Month: December 2020

In Winter
I burn you to ashes,
so I can inhale you.
Churn your essence with my spit
our seed in my mouth,
put us in the ground.
A thin film of the starlight of your body,
there on our seed
waiting to be split
open by the yearning,
of the unfamiliar
memory
of living.

I wretch and writhe
vomit up the bile of being
half-ling
half life
half alight with the eyes of those who
would scorch me
and make us into nothing.

To purity;
I wear white clothes and write prose and poetry
being a ghost of our destiny
is easier than bleaching the bones broken by our undoing.

Ignite
Ignite
This night like any other other calls you out in the sound of thunder from your bed
and you remember how the lightening flashed across both our heads
That night when nothing aligned and instead
we tasted the blood of one another
in the anger of injustice
still star crossed lovers
and our lifeforce spilt on strangers
who could not bear to be good friends.

Miss me, while I find sanctuary
by the ocean
between the sky and sea.
I grieve
You hold your head up while it hollows out
until
memories, memories, memories.
I make a den,
plant a garden,
sow a seed.

In Spring
I see you and me
seedling
loamy soil
roots striving
shoots reaching
and my heart knows
there is alchemy in fire
and it is tender to bury things
a while
until the light finds them
through the cracks in everything.

Last dusk
Grandmother shook the earth
and
spoke in her husky timbre

‘Go now child it’s time to drop your feathers,
go on and shed your torn and tattered skins.
Laid fresh on some one elses altar,
their use is not worn thin.’

She said to me
‘it’s time now, go’
‘Gift your best meant blessing,
hark your sternest cautions,
bury rusted hatchets,
hang out your bright white washing’

‘Child though!
Still listen to the ocean
and dig dead birds gentle graves.

Remember to sift the cinders from the ashen,
hatch a phoenix in your garden,
and reignite what can be saved’

‘In the springtime child you’ll
crown yourself in cleavers
and dandy up the lions
for now we set straw beds for winter dreamers
and tease free the strangled vines’

‘As light falls behind the mountain
leave the serfs and
sovereigns counting
and instead seek the purity of snow.

Catch the call upon the west wind
hear the silence in the hollow.’

‘Come to the cave that calls you
and listen to the void
Do not jinx the echo
but come to know
your own pure voice.’

‘Know your heart is first a tunnel
that births blood back to vein
Your heart is in the mountain,
the glacier that gave rain

so let your song come streaming
from the thawing of your pain.’

‘Now become yourself an altar
Wear the prayers you’re here to speak
Spin the syllables of a mantra
Scatter songs and stories
as ripe fruit and nuts from trees’

Lovers will come calling,
and always call too soon
those who seek the light
before the souls dark night

only fall on to the pyre 

just as

the moths

who seek

new moons.’

I am the Earth
That is why you fear me
I am her scars
Her fertility
Her deep secret reservoirs
Set ablaze at the end of history.

I am the Earth
You cannot escape me
Although you fantasize a different destiny
I am your creatrix
I am your blood
Your bones
Your body.

I am the Earth
You can try to reject me
Correct me
Rape me
And neglect me
You can call me inadequate
For your needs
If that’s how you choose to meet me.

It is only yourself you will hurt.

I remain the world
I sustain your being
Resist if you want to
Though you should know that
I am your true maker
Once you get brave
enough
to surrender
to me.

A lover left me yesterday.
We held each other and cried so long that he missed his bus twice.
His eyes are lit behind mine as a spectrum of colours I feel like I’ve never seen dance side by side before.
He never let me look in his eyes too long, he found it too intense.
To be stared at by someone with soulful fascination.
It is intense.
As am I, unashamedly.

We walked the cliffs down White Strand the days before…

The waves were huge and white and foamy and the sun was bright and I could feel them crashing in my chest. It all felt enormous, and the suck of the spray back from the stoney beaches makes a clacking clattering that satisfied some deep marrow memories that made our skins tingle. And everything was infinite out to the horizon.
And on one beach we found a scaly dragon rock, not like the flat flagstone or bouldersized pebbles, but one with the indentations of the skin of a reptile. He pointed it out to me.
And the waves were as high as the cliff that we stood on.
And all I wanted was to kiss the feeling of aliveness from myself into him.
Ansuz
Breath of life.
Can I kiss the world into being?

He told me to be careful on some slippy rocks.
I fell flat in a puddle and fucked my knee up.
We were looking at a mystery box, that was just an empty crate that had washed up.
As it turns out.
So I limped back to the car laughing with him at the dramatic way I howled and rolled in pain.
I thought that I would faint.
Not one to take it on the chin.
He made me laugh so much.

Maybe we don’t think about love, because when it’s there; its like breathing.
When that flow gets interrupted, you panic, because you are suddenly reminded, this is life, what do I do without it?
So for myself, I claw and scratch and caterwaul saying ‘flow, flow, flow in any guise at all, gust, breeze, hail, gale or hurricane I need to breathe in your love!’
I think that I am dying, that all the air has gone.

We fought about something so mundane, whether my tone was abrasive in response to something he’d said, and in 48hours he was gone.
It’s not right that word, ‘mundane’,which means of the earth.
It was not an earthly argument that sent him away. It was a spectral reconstruction of a theatre of hurt cast by the shadow whips and angst of elders and ancestors.

I tried to tear past his wall, to force my way through a door and be SEEN SEEN SEEN, because, I thought, in some part of me; I could not breathe.
And I was stripping bark from a tree, ensuring that it couldn’t regenerate and heal, stripping all the ring around the ash tree till it all fell down.
Here was my anchor and my axis and I wanted the world to fall down, because I thought that the world refused me and I could not breathe and I was dying, so the world would have to come with me.

And it did. I tore the world down, because I thought I couldn’t bear to be without the vitality of his attention after a maelstrom of miscommunication had sent him walking away from me once again so I could face a closed door for the evening and know that I was wrong. Incompatible with breath.

We were star crossed lovers I guess. Heavy that fate would have you like someone so much then send you into the underworld.
Orpheus and Eurydice.
Don’t look back I guess.

He bought me opal as my Christmas gift. He said it’s in the post the day he left.
He said to open it and have it when it gets here.

I will go to the sea now in these coming deep winter days to keep me sane.
Smooth my edges out in the shock of cold Altantic
and to learn to hold my breath.

My grandmothers name was Sile.
My father’s mother. She was mad.
She lived like she was on fire.
And then lived madder and more.
Until I last saw her, gibbering over a hot cup of something and sucking a quality street. Breaking my eight year old heart into the marbled blue of her rheumy eyes.
And putting a fear into me of something unseen that stalks me in my blood.

She appears so often when I write poems or stories, coming with the wisdom and the wrath of a wild fire, knowing that sometimes you need to just burn it down.
Or the hollowness of old bones caught the wind to whistle and clack she knows, she knows, how dead things are beautiful.
That ice is stillness.
That broken branches make homes.
She knows that in the flood there is surrender and we drown because our roots cannot hold the water.
She knows because those floods killed her.

I have been scared of her, her skulk and spit.
She walked with me after her death as a shadow, a shade that shook me, slung me from one life to the next, knots on a net in which you eventually feel like a caught fish, gasping.

‘When I first came to town…’

‘Keep going, keep moving, don’t settle, don’t sleep.
If you stay they’ll catch you. They’ll know.
They will find out that you are mad and they’ll put you away
and you will never know love or be anything.’

‘…call me Katie Cruel’

Mediums have met my grandmother Sile.
She wasn’t very polite to them either.
She’s vociferous;
it was never my intention to have them formally introduced.
I feel I’ve been a surrogate life for her sometimes.

Wait though, maybe that is hubris?
A bad invocation.
Indomitable woman that she is, I definitely don’t know the half of it.
She was known to be good with the faeiries, she is one by her namesake.
She ‘abducted’ her own son.
Manned searchlights during ‘The Emergency’.
Beat a gardener with a broken bow for watering gravel in the rain.
Loved a traveller or a banker, or both; she never confirmed.
Held a knife above her sleeping child with emptiness in her eyes.
And sang opera to the horses she saw with red raw scores of gashes across their hides on Westmoreland Street.
She cavorted with soldiers from both sides.
She took flight from isle to isle.
And disappeared for years and years to only she knows where.

Why do women become birds?
Same reason as in the myths and memories I suppose.

Persecution.
Swan or goose or wren.
The exiled shapeshift to survive.

Sile didn’t know how to live and settle herself and become another layer of sediment in the strata of Blarney village.
She was volcanic.
Combustive, combative, her tectonic edges so braised by rigidity and injustice.
She couldn’t help it.
She was a woman coursing with the forces of nature, without a place to change.
She was fucking dangerous too.
For what I know from her stories at least.

I suppose I can only speak of her spectre;
who I feel in me when my whole body yearns for the moon like a tide.
Or when I cannot abide a moments more conversation on inactionable notions notions notions and my blood boils up to my cheeks.
Or when I cannot move for the inertia of the unfinished lives that stand tutting like crooked teeth tombstones all around me.

Sile, sile, speaks to fairies.
Sile sile went dolally.
Severed from the family
Sile lost her head.

I say I feel like a surrogate for her sometimes because I feel I inherited her ‘unfinishedness’ as well as her insanity.
Her madness, her wings, her temper and her talents.
She had a kindness in her, that, like for many worn down people, eventually was not even for children anymore. Only the animals were still innocent.
She’d discarded too many broken parts of her heart in other places to have space for you. You’d have to go back there to the night of dance and get her, bring her here to herself now and maybe she’d remember you and be grateful, that someone, finally, came to get her.

For ‘She Named for the Shining Ones’, shining kindness is the beeswax candle on my altar to her. The one I have to tend, keep lit and remember to check.
If that light goes out all we are left with is the hard lessons that she had to live and those hard lessons weren’t totally written out of the inheritance.

Still, I get to live in a time where most of those lessons aren’t reinforced with the rap of a rapier, or the strap of a straight jacket.
Or shunning.
Or exile.
Or incarceration.
Or worse.

I still live with the paranoia of seeing and feeling more than other people tell me they do. And it’s irony is that it at times makes me closer to the repressed contortions of things clotting up my circulation in the world than if I allowed those veins to flow.
Awareness unexpressed erupts as madness once expressed.
It is in the ignoring that whisper on the wind become screams and ghosts become parasitic entities.
Maybe it is a stagnation in the blood that stalks me?

I suppose that is what Sile teaches me.
To ask; what happens to a woman who silences her soothsaying and burns her witch? Who quenches her volcano, plucks each feather from her arms and keeps her heart wrapped up neatly in some cotton and terrycloth and safely tucked away?
What happens to a woman who calls the wildflowers ‘weeds’ to please the churchyard gardener?
Or who apologises for the pain of bleeding to seem meeker about her earthly alchemy as a lifebringer?
Does she become happy and does the world break out into neat rows and picket fences?
Or does the world wither until she has to tear it all down and start again?

Is She Named for the Shining Ones named so because her dark life was an illumination?
That she could not help but trip every threshold set out before her, breach every boundary?
Call up the deities in her ecstasy and howl down the devil in her misery?
She was those storms and earthquakes the shocks and tumbles that humble us back to basics. Back to the source of things, beneath our feet, beyond the speculative machinations of the predictable seasonal beats we meet with such impatience.
The flash flood, the freak gust, the cold snap.

Sile never made anything sustainable.
The masculine was so oppressive that she had to breakthrough.
That was the cycle of her world.
Maybe that pressure is what makes a shining one.
I hope for her in her afterlife it did.

I often think the gold stolen from the earth and holy places was when man stole the will of mother nature.
And the earth rages that all her will is taken.
We had to take the shiny thing and put it in a cage.
Just to have something to look at.

I love my grandmother Sile.
In life I wish to be the shining that she was too burnt out to emit.
To have the consistency, to fold the wings and plant my feet and dig my roots in to
kindness, kindness, kindness.
To hold a lit torch of creativity and eros and never forget to play along with children and silly songs and breathe along with waves and sunsets.
To be patient enough to see if what withers grows back strong instead of simply burning it all away.
To love with equanimity everyone, everyone, everyone however hurt we are and what suffering we’ve all caused and been caused.

Somehow it often seems we all want to rip it up and start again.
Apocalypse, rapture, endtime.
And who inherits that pain?
That ripped up scarred out charred space? Threads torn from the blanket of spirit, veins torn from the living plane?
The parts of my grandmothers life that I mimic has taught me about that inheritance, and about taking responsibility for that legacy.

I’ve often said madness is an oracle.
And I believe that to be so. Still, we don’t need to consult the oracle as much when we know that the world cannot breathe, when it is right there before your eyes anyway.
I know madness.
Can I listen to what the oracle says?
Take responsbility and change in a sustainable way?

My work is to root my spectral inheritance.
Let Síle shine her light
and the generousity of the healing, nourishing,
breathing wilderness is the kindness she gives in death
as one denied in life.