Half Man Feel Double

I came away from it all
Pulsing with seismic aftershocks

The feeling of having been open
Of having let my substance slip
From cracked hands

It left new marks, 
New scores and scuffs
On oak-hard skin
Added to a thousand,
No different to the casual observer
Than the last raindrop to smear the window,
But spelled out on me in pain
Like a word

I am scattered across oceans,
And the effort of holding myself together
Is so great
That the needle of time
Scratching out tunes on my surface
Pushes too hard, too deep
From the white and dead
Into the living tissue beneath

Your Love

Your love is like a red, red knife
and a case of mortuary ice.

Your love is like a smoking pistol
known to the procurator fiscal*.

Your love is like a hangman's noose
just above some swinging boots.

Your love is like the ground up glass
concealed within a cooked breakfast.

Your love is more to me than life
and wholly worth the sacrifice.

*A Procurator Fiscal is a public prosecutor in Scotland with the responsibility, i.a., to investigate all sudden and suspicious deaths.

Never So Quiet

As I played the opening bars of my new composition
An old man stood in the darkness and began to dance
A curious dance in which he would spread out one hand
And then the other
And then there was a curious bowing routine
In which he would tilt forwards and backwards
And raise his hat to the young woman in the row behind him
It was mesmerising as a candle in a darkened room
It was profound as broken silence
It was tragic as a fugitive's fatal error
It was a dance none of whose steps or movements he would be able to recall
Though he stared at his polished shoes
And gazed at his beautiful old man's hands
And when he realised at last
That he had not performed the dance
It had been the other way around
He smiled and bowed until his forehead touched the soil of a distant shore

Speak for Thyself!

I.

There in the drafty, darkened hall,
limbs and jaws and bones withal,
a row of bodies, nude as sin,
knee by hip, and jaw by chin.

Pale were they, and eyes asunken,
lips were puckered, and mouths were shrunken,
and there amid the mangy throng,
was one I knew, and knew him strong.

Yes, eyes; yes, ears; yes, flaxen hair;
the features that I knew were there.
But not the knowledge of his parts,
what gave him to me was his heart.

His heart, that is to say his whole,
his composite, his living soul,
but sight thereof led not to sigh
of cheer, for he - that ghoul - was I.

But I were me, then who were him?
And how had mind been stripped from limb?
Once one is rent in pieces two,
How can the wit be threaded through?

I have been told 'Speak for thyself!'
by those who witness not this gulf
between the wick that flicks and flits
and the combe that keeps the wits.

II.

A moaning and a twitching gave me start,
And shiftingly those figures broke apart.
Sight of self was lost amid the throng,
trespassed by their eerie, keening song.

Worse yet, their shrouded eyes began to peel,
the sight of all those sightless eyes unreal.
And worser still within that song of bone,
the voice I heard the loudest was my own.

Whence from, this voice that issued from my lips?
Who would to mind perform such censorship?
Oh, clamour and the blabbing of the horde!
I tried to think and could not, so I roared!

"Be silent, beasts; allow me to conjecture!"
and, in response to efforts at prefecture,
my own white face began to twist and gurn,
and spit and scream, and that was how I learned,

as all the fiends took up their cries anew,
my bruit was my articulation true,
that when I turned my thoughts toward my tongue,
resultant din was how my words were sung.

So what, my friends, is poet made to do,
when all their words are rendered cry and hue?
Should I above my brawl try to be heard,
or beauty that I shape be e'er deferred?

Book Review: Lunch with Charlotte

I have had the pleasure of listening to the audio edition of Lunch with Charlotte written and read by the late Leon Berger. It is the true life story of the eponymous Charlotte revealed across innumerable lunchtime conversations with her friend, the author.

She was born to Jewish parents in Austria in 1919, fled to England during the war and died in Canada in 2010. It should be straightforward therefore to think of it as a holocaust survival story. However, perhaps it would be more fully encompassing to say that the second world war was, yes, a crucial and traumatic event in her life, but by no means its only event of significance. Nor is its core message that the Nazis were, and fascism is, deplorable.

Indeed, the event that most formed Charlotte's fascinating and contradictory character, while it may have been facilitated by the war, was much closer to home. And it is the formation of Charlotte's personality during her turbulent and ever-changing life that, in my view, is the true subject of the story.

The novel is written with simple realism, with few elaborate turns of phrase. However, it is in this uncomplicated language that the compassion and wisdom of the novel reside. All its many characters are drawn as people living within the confines of their limitations, as humans who must breathe, eat and love. Even the Brownshirts and Nazi bureaucrats are humans first, for all their flaws.

I wept considerably while listening to this novel, out of fear for its characters' safety as well as the wretched inability to do anything to help them. Indeed, some may be wary of reading a novel that covers such a dark period.

Therefore, allow me to reassure you. The novel is composed of a warmth, humour and humility that raise it well above the reach of the ravages of hatred. By the time you come to the end of the novel, though death and despair will have paid their visits, it is the mutual affection of a friendship lived to its fullest that will remain.

Buy the book. Watch the promotional video.

A sequence of haikus inspired by a series of black outs

There are more shadows in an unlit home than in the whole sky at night.

There are more dark steps
between two familiar rooms
than in midnight's blaze.

The electric home
slings its rays all the way to
the shivering grass.

A home of black air
draws the glister of the stars
into its bosom.

And so we are taught;
what is concealed by the light
is revealed in darkness.

A Christmas Tree's Lament

Once upon a winter's eve,
They came in mobs, those deadly thieves!
We spread our roots, our breaths drew in,
And then we bellowed, I and kin:
“Leave here, desist, replant your roots!”
They came for us in shiny boots.
They placed their teeth upon a string,
and showed us to that wicked thing.
They wrapped it round, in their endeavour
to cut us from our roots, to sever
each of us from earthy sphere,
And as we crashed, they cried and cheered!

They stacked us up on deerless sleighs,

And formed with us a foul bouquet,

And as they stole us, engine booming,

I found I was no better than a human.

I was from deep black soil dissected.

Now humans' unearthed state reflected

in my own proud trunk made rootless,

subject now to journey fruitless.

As savaged flesh wept and swelt,

Each jolt and thud was sorely felt

Till we from oily trap alighted,

And heaps of dead and dying sighted.

We might have thought our number small

Until we saw that ghastly haul.

It might have been a minor feud,

an act of impulse, a nasty mood,

but in this vale of broken crowns,

on this necropolitic ground,

at this high reach of Death's grey tide,

was an act of genocide.

And even now, and even yet,

exhausted not was Man's dark threat.

They came in ones and fives and threes.

They drifted up upon the breeze.

But how they differed from rancid stink

was in what they carried: those shards of clink,

that lit their eyes and filled their grip,

and brimmed their dreams and curled their lips.

And of this coin, what was the aim?

Of which foul sport were we the game?

What was the scheme behind our murder?

All was revealed as they began to barter.

And what the price of one arboris,

apart, of course, from its biosis?

Thirty pieces was final toll

to him, the brand new owner of my soul.

With nothing more than mute egress,

my time with kindred deliquesced.

Aye, from my brethren I was split,

And carried then to odorous pit,

shakingly upon their shoulders,

just as the cousin growing colder.

Placed upright by mantelshelf,

in mockery of my rooted self,

now I their furrow did survey

in all its grim and dark decay.

Of all their squalor and unfitness,

was I to be the judge and witness.

And back they looked with eyes agleam,

dashing hopes to dwell unseen.

To me they brought their tawdry garnish,

and I did they begin to furnish,

and when at last they came away,

I stood replete in gaudy lingerie.

And though clothed like courtesan,

my torment only now began,

for now they gulped and gorged and pranced,

frolicked in a state of trance.

I, in the midst of wilding pack,

had turned to aphrodisiac.

Time’s suffrance is ineluctable

yet passage indestructible.

It crept as surely as decay,

until I found I had outstayed

my welcome in that wretched dwelling,

and now my final fate was swelling

in Man's dark heart as they denuded

me of frilly garment, excluded

then from frosty home to street,

my transformation near complete.

Whence had I been sequined guest,

now was forsaken, dispossessed.

And here I am, and here remain,

my human value all but drained.

I lie here butchered in the lane

with others of my green domain.

Who knows what fate may have in store?

And yet I sense there's little more.

My shadow's long; my noose at morning.

There's only time to share this warning.

Should you consort with humankind,

see us, and do not enter blind.

For Man's had many staunch allies

and led each one to her demise.