Touched

 

Touched (by intention) - an extract

Her boyfriend’s tongue,

Tipped with promises,

Penetrates her mouth,

Loosens, unbuttons,

Unbuckles her being;

She slides off the edge

Of herself.

 

She moves through the cinema

Of the world,

Where strangers faces

Matinee porno movies,

Eyes panning like sleamy hands

Running amuck amongst

The folds and fissures

Of her undressing.

 

Her husband has an access

To her body she denies herself:

The piercing and eating

Of her flesh;

A gift, a right, she believes

She has freely given;

An invitation to ...

A movable feast,

A candle-lit supper,

A take-away dinner,

Finger food.

The napkin of her skin

Glistens.

 

One day,

He’ll push the plate away.

The Reader of Oneself, a poem on hope and loss

Ex libris

Browsing on the bargain shelf …

A school book anthology whose leaves

Thickened the dust on the shelves

Of adolescent minds in Tottenville High,

Staten Island 7, N.Y.

I see cheerleaders – rah-rah skirts,

Thighs as pink, as firm, as prosthetics.

I see jocks, jaws as square as photo-fits,

Lettermen strutting in their varsity jackets,

Their skin a size too small for their musculature,

Their minds gripped by the image of pudenda clutched

In taut white panty-gussets; Feminine rime

Grinding against the masculine scheme.

Such urgent, relentless desires:

Dreams scored in flesh and fire.

Turned cold now.  Lost your bottle;

Hope’s sunk like a ship scuttled.

Doctors now, teachers, fathers and mothers;

Or drug addicts, alcoholics, death-row murderers.

And the poetry’s mostly gone from our lives,

The lust too, though, maybe, some love survives,

And for those who moved on, who were dauntless,

Perhaps, they’ve acquired some rhythmic, prosaic happiness.

… I reveal something cheap about myself. 

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Self-portrait, a poem

Self-portrait

An image jars, and looking up from your book,

You catch yourself, unawares, staring back,

Lurking behind the kitchen window,

Not quite a stranger, not quite someone you know:

Someone outside, someone held in the dark;

Someone deformed by shadow, yet stark;

Disfigured, but mumbled rather than spoken;

Brushstrokes dissolving: a portrait by Bacon.

Half the face is missing (an unsigned caricature), 

The head tilted back, the mouth cleaved,

Turned down, toothless – a chevron of torture,

But the features whisper where they should scream.

Something atavistic in the cant of the skull - simian;

The black eyeholes watching, assessing you as prey;

Who’s outside and who’s in: Neanderthal? Homo sapiens?

Found out, you’ve been hunted down by your own Dorian Gray. 


Click here to see some of Bacon's pictures

The self and the other, a poem

In the last poem, Imago, there was the idea of a second self, a pure self - an alter ego, a possibility awaiting realisation: the voice in our head that speaks to us of us.
It is a fiction, of course - the story of us that we tell ourselves - an apocrypha, a shadow on the wall of our cave.

Second Coming

He was a long time coming,

A hard time we had of it:

Climbing the mountain took his childhood,

The summit never in view, always over

The next rise; the deferral of arrival.

Swimming the ocean found him struggling

To keep his head clear of the waves

That rolled over him, yet pushed

Him forward while the undertow

Pulled at his tired, aching limbs,

Leaving him washed up on the shore

Of middle-age.

The desert crossing was death:

The scenery unchanging and endless;

The heat dried him out,

The thirst was memory –

Unquenchable and imprecise.

And at night the chill broke his bones;

The swallowed sun shattered to a myriad stars,

Each one a candle his breath couldn’t reach,

A thousand birthday wishes he could no longer make.

Yet finally they went out, not of a sudden,

But one by one by one by one …

The darkness reaching back,

Stretching ahead.

He had always been a long way off,

Too far back to catch up,

And I’d lose sight of him,

For years … out of mind.

Then I’d see him, distant and dim,

Dwarfed by the mountain,

Or bobbing like a cork;

Swimming in the heat haze,

Or shimmering with the cold.

Then, finally, not quite erased,

He’d disappear again,

And I’d wonder if he’d’ve recognised me,

Or I him; We’d travelled so far.

The day he passed me by,

I was certain it was him,

But I couldn’t call out.

How sure his step was;

How I envied his glide, his grace.

How could I have doubted him?

Why should he not leave me behind?

Stepping over the divided line.

The world, after all, was his:

The mountains, the seas, the deserts.

There is darkness in the jungle.

God will not tread here:

The trees do not believe,

And the fruit ripens in the mouth.

I lift my snout from the muddied puddle,

Sniff the air, and scenting danger,

Scuttle back to my burrow.

 

There was so much to say,

And yet when I found him

Shivering in my dimly-lit cave,

Flickering like a candle flame,

Our shadows made monstrous

On the damp walls,

Our breath mixed and condensing,

The light simply went out.

We were extinguished, Plato.

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