A love poem, or a poem about love?

Imago

What one hopes for from love is discovery,

Not of the other, but of oneself:

Not a new self, rather something left on the shelf.

Love is rediscovery, a kind of vanity;

A rebirth of the imago that was held

Within ourselves, or that was shelled,

Discarded; the potential that had turned to dust,

Been buried, drowned, or lost;

Bartered, perhaps. But love fails us;

For what we discover under the crust,

What we see as the patina of emotion wears off,

Is rubbed thin - sanded down, abraded, scuffed -

By the ordinary, by the routine, is ourselves

As we were – unchanged.

Departure is arrival.  A similar unshelving

Of shock is sustained

When we see the soft disfiguring

Of our once unique features

As our parents emerge before us

In the bathroom mirror.

Life, fate, love, DNA will deliver

This unexpected, inevitable detritus,

The piled high crumbling of certainties,

The peeling of skin, the shedding of identities:

The plastic surgery of destiny.  Ineluctable!

And so, what we discover about love (the chrysalis),

And what we learn to take from it (the stasis)

Is that it simply makes being alone more bearable.

And what we thought we were was a dream, a hope, a notion; 

A drop of pure water dropped into the salty, tidal ocean.

Imago: Entomology  the final and fully developed adult stage of an insect.
            
            Psychoanalysis an unconscious and idealised mental image of someone,
                                      which influences a person's behaviour



The voice in your head, who is that?  It's a Chinese whisper.

What was the original message?

Nobody changes.


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A poem on the impressions of childhood

Childhood

Childhood,

Like a question unasked,

Hovers

In the silence between the pauses.

Childhood,

With its dog barking,

Chained and unfed in the back yard,

Is still straining against its leash.

Childhood,

With its stunted branches and fallen leaves,

Its fruit unpicked, or rotting on the ground,

Stands too close to the house and blocks the light.

Childhood,

With its cracked façade and leaking roof,

With its windows starred from stone throwing,

Has condemned its inhabitants.

Childhood,

With its locked doors and unswept floors,

Has thickened its cholesterol dust on the shelves

Of unread books.

Childhood,

With its plagiarised photographs

Passing themselves off as memory,

Has slipped in its frame.

Childhood,

With its fat piggy bank of unspent pennies,

In an unopened drawer,

Is bankrupt.

Childhood,

With its dreams locked behind panes of glass,

Buzzing at the trapped sky,

Has shed its fragile husk.

Childhood,

With its candle left burning

To play hide and seek amongst the shadows,

Gutters in the darkness.

Childhood,

Like a question unanswered,

Hovers

Between the silences and the pauses.

       

"Oh, piteous satire upon mankind; that providence should have endowed almost every child so richly because it knew in advance what was to befall it: to be brought up by 'parents', i.e. to be be made a mess of in every possible way."

Kierkegaard, The Journals

A poem about family life; something dropped

Splinters

To begin with, you are perfect, unsullied,

A pristine exhibit, kept behind doors,

Held under glass in the museum of us;

Kept at arm's length there are no visible flaws.

Yet soon, there are scratches on the surface,

Scores in the glaze that has become your skin,

As you are slowly cooked in the family kiln;

And you’re no longer saved for Sundays’ service.

Later, you are a chipped part of the set,

Casually treated, knocked about a bit,

Used inappropriately, as an ashtray,

Or a receptacle for items gone astray

(Unidentified keys that fit no locks,

Buttons that will never be sewn back on,

Foreign coins from holidays never taken);

Or simply slipped, unregarded, under a plant pot.

Finally, you’re dropped by careless fingers,

A cause of curses and invective, an upset,

The pieces pushed aside, swept under the carpet;

Yet there will be blood, pain, insidious splinters.



This poem comes from the offcuts of the previous one, "Plasticine". Some lines didn't fit and later developed a life of their own.  If "Plasticine" deals with parents who are controlling, overbearing, seeking to shape the child into their own image, eventually to reject it, "Splinters" shows the turning away to indifference, neglect and another violent rejection.

Click here to watch the film on youtube A note on style

If the earlier poem, "The Beauty of it", was freer in style, looser in arrangement, it was because of its narrative elements.  "Plasticine" and "Splinters" were an attempt to create a more 'formal', precise yet general, image of parenthood, employing a  slightly variable rhyme scheme within four line stanzas.  I believe that rhyme in poems is sometimes important.  I certainly enjoy the discipline and challenge it brings to the act of writing. 

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