Miranda Whall

you

The silence of the sea 1

Without a breeze

Without a tide2

Holds you

The sky and the sea and the sea and the sky3

Hide you

You more delicate than a porcelain hairpin

Made as though with a single bobbin and a single thread

Made more unique than a snow flake

Great, uncommon and beautiful

You are the high hot bloody summer sun at noon4

You black and bake my lips5

You choke me

and heat my heart until its as dry as dust

You are the pale cratered moon

Your chalky wry silver smile

Pulls me limbless

Weak and weary eyed towards you

You raise me to the highest peak of your highest wave

Only to then toss me drunken into crashing rocks

Life itself trickles and heaves through your tiny body, unnoticed

A thousand shipwrecks and a thousand more waves have faltered at your foot

And bowed

A thousand thousand slimy things have lived on between your toes6

While you have danced

To be honored by your majesty for just one moment

Would last me a lifetime

I would hold the vision in a glass crystal in my womb

My breath held

In that moment I would see not only you my love but a lifetime of lifetimes

Because forever is within you

All the voices of kings and queens

And all the worst of winters storms

All the hot moaning summer days filled with flies

The very deep rots at your heel

The water, like witches oils waits for your command

The birds hover until you utter

You dazzle me

I am diminished in wonder and awe

I evaporate

How brave and clever you are

How thrilling you are

Snow peaked mountains that reach far into the skies to try and touch the sun know something of what you are

The swallow that each year makes its epic journey to the nest above the door knows something of what you are

If you could just see me my love

You would see in my eyes the shadows

of the long years

of sweet pain

You would see me alone on a wide wide sea

As idle in love as a painted ship upon a painted ocean

the Journey

I walked to the dark red wine sea to find you

Each footstep burnt me

Each time I blinked my eyelids scratched and blinded me

I walked meandering paths scarred into the earth’s dry and cracked skin

The sunlit wings of insects darted before my eyes

Bees and horsefly stung me

Bracken scratched and tore at my ankles

Worms blind and cold returned to the clay as they heard me approach

The birds sang their special songs after the summer rain

and skinny lizards made me jump

Now I am in your burnt green, and blue and white waters

my soul agony

I long to share your silence and your long lone hours

In the nights strange sounds of stillness

Give me a sign

Show me that our love can soar high

That it can know no bounds

And no duties

Dare to thrill me with your beauty

Dare to exhilarate me

Enchant me

Inspire me

Encourage me

And reward me

Please my dear precious love

Let this wretched soul behold you

me

I want to feel you in the cells of my blood

I want you in my phlegm

Your bile on my tongue

To taste the deepest parts of you

Dig your nails deep into my palms

Draw blood

Live on me and from me like a tick

Be my parasite

I want to lick your soul

And suck on your heart

Hold your breathe in my mouth

Taste the waste that oozes from your kidneys

I need you for language

I need you for air

I am screaming

I am retching

Rabid

Begging is for beggars and for me

Wretched and worthless

I am sorry

I berate myself a million times over, for this is my state

I am this excuse

Compared to my pain flagellation is comfort

Arsenic a tonic

Hot tar on my tongue a delicacy

Let me savor feathers

So that I can spit and suffocate slowly and blissfully

Fill my throat with cement

Throw acid in my eyes

Blister my skin over and over with scalding liquids

Then mop the puss with barbed wire

Scald me with boiling treacle then rip away the burnt flesh with hot knives

For your pleasure my love these things I will endure

For your pleasure I will dance barefoot around the earth

Through a thousand thousand frosted nights and sun blistered days

My toes frost bitten and burnt

For just a smile from you I will turn myself inside out

And then eat whatever remains of me

Again and again

I would do this

For just a word I will drink the earths oceans

And die of thirst on its salt

For you I will sink to the bottom of the deepest deepest unmapped ocean

Where it is darker than darkness

And colder than coldness

Where colour is a memory and light is a joke

Down there blind

I would dare to blink only once, just to remind myself I once had eyes

Down there deaf

No longer an ear to ring

My flesh would hang over hollow bones

Quivering only when a life passes

Or when the earth pulls

A form I think I might have been

would crumble if touched

Unknown strange and frightening creatures will feed from me

I am no longer

And that is for you

My love

And that is for you

A rotten blind colorless

Cold

memory

dying

Can I tickle your toes

Can I nibble you

Is it loud in your ear

I thought I could hear you calling

Blue then blue then blue then blue

Straining eyes and ears, are they mine to strain?

I can’t feel them and I can’t remember

Is this my limb to move

Is this my will

Is this water

Or is this air

Why is it all around me

Am I drowning

Is this life or is this death

Are you me or am I you

Am I passing through

I thought I might have seen a light, a chink, just then

Its not as if…

If I am still here its because I’m still calling

In a foreign tongue

to you

out there

lamenting

I would have peeled away a slither of the moons silver for you

I would have peeled away each of my finger nails for you

And dragged my raw finger tips over the earth for a hundred thousand miles

I would have smiled a toothless bloody smile for you

In the long shadow of your absence

I would have caught the suns reflection

And placed it before you day and night

To offer you an image of my burning heart

I would have drunk every drop of wine in the world for you,

I would have caught every drop of rain on my tongue for you

I would have brought every waking babies song to you

tied up with a single length of my hair

I would have stopped the earth from shadowing the moon

I would have taken away the thorns from roses

I would have changed the colour of the kingfisher

I would have changed the shape of clover

I would have given the butterfly a song

And the worm eyes

If you’d wished it my love

Moss gathered

Spring dared not bloom

Instead it crouched low and leafy

waiting

Reflections didn’t dance

Lips stayed dry

Eyes itched

And limbs ached

We all waited

Wings were dusty

Bellies empty

Seasons, songs, seas and stars

We all held our breath

They not as sad as me though

They not as mad as me

I was the one possessed and damned

You bastard

the Rape

A hundred massive cocks at once

All squeezed in

Pushing and pressing

An evacuated body

No more room

I cry, or do I?

Throat closed

Broken bones hanging onto a spine, maybe

Spinning, no axis

Limp

Spent

Shivering

Lost days and nights

Eyes rolled back

Dead head

A high pitch

Blood on teeth

And all over, trickling

Drip drip drip

I taste my corpse, its sweet

You

Was this my due?

In heady pain I lie

And die again and die again

death

Suns and skies

Drifting clouds

Flickering and flittering

they are on the one hand

On the other is this

Oh my God there is this

This place

Charon didn’t carry his lost souls to this place

Dante didn’t travel though this place

Because God didn’t make such a place

Stuff like rot, slime and stench

Are appertisers

This is Hell’s Hell

Shredded skin is here

Rotted flesh is here

But of what it belonged to?

Stinking and hanging listless from all that is ugly

In a bog of the blackest purple

muddy people writhed and bit themselves

their bodies befouled with ordure7

But putrid and vile this place is yet unbegotten and unimagined

There is no place for blood to even leach from here

Because life has long gone

Breath, what was breath?

I can speak of worms, snakes and serpents oozing from nostrils, mouths, gaping wounds and torn flesh

I can paint pictures of all devilish one eyed hellish like creatures too ugly to imagine

But they all left

All things forsake this place

Colour forgotten

The sun silent

Even darkness did not know it could be this dark

Hollow did not know it could be this deep

You lead me to this abyss

Not with your cold stare

Not with your denying me

But with your offering of nothing

Nothing in the face of nothing

This is why I rot and languish here with the others that have long been forgotten

This is why I cannot move a thought

Or feel the great fury of an itch that has no relief 8

Or see the strange amorphous lights behind pressed eyelids

There are no eyelids

Or eyes

Or words to say there are no eyes or ever were

Or ways of knowing I had a heart

or cold blood

Because you didn’t even know I was here

Or there

Searching for you

love

But love is merciful on wretched souls

So I tiptoe away unscathed

A glance back

A snigger

A little dry salt on my lips

And a little bruise on my hips

To dance once more on the moon

To jump from cloud to cloud

To sing with stars

And giggle with Gods

A light blue sky

And a nightingale song

A dewy morning

And my longest day has gone

My love

My deepest love

My dearest deepest of loves

I will find you so sweet, so contented and ever mine

you

The silence of the sea

Without a breeze

Without a tide

Holds you

The sky and the sea and the sea and the sky

Hide you

You more delicate than a porcelain hairpin

Made as though with a single bobbin and a single thread

Made more unique than a snow flake

Great, uncommon and beautiful

You are the high hot bloody summer sun at noon

You black and bake my lips

You choke me

and heat my heart until its as dry as dust

You are the pale cratered moon

Your chalky wry silver smile

Pulls me limbless

Weak and weary eyed towards you

You raise me to the highest peak of your highest wave

Only to then toss me drunken into crashing rocks…….

To be looped continuously….

The poem contains extracts from:

1 – 6 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, English Romantic Verse by David Wright, Penguin Classics London 1968.

7 – 8 Dante, The Divine Comedy 1: The Inferno, tr. by John D. Sinclair, Oxford University Press, London 1975.