.Liquid Mercury

Writers-Workshop is holding a workshop on concrete poetry at the moment, and since it's been quite a while now since I last entered one, I was determined to rustle up something for it.

So here we are, a visual/concrete version of .mercury.

Please go and see the full-sized deviation here. For some reason this has gone all blurry in the resizing... :|


Stock:
+ Texture from Insan-Stock
+ Photo by moi

You can read the rest of the mythology series here and here.

.mercury

.

It is the magnetism that brings him back,
back, to the indigenous days of May, with its
terrestrial tilt and cadence of moonshine.
That, or the wide smile of a rift – a chink
or broken link in time.

That's it: it's simply scientific, he tells himself;
the puckered truths, traded dreams, the guilt –
it's all just a trick of kinetics, the fevered frictions
(or fictions) of the messenger. Esoterics.

But still. It's with pursed lips he meets the rip –
the shafts of split light that belt Orion
like snakes stitched at the hip, or a cruel twist
of fate, quick as silver. And this time there's no note
for him to relay or relate, because Mercury believes
that no one could be quite so helter-skelter,
so hand-to-mouth
as he.

.

* * *

Mercury was the Roman god of trade, profit, merchants and travellers, and acted as messenger for the gods. His main festival, the Mercuralia, was celebrated in May, and his symbols were the caduceus (a staff with two intertwined snakes) and a purse (hoho, moar wordplay, oh yes). The word mercurial is derived from his name, meaning something/someone volatile or unstable.

Inspired by this wonderful poem by the lovely archelyxs and Virginia Woolf (the final phrase is taken from a line in 'To The Lighthouse' - 'everyone could not be so helter-skelter, so hand to mouth as she was'.

Check out the rest of the mythology series here or here.

* * *

Finally, another mythology poem! (:

Sorry about the wait, things have been getting a little more hectic lately what with uni looming so close, and I've still got loads to fit-in in my final week at home. But I felt I really needed to write something, just to reassure myself that I still can.

It's a really weird feeling, knowing that everything's about to change. I've been trying to see the past few months as a really long holiday rather than just a limbo, but now I'm starting to realise just how much I've got to leave behind; how much of a new weight I'm going to have to take on. It's exciting, yes, but hella scary too. :P

But in the meantime, I've been trying to fit in seeing everyone for the last time (my friends and I are holding several farewell Midnight Tea Parties to mourn the temporary loss of each other), buying loads of new crap (I now own cooking utensils! Be very afraid...) and just generally sitting round feeling exhausted and listening to the entire discography of L7 on repeat. Good times...

Earthspun

Home is held in a dark place, a dank place,
beneath the musted plates of glass where, once,
I curled and crept into the rusting lungs of some cabbagepatch god.
Here, words are trapped, tapped into the husks
of my fingernails, the mouldering beds of marrow.

In the silence, I have learned to turn and face the wall;
to let the earth knot and clot in the back of my throat.
My tongue is swollen to a bulb: a stopped geranium that’s fixed to falter,
enthralled by the depths at which I can slumber without
going under. In this silence, I have learned to burn

and breathe beneath my breadth. O the beauty of usage!
I will weight in this angle of repose till I am fully gorged.
And then, when I seed and sleep, my bones will grow and strike their maps
of rot and roots below, to a Mother who is all glut, all mouth.
I will be sown - a row of milk teeth and raw kidney stones –
into the gut of the undergrowth.

I am already half unstrung, and plumped for hunger.

Just a little longer –
till I am gone to the ground, till I am sleeping sound
amidst the cracked vowels of the earthspun song.

Just a little longer
till I truly belong.

* * *

Alternative title: Sowing Stones in Glass Houses

More mythology poems are coming soon, I promise! But first, this: my entry for Lit-Community's contest, of which the theme is 'belonging'.

There are several references here to Plath's poem Who, which is the first in the Poem for a Birthday sequence (on which this is also based).

Operation Enduring -

Once in a while, it rains. And it rains hard.
A dislocated pictogram remains of the past:
the shafts of broken glass, the wedding ring picked
from the ash, the rag and bone anatomy that’s
strewn across the street. Under the tin shell of a bunker,
the people stuttered to defeat whilst waiting out the storm,
watching as the debris of their lives is sunk into the sands
of Helmand province. A man laid waste land.

This is home, someone says of a lean-to:
a couple of knotted sheets and the smell of old blood.
Next door houses heartache, Hell.
There’s an open wound in the concrete
where it’s been beaten back into a gaping,
a hunger. The children linger round the rim
like restless spirits; red-eyed, bent-backed, thin;
their skin scarred and puckered by the indents
of a rib cage, the shards of shoulder blades.
The throb of leaden hearts. This is a place

where the sky closes over heads
and mountains, sealing secrets; the broken
teeth and bones. Where a legion of poppies
raise their opiate eyes, open-mouthed at how
quickly the children can find themselves lost,
unborn.

Here and there, a stack of rubble slumps
like a charnel house or a cairn of cold stones,
which must leave them something like a sickness
for home.

* * *

My entry for Penessence's contest Afghanistan: The Pity of War.

Finally, something new. The process of writing this took several days, and even now I'm not sure it's quite as I want it to be. War poetry is not really my area, so I did a bit of research into the genre. I found some wonderful examples here, if anyone's interested.


Oh, and some more good news! Recently my poem .vesta was awarded a Daily Deviation over on dA. This is a pretty big thing for me, since it's an award I've wanted ever since I first joined dA (which is over four years ago now, eek!), so I'm super happy. :)

And do you remember that piece I wrote a while ago, Dog Days? Well, I won first place in The Flame(s) contest!