Blood Wedding
(for Madrid.)
Say it aloud. The town shakes like a morgue;
Man and blood lie divided by the purge.
Gather me in a pale moonlit gown, and I shall collect the dust, strewn by my night and your wondering.
I'm partial to this one too; just one sentence and it says so much.
Keep them coming drom
By the way, if you open a free email account with Yahoo, you will be able to store 100mg. You could send email to yourself and save all your lovely poems and thoughts on line.
Cartwheels
Lying the wrong side of the bed
She thinks of
Turning cartwheels in front of careless cars.
Not because of
Some wish to disappear in long,
Dark fountains, but in considering
The whole spectacle:
The grainy weather; the parted trees;
The drivers always busy doing nothing;
The spitting streaks of rain, and
Finally, the acrobat--
Her tresses like a fire's remains--
Enters and bounds
Off the diving board pavement.
Will the coming Pantheons
Give way? She jumps,
Fingers grazing the street like knife-edges,
Caught in the black land of a second's distance.
But don't stop posting here! I want to see more!
As I don't want to end on an odd one that I've saved for a reason that I can't understand... I shall post two more...
The dusk is dancing, and it is raining outside. The entire world closes its eyes to the outside world. Refuse and fast-food packets fall, where snow should. Christmas Eve. People like to think of such a night as well-balanced families sitting protected by tame fires. Christmas was here, in the train terminal, but in a different way. It was in the quick tinsel and easy plastic, lying unhappily on the chocolate machines. One can only see it when the grey trains come, with them their manic light. People are coming home; people are going home. It all seems to be manufactured, in some Tokyo lab.
The ticket office is dim. Around it, dormant knickknacks of minor value; a bear with a t-shirt that proclaims, 'I went to Skegness, and all I got was the 'flu;' a pregnable sign that reads, 'you don't have to be mad to work here (but it helps' more conventional crap. A harassed-looking, haggard woman (stress had made her age indeterminate) contends with rabid passengers after another delay, of seven or eight hours. Those who can, or want to, buy into a more reliable means of transport. A few stay behind, at the mercies of leaves on the line.
Amongst them, on the featureless platforms, sits me, clearly looking for something else to do. Looking like one from the days before being a student was fashionable, I thumb my hair and ?'The Tin Drum,' alternately. A man who looked as though had escaped from the Natural History museum sat down next to me, anxiously, fidgeting, as if he had something to say. I look at the book with more focus, but finally succumb to the indirect but unrelenting gaze of the geezer.
'So, what about that delay, huh? You were on the Leeds train?' he says, trying his hardest to engage, fit to induce squirms.
Reluctantly, I reply 'I had expected this; anything to do with transport automatically means different time zones. The time on the ticket is always right; it's your watch that is five or six hours early.' He bawls with laughter, in that histrionic sort of way that the least winning breed of liars uses. I look at him, wondering to what kind of lunatic I speak. He continues, 'Oh
different time zones
oh my word, that's so good
I mean
'
To kerb his mirth, I say, 'it's just exasperating when it happens on Christmas Eve.'
'I agree; but then, I'm delayed for a different reason' says the pallid man, hiding his fingers in his pockets. 'I've lost my dog.'
'Oh no,' I say, in that wonderful tone of voice mastered by having to listen to hours of how pornography has inspired every masterwork since 1860. The 'how great; next please?' voice. He doesn't take the hint, and continues. 'How I wish that I were at home, with my wife and children!'
I would want to say, 'just go then, if it mean so much to you,' but have the better sense to ask 'why don't you go home without the dog, then?' At least, it had seemed the best thing to say at the time, but it provokes a wonderful sermon on how much the dog had meant to his wife, how it saved her when her experiment with Turkish baths went wrong, and countless other 'accolades.' Then, out of the blue, he asks me to help find the dog. Although walking around a town at night with a complete stranger on Christmas Eve may be others' idea of fun, it wasn't mine. I make a bumbling apology, dotted with excuses.
'What else have you to do?' he threatens, 'wait here and do nothing?' Then he utters the worst words of all; 'It's gonna be the last Christmas I see her alive.' His throat catches on the last word, and his fat cheeks go the most fascinating shade of crimson. Forced in by his emotion, I hail the taxi.
The exercise was utterly pointless. Darkness consumed everywhere. For a few hours, I sit on one side, geriatric nutcase on the other, looking out into nothing for some dog. Balti houses and pizzerie pass by. Clearly, he tries to pique me. He tells me tales of escape from Poland, dubitable stories about the Vietnam war- thinking that bravado compensated authentic dates-, his moans and his faux philosophical conversations about 'what joy is' only served as drops coming out of a lead tap. For the spirit of Christmas, I involve myself in his musings about how the council forced ten-year-olds to look at babies' heads in buckets in an anti-abortion scheme. 'I don't need to see a murder to know that it's wrong,' he says. 'I don't need to debate it all tonight,' I respond. He goes onto the risqué subject of the demise of the steel industry.
He looks surprisingly blasé when, after five hours, he submits that we will not be able to find the accursed mongrel. He suggests that we back to the train station with the words, 'c'est la vie,' and then- for the first time in hours- he asks about me. Naturally, I lie.
I could not bring myself to ask why the mongrel that had taken my night was of such importance at the start, and of such inconsequence at the end. This was not because I am a gentle soul, but because he might ask the taxi driver to turn around, and we would start looking again. Eventually, to stop a discussion about his seductive powers with the unsavoury driver, I say, 'won't your losing the dog aggrieve your family?' 'No; I have no wife and children, no dog.' I sit in silence rather than chastising the man, and get out of the taxi at the station.
'Thank you; at least you did something on Christmas Eve' he bellows out the window, redundantly, 'what was your name again?' I make a pseudonym quickly, rather than ignoring him- I think it was Aurélie- and walk further away from the man, into the falling snow.
Wild stars awake
In pearl-drawn sky;
No heart weighs down
Those worn white spheres.
All things can burn,
Or fade to ash--
But you guide still
To poor, to rich.
M'aidez
Trudging through broken lines of hardened bones,
Dried up like raisins in the smoking sun
That never stops its sulkiness above:
This is not how those old, sprawled stories termed
Valour and honour; coiled up like stiff snakes,
Shrinking from fire, and from falling shells.
We see the bloodied truth of everything
Lain here: meek children, gun-tired, cowering
From looding garlands of white, blinding flames--
Holding their tarred arms out, crying m'aidez.
Drom, your writings hold so much romanticism and as you know that's the kind of poetry I like to read and write also. Keep posting.
As you know, dròm, I love short stories, and that one about Christmas Eve that you posted was just wonderful.
CB: I feel honoured that you would class me alongside yourself. I delighted in (sort of joint-) working alongside you, Edgar, Cav, Geligesti and others in the Spontaneous thread; perhaps we could revive it, when the summer fatigue starts to wean.
Smog: I am very glad that you enjoyed the story. It was written in a rush for a short story competition, here, on A2K, that never got off the ground. I have about fifty ideas for short stories, and many-- like the SP one-- that need finishing; hopefully, one day, I will get to these ideas, when the inspiration hits.
This is a small part of the Duke of Larisna's first soliloquoy... I have been writing a little play rather akin to a bastardized version of the Romances; anyway, part of the story is that he used to rule half of the islet, with his sister's uncomely husband owning the other half, Pasatia. The Duke of Pasatia raised up an army of four-hundred men and stormed Larisna, in which only about twenty lived. Most of the four-hundred men were supplied by the evil King of Balita, who wanted a presence on the island. Foolish Pasatia did not know that Balita would take all the island, eventually, for its rich silver. They stormed Larisna at night,-- but we don't know the details of it--; and the Duke was woken too late by his servants.
They took his daughter, Aurora, and where she had lain lay a pool of blood; so the Duke assumed the worst. The Duke was too busy looking for clues as to where they took his daughter's cadaver to raise an opposing army, and so Pasantia called himself king of the islet. Larisna is left with only his second daughter, an uncharming but compassionate and wily Agalia, (whom a servant of the 'King' of the islet would try to take later, who would also govern the island when Larisna had left) his worst but most loyal servant, Osman, and a tiny stretch of beach with a cove and a view of the thrashbearing sea. The story gets truly complicated, until the denoument in the end. Larisna is a flawed character, like all of them, but he is one of the most humane, even through his trauma.
I often like to sit upon the sea
And claim its expanse as my own. No one
Can taint its colour to a carcass-red,
Or burn its miles in savage love of wrecks.
How peaceful is the sea, even when wild,
And uniformly shows the sun at rise:
Never is it drowned in itself.
Wind speech
The wind is not proud like the moon or sun;
It sprints past houses, sheepishly, discreet,
Tumbling at times, breaking its days away
Clothed in an awkward inadequacy.
Unlike the others, it has no firm place;
Unlike the sun and moon
It neither tames the night, nor governs noon:
Nor has it their wide cloaks to twine the world
Around its wornwide fingers. Yet, because
It's not entrenched, its role's more principal:
It veils;
It works the soil between the sun and death;
It runs in pointlessly amongst the rest
Withers the clouds and shakes roses'
Blood boughs, as its wide power grows?-
Taming the road, through old slacks of nowhere.
There, like a heathen to the night,
Upon your ragged face of moss,
The pale moon aches. No fire lights;
No shoulder's left to bear your loss.
And one last one, before I start pulling out more stupid ones...
Grandparents walked the halls by candlelight;
Each corner of each room recalled their trot.
The candles did not pacify the dark,
But rather added to it, with their slow
And wispy light, which rose above like smoke.
Some power fault had brought about the lack
Of manufactured light within the house.
A fire had stricken miles around, so we
Had to depend upon what they could find.
And they found candles from their wedding day.
Their faces, sponges of experience,
Seemed old as silk. The candles let me see
That each line crossing seemed to tell a tale--
Of dancing past their curfews in some barn;
Or courting loves who could have changed it all;--
Above all, what I saw in their vague streaks
Are two things: how they never would have thought
That youth, or youthful bliss, would slip from them:
They cut their cake; they crossed their Water; grinned
In photographs, just as the past built up
Into the case for their mortality.
The second thing was selfish, I suppose;
How their plight would unleash itself on me:
On all of us; whatever we may do.
We had to go: and by soft candle-light,
We left them to their wedding day, anew.
Very funny play, Drom! I really liked 'Wind Speech' too.
... I prefer the short ones too. I didn't know that Yahoo offered 100mb; unfortunately. I'll do that right now. 
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