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Mockingbird
what could there be, worse,
than shaking off the black dog
on the sunniest of singing, birded,
mocking spring days
I looked for you to come out from behind the clouds again
your hair waving like jettisoned energy
into the dark, trailing spirals,
matter,
into the blind
void of life, imagination
potential
spring.
The sky burnt, the clouds hung,
the sun shot,
the sea moaned, the cliffs fell,
the sand shrank...
the rocks were dumb
I was not.
You ceased.
Even the air failed and died.
Mind World
I am on the beach, with Don Chihuahua. He gives me a cigarette, which I take, since I am no longer able to withstand the contagion of futility. The world is no longer able to find him, or me, without the aid of the blue puff of smoke whorling time into infinity for a few definite moments.
The Don casts his mind back to a recent weekend on which his consciousness dwelt on the rim of the bath. His body remained in his chair, gaping at the live world, but his mind-in-the-world was tethered to the rim of the bath; the hand of his mind raised, constantly, the ideal blade, razor sharp and inches long, hovering on the crest of his will. The movement of his mind-body pushed its arm up towards its chin, the mental knuckles resting there while the blade grazed the polyp-ridden cavities of the neck. A mind-eye watches the wrist flick blithely across the tendons - they are closed in their own world, believing in tension, and oblivious to exteriority, which must disillusion them of their fond dream: severed, the head flips through a half-circle and the gasping of the revealed arteries and sinews traces parabolic out-leaping carnivals of spending blood.
Yet, the Don remains in this chair, breathing, pulsing, living, inescapably. I continue to blame him for my lack of courage, although this very blame is itself the more cowardly act.
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Death in February
Death in February - part 1
My remembrance is violent.
It’s still not yet dawn
On this misty February morning,
And just the sound
Of a distant bus
Pulling off
- who could be on that bus
at this time of day? –
With a dull crack
It seeps into my consciousness
That it is me,
Years ago,
On that bus,
Leaving you,
And the crack
Is the crack that the dawn
Of realisation brings.
No more tenderness
Will pass between us.
Death in February - part 2
February is to me
valedictory.
The tenderness we lack
is the giving of the ungivable.
If once I said you rendered yourself
Vincible to me
All the more revealing
Of the world's seeming magic
Because you were, and are
So amazonian,
Now I realise
You never did nor ever will
Allow a lover to hold in their hand
Your precious, secret
Vulnerability.
Death in February - part 3
And February mocks us,
Valentine:
Dead behind the eyes.
The world is tungsten and cold.
The sea impersonal
the air salt and asthmatic
the faces inscrutable
the flowers mock too,
rather than predict
recovery.
The soil of my mind is barren
Emotion stunted,
Heart impotent,
Fear that no spring will free
The frozen potentialities
And kernels of new awakenings,
And that doubt will be
Its own self-fulfulling prophecy
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Fantastically complicated machinery
Don Chihuahua spoke, but not to me - he addressed someone who was, in his mind, leaving.
"There is nothing romantic or beautiful about depression. It is fantastically complicated machinery, and yet an arbitrary scribble over life. An old friend of mine thinks of it as an unsolvable glowing blue hovering spherical puzzle, which credits it with some kind of aesthetic quality it does not deserve. I might say it was a circle, since it goes round, and around. But the circle is ugly, imperfect, not circular. Not elliptical or ovular, but erratic. Repeating endlessly, enough variation to deceive, but not enough for hope.
"Do not consider my choices to be considerate. Choosing not to die now is not a kindness. Suicide does not signify a soul, and living does not signify hope for one. Might I have forced your guilt to be over me and my death, rather than for him? I am a coward. I am unable even to usurp with absolute selfishness, and yet it is not because I am kind, but because I am already half-dead.
"Something aesthetically pleasing can inspire pity. You must see this as mere ugliness. There is no such thing as a beautiful episode. There are only shifts in the location of nowhere. This will not make sense and I will not explain it, since there is nothing to explain."
I held him in my arms, only to feel his repulsion.
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