.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.

Any Distance

Any distance you can map, you can fly.
Picture it like this: not as a web
of red and blue looped across the page, but as
a vast expanse of open sky –
with you held in its heart like an opal;
the opus. Your icarus wings carve
sunspots, trail clouds and split
the heavens in two. You,
strung high, the world below blurred
by the fevered myopia of vertigo
and the sheer fear of the fall.
But know this - that however far you go,
you will remain always
the centre of it all.

* * *

For my fellow king's leavers. I love you all and will miss you epically. ♥

Of Star Guts and Satellites

-So;
what is it like, learning to grow?

-Well, first, there's a spark:
a kick in the core
of your nerves, like a light
blinking on through the dark. Then,
you've got to think
yourself into the part; ignore your
splintered limbs and learn to stretch,
fearlessly. Like roots into earth.
Question and answer.

-Does it hurt?

-Only being fearless. That's like having flint
stitched into your spine. But time,
you'll find, will heal these scars –
ours is the business of rebirth. Even cradled
in the hold of our half-formed words
we manage to pluck
the stars from our diaphanous skies,
and the chewed jewels from our throats.
That's natural selection for you.

-Or is it just luck? You see, I'm not
even sure how to find my feet
right now, let alone play dot-to-dot
with constellations.

-But you must understand
that the world is full of such complications.
Tracing the veins beneath the surface
isn't the same as finding your pulse
in the first place.

-I get that. But space -
what does that have to do with anything?
Lose the metaphor: you can't confuse
Orion's Belt with rib-bones, or the Big Dipper
with your intestines. They're not remotely
comparable!

-But don't you see? They are.
For we are all born from the insides of stars -
we wear the indelible fingerprint of the universe,
and bear the pockmarks of each black hole
that’s sucked our bones. Spat
from star guts; that's us! We're snips
of trails of comet tails: by-products
of the Milky Way.

-Wait – so now you're saying
we’re cosmic waste? That galaxies
are a scatter of snapped synapses;
fractured nerves splayed
across the universe,
I can believe – but that we
may have sparked from that same circuit?
That our spines once lined
the stomach of some supernova?
What does that make us –
foetal stardust?

-Not exactly. We’re more reflections
of the sun, undone. Like a litter
of moons, we glow echoes, refracting shards
of glass and wisdom equally. Our path
is one of satellites, wound round our hearts;
and it's these glimpses
of poetry, flickers of meteor showers,
that help us grow.

-But you said growing was a stretch,
a flash of light and the spreading of roots
through rock. Question
and answer.

-And that's right.
You've got to have your feet
planted firmly on the ground
and s t r e t c h
before you can learn anything profound.
Sometimes in the asking, you'll find
the answer. Other times, you've just
got to learn to stop staring at the sun
and look around, above, beyond
the obvious.

Be fearless:
persevere, and
keep reaching for those stars -
'cause only when you rise
can your mind open
to the skies.

* * *

This is a piece of performance poetry which, hopefully, will be performed by a couple of my amazing friends at our school's Leavers' Concert in a couple of weeks time.

Hence some of the cliché images - trust me, this is a lot less soppy than the original version!

Inspired by my poem Paper Planes which is apparently one of my friends' favourite pieces of mine, and was the front-runner to be performed. But it wasn't very suitable, so I kind of took it and rebuilt it in a different form. Hence some of the borrowed lines/ideas in this.

This is also inspired by an amazing poem I read a while ago now by mintleaves which is far cleverer and more poetic than mine. It's where the image of 'star guts' comes from. So thanks for the inspiration!

Wasteland

They told me how winter
strung the skyline with garlands of
stars and staccato limbs, and how
the night air bit chapped lips. And
they told me

how these lips
sung as spring spun
sweet silence in a three
four tempo, lullabying the days
that crept like chloroform across their eyes. And how

summer sighed, and
collected their sleepdust where
the air ran low beneath the
rushes, the grasses, scratching
whispers into the sunlight, feathered
with dreams. And

they told me how autumn
was absent – still
broken from the fall. But no

body thought to tell me how
nature is shelved and flawed;
how time lags; and how

the seasons can be thrown away
in plastic bags.

* * *

Written for my school's poetry competition of which the theme was 'the seasons'.

I drafted and redrafted this so many times, and it has come a long way since the first draft. The subject matter has changed loads during this time, from the death of a loved one to climate change. I really, really wanted to get away from the massively over-used 'spring is like this, summer is like this...' structure that is a trap all too easily fallen into when writing about the seasons. Same with crappy metaphors with the weather echoing the seasons of someone's life.

So here is something that does not quite escape the trap, but does not fall straight into it.

Some days I love it, others I hate it. Definitely not competition-winning standard, but then I would never really choose to write a poem on the seasons, so it was enough of a task to write anything at all. Not sure if I'll submit it or not. I guess we'll have to see if I can muster up some more traditional poetry shizz before the deadline...