The Mermaid Tavern

 

Are they smitten?

They all ask how poetry should be written

When they’re through

Ask: what can it do? 

Do you beseech;

“What are my understandings of the rhythms of speech?”

While they’re busy reading you - goo-eyed, patient, empathetic

Construct your vision of industrial aesthetic

For whom do you write?

Are you privy to the information that comes at night?

Can words heal?

Is poetry reparative?

Therein, what are the possibilities of narrative? 

Do you think you’re so popular

That your prose could instigate fighting?

Then, how come you’re so careful in your writing?

Quit trying to reach the hearts of men and women

You are the heart

Your blood the ink

Your veins the pen

Blood thinning

Sail out

Once more unto the breach

Splash not in the foamy shallows

Of what they tried ever to teach

This craft on which you float

Is more than a license to roam

The decoy is this poem, those screenplays

That tome

Her gift will lift you and sift through the clotted blossom 

Of your gilded fleeting dream

Like an heirloom comb

Such that the farther you drift out

The closer you are to home

...

Storm Chaser

 

I had a dream about you:

You lived with your family way out in the country

Rich green grass stretched out in square textured patches to the blue horizon

An American quilt of English lawns

We were having dinner outside

After, we were playing with a tennis ball

And then I was over-arm bowling at you with a table-tennis ball

Cricket style

It was summer

Dusk fell lightly on us 

We conversed as dining people do

Relaxed on the whole, if a little affected, by our roles in the civil occasion

A fourth adult was present 

A man 

Possibly a friend of yours

At some point I accidentally threw the ball beyond Matthew

And I ran up behind your row of buildings to the back gardens

To retrieve it

Here I found a series of narrowboat locks

Glimmering surrealism like sunken fish tanks in a Dali frame

The ball bobbing gingerly on the surface of one

The water: astronomy blue like mystic dates

I made as if to scoop it out at which point your husband made a sound like 

“Don’t! I’ll do it. You’ll annoy the neighbours. They're our mates."

They say all dreams are wish fulfillment

It makes sense

I wasn’t even trying to retrieve what we’ve lost

What I’ve lost : all dreams are egoic

Nor was I trying to resolve the thing

I was transporting us to a time and place where resolution had cleared the weather for

Another shot at that clear-sky thing we did

To a version of me who had stopped chasing storms

Those fields were so green! 

I know

It was all just a silly dream

...

Getting Ready To Go Out

 

I’m at the bottom of the world making my way up.

People think you’re at the left side of the page and you’re travelling on a line that heads off to the right. Westerners. 

But you’re not.

Life is a road trip and each day all you have to do is make it to the beginning. The starting line is always where you’re headed. You are making preparations to go somewhere. You’re calling them days. 

People think that life is proof that the journey is already underway and that you’re trying to make it through to the end. 

But it isn’t and you’re not. 

In the end, you’re always trying to make it to the beginning.

Look at the children. How old they’ve become. And the senior citizens wobbling right on the edge. Arms flapping. Making cooing noises. Like babies.

Some say, as time runs its course, we get older. Try and avoid such heresy. The truth is that we grow into youth. And everyone can see that climate change and loneliness align. That as it gets hotter we get colder. 

People think the past came before the present and the future comes after that but it didn’t and it doesn’t.

The future always comes before the past. It’s out in front. That’s why they call it the future. Everything starts off in the future, rains down on you as now and then weaves and bends along the echo of an arc called yesterday. Seemingly graceful and getting smaller and disappearing and all. 

Historians. Teachers. The news readers. Diarists. They all read everything backwards. They make it sound like the past came first. 

People could really use a crash course in the nature of the past. For Christ’s sake! It came last. It’s a footnote and the footnotes come at the end. She’s always last. That’s why they call her the past. 

We’d stand in a brace on Saddleworth tops or Castle Hill or Blackstone Edge and hold hands and look up into the stars and Alice-Anne (pronounced Alison) would say stuff like “Out there in the universe…” and I’d listen for a bit, watching her voice fall off in numbers against the soft shape of her nose. Then I’d look deep into her so-called outside sky and declare “No such thing. There is no out there.” and she’d gimme the big thirty-twos and she’d qualify with “Yeah alright. I know we are part of the thing” and I’d tilt my head and say “Not quite, Cuz. Nothing is out. The universe is in us.”

She’d disagree and make a low noise like something switching on. Something in a cupboard on a timer. I’d argue and she’d parry. On Mastermind her second-round specialist subject would be Disagreeing With Gary. 

And down below us, the trembling neon of a whole city high in the mountains shimmered and gaped and winked and was grinning. The way of things. It was all made out like laundry that your mother laid out. The answers right there to read if you’d care to still your breath from fogging your vision and commit to the deed;

That the more we lose the more we are winning. 

That all this time we’ve been reading time backwards.

That life is a road trip and in the end all you have to do is make it to the beginning. 

And even when the sun goes down there are no surprises.

Because at the end of the day it rises. 

...

gK