By the Pool in the Woods

Soft milk beneath a dying star

Rests long amongst the Beech

Oh silent tangled banks, how far

do roots of charcoal reach?

What pure intention drives them forth,

that I may once have known?  

And can these deeds upon the earth

In surrender be unsown?

Oh roots clasp me with inky arms

And plunge my shallow form 

Into the ashen catacombs

 So I may be reborn

Reborn above this tawdry rhyme

A little fist of light

Who can but burn, immune to Time

Abstract from former plight

I wrote this about a year ago. The poem came very naturally - I think because I was in one of those weird transition zones between emotions that refuse to be labelled. Anyway, what interests me now is the focus on beech trees. Beech, along with Oak, is a great giant of southern English woodlands. But unlike Oaks, which often appear dilapidated and haphazard, the really old examples of Beech (300 + years) maintain their elegant, sculptural quality. And by moonlight their bark is wonderfully transformed; they tower over the rest of the forest like Daliesque, burnished elephants.

Beech trees migrated to England around 4000 BC via Stone Age settlers who ate their seeds. Beechnuts in fact remained an important rural food source into the modern period. Yet the Beech was never domesticated, due mainly to its extended lifespan (Some trees don’t flower for 50 years). It’s fascinating to consider that prehistoric humans may have therefore collected and distributed the seeds, knowing that only their children, or perhaps even grandchildren, would reap the rewards.           

True Life

This is a piece I wrote ages ago for a friend’s magazine. It’s meant to be some sort of absurdist take on our plastic culture, written in the confessional, semi-illiterate style of tripey women’s magazines. I totally nailed the semi-illiterate part…

"My family say I’m unholy, but you can't put a price on true love"

After Keith dumped me I used to just sit around watching Cash in the Attic, spooning tub after tub of ice cream into my hopeless throat. I was so unhappy with the way my body looked. It seemed like my dream of being a model would never come true. “Get yourself together!” my mate Kathy would say, helpfully tilting the sofa until I fell to the floor in a ball of realisation. I needed to do something, but in truth my ankles were all wrong and I had a back like a bad cathedral.

I’d never even thought about getting any plastic surgery till I saw a billboard in town with my mate Beth on it. It was an advert selling clocks to wives and Beth looked dead glam. I called her up that instant, and after the usual half hour of veiled criticism, we got round to chatting on her new look, which she explained was the work of a certain miracle doctor.

Dr Grampton (or Dean as I would come to know him) was not what you might call imposing. He couldn’t have been more then five feet tall and his limbs were all bunched up, as if trying to escape the world. I noticed his unusual facial spasm straight away, like a lizard snatching flies under strobe lighting -  I didn’t care though, he had gentle eyes and a gruff, kindly laugh reminiscent of Garry Bushell. We decided that I should have a total skin peel and some of the excess flesh taken out of my leg to let the femur breathe. At the end of the consultation I plucked up the courage to ask him out.

Later that night we got back to my flat and Dean began to gently caress my face. He told me I was a precious flower bud and that he was the sun, before disappearing to the toilet for several minutes. I set my Febreze plugin to ‘Cleansing Rain’, dimmed the lights and waited for him to return. The sex was fantastic and Dean treated me like an absolute goddess.

After my first operation, Dean still wasn’t pleased. He decided to make my shoulder look like Johnny Borrell and wanted to place several major organs facing outwards. Dean certainly took care of me, whispering beautiful things as I recovered from the anaesthetic such as “getting there” and “definitely an improvement”. Sure enough the job offers started to pour in from all sorts of lads' mags: Scrot, Tish, Geeza and Flaps all wanted to splash my charms across their centrefolds. It was every girl's dream, and what's more, Dean just couldn’t keep his hands off me.  It was like going out with a 14 year old or something - he was absolutely insatiable. Sometimes it did cause problems with the dressings and the healing process in general; I remember on one occasion it got quite bad.  Dean just smiled at me.  "You’re a bloody mess,” he joked, removing the wrapper from a Milky Way he had stashed in his jacket pocket.

Yet more procedures followed: a cluster of eyes in the armpit, chapped lips crudely stapled on the knee, a car battery dangling from the guts. I decided it was time to tell my parents and took a taxi to Newham to visit my dad at the bacon factory. Inside, the air was heavy with the smell of pig fat and disdain. When my dad finally saw me he just stared blankly, as David Gray’s Babylon seeped from an old transistor radio.  “Daddy, it's me,” I remember calling out, but to no response. I turned round and ran, past the greasy leering faces and out of the factory.  Later, I found comfort in Dean's words. He had such sweet little nicknames for me, like his “tiny chimera” or “Mrs Insideout”. Consoled, I felt ready to take on the world.  

Nowadays I do get loads of attention - people staring at me in the streets, that kind of thing. I think basically people are just afraid of what they don’t understand. Sometimes they will shout things out like: “I can see your lungs” or “you're dripping bile”. I remember one old guy renounced the Holy Trinity after knocking into me in the Camberwell Happy Shopper, which, despite the inevitable leakages, I felt was an overreaction. I know Dean has other “pieces” as he calls us and sometimes when I’m all clogged-up I do think about, you know, ending it all. But then I remember how caring he can be when he’s sober and how great the sex is.

Pillbox Thrillbox

March now, but still contorted to my post I rest

Ash-dusted dunes a bitter host

And the clouds confess –

Nothing.

Cancerous light envelops, entangles brown sea

And spreads its dirty lies.

Oh that I could sculpt the scene -

 White sand, white sheets and nuzzling thighs,

Not fear-hung waves ever fucking Time,

Trapping fish with dinner plate eyes.

Down telescope the wreck yawns statuesque.

But lifting metal scrapes wet skull

 Till thoughts of a dawn are paste

And dull salt-smattered gales taste so silent

Beside mother’s vicious siren -

That goose-stain from the mud-flats - grotesque.

I’m intrigued by these odd little beachside ornaments. Venturing into pillboxes sometimes evokes notions of simultaneous deep-time; WWII terror, modern littering and fornication coupled with some faint trace of an awful future use.           

Dead Pixels a Paltry Firmament

So lapsing lie in scanner’s night 

Awash with clunk and thud

Anticipating spacious light     

Like birth but with less blood

And though my head is coil-caged

My body bound in sheets

Lost mind cares not for place, nor age

Nor taunting will to sleep

Instead it rushes through the dark

Defaulting like a bitch

Before from intercom comes bark

“Repeat till he ceases to twitch!”

Stagnant Dreams of Transition

In my dreams I am pacing down endless, timeless lanes

And the brambles curl about me

And the moon drops a pallid knuckle

In my dreams I am buried by the stench of Autumn’s decadent death   

But still bludgeoned by honeysuckle

Though the nettles have boiled and hissed

In my dreams the road is soft, white, and lifeless beneath my feet like an upturned eel belly, jellied in the farmers jar  

And the thorns are crowned in mist

And the blackberries weep and pound 

Dark-hearts on a string

Deluded, they sing

And the maggots devour the sound