Beneath the Bell Jar

Today I found a message in a bottle,
its words smooth, rounded pebbles
beneath the tongue, verbal apostles
torn from our tangled tree-
root syntax by the sea.
It read:

{We have found sounds that bridge oceans,
we have borne mornings out of sunsets,
we have grown bones of icarus wings,
yet we cannot see
beyond the glass: for
we know why the caged bird dreams of
charred ribs and sawdust -
(we just try not to think
about it).

Caught up
in the jarring poetics of smart machines, paper
bags and iron ore, we ignore
the dreamdust, the cinereal. If we woke
and tried to stretch our knotted limbs, our cries
would catch on gnarled branches, sepia skies
and spiders’ webs, and we’d realise
that all the world’s a cage,
and our sagely words
are nothing more than flightless birds.}

Here, the message fades –
the letters coil
into spilt oil
and singed soot
has blackened the foot
of the page. I look out to sea
and see silver limbs skim
the surface, before
they sink and begin to claw
at the ocean floor.
The gilded veins of metal monsters snake
across the water, reflected
by our burntout sun.


And I am held by my own
chained pebble poetry under that sore
sky, for I can hear beyond
the clamour of my bloodbeat to
the space between the shoulder-blades that speaks
volumes without sound.
It says:

{Our mouths move,
but our only song is silence. Even our breath
is bound by blackened bones and
clipped wings.
We are broken things.}

- and over everything is
a glass bell.

* * *

There are two sides to every story. Sometimes were are so caught up in staring at the bars of our gilded cages, we don't see what's on the otherside. It's the old battle of material / visceral vs. the spiritual, I guess, just set on a post-structuralist stage.

This took literally ages to write. It emerged out of many, many ideas (all my poems start off as a collection of random phrases / images I like the sound of), half of which are not actually in this poem. In fact, this is the secondary idea for the poem I originally started to write, which is now at the stage of fragmented thoughts. It was a bit too cluttered before, and nonsensical, so I hope that the message is now clearer.