GRIMES GRAVES

The echoes of long dead miners fill these chambers:
hollow, clanking sounds
coupled with an eerie distant murmuring.

The tunnels run for miles below ground,
like the digestive system of some giant beast
meandering down into the bowels of the earth

where, if you touch the walls,
you can feel the core's heat.
But none of this is in the guide book

you've been reading since descending the ladder.

Suddenly claustrophobic, you could swear you glimpse
shadows drifting through the silent gloom...

BRACKLESHAM BAY

For Billie...

I sit, in faded jeans and leather jacket, on a groyne.
I listen to the continual crashing of waves -
and beyond them another sound. Electrifying. I stand
and train my eyes along the shoreline...and wait
among the pebble banks and dried seaweed
for the appearance of stallion and rider.
But no one comes.

I think of last century and of you
riding madly, recklessly, before the groynes or I were here.
I scramble up the beach
as the tide turns, and head for Stocks Lane
and Perley's Marsh your old home,
and your riding stables.
Both are now replaced by modern buildings
jarringly out of place - and I feel
suddenly so alone...

ICE GIRL

People out walking in the frost
wrap themselves in coats, scarves, hats, gloves;
believing that without all this paraphernalia
they will freeze to death.
Well, perhaps they're right.
But I walk through it completely unclothed
because I am made of ice. They still tell
of the hoar frost that clung to tree and mountain
at the time my mother expelled me from her body
amid a pool of blood that instantly froze,
and how the midwife had to rub some life
into my tiny pure white body.
I am daughter of the Ice Queen -
born in north Iceland, raised in coldness,
and six month nights were all I understood.
I had to stay one jump ahead of the summer
because I knew it's alien nature would thaw my body
and burn out my pale eyes.
So I hid beneath the snow drifts
like a white vampire.
But it's harder now I've reached womanhood,
as I'm driven to flirt with the sun
and be caressed by his deadly rays
like all the other women I see around me.
He is like no other lover - dangerous
and therefore irresistibly alluring.
What happens when fire and ice combine?
The Aurora Borealis tells my story.
I think I'm inviting chaos. My reflection
is up there in that northern evening sky -
all the colours of coldness, remoteness,
a reminder of what I am...

OK, OK, I'll come clean:
the above is all fantasy, you know!
In truth, I am an ice sculpture that adorns
a corridor in this year's Ice Hotel.
But I so want to be human.
You see, my beauty encloses no Soul.
There is only cold rigidity inside me.
I can only hope that one day global warming
will come and put an end to this half-life:
will reduce me to a pool of water
that cannot think, cannot feel,
and cannot yearn to be loved.


Just to let you know...I have been diagnosed with cancer, so have lots of X Rays, scans etc. coming up before I have surgery. 
I will visit you all as and when I can in between all that is going on...try keeping me away!! ;))

WAR NEUROSIS

Dedicated to all those who suffered...more than we can ever imagine...


Remembrance was your greatest tormentor -
perhaps even your torturer. Now, all
your possessions, your wife, your life,
no longer held any meaning for you.
All had been superseded by the horror,
the sickening retro-visions
that came nightly.
This horror took on the hue of your bedroom walls
and concealed itself in the undulating folds
of the matching curtains.
You could taste the blood in your whiskey,
hear shells exploding in each passing car engine.
Body parts and lost faces lurked in their myriad lairs:
your candlewick bedspread,
your latticed windows, your carpet, your wardrobe.
You stared at these. You perceived the presences.
They hid in your army uniform -

that was their favourite place to lie in ambush.
When you dressed, you would pause halfway
to closely scrutinize jacket or trousers,
absolutely terrified of what may be secreted in the seams.
Khaki: fear personified
there in your hands -
the rising neurosis that threatened to choke you,
suddenly erupting into the uncontrollable shakes.
Your entire being turning to jelly.
Your wife, your son, your body, your life -
all dissolving into the carnage of the battlefield.
You could see it all, there
in the faded bloodstains ingrained in your uniform.
You knew the horror would never leave you.

So you took your own life.

THE EMPTY ROOM

For Ayrton...

In this empty room now devoid
of your clutter and chaos, I'm lost.
The door and windows have stories to tell
of the boy who grew to manhood here
amid deafening music blaring out
and technology wall-to-wall.

Though silent now and stripped quite bare,
this will always remain your room.
It's filled with precious memories
that once acknowledged spring to life:
happy times shared between mother and son
that I'd thought would never end.

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.