Past

From Ultramarine 2014 to buy click here  The sky’s a huge talismanswiping painted gardenwe meet in cyberbarsexchange kinetics,type in adjustmentshope for settlements.  

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 Breakfast, where morning glibness is wiped away by two o’ clock shadow, the look of trust in grown child’s eyes as he fleetingly rests beside me to ask for answers.  He is huge, towering above me as we walk the streets; people stare trying to perceive how we fit together.  We are borrowed for each other and somehow with luck and distance have grown beyond the parent child dilemma, we carefully skirt the issues , not because of fear but because there is nothing more to say, distance has resolved anything between us and now there’s just  life to live.  The house is sleeping with my three children beneath an angled roof, they breathe softly in a different dimensions and I’ve been caretaker to movements of DNA. 

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So now I gain news third hand, have been obliterated from your map of who to tell.  The dinner parties were always hell however you look at it, the last bastions of English aristocracy never gelled in a room together.  Children were kept out of sight ,fed on leftovers by bonded maids terrorised into keeping them in their place, and the speeches with the hard edged smiles, I was always wearing too little, looked too bright melted in the wrong places.  The other daughters - in - law seemed to be in sync, whether out of pity or right of space in the hierarchy.  I learnt to get through it, shut off at the intellectual conundrums that piled my ears, sneak an odd child onto my knee and never reveal what the champagne dealt. 

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 My garden spreads like a beautiful woman wild at the edges, tousled in creases.  I jet a path through the heavy grass unwrap bindweed from its throne: above the sky holds its gloam of grey slate roof. My sleep is scattered with stranger’s faces, long car journeys, I ride the morning like a hunter waiting for my thin wisped prey.  You’ve been hammering at my door like the postman delivering packages, but the packages are empty of everything but blindness.  Soon I’ll make plans to store you, my jam for winter evenings.

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The past is like a necklaceonce beloved, now hanging,forgotten on my mirror.    

Poetry