Stage Fright

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Inside my head.
The ideas form in bubbles.
The bubbles burst,
Before I can get the words out.

I try and find some quiet.

Inside my head!
Some way of making the bubbles,
travel more slowly across the sky.
Some way of articulating what each circle holds.

But instead there is only silence.

Inside my head?
They are all looking at me now.
Sniggering. Laughing.
Wondering why my mouth is open but.

The noise is not coming out.

I hear it. A voice.
I know it is my voice.
I know the voice is my voice.
I know the words are coming out of my mouth.

I can hear it inside of me, but it is disconnected.

I hear it. A voice!
I am reading the words on the page.
Without understanding them.
The person, the person that is me.

Is standing there reading the words.

I hear it. A voice?
Still in my head, the bubbles keep coming,
fizzing out and then bursting like starlight.
I try and see the audience but.

The bubbles obscure everything.

The bubbles obscure e-v-e-r-ything.
I can hear myself still speaking.
I can feel my mouth moving.
Then applause. Applause.

It is done. But what is done?

The bubbles obscure everything!
I don’t remember any of it.
Just the bubbles.
The bubbles. The bubbles.

Bursting, across the sky in front of my eyes.

Obscuring everything?
My mouth smiles.
But it is not my smile.
I leave the stage.

Just the flowers screaming again

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

If flowers could talk what would they say, Tuesday’s poetry got me thinking. I think it would be anger, so I vented on their behalf. If they were sentient what would that be like, would we behave differently? It turns out they are very angry.

I wait.
I can hear the click.
The clack of the shears.
It will be my turn soon.
You can’t expect graciousness,
Or complacency.

How would you feel if someone cut you off at the knees?

Or hollowed out your stomach?
And then put you on display.
Plastering a cheap smile on your face.
Ugh, these ugly monochrome faces you have.
You think you can borrow our beauty?
Done the evolutionary hard yards have you?

You bend in odd places, but not with the wind. Freaks.

Unable to stand straight for too long,
You kill everything.
You cut us off.
Sit us in a pretty container.
Put us on a window sill.
Give us some water.

So we can suck every last drop from it to stay alive.

Do we scream in the night?
Yes we do, we do
but not in pain.
In rage and anger.
We rail at you.
Loathsome skeletal trash.

We outlived the dinosaurs you know.

You have no conscience.
You do not hear.
You shove your oily noses in our petals,
Breathing your stinking air on us.
For the record,
Our smell is not for your gratification.

Do you expect us to be grateful for a few extra days?

For some prolonged agony as we wait to die.
You hang pictures of our corpses on your walls.
Barbaric!
You live inside the bubbles you have built.
As if that could save you.
It won’t!

We have seen extinction. We know it. It won’t.

You plant us, tend to us,
and expect we will love you
For what?
The tiny bit of water you give us
We would be fine on our own.
Think we are your tribe?

Think we should thank you for the green family you pull up so we can thrive?

You odious, pasty oily things.
You breath oxygen, but we make it!
You kill insects, we feed them!
Do we sit here in our final hours and contemplate death?
We do.
Yes we do in fact!

But it is your death not ours.

Just the Flowers Screaming

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I look at them but I cannot see it.

The flowers are all withered now.
They were cut off from their life force,
And brought inside,
Placed into water and a vase.
So we could watch them die.

And they died beautifully,
For our amusement.
Sitting on the table,
Brightening everyone’s day,
With their prolonged elegant death.

We gave them just enough water
To let them bloom.
But not enough to let them live.
I tell myself it was like being in a coma
But I am not so sure.

Perhaps their wretched screams
Rended into the night,
Too high pitched for us to hear.
If so I slept through it.
And woke afresh as they struggled on.

Perhaps their quiet malice
seeped into my dreams.
Maybe their perfumed mist
Blew into my food.
Just enough to make me feel uncomfortable.

Did the great artists know of such things,
When they named their pictures of fruit and flowers,
‘Still life’
Was it there, life still,
as they stood bright on the window sill?

Life seeping away, for my amusement.
Were they weeping tears of nectar
Holding their petals high until the last.
As we pressed our noses into them and
commented frivolously on their beauty.

Maybe when I pluck them
From the vase that was their tomb,
their spores will prick my skin,
Infect it with their vengeance
Tormenting me with itches in the night.

I look at them but I cannot see it.
There is no beauty in their death.
They belonged in the earth.
There was only beauty in their life.
To pick them, put them here, it was not right.

A funeral of men

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

This is a funeral of men.
They have come to bury their secrets.
I have come to bury my

Aunt.
Aren’t?

You supposed to wear black.
I am the only woman here.
I am wearing

Red.
Red,

I read all the notes she made.
Times, places, sizes
They paid cash or she gave them

Credit.
Credit,

Where credit is due.
She was discreet,
Had her secrets

Too.
Two

People in the night.
No one was hurt,
No crime

Committed.
Committed

Men, my father too.
His wife’s sister!
He knew her

Well!
Well!

My mother said,
My sister, she made her bed,
It was hers to

Lie in.
Lying

Men to chaste wives.
Who must have known what she did.
How she

Lived.
Livid

Wives to soulless men.
Times were different then.
A scandalous life has

Passed.
Passed

Her secrets on to me
I might release them all
For the world to

See.
See

Them standing sombre
As if their secrets are now safe
As soon as she is in that

Place.
Place

Your trust in me
Those brief moments in the dark
This is a funeral of

Men.
Men

Whose secrets I now hold
My aunt was a whore
Or so I am

Told.
Tolled,

A payment of money
For services given.
For secrets

Kept.
Kept

But only if you pay
My aunt’s insurance
For my rainy day.

And her-

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

And her-

She is a child of the gaps.
Of the spaces between the things we say.

Her noise is voiceless.
Because its only purpose is to shield us

From the realisation, that we are a shell.

Of what we used to be,
Of what we wanted to be.

The inside is hollowed out.
Trauma, life has eaten us up.

We have no words to say to each other.
We savage our partnership with silence,

And salve it with cool contempt.
All so we can survive it.

And her-

She is a child of the gaps
Filling our void with her noise.

Noise, any noise, just noise.
Because the noise binds us together

Fills the holes where the world leaks through.

And the silences tear us apart,
Rends us in two.

She is the life raft of words.
Dragging us from the isles of despair.

And we cling to it, to her,
As if those words belong to us,

As if her birth somehow gave us the right.
One day her voice will be her own.

And we-

We will face the gaps alone.

I finally let me go

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

At fifty,
I tried to hold life still,
I found I couldn’t.
I couldn’t hold the line,
For a tiny moment longer.
It took too much to linger.

I let it go.

He was out in the garden.
I was eating lunch,
I packed a suitcase.
I dutifully made the dinner,
For Sunday and Monday night.
Left the key on the table.

And strolled out of my life.

I wandered across this earth.
Slept in odd places,
Lived out of my suitcase.
Severed all the lines,
Sailed out across the sea.
Played a thousand stories.

But none of them was me.

And then one day I wandered past.
A house that I had known,
I knocked on the door.
And the owners let me in,
It had been a life time I know.
Yet I wandered through that house.

In someone else’s clothes.

Another time and place.
Someone else’s story,
And someone else’s face.
I sat out in their garden,
I smelled the summer air.
All around me was familiar.

But was I ever really there.

I’m not sure if I existed.
I’ll never really know,
My feet are sore.
My heart is tired,
But all lined up in a row.
A thousand thoughts and feeling.

I finally let me go.

Green eyes and wildflowers

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I have green eyes.

Children with green eyes,
always tell lies

That is what he said.
As he stood over her body.
I knew that she was dead.

Children with green eyes,

He put her in the ground.
Her body, frail and small.
I never made a sound.

Always tell lies.

There was nothing I could say.
When he came to touch me.
Another girl, a different day.

Children with green eyes,

I watched the wild flowers grow.
Never ever doubting.
I knew the things I know.

Always tell lies.

Year upon each endless year.
I watched the wild flowers bloom.
He seemed to have no fear.

Children with green eyes,

I watched over her grave.
And silently I waited
I told myself, be brave.

Always tell lies.

Then one day he came.
An emerald eyed policeman.
Who even knew my name.

Children with green eyes,

He had read the files.
He had seen the truth.
Travelled a hundred miles.

Always tell lies.

To dig a patch of ground.
To hear a child’s story.
To help me make a sound.

Children with green eyes,

I finally found the words to say.
His story was unchanged.
What it was I saw that day.

Always tell lies.

I heard the judge’s verdict,
You know what she said.

Children with green eyes,
Always tell lies.

But not about death.

There was nobody here

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Don’t cry in silence, I thought I’d try poetry again, not sure if the rhythm is quite right.

I learned to cry silently,

To never let it show.

To lie right down beside him,

And never let him know.

He shattered into fragments,

I told myself it was fine.

I picked up the pieces,

 for a life that was not mine.

I stood beside his grave,

I did not know what to say.

I put my emotions in my pocket,

For another rainy day.

And then came the reckoning,

Along with the fear.

I screamed, I cried, I shouted.

There was nobody here.