
Billie, please don't enlist. From here, I see your future!
Your patriotism. That cropped hair, so immaculate in contrast to the later you I met in hell.
Nowadays, I keep your unsuspecting eyes in a special box,
as if to hide from them the devastating horrors to come.

Point of intersection: my bedroom. There, you collided with my brain,
releasing suppressed memories of a past life in which I was a young second lieutenant
you rescued from the Somme's carnage (minus my right arm).
In the casualty clearing station, you wiped the blood from my eyes
with such tenderness that I fell into an all-absorbing forbidden love
that turned my world upside down. But you were strictly heterosexual,
so I never dared reveal my feelings, just buried them deep inside.

Against impossible odds, we both survived that monstrous artillery. But you were broken.
After I left for Blighty, I never set eyes on you again - not in that life anyway.
Neither did I love again.
Your image possessed my heart and mind
so exclusively that I expired years later a lonely recluse.
But such longing does not die with carnal flesh.
I found no peace: not in the Light above, nor in the grave below.

Then Karma kicked in: I was re-born in female form.
And you came back, because those deep-seated taboos had vanished with my testosterone.
As I read your disembodied mind, I recognised what it was
I had seen in your eyes that day in war-torn France
but failed to understand at the time. A pure Love
that transcends gender and physical separation.
We are two halves of a single Spirit.

Today, I am your body.
You are my mind...

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
we will remember them.
1914-2014