Dead Fire

In london, I walked into his room,
just chairs and a slide projector
and a smiling American woman ,with a pretty face and warm hands.
It was full of others more like me than I.

Inside we sat in rows, on old blue carpet.
At the back alone, I spoke with no one.
My head always lowered, a woman's magazine resting on my lap.
Me drops I into the remoresless empty pages,
of others birth femininity, and I hear,
40 years of silence echo back...

Outside the road continues roaring past!
And the bright sun upsets me...
Far off the distant sound of construction
could be heard forming new architecture.
Men going about their sundays;
the match, work, mates, lovers, cleaning cars.

I always knew i could never be either.
Even at 6, dancing in darkness ,
dreaming of boyfriends in my sister's clothes.
Now at 43 watching faces being broken,
cut, twisted, distorted and pulled
and seeing a surgeons map for a lifetime of loss,
I know again!

There is no pity or sadness, just calm.
The chairs are now pews and the light pours in.
Filling a childs innocence with religious redemption.
The backs of others hunch in mourning,
my dream choir in their own silent reverie.
The American woman smiles again and takes communion from her host.

Now in death!
I shall wear my childhood bridal gown.
My still cold beauty will flicker in the dark eyes,
of a handsome unfelt lover.
He will kiss my pale lips and in that one glorious moment,
he will spark a dead fire!
And I shall joyously burn inside his furnace of gold.

I am Sin

I am Sin.

My love is Crucifiction.

Priest like, I worship,
your blood filled chalice,
buried deep inside the unborn vulva.

my NOT vulva.

The Passion for communion; hymn,
parts my biblical sea.
Sermon floods the unborn womb.

my NOT womb.

Clothing scattered, lots cast, limbs outstrecthed, seed blown.
Creation
falls...

From the unborn opening!

my NOT opening.

Snake slithers from sheets,
crawls... H i s s ing.
Forbidden bitten.
Nakedness revealved.

My God, why have you forsaken me?

The Dress

The pink bow on the stocking top,
I adjust as I raise my dress.
Suprsingly I feel more myself if the bow is straight.
Flattening the dress with my palm.
I say out loud 'that's better' and proceed to write a poem.

The dress, squeezes air from this room.
Each fabric fold, compresses my lungs.
My thoughts refract, and I watch identity,
float on material soaked in serotonin's spray.

To put her on is to embed a shotgun in the shoulder.
Recoiling from fairground reflections,
deciphering disappointment blown across glass.
Revealing the succubus feeding on somnolence.

Here, now is the disclosing of a prophecy.
A necessary unburdening by ritual.
Conception's bonfire built, born alight, ablaze!
A living sacrifice for anomaly's blade.

The scalpel must be the compass needle,
finding the magnetic north of the lost soul.
Let it create blood contours on this hidden map,
that I might recognise the hilltop of myself.

Difference

The sun sets like an overcoat,

falling gently, onto the shoulders of a lover.

You don't feel its soft weight.

Do you hear the footsteps of Mozart, Godard

and Beckett passing between us?

On this empty Oxford street. 

My heart skips a beat, 

and for one single moment,

I understand...

Then it is gone.

Fleeting! 

Fragile, as butterflies swept 

up in a storm.

 

I looked at you, mobile pressed to your ear again,

bags swinging, and your mouth making the

slow silent word, c-o-ffee.

In that second, I think, this can never

be, and I despise you for having such

wonderful eyes.

In the cafe, you talk of sex.

How you want to explore some things. 

I feel aroused, and sense your erotic femininity,

your love of life and the things that stir your soul. 

I smile and think...

How empty you must find me.  

Heading home. I see in the distance,

that giant mausoleum of sculptured

shape, your car park. 

I think of fucking you and the sounds and

scents of sex. You are beautiful 

and I am excited, but I am unhappy.

I know this boredom, our mutual loneliness.

Flowing between the unseen current of 

disparate souls. 

You load bags into the boot,

and chatter endlessley about holidays.

On the long drive back, 

to the building we share.

Transexual porn film

He took me,
through a backdoor!

I had prayed last night,
he would remove a rib.
He didn't.

Now.
I am sore,
and the manufactured breasts
hurt my spine.

Later.
I pull up my knickers
and I feel.
As a transplant patient,
whose body is rejecting the organ.

Cut.

Air Lock

Air locks in rose stems,
cause their heads to droop.-

Tricks with needles, newspaper,
and buckets of cold water, like magic;
bring forth their majesty again.

The rose is not the same however.
Its beauty, is only bejeweled,
in the color of before.

Nothing has taken place
within the alchemy of intervention.
The flower has touched reality.-
or rather we have lost the dream state.

And our perceptions of the wonder of it all,
lie as fallen petals, within the harshness of a city.

Gradual Blindness

N no I think its A.
Look at my ear;
look up, look down, look straight ahead.
The light a brilliant atomic white.

I hear you suck in air.

You...

Your strange telescope, sees the war directly.
The damage and destruction done,
on the surface of a dying planet.

Me...

I only notice a dimming of the light,
a gradual fading, lines refracted differently.
Sights lost soldier.in the quietest of wars.

To come...

Is to hear dispatches of the unseen battle.
slowly being fought,upon a distant fading star.

To go...

Is to be far from the conflict,
but also at its heart.
To journey across darker receding landscapes,
through the silent bombs of disease.

After Dinner

With light comes shadow...
And the heart , like approximation,
journeys eternally, in the half light.
Between joy and emptiness.

All beauty is confusion.
Order is the single idea,
hiding one path from the other.
Dulling the senses.

This, the fragile in-between,
is where we are most human.
The hardness of definitions
puts an end to narrative.

How long it takes to learn,
Restlessness is the souls balm.
Night is always becoming day
the merest edges for philosophy.

I say all this after dinner,
and you think how odd!
Unseen I feel a path between
but perhaps it's just a crossing.
In half light it's difficult to tell.