gesture without motion

writing since 27/10/16

[tender-indifference]

icon

was that a flash of the divine? your face catching a halo as you cupped your windchapped palms a small, brave flame. touch your lips to it. in the shadows, shrug a shoulder of ash across your knuckles. try again.

[sangredesirena78463748-deactiva]

crazy how men can just exist and i am a carefully crafted performance piece

[tender-indifference]

decaffeinated

um. just a latte, please i managed, though the words were frail and cowered in the sharp electric light. small is good, thank you. sorry, would decaf be ok? shouldn’t let a cup of caffeine shake what’s left to call a mental state, or else to fill the gap it left. though then again perhaps it might have propped me up - like, as it is, i’m finding that my feet can’t seem to get a grip. i’m leaning on the counter just so i can stand up straight. i had to dump the little pile of books i picked up like dead weights with half a fragile memory that i thought i had, that whispered of a time when poems helped. i think i hoped that other people’s words might dig me out. i guess perhaps they could come echoing back across the cavern of the last four years i thought i’d spent rebuilding me. turns out i still can’t find the strength to lift my coffee cup and when i do the brownness sloshes in my mouth and watches, waiting, while i try my best to find its taste or just the will to swallow it

[tender-indifference]

November

Silence snaps shut, a frost on the air Time, frozen and listening The wind knocked clean out of it And not so much as a breath from the trees

They stand cold and bare And they stare into the heart of us As we trespass over Earth’s bared breast Where we stand, surveyed

Swallow me whole And freeze me into you ‘Til winter shoots its icy tendrils out of me, Spider’s webs slicing me open

Let me fragment and shatter Like the time-trapped, dwindling, infinite branches Of a tree stripped of autumnal glory Earth, take me unto you

[tender-indifference]

i: endless

somewhere, i: floating,

lie high in the sky.

i: swept up by currents

not ending, still ebbing,

not current -

but somewhere, i: floating.

i: disintegrating.

i: somewhere is someone is watching

from something beyond

and i: far too far gone,

i: untethered from knowing,

from being, from me,

am i: paralysed?

maybe i: drifting so far beyond currents of time,

that time’s ebbing and flowing leaves this i behind

until i, out of mind,

could find no i to find or to follow.

[tender-indifference]

A man in a field of his cows In a world of fields and hedges And nothing stretching higher than An oak tree til the horizon

(Endless horizon), which never So much as flickers with the curve Of a smile to revel in the Roundness of the world he won’t see

The roundness of a world clinging Tight to itself and wrapped in a Blanket of its own enormous Gravity, rocking itself to

Sleep in a tumultuous cosmos. And still the man stands in the field With the cows. He could be farming In Mesopotamia or

Judea, some two thousand years Before the calendar of four Thousand years later begins. Or Perhaps he ploughs in England,

As autumn light grows golden and Slips horizontal over sheaves Of gilded wheat and mellowing corn, Or some such green and pleasant land.

The man stands in his land, and in His land he does not wonder how A scattering of neon, or A smattering of WiFi, or

Another puff of methane or Some more exhausted fume, or the Plastic packaged promise of the Good might be the key that drags him,

Dizzy, through the centuries and Decades and accelerating Seconds far away beyond his Earth but closer, somehow, to some

Knowledge of some purpose, Squatting, quiet, in the eye of This galactic hurricane - this, Even in his deafness to the

Crying of the cryosphere, right Here, right on his doorstep, as he Pauses for a second to hear The rustling of leaves, up in the trees.

[tender-indifference]

Unfortunate, essential // sunset

Enveloped in pain, if it’s all just a game, tell me Can this be counted as gain? And then how much remains That we cannot explain but must take to the grave With us, tear-stained and etched With a shimmering, needlework gilding of scars?

What of the aching, at sound or at sight Of your name on a page (bruise-like blossom Of blood-vessels, pumping and rupturing, Purple and flowering, bellowing, billowing, Silent and cloud-like and backlit, as golden-grey Sunlight pours over them, under them, into them, Singing the dying light requiem Mourning the end of the day As the sun slips away)?

Dusk, humming away the remainder of day, As the endless horizon is lancing the curve of the sun. And me, aching to watch as her life-blood is Fleeing the skyline and flowing like shafts of a Roseate light which is blushing through Tear-stained glass windows of some great cathedral.

The land and the leaves and the river and trees And the slow-cooking orange of the hushed, Drowsy street lamps which people the quieted cities All blush to behold the dying throes of day And I, sighing, can find here no lonely misfortune of twilight. No – here, I have glimpsed something truly essential.

@inkstay August word prompt #2 - Unfortunate, essential

[tender-indifference]

The Nearest Possible World

Tell me where can I find The next possible world In which something more might have been? Find exactly how far Is the most possible world, Which you or which I would have dreamed.

Could you tell me how changed, How deformed, how deranged, How the mind must have raged, Become Escher-like and strange, To try to comprehend Another a chance of better days?

In that possible world, How does sun fall on the trees Swaying, silent in the breeze, And crooning mellow cradle songs As golden evening sunlight glides And comes to rest across their leaves?

In that possible world Are they playing this elegy, Beautiful lullaby Requiem (song that I Gave to you) here, where I’ve Run to, to hide from you?

There, in that all too Impossible world, Where the sunlight shines green And the moonlight glows orange, Do I run to you? Please, tell me. Would I come back to you?

Inkstay August Prompt #6 - The sun shines with a green light and the moon is orange

[inkstay]

August 2019 prompts

Write a short story, poem or anything that inspires you based on one of these prompts and tag it with #inkstay. Make it clear somewhere in the post that it is written for one of the inkstay August prompts (also mention specifically which prompt you’re writing for) and post it before the 25th if you want your work to appear in the magazine.

Prompts of the month 1# - Four children living alone in a house, convincing the entire neighbourhood there are also adults living there to take care of them. 2# - A fish manages to survive on land, but find it misses the sea a lot. 3# - Rain falling down but never hitting the ground. 4# - A teen has come up with a song to remember everything they need to pack when they go camping. 5# - An elderly fairy teaching its grandchild how to live in a house without humans noticing. 6# - The sun shines with a green light and the moon is orange. 7# - Someone is in a subway station, no matter how many stairs they take or halls they walk through, they never find an exit. 8# - A girl finds her father has a collection of skulls and goes to investigate why. 9# - People carry their worst fears with them in their backpacks at all times. 10# - A stressed college student is trying to figure out where the materials they need to know for their next test are.

Word prompts 1# - archaic 2# - unfortunate, essential 3# - whine, redaction, convincing 4# - speculate 5# - auxiliary, embezzle 6# - hot, famine, attention 7# - flair 8# - vulgar, planet 9# - candlestick, perseverance, growth 10# - inspiration, plum, disorder, volition

[tender-indifference]

Me Gripping the window frame, knuckles white and desperate, Clinging to the stone and brickwork of this room which is yours, Spilling myself out of your window, precarious in the pouring rain, Craning my neck to watch as you walk away – Away through the rain on the tear-streaked cobbles of the street which is home With our friends, who are your friends and also are my friends, To a possible future where you can have your friends and I will have my friends, Where I want to be one of them as much as I could never have wanted to.

 I want to fall from the second storey window And tumble down the street in your wake And scream and shake you awake, And I want to be silent and vanishingly small and curled up in a ball And never remember the sound of your name or the way you said mine (for the millionth time).

 You Never turning to look back. Where is your gaze? In the haze of the rain do you see / do you watch? Do the cobblestones gleam beneath your feet? Do you tread them down wary or weary or wearing away? Do you have to? You need to? You want to? You chose to? You choose to? You think you know how to? Did you think to look back to the room that’s a tomb but not yours anymore? Did you hold your head high? Did your glare grill the sky? Did you look them in the eye? Try. Laugh. Can you cry? Did you want to? Or try?

 You, you creature defying my plans, you are slipped from the palm of my hand and, Like sand, you cascade through my fingers, An egg-timer stream, million Ones and no zeroes, But screaming for one, or for one another, and running as a whole And so jostling, muscling, scratching, eroding, Rubbed smooth on the walls of the glass Which was once a billion trillion grains of sand, But is now one and unable to claim to be grains at all.

 What does that sound? How does that sound? Did you catch that? Were you listening?

[tender-indifference]

Dawn

Here there is a twilight full of hazy, unpeopled half-being, of the pale, grey, shimmering dust which filled the spaceless place at the ends and at the beginning of the universe. In the tentative rays of silver-gold sunshine, the space between us flickers in and out of reality, unconsummated by human contact, living contact, breathing contact, and stillness floats, unaware of the dawn.

[tender-indifference]

Dawn II

And so we are back in the place we began,

Now too late to sleep, still too soon to remember,

The dawn spilling grey through the cracks in my armour,

My mind numbly humming, we lie shoulder to shoulder,

Close my eyes and remember: in vino veritas.

[tender-indifference]

Here, from the top and the bottom of the world with you, as far as the eye can see, the heavens exhale a darkest darkness, swallow the world’s whole globe - but you pinprick the universe’s blackness for the gleaming eyes of infinities of stars.

[tender-indifference]

Memory

North a little, East a touch, A smidge to my right ‘Til you zoom in – Then what happens? Where are you? Doing what? With whom? 

There, in your place, How many colours Are in your sky, And in your sand And the leaves in those trees Where you are? 

These trees are just green, Green like my name, And only a flash Of a fraction of the thousands Of avocado, olive, Evergreens in your eyes.

Now the trees are green, And tomorrow they will be Golden, copper, rust. They burn themselves away, And I’ll be left behind, And you will drift away.

[tender-indifference]

On return

I am an exhalation An evacuation of the lungs Choking with smog And things unused, The bits we didn’t want.

I’m a ball of scrunched-up paper That will never quite lie smooth. Once crumbled up, These scars are stuck - Never again like new.

I’m the scars that line your forearms, A reminder of the days We spent alone In twilight zones Which cannot be undone.

I’m the dog-ear at the corner Of the books we didn’t cherish. We ripped the pages, Bent the cover, Snapped the spine forever.

[tender-indifference]

words after silence

do you feel it in the silence, in the blackness of the night? do you feel it in my breathing as your limbs are curled in mine? do you feel it in the flutter of my eyelids as I sleep, as you hold me, as you soothe me, run your hand across my cheek?

do you feel the words I can’t say? do you know the thoughts I hide? do you see the way you calm me on the phone, way past midnight? do you know I know I love you, rhat I hold you in my heart? do you know how much it hurts me when you leave, as we must part?

[aseaofquotes]

Carol Ann Duffy, “Words, Wide Night”