A Glamour In Black

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They turn to me, a black tie gathering,

dialling the air over the arms of a sticky pine,

for the number of some beast or boggart,

and the business of death.

 

They ask what I have to trade for the privilege

of knowing them, and listening

to their raucous debates about the resurrection

of our spent human scaffolds.

 

They invite me to rook and rail with them,

and chant under the canopy of dusk,

and about their ledgers of the interred,

tomb openings and bone counting.

 

They’ll charm me out of my stiff walled trench,

my six pounds of ash, and join them

in crowing over spruce and stone,

and the transit of planets above.

 

They’ll tell me that Olympus is not so high,

but only a few tens of metres above the churchyard,

and convince me that black is the true colour

of all things, and death the brightest black of all.

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Not All Orchids Are Flowers

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They press my pause button,

cannulate me, rinse me cold blue,

dress me for the ritual in white samite,

my silent night acolytes waiting

to hinge me open. Their hunt

 

is my orchid, a bruise, deep-seated

in visceral cavities. Listen to the tearing,

raw silk seams split and spilled, pathways

opened out, my dead meat excised

to the sound of easy listening music.

 

The master of ceremonies is the medium

at the séance, flourishing a blackened

ectoplasm to his onlookers, the rot extracted

to the applause of his audience,

his fellow masked trophy hunters.

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Disentanglement

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They say there are three kinds of attachment.

 

I want to give you another, where your own

Arabian storybook carpet and its billowing sails

are a neglected box of coloured cords and fading

instructions.

 

And your mother is too busy knotting

her own tightly woven shield of threads, knit one

purl one, row by row.

 

Behind the door no-one hears the crack

of your ribs as your lungs collapse

in on themselves, your breath giving out from

endless free diving.

 

The thinner the strength of the seams

that bind us, the more they stretch and fray

until all that’s left is the faint echo of our torn fabric

 

And the tricks remembered from

your psychiatrist’s recovered memory sessions.

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Changeling

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“Change your form and you change your name “, Louise Glück

 

Hue of a creature’s skin

or cut of meat you bear,

to slip through doors unnoticed

be the insane changeling

holding the sharper knife.

 

Cleave open warm or cold blood

to find the centre of its animus

breathe your own raw seed

across its visceral estate.

 

Soar over rocks and headlands

claim them for yourself

or perch over the crack

of Hades depths saying not yet.

 

Burrow deep your own foetid past

unearth a sou of knowledge

bursting from the ground ready

to claim yourself cured.

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Hard, Isn’t It?

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Can you see enough into the dark

to find the edges between

black and black, find the glint

of an outline, something more solid?

 

Can you feel the notches and faint

imprints left behind, the fading

edges of hearts consigned to the

depths under cemetery stone?

 

Can you hold your hand aloft with

any certainty that there was no thief

in the black, biting your edges of hope

to leave a nasty stain on tomorrow?

 

Can you believe in yourself enough to

run off your own blackness, tearing back

the blinds, to greet the morning as if

yesterday didn’t matter, didn’t exist?

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Gravlax

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You might sense it in the air but not

as rooks do, a fragrance of alluring musk,

its odour earthy pungent slightly sour,

the calling card of the cemetery.

 

Above ground, all is notes of grass,

the peace of eternal bone-hard resting

under a hundredweight of chiselled

memorial and memoranda.

 

Below, tenanted, is the necropolis,

a gradual shifting glacier of layered

carpet, ashes to dust, the food chain

of a darker bouquet of seduction.

 

Strange though, how we bury food

to mature and meld over winter months

to call it a delicacy, the acquired taste

and aged flavour of buried sea trawl.

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