Dance of the Poet

Lazy poet, lazy person.

[sixicecubes]

My beautiful friend is writing and directing her first film, a ‘A Surrealist Breakup Movie with a Vampiric Twist’. I’m so excited for her and the incredibly talented cast and crew! They’d really appreciate a like and clicking the remind me button on kickstarter to get some traction!

http://kck.st/3kLCvMa

Part Road Movie, part Vampire film, part mediation on absence, desire, grief and trauma, this is the surrealist twist on the Breakup Movie that you have been waiting for!

[danceofthepoet]

14. Ebberman

[1. one who fishes under bridges]

One shadow, fishing under bridges, The quiet lapping at the shore before babbling moans, wheezes, hisses.

Scaled, slick bodies flapping, twisted Bloodied heads beaten in, mouths torn, One shadow, fishing under bridges.

Parasitic tongues gasping for kisses, Our phantom troll toll man listens for Babbling moans, wheezes, hisses.

This dark arch is where his bliss is, Their briny guts grease on the floor One shadow, fishing under bridges

He and them both, eaten by midges, His puckered lungs filled with sores, Babbling moans, wheezes, hisses.

In the blood and the salt, he reminisces, Drowning in fluids, an animated corpse, One shadow, fishing under bridges Babbling moans, wheezes, hisses.

[danceofthepoet]

13. Latitudinous

[ lat·​i·​tu·​di·​nous 1. having latitude or breadth especially of thought or interpretation]

Last week I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise my face.

She and I stared at each other, uneasy as the breeze dropped in the growing summer gloom.

I turned my back, hurried away buried my head in the pillows to escape that strange face surely following.

When you become someone you don’t know is that growth or is that fracture?

[danceofthepoet]

12. Welter

[ wel-ter  1. a state of commotion, turmoil, or upheaval.]

It’s a land turning itself inside out, spitting up another chunk of fatty sludge that’s been sat wallowing in the guts of its guilty mother for 400 years.

Incandescent revolutionaries, clenched fists to the sky,  burning back this baying beast that was grown suckling at their blood.

[danceofthepoet]

11. Lutescent

[luːˈtɛsənt 1. yellowish in colour]

You only get what you can bear to pay for. I used to indulge in yellow: rows on rows of bright waxed lemons and golden yolks carelessly gathered, split in a bowl with caster sugar to make custard so rich it clings in a thick film on the roof of your mouth the whole evening. 

These days I buy yellow like aged eyes peering from wrinkled lids. 

Like the drying crust of albumen smeared on the countertop.

Like the thickened fungal toenail, that hobbles the foot it was made to aid. 

Like the lizard skin peeling from a sunburned shoulder.

Like the righteous fire burning down a police station, a quarter way round the world, smoke wafting across my doorstep.

[danceofthepoet]

10. Sematography

[ˌsɛməˈtɒɡrəfi

the use of signs or symbols (rather than letters) in writing.]

Systems are shifting, people resettling in this sea of Zoom calls, ‘uncertain times’ and ‘new worlds’. A new kind of dangerous air, new snakes spitting poison new steps in the hierarchy. 

I’m fear-fascinated, a child crouched in the dirt, watching an fire ants scurry to and fro, one mind, adapting to the ebbs and flows of the dust.

New signs, new symbols that we can’t quite speak yet, mask muffled, our old voices, old ways cocooned knowing something new is growing, inside, out.

[danceofthepoet]

9. Fictor

[ˈfɪktə 1. a sculptor or carver] 

There’s clay piled around, big chunks of earth piled up like the mounds beside city roadworks. 

The sculpting room smells like the first drops that break the heatwave, makes me want to pick pavement grit  up on my tongue, breathe dust into my lungs, the soft crush, crunch, crumble of charcoal between my teeth. 

We make pots and plates here, bowls that you can smash back to dust, made of dirt, just like us, like the brown crescents beneath our nails. 

I want to eat the earth, eat my own tail, push my hands headfirst into the cycle, guilt-free, guileless and smooth, tender, pliable like the first curves of the pot being born on the wheel.

[danceofthepoet]

8. Uniphonous

[ū′ni-fō-nus 1. giving out only one sound.]

 Growing up sometimes feels like growing apart.

Age stretches the uncomfortable boundaries of the nuclear family and we’re uprooting the stakes of the picket fence to better fit four adults in one house.

But my mother sings through her ablutions, a lullaby every evening. My dad sings in a falsetto as fish scales fly out from under his knife and stick, iridescent to the kitchen sink. My brother raps in the shower, backed by the wireless speaker I bought him. 

We all sing different songs now, but we all sing, just the same.

[danceofthepoet]

7. Trochal

[tro·​chal 1. resembling a wheel]

 Every day this week has been the same. Quiet. Filled only by the midnight skittering of a hamster’s wheel,  the croaking calls of circling seagulls, the drone of soup for one revolving in the microwave, the clicking of dog nails as she spirals before bedtime.

The hot hum of the current heating the filament in the bulb just before I turn out the light.

[danceofthepoet]

6. Acervate

[acer·​vate 1. growing in heaps or closely compacted clusters]

Early in spring we brace ourselves against the lingering chill and plough through the organic archive in the compost bin. 

Disrupt the dank piles of activity: the frenetic scurrying of woodlice; the arduous, slick commutes of yellow keeled slugs; the endlessly upward aspirations of earthworms. 

A beached grub writhes slowly in the flowerbed twisting it’s segments in an effort to overturn its body, bloated on soft spring leaves. 

Dandelions, thistles, knotweed, cut grass, brambles, climbing ivy are piled high onto the heap.

In the shadow behind the bin, mushrooms spill out from themselves, growing in an unregulated mound, dark, quiet, compact and complicit.

[danceofthepoet]

5. Percale

[/pəˈkeɪl/ 1. A closely woven fine cotton fabric.]

Can cotton hold memories, form synapses to bridge the tiny gaps in the weave?

Does it remember being planted in spring, or its dying boll baking in the sun?

Does it recall the mother’s love that nestled it in the bosom of a barrel and sent it across the ocean as a babygro? 

Do bedsheets know their bloodied history, the discipline of furrows?

Do they remember nights of fevered sleep when they are crumpled in the laundry heap?

[danceofthepoet]

4. Fragor

[ˈfreɪɡɔː 1. a sudden loud noise; a crash]

 The moment after the crash is couched in the brevity of shocked silence, damaged cells bring up their tinnitus moans and bees whine through front gardens.

Blind peeping, curtain twitching,  tense passersby, turning heads hesitantly, passing by. A man sits on the curb, bleeding head in hands. A car door swings to the limit of its hinges.

[danceofthepoet]

3. Nitid

[/ˈnɪtɪd/ 1. shining or glossy.]

The whole street comes out for the sun, polishing wax into hubcaps, relishing the sticky slide of lip gloss or tree sap between their fingers.

Rotating doors of skinned knees,  scabs and weeping eyes stinging in barbecue smoke. Ice cream and peeling crispy skin, leaving the dishes to soak.

[danceofthepoet]

2. Mydriasis

[mi-drahy-uh-sis

Excessive dilation of the pupil of the eye, as the result of disease, drugs, or the like.]

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An expanse, A blackness that doesn’t respond, Won’t pose for the pinprick flash for a blurred photo

Looking blindly into the lens like the glassy eyes on the fish counter.

In this irradiated moment is it fever or flight? Iris slimmed to a razor circle, open eyes Let the night in.

[danceofthepoet]

1. Singult

[sin·gult 1. a sob]

I’m grieving the obsolete, one purposeless sob for Windows 95, floppy disks, fireplaces and film.

I’m indulging in the stupefying satisfaction of nostalgia, scared to tip the scales and fall headlong into disaster, nestled in a thorny past I’ve misremembered as absolute.

Swimming in circles, fancying it mimics a cyclical universe but no matter how I turn,  brittle eternity is rendering before me.

Pick any direction and I can chase my grief into the future.

[danceofthepoet]

30 Days, 30 Words IV

Back on my bullshit.

See I, II & III

[danceofthepoet]

20:04 05/07/19

Worms burrow between my fingers broken into this world between eggshells apricot stones and shovel blades as I break the slick clumps of clay labouring under the grey heat of a summer wave about to break into a deluge

of raindrops and petrichor, relief just out of reach, sweat dripping past my eyes down my back, palms and thighs. Kneeling in the baked dirt and watching skin burnt in melanin stripes the shape of yesterday.

Lay my face in the earth, eye to eye with the blind bodies all of us hiding together.