Hey Doll

Take it off.

Take it all off and show your skin.

Peeling dried

smooth cheeked

sun-bleached fringes of dull jaded fern

You hate it, I know,

You hate the limits that your skin has an end

That air touches you and makes you real

That you watch so many things from a window

Orb of yellow, pool of spite

Light in your eyes

distorted with layers of temperature and current

You are not real you are a vapour trying to keep its form

What form will the spaces give your face now

Will you be pious?

Good little girl, brave face

Sliding down in beads of water

Hardly seen

Coming up again in a cloud

Hardly seen

You have no touch you are painted over

Hello, doll.

I Want to Be Like You

 

I have a vision of who I want to be,

it is a dream of immobility,

with large frozen eyes,

an imperious smile,

cold and unmoving, sitting still pristine

under layers of transparent clear laminate.

Long neck, two eyes, swanlike.

 

 

Image by Ed Ball

Paddling

It strikes me that we will never be great

Like those grey dots separated by nothingness

On a flickering screen brighter towards the center.

The world is a tapestry woven




For each of us, to forever hold

Sacred and watch

And watch

And watch




Watch with these frightened eyes,

Frightened of what, we do not yet know.

Watch through tears running down our cheeks

Arising from the crest of the undertow.




This silk drops from a great height,

Travelling through time

Through dust born by gimlet eyed carriers

As the path leads we know not where



And the ripples scatter like ducks over a pond

Even as we cry and hope and laugh and rage,

We raise a gun, and take aim.

 

 

I really like the bleakness of cold mornings when people go hunting. I don’t know why. It seems very arborial and antiquated to me – hunter gatherers of the present.

I don’t have a lot to say about this poem, I wrote it just now, so it’s quite clear, I think. The picture is from somewhere in Canada, I wanted a very cold and foggy one of the lake district but I couldn’t find any. It’s a very cinematic shot, it’s so organic and beautiful, and those are geese curving their wings, not ducks.

The more primeval parts of the lake district make me think of Seigfried and the dragon and it’s all very medieval Germany for some reason. Or is it Saxon? I don’t know.