Monthly Archives: August 2014
Mud
Reality is mud and I want to keep you clear;
keep you alight. My love for you is pure
but when we embraced on a stepping-stone
everything I said seemed as clear as the mud
we seemed stranded in. I just have to hope
you can keep your balance and not get grabbed,
dragged into any boggy ground. No matter
what mud slides our way, I hope our love
will always rise above and we will be able to share
the same stepping stone
The Silent Mill
In case you’re wondering how I knew,
a poet told me. We were bunched,
in a circle of minds taking turns to tread,
with each others juice between our toes,
when I mentioned Scammonden and
the crouching remains of homesteads
that we found there, fallen but still
holding that ground and how there was
a sadness but a strength in the energy there
and he put me straight on a few things
-the industrial revolution didn’t always
suck people away from the countryside,
sometimes the opposite occurred and
scammonden saw such an influx in the
mid 19th century that its cottage industries
and farming could not sustain its population
(up to 1500 people, from what I can recall..)
so
in an effort that seems to have been communal,
they gathered investments and contributions
and built a cotton mill to provide a future
although the mill was built it was never used
(due to the American Civil War
which created a cotton famine)
and what became known as The Silent Mill
is still there in a wooded valley in Scammonden-
we eventually found the mill
like the thoroughly piss wet three
in streams of rain from the broken banks
of a bank holiday Monday and immediately
stepped into its aura; 150 years of depletion
had seen it shed its stone; immense bars
of cut stone were gathered around like feathers
around a dead bird that never flew, all carpeted
in mosses with elder and ash coming up
between gaps and the hidden treasure, the ghost
stories are all in the imagination of the future,
what was-what is-what could be-
absorbing and looking at the past…(time’s up!)
https://deerboy.bandcamp.com/
If You Say
If you say I am beautiful then I am beautiful
and I’ll just have to get used to being
beautiful. Instinctively, I decline any praise
I am in such a state of attraction I can only gaze
I am so drawn, overdrawn, dumbstruck
by seeing my love alive in you
I forget that means you see your love
alive in me; and it must be.
You tell me to my face and behind my back-
let me know while I’m transfixed by flow
always at the window, but always words
seem too gentle, like sparks that dissolve
on the surface, fizzle into our conveyor,
whether spoken by you or me, like rain
falling into the brawny arms of a sea.
Rez
Girona Cathedral
Giant egg box ceilings with
pillars that spill down to the floor
like croquet hoops; stone to stone.
We do the circuit, absorb the caves-
the frankincense; all the saints in
ornate booths, all the stone faces-
the carvings and the drone of stone
that spreads into dark walls that seals,
daunts us within its halls, almost air tight,
forcing the eyes to the stained glass
illumination and two facing windows
lined up, as if a massive strip light
bulb is missing; like two coal holes
of painted light giving us a familiar answer
to our prayers, making us look up to hope,
but we couldn’t even throw a rope up
to that elevated place of freedom;
humble tourists we accept the awe
and shuffle around the craft,
so vast-the structure, the history-
French, Spanish, English, Catalan-
the devotion, the time and work gone in-
centuries of sanctuary for conscience,
for craftsmen, servants of belief;
their stashed treasure-on display for us
to see, be used still before going on
into a craft-less afterlife.
My Deerboy 