Trying to leave the Battlefield

Oil pastel drawing

Lighthouse Flowers in the Martian's Flowerbed.

Oil pastel drawing

Full Throttle Fantasy

Oil pastel drawing

Dark Thorny Flowers

Oil pastel drawings

Red Blooded Tangle

Oil pastel drawings

Scars, thorns and flowers

Oil pastel drawing

Full Moon Story

Last night while we sat in this dark room
I watched the fire float orange on your face
and move shadows behind your shoulders,
lighting you up in deep planet colours
as you spoke me more here and human.
Slowly you filled the room with soft words to fix forever
like a gentle spell from the good witch.

And then the fire died down saying,
"so the Moon can make her entrance," as it left.

The window stretches itself wide
to swallow a whole month's light.
Fuller and swollen hard, in it comes,
right upon you until
your face is entirely a smaller moon.
That's when I see it,
shocking me like this dark torch brightness does tonight.
It's an angel-phantom in your face I've seen
(discovered by mistake by me).
Not so human to come and mend me with your cautious grace.
I touch your skin in the dark,
marvelling you're with me and crying on your clothes.

It's passed eleven.
You take me up to the top of the hill
to feel the wind come blowing in off the moon.
We stare out.

"It's like I can smell the craters!" I'm saying.
"Mmmm..... " you say back because
of your shut eyes and
that big angel in you.

GEESE

It's the time of year when
big brown birds come from across the Atlantic,
to bark in the bay, disturbing our dark nights.
They've been circling the houses, the crest of the hill
for days,
using up our last bleak bits of sunlight
like they've read the maps on our palms
from so high up.
I watch through the windscreen, through the roof
as they cross us;
traveling faster on tough feathers,
forming a fleet in the air
like battleships
going into war.
They're making a giant compass in the cold blue,
looking down like they know something about you
I don't.

People say I've grown too sensitive
to the beatings of their wings,
to their weird shouts
but they're gathering up for something,
sweeping one horizon end to the other
to point away inhuman distances,
directions for a different journey.

Because I am afraid of them,
their straight-necked authority,
I try to re-orientate myself away from you.
I know those stiff-billed birds could tell me,
But they never say,
yes or no,
you're still home,
gone away,
not here now.

Making Monsters

Unbeknown to you
I stood in the shadows of your room
And watched you as you sewed me:
Thigh to hip, thumb to palm, calf to knee.

I watched your elegant fingers
Threading big, wayward stitches
To link my skins and make me whole.
I saw your needle flash in the dark,
I saw that glint in your eyes
As you drove the point sharply home.
I felt the heat in you
Like you were making yourself a new lover
But the frenzy was for theory not for flesh
Your haste was for history and science
Not a haste to hold me
or Have me.

You didn't take the time to tailor my fit,
To fashion my stitches prettily.
A storm was coming
And the rush
(The rush I thought was your rush of love for me)
Was for your own great name and knowledge.
When I was born
You were a monster-mother
Who would not see her ugly child.

Unnoticed

As she turns off the T.V.
fingers on the controls,
turns out switches in the walls,
allowing the quiet heave of night
to blur away remnants of the day's busy flood,

Way, way above where time is absent
but where light years ruler it out,
some nebulae forms cloud-like
into a spectacle of vast stuff and stars,
glowing out a hopeful signal to bless her head.
A flindamental thing unwitnessed,
it sends out a message
like a time capsule travelling
waiting eons to be opened.

Below, she says out a help to space,
to its million white specks
and deems that respondless spray an empty nothing.
She turns over in bed
anxious to the morning, staring at her sleep.
Meanwhile space goes on saluting her beautiflilly,
loving her unnoticed.

When The Land Spoke To The Sea, What It Said

You've been stretched out before me for a long time now.
History's great ages have come and gone with little impact.
People say you are my flattest, blankest lover
But you are my only one.
You lie beside me always like a stranger
Reflecting back sky impregnably,
A whole different world inside you.
So swellingly private that ships fall into you
And only reach land in fragments.

So bring me your flotsam-jetsam things
Like offerings to Goddesses.
Bring me your salty prizes, your hidden treasures,
Your star-shaped creatures and fish like dragons.
Bring me beautiful shells, pink and wet
Shells like encrusted jewels from the bellies of ships.

Yes, fetch me up your loveliest to gift my sacred, sandy shores
But bring me top the shitty things,
Dirty clues I can use to fathom you.
Bring me the litter and all your splintered bits,
Bring me the sewage that pollutes you,
The stinking debris that sullies your sub-aquatic realms.
Dredge the very pit of you and bring me what you find there.
Churn right into the hurt of you and bring me that too.
Lay it down on me
For I am stronger than all your crashings
And I can contain your worst excesses.
If you come at me now with your furious, frustrated waves
Loaded with shrapnel
I will hold you still.