Poems

A collection of various poems I've written.

I'm getting better at poetry recently.

--

Ars Poetica

Poetry is in the crisp air and deep throughs

Dripping through like a water clock.

It measures ideas to words to time -

Abstracts and definites.

It is the harshness of a concrete wall in autumn,

A lone seagull circling,

A car on an empty road as it drones on home.

It is crinkling pages and the

tap tap tap

Of a keyboard

And indecipherable letters.

--

Skins

Standing there, they began to grow skins.

Rough callous -

Almost scales.

With that comes the wall,

It coddles and cuddles the tender

innerflesh.

Winds batter and bash to no avail and

A garden of thorny rails springs up.

--

Bones

Rusted wrecks - ships, submarines.

The Nancy here, Ann Cargill's bones -

There the men of U-124,

the bones of Captain Johann Mohr.

Bones in natron, tarry-black

Desert heat that chaps and splits -

The bones of Tutankhamen lay

In a case, upon display.

--

Talvisota

Everything stands bleak and bare around him.

Cold bites into bone even under

The five layers he wears.

Canvas, wool, heavy leather swamping him -

A monstrous pale form prone amongst the upright firs.

His hair lies crisp with ice

And his heart has frozen years back besides;

Even before these thick wastes

Until the notches on the butt of his Mosin-Nagant mean nothing.

No bodies

Only snow.

--

An Episolatory Poem to my Mother

Mum,

I know it must be hard

How you can't move or speak.

I pushed you around in your wheelchair,

Sweating in the summer sun.

You spent six months locked in that ward

With the pungent stench of overcooked vegetables

Sneaking through the doorway.

It was winter when you came home,

And I lost my head.

I spent the hours obsessing

And curling up

In on myself - a dead leaf.

All the while you called for tea

And didn't understand that your daughter was now a son.

Do you remember when dad and I brought back a deer?

We found it dead on the verge -

A yearling, antlers barely grown.

You had venison for weeks.

Ellie cried as I carried it through by the hind legs.

Body dragging and knocking on the floor

Tongue lolling.

I worry, pick at my hair -

Do you still love me, now you have a son?

You couldn't have planned this

Just like I didn't plan your illness.

I didn't plan for you to grow sick

Weary and frail

Losing weight and words every day.

Your son.

--

Seahag

It is simpler down here.

The occasional vacant moan of a whale echoes from space above.

Fish struggle across brine lakes in droves,

And herds of sea pigs crawl along

Browsing like sheep.

A corpse rocks and rocks, reanimated, restless -

Dull eyes staring into the expanding nothing,

The conical teeth and brick square nose

Calling only to grit and seafans.

Alone.

Ancient vertebrate, cursed,

Eyeless, empty-nosed

Squirms through a cavity

Drenched in mucus, skin slippery, witchy and loathed.

Here in the depths

In the company of rusted wrecks

And the endless silent anxieties of bones.