Benefactors

(a found poem from Micheal Frayn’s play by the same title)

run down the road
in the sunlight
where the railway arches.

twilight is a garden.

you were barefoot on the street,
you were not a road for coffins.

I am an empty sky.

love used to fly
and overflow.
(some people kiss on in the bus.)

you’re all cold and dark.

the day light is facing the gardens.
the world is magical.

the emptiness came down like a pack of cards,
screaming with hunger.
Daisy eyes gaze at you.
(I always wanted you.)

in the real train station,
you wanted
sex.

we just sit and laugh, wide-eyed
(I’m sorry. I don’t know how laugh).

that woman is electricity.

cry and take a deep breath.

(I’m frightened of love)
I hold love letters.
that woman: you’ll see her.
(I’d touch you.)

you’re a beast.
(Daisy’s in love.)
I look at you,
you with the round eyes.
you are daylight.

I was in the woods.

(funny to see you on a walk
in silence
in the rain.)

I laugh about falling in love
in the rain.

he looked at you and forgot
love is just
a simple equation.

we laughed and couldn’t stop.
then she just left
and I don’t know why.

suddenly she opened the door and he was alive in his eyes.
the blood rose to her cheeks
and I can laugh again.
I should marry her
(oh yes I like you).
I see you cry in trees of green, walking in the night, still laughing.
I’m going to start a bonfire and break the dark
the appetite is monumental
and they move round each other
could you stop sprouting up in the garden,
standing in the rain?

You must be starving…I know you’re worrying about me.

I have been waiting for you.

things of changed.

get out of here.

you don’t know how to love.

HE left.
SHE left.

he held out a flower, wanting to be loved.
it was too late.

but it’s a beautiful day
and it’s summer,
I was happy!

Copyright 2016 Golden Star Poetry 

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How to Take a Shove

she was sitting in an old chair, but she wasn’t in repose.
she was laughing at you.
she was looking at the way you hold her fingers like an infant,
searching for a person in a person right in front of you.
she had been stealing, but not for love.
she was stealing a book on how to take a shove
she was minding her own damn buisness.

she was in your arms.

she had her sweet, sweet song,
and liked to think she had your tongue
which dovetailed on her lost nomadic sentences
you never caught her kissing under false pretenses
and when her words started dripping out like smoke
within the wooded moss, the fog grey air like a brush stroke
you found an orange myrrh baloon in the sky and it was her
happy to become smaller and smaller
pointless as a gunpoint, barely much asunder
lightweight, featherweight, bit of string and whispering
take a shove and leave a shove, it’s cheaper by the dollar.

Copyright 2015 Golden Star Poetry

On Getting Used to Denial

I should be living under the floors
spending my days under an array canopy of boards
and creaking bones of the house.
I can see a man on the other side of the
underbelly
of this house
and he smiles
even though there is nothing to be
happy
about,
and the days I count,
he does not count the days
I count the days
that wait until I get out.
He has tried to assure me that
the smell of must is likened to a cologne
and the putrid smell of gasoline
is merely smoke
from our breaths,
and he is trying to teach me
that the people like their lives
above ground
and I wonder,
if he’s right.

Sunlight days
I went out
I saw pastel hummingbirds
speaking in French,
and I was,
undeniably,
insane.

the clouds were now
filling up the daylight
and there was only a
Raven
to caw out into the street
when it was least convenient,
brushing his grease shining feathers against the
brackish sky
yet seeing me
smiling,
I walked,
step by step

each foot carrying it’s own message
to the childhood I was promised
to the life I promised myself
growing up
without the help of strangers
or a guiding smile,
to keep me tied down for a while.

Copyright 2014 Golden Star Poetry

This Winter, Two People:

This winter, two people
edge upon edge
and the slight misgivings .
on the lawn the boy is rushing up the frost bitten lawn
his red button nose and pinched smile:

“what did you want from me?” he asks,
but soon all the boy remembers
is his father clutching his mother’s hand
(that’s him, that’s him, now hold it in, hold it all in)

why do all these idiotic
moronic
stupid
people
want a way out?

the world doesn’t come naturally to anyone!
when he was younger the boy lived in a strange world
full of awe at the bustle and life of it all,
in that dreamworld world where you forgot your own name
in the fancy of it all.

This winter, two people are on edge.
that delicate flower you were trying so hard to preserve
like melting snow, soon gone
and not till he takes her through the second barren dawn
will it lift her from the sleep again.

The mother will see the smiling boy
And she painfully
regretfully
remembers a lost moment.

Kissing is that act of sheer remeberance
as the two people edge upon edge
topple against the sunlight,
exposed and bare, unable to
remember anything, but trying so hard…

The boy enters the house,
his breeches worn from the wind
and the wintry weather.

Night falls on the county town,
and the homestead will slowly quiet down within the hour,
The father in his armchair, reading by firelight,
will see his son’s ruddy chapped face
in a bright white silhouette
imagining for one single guilty moment that he is his son;
and his son will catch a hopeful glimpse upward
and imagine that he is his father.

Copyright 2014 Golden Star Poetry