A Lesson in Melittology (or Tea with Plath)

“You always made the best tea”, I confess. 

Something in the method: fanning the bag 

In the cathartic lung space ‘tween spoon and china. 

“you’re too new” she mocks, “too shiny”,

Indisposed in her sketchbook, tracing the tentacled yew tree

Down to its most primitive honesty: its brutal 

Old-man nakedness

and child-bearing insect chambers

Then down further still to where its bony roots gift hair to  

The all-seeing Undermoon-

          “What of the Undermoon?” I start,

“Off topic”

          “and the yew tree?”

“salvation” 

          “and red?”

“humanity.”

          “Then what of sentience? Of masturbation?

                        Of the lions we left to nurse the newborns?”

“How round their heads would look in crowning jaw”. 

We bake, as usual,

Outwards -> in like Grandma did, 

though our cookies are never so sweet.

“I don’t like eyes”, she offers after a pause.

“I have too many windows you see,

Too many stalls. Peepholes.

Too many cracks and crevices they can crawl into 

Like after-9 anti-gentlemen

Hunting the Blood Egg.

O eyes, eyes, eyes,

Hooking to me like pollen to the pelt of the fattest, 

Most barren honeybee.”

          “But what of the faces? The sockets they alight?”

“They would have me a table-top tragedian!

A pocket-sized Rasputin wound up to dance my

Ends again and again, a quavering filament 

afire 

afire 

afire. 

O would you not just unplug it all? 

Break from that wheezing old Undermoon?

What has it offered you anyways?

For I have known the pain of sunrise, 

How it soars like a fist - 

A swift influenza 

Blistering the grassy worms that wriggle like

Fingers on my summertide lawn. 

O tell me, would you not just unplug it all?

Detach from the great milky umbilical 

That holds us all distinct? 

They do not see, they just do not 

See!

Poetry is no gift to beauty,

It is an amputation. 

It is a funeral.

A grey hair. A gold tooth. A black leaf. A freckle.

It is a death 

of part."

“You do not see”, she smiles.

“you just do not see.

You’re too new.

Still just

Too 

shiny”.

On Regimented Nihilism and Stockholm Syndrome

i. 

The flowers are not welcome.

They are tuneless and crass, a greasy regiment

Of soil-fed priests cutting deals with vagrants

In their subterranean Duchy of undying Narcissi 

And blood-metal towers.  

They are headaches; 
Tiny robots of precision, 

Their sharp anvil teeth relentlessly grinding sun as sky-shy

Invertebrates bathe indecently in the thick oil

Of their ancestors 

Coagulating clot-like in the straw-drawn rivers

Snaking around this Demi-kingdom of half-dead cigarette butts. 

(I will not read the suicide notes they leave on the snowy cobbles, 

I will not.)

ii. 

They are of the Oldworld, prejudiced by their pedigree 

And disfigured by their resolute nihilism. They care not for sentiment

Or blithe being, yet they are ubiquitous!

A rotating sorority of predatory nurses cloaked in the

Redundant asymmetry of their own spoon-fed asexuality. 

(They ate all of the pigeons... they won’t come back.)

They have split my garden, 
Ripped it blindly into a colour-coded 

Regime of repetition, the leafy giants lassoing bees

Like furry humming balloons as laboured ants are held to order

Along the cracked checkpoints of inertia. 

They are everywhere: a shoal of anaemic anaesthetists 

Rooted in the waters of my subdued cognition, 

But I will not join them!  

iii.

I will not be that flower!

That sickle-spined orphan of communism, 

Shuffling heavy-leafed 

Into a personal apocalypse of howling morality. 

I will not be that flower, 

That rip-roaring shadow of light-stem 

And endless eyes, 

But I’d be the happiest prisoner...

Swapping spit with Moscow as Father rapes the winterlands

And the neighbours’ kids clap like geese 

With fat livers.

Yes, I’d be the most obliging prisoner, 

A downtrodden god with a dirty face

Knee-deep in reality and awash with the stains 

Of a pre-war dystopia. 

Oh, I’d be the most forgiving prisoner,

Breaking my wrists at the Altar of Weeds and

Content to accept the inevitable singularity 
Of existence,

But I will not be that flower. 

I will not.

I will not!

The Haste of Yellow

Summer took the first bite.

I recline, a bruised mushroom

Peeling shamelessly in this musty kiln 

Of faceless wasps. I threaten to explode.

To inflate to the size of a Roman God, all red-eyed

With the sale of Pompeii; but the bite was non-committal,

So I retreat. 

Again.

Only half-awake 

As It bloats recklessly along the suburban midriff, 

Arms clouding a malarial sun that buzzes with the epileptic frenzy

Of a light-drunk cicada. 

It’s always been like this, 
Us sitting eye to eye, 

As ugly as the other and skinless in a souring garden

Where the day is a butterfly-eater
And August is a hallucinogenic rash
That paws at the inchoate peace we've built
On dust caught out by prying sun-threads. 

We have a difference of opinion you see;

I wear my religion like a hand-plucked sheepskin, 

While it prefers to keep its in a loose jar that tolls

On the hour. We’ve come to an agreement of sorts... now.

But I dare not sleep, for once a year Winter feeds 

Its securities into the mouth of this obese child of heat

And it once again dips its toes into the unchartered waters of 

Our contested sovereignty. 

One simply cannot underestimate the haste of Yellow.

See how it stalks the scrawny tide-turners as they drag

Their little pieces of sea across the land. 

See how it disorientates the lowly fireflies as they impersonate stars 

Around old whisky bottles. And see how it scratches

At my nuclear skyline of half-eaten curtains 

And vacant window-lickers. 

This will not do, this flailing treaty of disarmament.

I will raise an army - exonerate the dissidents, and mobilise 

The curious little bone colonies that live like overfed lichen,

Gnawing on the shallow warmth of 

A noxious rockery. Have you heard them? 

That despondent rustle of 

rock         upon         rock 

In earthy mimicry. They know too well the 

Realities of a world where you learn to cry

Before you talk.

Then we will rally, 

A chain-smoking march of the Empties, 

Arm in arm and sewn together as we scale the shoulder-blades

Of a foreign mountain and take Summer while it sleeps. 

And then I will turn on them

Where all can see

And gobble them up 

one 

by 

one.

For this is a one thing.

We are a one thing. It is I, and I alone 

Who will raise this kingdom of white noise

And compulsory sedation. Who will reinstate a monopoly of grey

And paint a night that cloys like toffee.

For grey sets the scene for a most panoptic introspection, 

And I’m afraid our displacement is far more guaranteed than I’d hoped.

The Melodrama of Solidity

The sky doesn’t laugh anymore,

But folds autumnal and crisp in our palms,

Papery and fish-bone thin;

Its brittle horizon safer in copper resign,

As we ice things, sober on chalk, 

All holes, friction and discontent,

Hedge our clouds in a tumorous fashion - 

A windless artillery against this stale skyline 

Of hopelessness and self-consumption. 

We haven’t always sold our steam in rusted boats, 

Landlocked in algal waters as brined mist corrodes our cobbled past. 

We once feasted on charcoal, rain, and the maimed chime 

Of Big Ben dressed in his best oily philosophy,

Breaking atoms along the ley lines with dirty feet

And a wooden conscience. But now we drift, 

Surrendering to the wars in shadows

That breathe heavily on our starving eyes

And slurp at the metal we sold our names for.

The Earth has forgotten us. It lives on its knees,

Feral and drugged, suspicious of our hands,

And the birds are nestless, 

They fly like rocks, overloaded in submission and

Judging in their applause. Though I will not feed them.

Not now, as we stand on the brink of Land’s End, 

Ensconced in the melodrama of solidity, 

Our discoloured empire draped in the sighs 

Of a collapsing moon that has long since regretted us, 

Violent and incoherent as we cut its hair at night.

“You have to smile”, they said, it makes it easier; 

Though you can’t love in bone, and the hollow beaks

Growing between our footprints threaten to unsettle 

Our instability. We must embrace the tragedy of silence,

Grab it by its tail, and pin it to the naked masts, 

Wash our rags in the bones of blue,

And swallow the coal-bred depression 

Foaming in the dreams of the altar-less monks

Who fought so long for the nothingness we call our own.

No, no. The sky doesn’t laugh anymore, 

And for that I am glad. 

I fear a laugh would shatter our delicate state of 

Piecemeal rebellion and earthy resentment;

I fear a laugh would undermine our alloyed sanctity,

And know too well how the stars became diseased 

All lonely in the closed mouth of day;

And I fear a laugh would break the cold solidity we cling to,

Mollusc-like and babe-handed.

Though to break,

Could be a fine thing this undying night. 

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It's been nearly a year since my last, so thought I'd finish this piece which I started quite some time ago and left. The brilliant picture is called "element of the sea" by Vadim Trunov, who has many great pictures here: http://www.outdoor-photos.com/photographer/273965/. (copyright subsists in him).