Author: Sionnachaí

At your ankles and elbows are angels.
Spritely things that light the irises
that blossom and blink
in your fingertips and split-ends

when you walk among them
so that you might illuminate
that which is unseen.

You to whom darkness is not an enemy,
amniotic to the anamnesis of jaded destiny.
Lantern lit at the core of your being.

And when the black crow comes cawing
on the portal days and calls you
into the arms of death
you cast the wicked back with an embrace
and ask for nothing
but serenity
from the faceless presence that is swept
by the skirts of your memory.

When you are granted emancipation after
wading in the waters,
time and tide churned
in the depth of your being
that sizzle off the embers of your belly,

the raven holds for you
a shiny thing
to
clatter down the chimney
dislodge the dust
so that the fire can burn hotter
and higher
and kiss the sun that sparked it
blaze up your body’s conduit.

In the in between the dreamtime
when the wolves came howling
on the river bank
your ancestors flanked their reflections.

And you saw what you saw.
And that is what you knew.
Their lilt is there so as to
light up a moon for you.

To my elder sister,
who has shown me a spectrum

of kindness

and wildness

and patience

and scald

I hope for you everything
Everything
Everything

You could ever dream

And thank you for being there
to inspire and encourage me
to come
when I was called.

Along the granite shore the bulls rush
at the beckon of a breeze
while hollered out of hiding are the brackish geese,
striding through skies cast with the sulk
of the ever fickle Atlantic slip.
The skirts of a femme-fatale,
mesmeric yet melancholic.
Outdone only by the tragedy of Lír
in the shatter of swans from
the looking-glass lake.

Odd shod donkeys,
their hooves curved like the back-end of a hammer
and a mare as sullen and silent as a full moon.
Her eyes casting curiosity coyed
behind a silver mane.
The gnarl and nip of hawthorns hiss-per ‘stay away’
and blackberries gush from their prickly seductress bush to
tempt you
back again.

Our laughter skips and we are shadowless.
Pixie petals mock the sturdy wirework of marran weave with
their savage untamed frivolity.
Their hues hum mischief merrily.
Each graze of you
each embrace echoes back a craving to buried
under warm, wide, flat stones.

Or to be submerged
in the boggy water
to sink my skin
until cured in dark ancient remedies
tattooed with the indifference of skyless centuries.

With one foot soaked to the shin
and my misted crown cradled
between your shoulder and chin,
I can see them bend the whip of westerly gusts.
There are two worlds we roam
you and I,
we and us,
not simply because we want to
no,
because long ago
we were told to listen
to the voices across the limen
and that is why we hear them
when they call to us.

I am the child disorganized
A duality of being,
a dichotomy of lives
in a dialogue of truthful lies
I am sexless as she and fertile as death
fecund as decay and as withering as blossom
I am
incompatible with myself
a shadow cast by no one
one life lived in plural
a collection of nothing
I am content and awed, isolated and appalled
tooth tail and claw, tongue flicker eye roll rib raising sigh moan and squall

.

I am here for the taking,
yet intangible,
even my matter avoids grasp, not least my meaning
I am lonely, spine-cradle-less, unsupported
yet suspended by tendrils of hope and growth
a star burst in the canopy.

There is nothing in this that cannot be languid, long.
Juniper limey twist,
the softness of f’s and s’ on your tongue and the
oh bone e oh setting, the muscle stretching the lid settling
Nature of your balm
On afternoons that grow like calendula,
It’s own root
Strong by the virtue of subtlety.

There is a hushing lap on the shore of your twin spheres of
ancient lakes straddling unity and circling a vast unknown familiarity that waxes and wanes
Two black moons in the orbital romance of a
great blue green shale psyche
Shine back at me

In your chest and arms
on dappled days the watercolours of light play
Across your face
I see no shadows chase
But an iridescent concupiscence
that lingers on my eyelids and i feel it at the stems
and hems of my hairs and skirt grazing fingertips
crowned in ivy at the flurry of the coronations.
We have plucked out all the thorns.

In the quiet between the druidic moon and milkmaid dawn
our limbs and fingers spill unbound
from their clutch of thumbs and awkward elbows
to irrigate the groves of grooves
on marbled skins.
Cool the igneous memories, the great cracks and mottle of things.
The volcanic birth that marks me

We cast threads of our dreamings,
spools through the illusory,
to navigate the labyrinthine haze
of things we never agreed to believe
until we breach back down into

Endless
Nourishing
Earth

our tap root fingers,
deep, thirsty and knuckled
as the roots of Indian teak.

You speak
silly soft and magic
hold me to your rhythm
skin taught across the hollow
at the strike of which all things begin.
I want to hear you knock
at my gate
and ask me out to play.

In this dreaming we are tunnelers through worlds
witching hour wakeful
slaking a curiosity of self and shadow
dancing past the threshold
enchanted by a passage
that circumvents the tomb.

And on the gaps in difficult days where the sun through the grass splits rays
you refract all the artifice of life
until you are an architect of light
beaming better ways
prismic and primrosen as the glance of white sun on a horizon.

We both can remember how

I told you that I love you
long before
we ever
even

kissed.

All along it was a fever
that came down with me.
I came to burn the witch
the simmer and twitch of madness
but firewater
does not burn her clean

on the end of the mourning
in the middle of the afternoon
you are a balm to me

down in the meadow
scrubland
undergrow

I cannot keep my head straight
and this old jacket
pulls arms across my heart,
and bends me out of shape.

I barely sleep at all these days.
We rock back words on grey granite waves
clint clamberers
and the scramble of brambles
bracken and lichen
the gorselit fires of
meadow sides
and stingy nettles
what which we we walk amongst
with wrists that grasses graze.

My palms listen to the bark and
moan of bitter holly trees
our jabber and jumpers punctuated with their leaves
while on the salted breeze
gypsy jinny-joes alight like thieves

I can’t look you in the eye,
but the silence we drink for a short while
before hills rolled out like tides
brings a cool white forearm to my
fevered forehead
settles my slacken jaw in a smile

and I swoon back into the sanctity of it all
and the holy petticoat immodesty
of wildflowers
wildflowers
wildflowers

I know there was a time, once upon another. Attics and trampolines and red bicycle rides down midnight drives, mushroom yawns and mescal dawns. There was.

there was

A gypsy joy, a spiral that rose like silk spun from the absinthe ascendant worm dizzied by our wheel and reel.

I know I know
I was there.

More there than I have been elsewhere.

and I saw the flickered stars fall in your back garden and rain on the last day of forever.

our own bones clocking out a jazz tempo that kept us hungry
wired jaws what kept us lean

the mismatched hiss of two narcissistic emotional alchemists
boiling over lust, leaving love on the back burner to simmer-dry
and smoke
choke us out of our fever dreams

and the finger snapping debauchery of beaten out of time
thieves of the coronary kind stealing
kisses
from our paper lovers
compromised
by the unmistakable
signifigance of the other

Lit match
stargaze
clattering down alleyways
fucked drunk
hash haze
On dog dangling days
the absurdity of us
cracked out
our
lips simmering with smirks
teeth chomping
at the bits
of parts that we pretended not to play

And then you were gone
(arms length)

and I was gone
(earths length)

long enough and we become shadows
dancing iridescent
cast by no one.

a small warm thing cradled in the crook of your neck when you are lonely
a balm on love bites that keeps you tender as petalflesh
a tongue that roots for a tooth only to graze blood metallic gum.

still sometimes you make and unmake me

…

You stayed gone. So I tried to shed you with my skins.
i buried you on a hill,
i burned you in fires,
i cast you from cliffs into oceans onto rocks and down into ravines too deep to know what troglodyte hoards your bones.
i tattoo you on my wrists that your ink might corrupt my blood and possess my hands so you can scratch yourself out of me and onto a page.

You are unique in this way.

I wait for justice for you in some great work,
something essential and devastating…

but it eludes me.