Poems at a Distance

Poems at a Distance

Distance, figuratively through a lens or over physical miles, brings a focus and perspective to the human experience; particularly in my case to a sense of connection and disconnection. When I am away, in those first few moments and days of separation, whether I am leaving behind home or returning to it – I feel this tension of being pulled apart. My voice here is that between lovers, but really, it’s the cry of what feels like home anytime you are separate from those who welcome you, who bring you back to yourself.

So here, a series of poems at a distance and what it is like to feel that connection and disconnection over miles or through a lens, from that which we love and which calls us home.

i.

Kiss me one thousand kisses
A single drop at a time
Kiss me under moonlight, rain and sky
Kiss me sweetly in the morning
Graze my cheek as you come and go
I will count each one as offering
I will learn it we go
Kiss me to finish an argument then end it anyway
Your thoughts are as fierce as your lips sometimes
I am learning you best this way
Let me taste the kindness on you
Let me taste til I’ve drunk you in
When I am drunk enough on you at last, one thousand kisses done –
Then give me one thousand more,
Til kisses are breathing and words and knowing
Til you can’t take them back.
Kisses like water when they are true
Healing the dust and the ash of you
Kiss me with your mind in the morning, touch me with thought all day
I am yours one thousand times over, in each single turn through space.

ii.

There is a curve of you
Where the light rests and if I could
touch you there, quietly
just a caress of atoms and
feel you breathe, life within you
I would rest complete.
But though your body rests
beside my body during conversation
You are beyond reach just now
holding yourself together
just where I want to hold you.
Release yourself, I demand
But it is whispered like a prayer.
Oh, how I long to touch the light in you.

iii.

In my dream I am half of nothing
And whole of a whole
I am the tree and the bud
One round curve kissed by light
Another curve in shadow
Half of nothing is the difference
And the whole of a whole is complete.
It is a sweet dream to be touched by the moon and caressed by darkness
When one is your hand and the other is also yours.

iv.

Touch me again with your eyes
Let me soak in your voice
A little longer, a little closer
The timbre of your pitch humming in the air
Whisper closely and touch me with a word or two
But do not touch me
I do not want to touch you more than a whisper
Not yet, not today
Today is the long, slow luxury of not touching what I want to touch
After tomorrow, I will have only to remember what it was like to wait on you, fingers, hands, lips
The hidden corner between your shoulder and neck
I should like to live there a while
Resting on your pulse, rising on your breath
So, just – there.
Yes, your fingers are gentle and go no further

Touch me but do not touch me yet.

v.

This is the view of my weary heart
Another hotel room with crisp sheets
Only one side of the bed will warm
and I reach endlessly into white blindness in the night
It matters not that you do not share my bed when I am home
My mind is warm with the thought of you so the bed is emptier while I am away
My thoughts return to you, no doubt sleeping on the other side of the earth.
You are all imagination to me now, too far away to be real, a phantom in the night when I long for home;
I chide myself now home is something, someone I do not know.
I cannot claim to know how you would lie beneath these sheets
Or occupy this space with me
But you do occupy it, softly, insistently.
I push back against your presence in my mind and wonder if you feel me occupying your spaces or feel me in your dreams.
I still myself against this ocean of pristine cotton; think only what is real.
I will pass this day and the next one too; I have lived long not knowing you –
I can sleep alone.

vi.

I am sleeping under the stars in the Czech Republic
Which has known so many names
for one small piece of earth.
I too, have many names.
Long, short, punctuated and sentimental.
Soft names and hard names made of history’s sad stories.
Like this land I breathe and walk on, I cannot direct you north or south on it or point you to clear winds.
Like this body, I cannot whisper how to map your way through me, my great city of Names.
Perhaps do what no other has, carve me a map of myself using only your name; the name you choose for me.

vii.

Sleep, love but do not sleep –
instead dream.
Dream hard and long and wild, no pretend
that dreams are mild or mannered things.
No, a dream is a phoenix of the day passed
and dragon of the day to come.
A dream is what carries you to me in the dark
between oceans and thoughts.
More than an imagining now, you’ve left some
thread of yourself on me
now in the dark, my mind can paint you in a dream
one thousand times over.
I need never be lonely but to
dream and remember you.
Sleep, love but do not sleep
dream of me instead in whatever colour
I have left upon your chest
or written in your mind.
Dream hard and long and wild
and meet me there in the long dusky cloud.
Sleep so I can reach you in my sleep.

What If There Is No Magic?

What If There Is No Magic?

I am a storyteller, of sorts. I see stories in everything – as simple as a precise emotion or sense inspired by a broken fence swaying in the wind, or the exasperated look on a mother’s face leaving her child at the train station. I like to believe there is a story there and often I imagine for myself what the story might be.

I have too many storytelling tools at my disposal. I unpack the inner workings of my mind into words here on this website. I write in columns for other publishers, sometimes I write for radio and tell stories there. And then that Goliath of the modern age; the social internet. I tell stories with pictures and poetry on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter. In a word, I am prolific.

And I say that it is storytelling but in fact it is partially storytelling and partially just reflecting what I see and think and feel in a moment. I have never been in love but I can tell you a story about love in a few words. It’s tainted, of course, but it’s still a story about love. And maybe it’s silly but I want to be inspiring and thought-provoking. I want to be funny, oh how I love to make people laugh.

I want to be unexpected and yet reassuringly the same; at the end of the day you can find me telling stories in a whisky bar. It’s a nice piece of mythology for people to grasp hold of. I want to show what is possible in a life, in wringing the marrow out of it, not just in adventure and experience but in feeling and living and breathing these moments. All the neurons buzzing, flying through the mind and currents fizzing, firing through the body. Heady, giddy, dazzlingly alive.

gutsygirl4

From www.brainpickings.org

I publish these stories prolifically. I am writing for an audience, I am always doing this for ‘you’ and sometimes you are one thousand readers, sometimes you are just the one person I am telling a story too, although I am letting the world watch. I am doing it for myself too. I crave the expression and the art of it. Not a dozen reactions to a self-portrait, but the creating or sharing of a moment. I am a collection of light reflections from a dozen facets in a stone. I am interested in almost everything and passionate about ten things, when two would satisfy most. I have an insatiable curiosity and a need to find wonder in it all. I want magic in the world, as much as I want a pragmatic guidebook to it all.

Sometimes I Make The Magic.
I am a writer and all writers write in code. You see it there, a certain pattern to the words they choose around a subject matter; inspired by or in tribute to the conversation that started the thread of the thought. A phrase that means something more to just one reader, whether the faithful editor or family member. I use it in hashtags and captions always, a story within a story. A story  for one within the crowd.

Two words that mean ‘I am thinking of you in this moment, but you are not with me and I would like it to be otherwise.’

A phrase that really means ‘I have been here before.’

And when I am sad or the darkness threatens, either brought upon me or because I have it… the words ‘on the land of birth and burial’ appear again and again. One day, when some poor editor has to work through my collection of poetry they will no doubt cross out those words more than once.

I put magic into the stories I tell, hoping someone will see. In every part of my life, I want people to speak straight and true, but when you read me, how I want for you to read between the lines. But it’s all reflection and external representation, right? What is there to read beneath the text I give you?

All along, I say to myself, that is not the best of me. The best of me is hidden away, the best of me is still a story told face to face, the whisper of my voice, the response of your eyes and hands as I unfold these stories, these observations, these questions into your hands. That is what I tell myself, that there is within me still, a deeper Magic.

I don’t mean the novel; the story of miscast lovers that is really an allegory for everything I’ve seen and learned about taking responsibility for your own life. It’s not the other novel; about what it takes to forgive beyond reason. It’s not a work, that’s hidden within me – those works are in plain sight just biding their time.

I mean, the Magic I hope is there. Some substance to me that is more than the ability to mirror the world in snapshots and morsels. Some Magic that causes people to be as curious about me as I am about them. Some Magic that is the mystery of a tree with roots deep down into the earth that reaches to the sky and somehow lives whether the river runs wide or dry.

It has occurred to me, perhaps there is no intangible root or sweet, ripened fruit. Perhaps, between the lines there is simply nothing more. I tried to put it into words, who I am, the magic I hope is within me and fell flat. I stumbled for a phrase when I should have sparkled, at last given chance to reveal myself and say here, look and see – this is my something more, this is my magic. So I have been searching for it. I have been trying to find the words I should have used and to describe to myself…what more there is beyond this story I have created. All night I have searched and I have not found it.

So, perhaps there is no magic. Maybe I have told all the stories there are to tell. Perhaps I am just a mirror, driven by curiosity and exploration. Perhaps I should stop, before I run out of interesting things to say.

But I want to believe. Don’t you want to believe, that there is always something more?

I want to show what is possible in a life, in wringing the marrow out of it, not just in adventure and experience but in feeling and living and breathing these moments. All the neurons buzzing, flying through the mind and currents fizzing, firing through the body. Heady, giddy, dazzlingly alive.

Like a Second-Hand Book
I love second-hand books, the kind that are hard to find – collections of poetry by mid-century New York writers (Frank O’Hara comes to mind) and of course, Neruda and Cummings. You can’t leave them behind. I like to pick up them up tenderly, gently coaxing the spine open and seeing where the pages fall. Where have readers before left a trail for me to follow? Those pages falling open by habit to the favourite poem, or where soft pencil scratchings have left a marker in the margins.

‘Go here, follow this path, find what I found.’

You see where the writer and the audience met and laid out their secrets to one another. In some volumes, you see the reader was obsessed with sonnets, in others you see the reader was battling sadness. You see the magic of the author and the reader.

So I wonder now, is it the same with me and with you? Can we not see our own magic unless someone shows it to us? Perhaps the magic is there, but I’m in it and surrounded by it and therefore hidden in plain sight, the ‘something more’ escapes me because the Magic isn’t crafted like a piece of poetry, it isn’t thought out to be funny or wise or kind; perhaps the Magic is just what tumbles out when I am no longer thinking about the audience at all. When I step back from the microphone instead of into it, when I stop reflecting like a mirror and have the chance to see what is reflected back to me.

curiousYes, that I can believe. That I can take silence in, rest and believe the Magic in me.

What is secret, what is hidden, what is yet to be revealed? Yes.. there is something there. I felt creep up on me in the quiet just then, so I am content. It is not for here. It is simply enough to tell you there is more than this.

 

Poem: Ten Thousand Million Atoms Deep

Poem: Ten Thousand Million Atoms Deep

I’ve often gone through periods in my life of rising in the early morning or taking respite in the late afternoon to write with pen to page. Often these minutes are a way of emptying the endless-seeming thoughts in my head on to  a page, captured where I have no fear of losing them. Recently my head is so full, I fear if I was to pick up the pen I would not be able to stop for days.

People sometimes ask me, the difference between the thoughts I publish in pixels here and the thoughts that remain private, locked in paper. How strange it is that pixels can now never let me down, but my most secret self lives in frail paper and ink. It could succumb to fire, water and age. Attacked by rats or if I was to fall into a moment of rage or despair I might tear them up. I’m writing those journals of my deepest self in the hopes by the time my mind is old; some lover, child or friend will find my true self remembered there.

Writing on paper leads me to silence; silence of the clammering head. Like listening to music without lyrics or tapping out a rhythm without melody; it makes a liminal but precious space. In that space I cannot speak, cannot write but all of myself reaches out into the Universe longing to be heard. I highly recommend you open this link to the beautiful music of my friend Derek Mount. I invite you to play it while you read the rest of this post. Yup, do it now. That’s it, there you go. This piece is called ‘You Have No Idea’ from his project Brique a Braq. Just give it a second. Breathe it in.

I imagine in these moments every one I ever loved somehow feels me in their spirit, without touching. That everyone I ever embraced feels me in their blood for a moment and all that is good or bad or wise or true in me hangs like moonlight on stars and in the dust of the Universe, on the breath of the Earth. Somehow in that moment, listening for each other in the great Silence and making a beautiful fingerprint in the world, both compass and constellation to navigate by.

Ten Thousand Million Atoms Deep

Shh and

listen to me now

really listen, beyond clammering head

eyes closed and all your atoms

stretched towards me

feel the electric hum of

my atoms reaching for yours

listen with your whole body

for what touches without touching

names without naming

that remarkable thing within you.

Forgive me the frailty of language,

my incompetent hand, hip and tongue stutter –

were I trying to convey words

on a page my fingers would fly

instead my lips frozen without breath

but listen to me now, straining towards you –

remarkable you.

I concluded there is nothing to say –

but my longing is you to hear me, wholly myself

in the dust of the Universe

giddy amongst inverting stars and moon we share

in the air and blood of me

ten thousand million atoms deep

wherever you are, say without speaking

shh and listen to me now.

 

 

Remember is Quicker than Forget.

Remember is Quicker than Forget.

I once said to someone that writing requires an ability to recall a moment, a feeling, a person in an instant. To re-enter the past and all we experienced there, then step back into the present. Thus, it is possible to live with much experience and emotion close to the surface of your skin yet not live trapped in the past.

It’s muscle memory; the ability to recall, interpret and re-create those moments into new moments. It requires some remembering and some deliberate forgetting.

I saw a man in the corner of my eye the other day who may or may not have been worth remembering or forgetting but I walked quickly away; without giving myself the chance to change my mind. I think now, in reflection, he is better to be forgot.

At the crosswalk I chose to not look behind me although I was certain I could see his shadow catching up.

Regardless of what we wish for; it’s remembering that happens so fast and forgetting that takes so long.

This was born on an airport concourse, while I was travelling forward. I stopped and breathed and this time, I was not caught.

i.

Remember is quicker than Forget

on the track of a mind.

You are easy


to forget to think about

if I walk quickly in a forward direction

if I do not look back

– I do not think to think about you.

I do not write you down, I do not imagine words to shape you

Out of the nothing, back to the mind. 

I do not remember to make you from memory, I would not remember to forget. 

I leave nothing in memoriam, but everything is left behind regardless; in nothing-ness.

 

But – if I stop or pause,

if catching my breath on an airport concourse

at a train station;

driven but not driving and left to wonder


interrupted by a red light –

if I do not propel myself forward from you 

in every moment unceasing;

then Remember is quicker than Forget – and catches up to me.

I encounter the memory of you
who taps me on the shoulder, 

I collide with you, the thought and thinking of you. 

Remember is so quick, Forget so slow. 

The Body Communion

The Body Communion

I wrote this piece in the last few days.

It’s a simple prayer really; it has a lot of uses and it echoes a number of sacred acts.

 

i.

my body welcomes your body

my blood rises to meet your blood

our body welcomes your body

our blood rises to meet your blood

come to me deep, i am hungry

i thirst over and over

collide in me, divine

ii.

my face turns to the sun

turns to the sun to feel warmth

my blood and bones touch your

body and blood and bones

under the sun

i drink you in

iii.

my body welcomes your body

our blood rises to meet your blood

i hear the song of the tui

the fantails dance beside me

by this i know, the body knows

death and life are coming

my body touches your body

tells my soul, thirst no more

hunger not, here is our body

death and life colliding

in our oneness

Words About The Body

There’s a ritual many of us partake of each week or month that has a tone of Holy Sacrament. It is visceral, complex and symbolic. We take bread and say that it is the body of man. We do not say it is ‘like’ the body of a man, we say simply ‘it is’. We eat the bread and our bodies respond. Tastebuds activate, tongues moisten and the body welcomes the body back inside. We take wine or juice and pour it. This time, even more primitive, we say that wine is blood and we swallow deeply, blood into our blood. Lips flush, cheeks redden and we taste.

The intimacy of eating and drinking, the act of consuming another person’s body is not unlike other intimate acts. Oneness is the goal, union and communion the objective of these acts. The body willing, the mind open, the heart and soul receiving one person into another. Adopting that personhood into ourselves.

What a gift of beauty, what an act of love to welcome another’s body into your body and to realise the Christ ritual of Holy Sacrament is deeply personal; the idea of communion with the Divine a holy sacred and intimate one.