Poetry
Some light verse, some descriptive, some personal.
Shoe laces
‘Practically-challenged’ they said.
Couldn't even tie my own laces, I remember well
my father roughly knotting them
tight with shame, how
undignified it all was.
How embarrassing.
I was ten.
All practical tasks were beyond me
(many still are)
But autistic meant
'doomed' in those days,
don't even think it.
So I tried.
Others would watch me,
this ungainly, cow-eyed kid
flop around, push daintily, pull
half-heartedly, helplessly, then
"Give it here!"
snatch it away, do the
deed themselves and I
so pitifully grateful.
But my father decided.
A boy must
tie his own laces.
It took a long
long time
and the sheer patience,
the control not to scream and
slap this pathetic, limp-wristed
mooncalf staring dumbly at the
laces like they were indecipherable
hieroglyphics, staring
at his own hands like they
were not his own, unfathomable.
But my father taught me
to knot
my laces, my tie.
I still don't know how he did it.
One of my
greatest achievements.
He may not know it
but it's
one of his
too.
Sea
I look out at the sea.
The smooth, shimmering wall of the wave
curves into a giant’s half rib,
cracks; collapses in on itself.
Foam fizzes and spits
like reacting magnesium.
Sharp, transparent stalactites
spike the shore,
hang for a second,
then sucked
back into the mass
like roots shriveling
back to the stem.
Rising and falling hiss
of sheet-water racing onto shore,
like breathing
through clenched teeth,
or rush of sand
from holes in a sack.
Incoming waves growl,
smack rock,
subside; growl again:
relentless war cries
against the shore.
Patter of showering foam
follows each attack
like the spilling of rice grains.
Reaching the shore,
stench of dry, dead crab
and stale seaweed competes with
sharply cold, clean freshness
of air over the water’s surface.
I dive in. A wave smacks me.
Choking, my palate
retracts,
overpowered,
forcing a grimace.
Salt parches, roughens
my tongue,
sharp and stinging.
I move my hand:
smooth, liquid brush
slows motion,
like running in a dream.
Pressed tightly on all sides:
body heavy, hair light,
floating.
cold aches my head,
makes veins bulge.
I feel each pulse.
Tea Ball
That chain, that round shell,
those holes in the casing
like the breathing holes of knights' visors.
Could be half a chain mace,
or a squashed egg from
a robot chicken
shot through with
tiny laser beams.
I put them in the same class as
thumbscrews
or knuckle-dusters.
Nasty little things.
Sitting Room and You
Magpie-like, dragon-like,
you collect, you hoard
your thoughts into desks and trinkets
so that by breaking them
I broke a piece of you.
Scarring your cherished room:
my childhood vestiges of destruction.
The shiny copper cap of your tiniest
cut-glass perfume bottle,
crushed, cracked and
dented by my
ravenous milk teeth.
I saw it done in a film with pirates.
The patch where I burnt the carpet:
the bristles hardened and
melded into bumps like the
lumps of a crusted scab.
Now older, I am ashamed.
Paintings:
your pensive melancholy in
watercolour scenes:
darkening, sultry skies cast over
dull river-water
and long, damp grass whipped
by a cold wind.
The room is peopled.
A monochrome of your young
grandmother,
half ethereal-pale,
half ensconced in shadow,
like the moon at first quarter.
Nonchalant, sulky,
limply holding pearls to pose
she resents the task:
fierce, Oil-black eyes flare
defiantly past the frame.
You wish you were strong, like her.
On the piano sits
your Father,
your Daddy.
Young there, baby-faced, awkward
in tie and uniform with
cheeky, half-cocked smile.
You told me he was
an electrician,
nothing more.
In conversation, intoning
"Daddy"
you pout girlishly, whisper softly,
head down, reflexively read the ground
to smother a grief borne alone,
never shared.
Like the things in the room,
it is mummy's:
we musn't touch.
Trolley Pusher
I am a Trolley Pusher.
Laden with boxes bursting with files
I push this trolley through miles and miles
of NHS corridor and plastic barrier.
It ain't fun to be a carrier,
an automaton.
You're less than nothing, it's like you're see-through,
a whale-sized trolley yet nobody heeds you.
They get in the way, pretend you're a snail
as they let their offspring frolic and wail and
dodge past your trolley, so you almost squish them.
But if I did, I don't think I'd miss them.
Terraforma
Grey expanse.
Wide and broken by the sprawling veins of trees,
Diversifying into the sky
over the rooftops.
Lonely majesty of those trees.
Solemn stillness.
Lone sentinels of a forbidding sky.
Silent as death.
A fly on the wall.
It crawls stealthily,
up and up,
and out of sight.
Bones lie buried in the garden.
They lie in the
dull, spiked earth.
Flesh of a form that was,
and is no more.
The gloom is descending.
Shitty Air
Head choked with
night-thought I
stagger from bed to
toilet, sit and
open a poetry book,
reading of waking to
nightingales and
cool woodland
air and I think
"I smell cigarette smoke
that neighbour is
killing us does she
sit and blow it
through the
fucking vent
while we sleep?"
We get the second-hand
shitty air, smoked in
and coughed out
in tightly-stacked
lego apartments.
W.H. Davies never
had this problem he
could breathe easy
under the stars
(although I don't
fancy being a
hobo with no
money I'm not
brave enough
for that)
Swenglish
A language
regurgitated by
faux-american throats,
Neutralized, neutered and
patched plain like the
beige fabric flowers
In Ikea.