.mars

.

He still choked on goodbyes,
words like 'charred' and 'charnel',
but it always fell to Mars to make
the house of bone and regolith,
to take fingerprints from the dead.
He breathes the scenes of crimes
time after time in his own grim theatre.

Like a surgeon, he sculpts the earth,
wreaks revenge and wreckages.
Teethes soot and stones into the tired wings
of ribcages, wishbones - each one

a promise. That one day,
bulbs will breach the eyes of skulls,
that fruits will fill the skypits of the lost.
One day, these bruises will amuse, and
all that bloodrush will be just blush
beneath his skin.

.

* * *

Ta-da! The final piece in the mythology series!
_{[Yes, I'm fully aware I've missed several key gods out (including Pluto, dammit!), but 6 gods, 6 goddesses is quite a nice, balanced number.] :P}

Mars was the Roman god of war, revenge and courage, but also spring and growth in nature. That sense of rejuvenation is what I found most interesting about him.


You can see the rest of my (now complete, at least for now...) mythology series here or on my dA page.

.vulcan

.

Dug deep beneath the earth, there is no light.
No footholds to electric nights or larvae of
synthetic flights. No future. Just Vulcan,
bone lonely, with only his primitive kind of hunger
and a longing to hear something other than
the cemetery talking, walking over him. Unearthed.

This is his forge, where the flower of amnesia,
allowing one man to rewrite another, grows molten -
blown into glass, gunpowder and pyrotechnic stars.
Past, present, but only the future scars in the dark,
this life in transition. And though over and over
he's said it's over and done with, there's always
more. Always a greed, a need for hunger.

God of fire, Vulcan sulks alone, lying low
below the mountain. Nurturing burns.
He's learned to hide his heart, smoked
and charred, but still he chokes electric,
growing on into stone.

.

* * *

Vulcan – god of fire, blacksmiths and craftsmen. His forge is beneath Mount Etna, where he forges weapons for the gods and heroes.

I've always imagined Vulcan as a wretched kind of figure, twisted with loneliness. Probably because my interpretation is based on the impression I got from the Roman Mysteries series I read when I was little (I was quite literally obsessed with it, at one point :P).

Wrote this several weeks ago now (sorry for the slow and multiple updates!), and I'm still not entirely happy with it. There's something a little iffy about the way it slots together...


You can see the rest of my mythology series here or on my dA page.

.jupiter

- Is this your first time drowning?

I'd let you speak for yourself, but I note
that in your – not inconsiderable – credentials,
it states you're a compulsive liar.
And you've a throat of thunder, at that.
You've been choking back
on atelophobia ever since you woke
under turpentine skies. Wondering why
the cat has nine times to die
and you have none.

- What happened to the sun?

You know only too well.
You gripped it too tight
and snuffed out the light.
Show me your borders,
your whalebone girt,
and I'll show you the way
the rays will pucker your skin
like a Nazi lampshade.

- What about the thunder?

Yes, what about the thunder?
The way you dialled telephone numbers
on knucklebones? The way you put your ear
to the floor, one foot in the door,
and felt for a pulse?

Each of these is a symptom of acute
sickness of the mind:
labyrinth disorder and your own kind
of Stockholm syndrome.

But I'm curious -
did you ever get an answer?

- And who sent the rain?

The answer's the same;
the same old shame
burning like a bolt
through the blue -
all that's left of you.
I am the perfect mouthpiece,
the missing organ,
and you say it all
in the way your bones
groan under stress.
In the stories I spin.
And in the way you begin
to stumble as you
carry yourself
home.

* * *

Yes, the mythology series is still going!

Jupiter – ruler of the gods. God of the sky, lightning and thunder. He had many alternative names, including 'of the light', 'thunderer', 'defender of boundaries' and 'sender of rain'.

There is only one voice in the poem. He's the doctor or the politician or the priest - the mouthpiece of the gods, who really never get a voice of their own.


You can see the rest of the mythology series here or on my deviantart page.

.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...

.neptune

.

After the months spent in utero, walking feels strange.
Ground is sound in colour, synaesthesia beneath the heels,
watered down to reveal a horizon of endless blue, and Neptune.
Opening himself like a oracle. He is all mouth: a throat
of thunder, teeth a string of binary numbers. Kether of kelp,
barnacle bones strewn in every bottled message, each letter of
HELP scrawled into the shoreline. A missing-person clue.

Feet rubbed raw, he heads for the ocean, where those water-
logged wishers wash such surface wounds with their salted tears.
It's a pain that's only real when you're reeling, that you can only
find when hanging from fish-hooks and the coral-plugged ceilings
in the backwaters of your mind, though it's hidden behind
every dark glass. Basketcase, they may have said, but it's a fatal
tendency to identify the whole being with one interest,

and this will give him a certain distinction when he's dead;
an heir of tragedy. He looks out to sea, and sees white horses
ride the rip tide, dragging their kelpie cries and their jesus hair
through the air. They seem almost to catch and cloy, buoyed by
their bloated bodies. He would rather breathe water. But no –
he's over-exposed, caught under x-ray, so that only the bones show
through, blue-blooded. And by this, he knows, he's finally found his way
home.

.

* * *

Neptune was the god of water, the sea and (quite randomly, I feel) horses in Roman mythology.

The final stanza of this poem pays quite heavy tribute to Sylvia Plath's Medusa - one of my favourites.

The line 'a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest' is a quote from critic A.C. Bradley describing the fatal flaw of Shakespearean tragic heroes. It's one I had to learn for my English Lit. exam which has stuck with me.

And if anyone's wondering what the hell this is all about, it's about the mother. It's always about the mother.

You can see the rest of my ever-growing mythology series here or here.

.apollo

.

Apollo, sleepcrawler, trawls the sky between day and night.
Behind him, the sun enters like a dreamer, shattered. Kite-
boned and obstinate, he soars toward time, dragging the raw
white eye of light, fixed inside beside the solar plexus.
Just another dead weight.

This, he knows, is important. There are few things you can learn
from a ball of burning gas and light eight minutes too late, but
from his aerial migrations he's made several notations on life.

One : to shoot stars, you must become bulletproof. Collect your
heirlooms in the hatch of the attic, patch the holes in your roof,
and learn to read braille by lunarlight.

Two : only one who fell was ever an angel. Try to fix fictitious
fractures by splint or flint, one crude paper wing at a time.
Repeat for any rip or tear you find in the fabric of the universe.

Three : he's not star-struck, he speaks only the truth. And he's just
realised that only the weak use their eyes – and that in these bones,
you can hear the horizons sing.

.

* * *

Finally, another proper update! And yes, this series is still ongoing... :)

Apollo was the Roman god of music, healing (who taught man medicine), truth (he supposedly couldn't lie) and the god of light. It was believed that every day he harnessed the sun to his chariot and pulled it across the sky. He was often portrayed as an archer.

The line 'only the weak use their eyes' is a from a song by The Romanovs called King. It's one of my latest obsessions.
And the line 'in these bones, / you can hear the horizons sing.' is a reference to the words on The Millennium Centre in Cardiff, 'in these stones horizons sing'.


And, as always, I'm going to have to ask you to see this in its proper format here on my dA. There's probably some way of formatting on blogger that I'm just too lazy to figure out, but nevermind.

You can see the rest of this (now quite epic) series here or here.

.juno

.

Summer seeps back into focus once again, and Juno
spends the moonless nights bending back into spilt-
oil images of sleep, lulled slick in a gulf cradle. She
dreams of tar babies, dredged from the deep, sucking
thumbs and fingers that spread oceanwide with the tide.
Each cry is sunken to a slumber, whilst someone shuffles
and mumbles excuses about fishbones caught in throats
and how no-one knew nightmares could float on water.

Only with heels congealed together could the tar children
translate the runes of an ocean beaten back into the ruins
of its own past, or understand how casting hydrocarbon-cut
ruts in the sea floor has scarred the shore. And only Juno,
hand-on-heart-on-sleeve (-Queen of kerosene, the god-breathed
babies and every marine casualty that slept too soon-) can realise
why the insides of the earth were uprooted in the pursuit
of persistently plastic things.

.

* * *

I've been meaning to write about the gulf oil disaster for ages, but it has taken me a while to think of the right words to use to write it with both shame and respect. Unfortunately, I don't think writing about this can ever be too late to be relevant.

Juno was the queen of the Roman gods, protector and special counsellor of the state. One of her titles was 'she who brings children into the light'.

The line 'of persistently plastic things' is definitely not a reference to the lyrics of Angle of Repose by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum).


More mythology poems:
.diana
.ceres
.vesta
.venus
.minerva

.minerva

.

Dawn, and Minerva murmurs from the riverbank.
She's watching scrolls of blue mist drag the lake,
unfurling remnants of a drowned world in its wake:
a glint of fish-tail scales, the torn leaves of love letters,
the bloated bulk of a plastic bag.

She takes a piece of each and logs them in her book
of things she took from history, picked from the pockets
of time. Each has a story to tell: a singed feather; an empty
snail shell. The twisted limb of a tree. Each sings
with its own broken flutings, its own fractured poetry.


When the rivulet where we are borne and met dredges up
the dawn's tribute, Minerva's on the edge, waiting to pluck
these fragments of convoluted memories from the deep.
She marvels at each scientific discovery found as the night
bites down on day, and the shattered sounds of time travel
each relic makes in sleep.

.

* * *

Alternative title: Of Natural History (which is definitely not a reference to a certain album by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum)

Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, poetry, science, learning and magic, and she was credited as being the inventor of music.

Again, I'm going to have to ask you to please see this in it's proper format here on my dA.


More mythology poems:
.diana
.ceres
.vesta
.venus

.venus

.

Venus broke the night. She sucked back the stars
and started to shine with her own brightness. Sick
of cold equations and mathematical divisions, all
these diametric fixations, she preyed for a collision;
for the moon to tap into the craters beneath her fingernails.
This, she called The Pruning – the sculpting of Edens
out of satellites and solar winds, wound round her sides.

She’s tithed to her own tides, moodswung as a river
cut through her insides. She's happiest when her blood
is flooded with lovers swept into her depths, sunk into
astral sockets and crater lakes. Dreamdrunk on Venus'
sweet venom, bloated with pride, they float with the tide
as it seeps in, and take their place beneath her skin.
Feeding her Edens' deep sleep in their terra of love.

But alone, she sits and counts on fibreglass fingers,
interlocked in herringbone knots, and the loveless
dove tales of each pigeon-toed goddess. Solo,
she splinters no night, just whispers like a morning scar.

.

* * *

This is it, dear readers - this is as romantic as I get.

Venus is the Roman goddess associated with love, beauty, gardening and vineyards.

The poem also makes a lot of allusions to Venus, the planet, which was named after her. It is often called the 'Morning Star', as it's the brightest natural object in our skies after the Moon. Venus used to have a Moon itself, until they collided. It has a pocked and cratered surface, with several continents, all named after other goddesses of love - including Aphrodite Terra.


More mythology poems:
.diana
.ceres
.vesta

.vesta

.

It is time. We feel the pull of summer along our spines
as we head into hibernation. Bed is short respite for our leaden limbs,
our singed hair. The air aches with the wait of it, where the embers
click and sing like crickets. Snippets of sound from the underground.
"This," someone says, wide-eyed with awe, "is what the insides
of the earth look like" - the world beneath, struck through with
dragons' teeth, pocked with open sores. The slit smile of the crater
in a slack jaw. Our scarred skies are littered with lights, many
mechanical suns spun into the ceiling, glinting like electric sequins.

And in the middle of it all, where our tracks meet, lies Vesta,
incomplete. The heat seeps from her as she speaks neat,
untranslatable lines of words, tapped out as if on a bell.
She's a shell and she knows it, tied heart to hearth. She hears
the earth and extracts, repeats an exact echo. Sometimes
she's nearly crushed by the rush of words, spilling into the air
like prayers, but by now we know how to piece her back together.
The boughs of hair that map the family tree; the jigsaw of bones;
the singed rings round her coalstone eyes. The slack jaw.

Three hundred and ninety one summers we have huddled down here.
We tell Vesta to rest, but she won't hear of it, ears fixed to the floor.
"You're sick," we say, feeling for her burning temples, the flames
of fever staking their claim, "and we won’t stand for it anymore!"
She's tired, can hardly lift her head, but she cries like a child
when she hears what we've said. "After everything I did for you –
sang songs stamped in amber, rocked you to sleep-" She quakes and weeps.
After each rebuild, breaking is easy. We simply take her apart; pluck out
her heart. She lies Promethean, slack. Her split sides smiling wide.

We turn our backs, and only then we learn
that we have nothing left to burn.

.

* * *

I think this one requires a little more explanation to get some of the references (and some of my bad puns!). Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth, home, family and fire. Her presence was symbolised by a sacred fire that burned continually at her temples until worship of her - and all other public pagan worship - was banned in Rome in 391.

Prometheus was the guy that stole fire from the gods and as punishment was tied to a rock and had his liver eaten out of him every day (which is actually Greek mythology, but never mind).

I heard someone say "This is what the insides of the earth look like" whilst visiting some caves in Kefalonia, and for some reason it kind of stuck with me. So thanks for the inspiration, random stranger! :)

More mythology poems:
.diana
.ceres

.ceres

.

Harvest rolls round again. We root up the ground, and in the remains,
bury our dead. One day, it’s said, she’ll just stop loving us. Stop giving.
There is a limit to all things. To every word, half-bitten back
in the cheek; to every outstretched reach; to every breath, choked
down. Ceres, the devoted. The sorrowing. Note: the two are remote
yet inseparable. To mother is to hold love in one hand, loss in the other,
and fix them into the bone cradle of your chest, right and left.
It is a savage rite of passage.

So when Ceres steps from cities of corn to streets of crowded houses,
the fields of open mouths seem to glut, swallow her up. She sees
her ruched brown seeds feed those who hunger, not those who need,
and it shakes her to the core. No more the mother of all - just grass.
We see her now through a glass, darkly, as she breaks, face by face. Our traced
smiles sewn stark, child’s eyes swapped for magpies’. Greed is gold.
Love is loss. Her tears flow fertile as she folds, breaks down into the land -
bone in bowel, heart in hand.

.

* * *

Two poems in as many days? I must be on a roll! See, I wasn't lying about the whole mythology series thing either!

Ceres is described as the Eternal Mother, the Sorrowing Mother, goddess of agriculture, crops, civilisation, and the love a mother bears for her child. She was protectress of women, motherhood, marriage, and her worship involved fertility rites and rites for the dead.

Please do read this in its proper format on my dA page.


More mythology poems:
.diana

.diana

.

There will be thick sleep tonight. Drugged on the dull anaesthesia of lullabies,
even the anchorless feel the tug of the deep, consuming like a love, a hunger.
Above, the moon sucks in the sky like a craving, wide-eyed. Dilate. Diana ditched
the forest for the midnight; she's stitched herself to the undersides of stars.
She spears and speaks through the mouths of clouds. Moondrunk, she's sunk
into the currents of our mumbled conversations; our fumbled demonstrations
of humanity. Hunting a heartbeat amongst a fleet of ghosts.

Sleep is her uncountry; the estuary that feeds her sea of sky. She steers
past the arms of drowned suns and daughters that reach from the waters.
Taking names, notes. Traces of heartbreak in the wake of her boat.

War-torn wishers, we flit and fall like sycamore seeds, feeling not high, but afloat.
Even here she hounds us, smiling like a child, dog-hearted. She is ellipsis, eclipse,
the call of the wild slipped behind the scythes of her fingernails. We close
on the guise of the city, the immutable face of a father, and collapse back
to our tiny premature deaths: sleepscorched breath and the smell of surgery.
Flight, distilled. Diana sits and sighs, the virgin queen, unravelling the night
into morphine; saline; the salt of sleepdust rusting round the eyes.

.

* * *

I wrote a lot about sleep whilst I was away. This is largely made up of ideas I salvaged from the wreckage of my attempt at a longer project...
Anyway, at least Greece (and its amazing mythology) was inspirational. I might make a series of these.

Also, some exciting news! Guess who's been given the chance to join the questioning panel for dA's An Audience with Margaret Atwood as part of their 10th birthday celebrations? Hell yes. :D