There Is No Rose

There is nothing that binds us
Except the clutter around
And the noise unwelcome

This was unexpected
I have not...
As what courses through us
As what flows away.

There is no rose
There is no rose of such virtue

Nothing binds us but the roses
And the boredom.
Everything else is a pasture
We dare not graze

There is no rose of such virtue
There is no rose

The rhythm is unbearable
Your face alone despises those fruits
Beyond your grasp
The rhythm is beyond my measure
We shall not eat
We shall fast
We shall fast

There is no rose
There is no rose

Grace and your skin and time unearned
Bind us in fasting
The rhythm burns my lips
There is no light there is no rhythm there is

No face
No rose there is no rose there
Is no rose

There is no rose of such virtue
There is no rose of such virtue

We expire upon the thorns
The light is cold on your shoulder
Your skin must fear me a little

There is no rose
There is no rose

Impeccable in newborn sunlight, a face forgotten.
Ash hangs alongside your indifferent delight
Warm in the dew

The fast it is that binds us
We are blind only in the light

Your body sways like light
The wire in my mind glows
And cracks
There is no rose

There is no rose
There is no rose

Just stars
Welcome, night
Cold your face now
Cold your face

There is no rose of such virtue
There is no rose of such virtue
There is no rose

Dancing

I am done
With 'being-always-outward'.
Books line the shelves like a reproach
And all I can see is dancing, dancing.

There were memories, once
Of things now forgotten
And of birds
And of nothing at all

There were memories
Of light in a child's bedroom
Of a hand on my mottled cheek
Of you, dancing,
Dancing.

Now all the books are trying to say one thing
To be one book
Because something must replace the loss.
Dance, dance.

Broken Swans

One bright morning, as
The last flicker of Winter yielded
To the glimmering of Spring
Before me on the pavement lay
A broken swan
Offering me her last sigh

I looked up through impotent tears
To see my path and the world littered
With broken swans
As the last flicker of Winter yielded
To the glimmering of Spring.

A Prayer

Explain the world to me in my dreams
That knowing may guide my night
Though when I wake the knowledge may be gone
The having known forever remains

Know the world for me in my waking
That it may be hers through my eyes
And let this little thing forever be
A sign for those to come

Let thought the tiger abide
There is no peace here

Like a Muggins

This is my first non-fiction entry since my shamefaced, ninja-silent return to the magic of the interweb.

Good lord, look at all that blank space.

Um.

I left the internet two years or so ago, saying that I didn't feel the need to blog anymore; that it had become a chore to fulfil instead of a pleasure or even a catharsis. I deleted my blog, said farewell to my literally teens of readers, and sloped off. Well, now I need to have a corner to rant in again.

My previous effort was ridiculously frank; I bared my chest and wailed at the computer and hid nothing. This time won't be like that, I suspect. I will use this mostly to put up things that I have made, and that probably fairly infrequently, in contrast with the glut of posts so far. Photos might happen soon. There will be some ranting, though, at some point. When I began to type this entry I thought it would contain rather a lot of ranting, and maybe some expletives for good measure. However, this isn't the time.

Listen (W.I.P.)

Listen:
When this is ended, you will remember three things.

The first will come by accident
On a summer's day
You will be eating an orange in the shade
And the breeze will bring you
Memories of dancers
Of the heavy smells
And solemn mysteries.

I dreamt a world of cranes.
I flew among and over them
And though I could not see
To what purpose they swung and dipped,
I knew their work would never end
That what was to come
Could not surpass.

The fruit in your hands
Will become a sphere of my flesh,
And you will eat.

Four Things (W.I.P)

At our most desperately broke, when I’d been unemployed for a year, Jenna was chewing through every prescription drug the doctors could throw at her melting brain, and Lisa was still two years short of school, we barely lived off every government benefit we could beg in a sub-let basement studio half an hour’s walk from any recognisable area of east London; I guess it was Mid-Ham, if you want. All three of us ate, and slept, and cooked, and Lisa sang and danced and cried and ran and Jenna drew, and sat, and stared, and I wrote and self-dramatised and played at holding a family together that in fact I had no hope or intention of saving, at least in its current form, and Jenna and I almost never, ever fucked, in one yellowed, subterranean room with charcoal carpet tiles taped over the floor, excluding the hospital-green linoleum-covered ‘kitchenette’. Our bowels moved and our ablutions were performed in a peeling cupboard we shared with the anonymous inhabitants of, I think, four similar holes.

Lisa spent most of this time playing with a toy horse my grandfather had made for me. I have to this day no idea how he fashioned this little concoction of wood, springs, and wire, but however the mechanism functioned, the upshot was that, when pulled along with a string, the horse would follow, not on wheels but at a fragile trot. He could be upset by pulling too hard, or not hard enough, and any obstacle would topple him, but the horse was Lisa’s greatest joy, as it had been mine; this was a particular relief at a time when actually buying a toy was out of the question. It was a roughly-carved, childishly painted, oft-repaired thing, a fabulous thing, an object I envied every time Lisa caressed it with her fat, beautiful hands. I could not have her play with it when I wrote; the plod of uneven hooves on the carpet tiles, or worse, the slap on lino, would unnerve me with a jealous desire to be small enough to justify tearing it from her arms and cradling it and abdicating. So Lisa would be unsettled as I wrote, and Jenna would draw, always dancers and birds. What’s that, mummy, it’s a dancer, why are you drawing a dancer, mummy.

‘I like to remind myself how ugly anything can be if you pin it to a piece of paper’.

Always looking at me.

She said crap like that a lot. It really helped when she had an appointment. She always presented well, especially when it meant she could score a point, be it against me or against a medical professional. She didn’t care an inch that her daughter didn’t understand, she didn’t care an inch that her daughter understood just well enough to start crying, she didn’t care an inch that the same thing happened every day, it seemed. She held our sobbing child in our pathetic home, in her pathetic, flaccid arms, and poured recrimination from her sallow eyes, blue spots in yellow cups in a purple shroud.

Jenna Mackie died at the age of thirty-two in a nice house on a nice street a very long way from her daughter, which is as it should be. Her grave lives in my mind always accompanied by her second husband, who wanted so badly to save her. Never trust a man who wants to to save a woman who is beyond it, because he will destroy her faster than anything else, and himself too, by the by. Jenna, lovely Jenna, bitch, was an addled vortex, sucking love from whoever gave it, the more, the more quickly and ferociously. She sucked everything that sweet, kind, stupid man could give her, and when he was almost dry, she took every pill in the house, I mean, a lot of pills, and followed it up with oven cleaner, just to be sure, and maybe for a flourish. I heard from elsewhere that she’d draped some used condoms, not his, but hers anyway, around the place for the husband to find, the ultimate suicide note – not only, but also. She was naked and frothed up and four hours dead and five hours last fucked when he came home. Thank all things holy they hadn’t a child.

I would like to say that he will be better off without her, but no-one was ever better off after Jenna. That was the first of the four things she had pinned to her door when I first knew her.

You will not be better off without me.

It was at the world, and once you were swept in by the outer arms of her furious, pointless little storm it was irremediably true, forever and ever amen. She made your world smaller and smaller until there was no room in it for anything but her: not just lovers, but friends, flatmates, her ruined mother, I hope not yet our child.

My first relationship after I finally achieved escape velocity, 1000 small atrocities after I should have, was with a woman who had been Jenna’s confidante some years before; she had been discarded without warning after half a year of abuse, the solvent of her adoring company worn out. Lisa loved Anna, loved her cakes and her full, chubby black fingers which stroked Lisa’s hair as they sang together, and I loved her, because she had known my now ex-wife well enough that we could talk of her endlessly. It seemed for a time that we would spend our whole lives together, conducting a shared post-mortem on our gall-encrusted love for the irreplaceable, unforgettable Jenna: Jenna, who transcended sexuality, who overcame all objections, and became the object of every unlucky acquaintance’s jealous, horrific devotion. We talked of her, honestly and sadly, and I held Anna’s adipose hands with their mother-of-pearl fingernails and the semi-permanent burns just below both thumbs as she revealed, unawares, a love that certainly eclipsed ours for each other, and perhaps matched, in its unrequited intensity, even mine for Jenna. When she remembered Jenna fondly, Anna would smile a great cracked-earth smile and I would realise how happy a person she had been, and how much she had had taken away from her, and I would love her all the more.

What drew us together of course tore us apart, as our burgeoning feelings for each other and our eternal ones for Jenna crossed with increasing frequency. A shared notion became a cause for envy or mistrust, and the honest core of our communication, always her, became careful, tentative. The ruptures revealed how little we had in common, how little this love was in comparison to that which spawned it, and so our runt love died. At least the resigned animosity that grew up in its place bore the clear hallmarks of its progenitor, so that we could remember Jenna even as we parted, point two of her little manifesto – You will never forget me – proven at a double remove. Thanks for the memories.

I was a midway through my PhD when I first encountered the woman who would come to overshadow my life; Jenna was a surly, feral undergraduate in an introductory seminar I taught, inspiring rather unwholesome thoughts that made it all the more difficult to try to inspire bored teenagers to care about Hume. Initially, while noticing her beauty with passing indifference – as one must when tutoring eighteen-year-old girls – I had found her irritating, her sullenness overshadowing the whole class and her full, spiteful lips only parting to snap some withering and wholly unhelpful remark at one of her nervous peers. She must already have had me by then, because the force with which I reacted the first time she smiled at a crack I made in class belonged to a maiden in romantic fiction rather than a diffident, posing postgraduate.

I left Elaine, my girlfriend of three years, left my supposed soul-mate, left our shared flat, left our planned future, two months after that smile: she seemed too stunned to be truly upset, or so I thought. Many years later, when we were firm friends and occasional lovers, she told me that she had met Jenna, once, before I left, before she knew that I had been unfaithful to her with a girl six years her junior. Jenna had been hand in hand with the deputy head of our department, buying groceries and grinning; interest piqued by a truly academic love of gossip, Elaine had asked around to identify the ingénue for whom our superior was risking his career. When she realised for whom I was leaving her, she told me (with no little glee), she’d looked forward to hearing of me lying in the bed I’d made only to find it riddled with vipers. In fact, Jenna was still screwing the professor a full year into our marriage. I found out a week before the wedding, a month after her graduation, but was powerless to remove him; their affair, as bleak, which had destroyed his marriage, only ended when he suffered a non-fatal stroke that affected his speech, causing Jenna to lose all interest and leaving him in the care of his hollow wife. She informed me one evening, as though passing on news of distant acquaintance’s ill fortune, heard third-hand; she was pregnant with Lisa at the time. I could not help but think the blighted man lucky, even as a clenched fist of triumph flowered in my stomach.

That triumph was to haunt my ugliest moments. I felt it most strongly standing at Jenna’s graveside, next to her second husband, triumph over her because I’d outlived her, triumph over him because he was the one who’d spend the rest of his life feeling he’d killed her, triumph because our daughter was now mine, triumph because now, at last, every time she corrupted my dreams, I could awake and remind myself that she was gone, forever, and it was only the bit of her horror that she had gifted me that could torture me; only my imagination, so much weaker than hers, that could craft new punishments. That night I comforted my daughter, my daughter, relishing the words, suffused with a sense of victory.