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Do me a passing kindness
or give me just one word without spite
I’ll let you fold me like a paper tigress
or dance me like a kite.

You can keep me in your toy box
and show me to your friends.
Just dust me off when you remember
that I am lost beneath the bed.

I’ve whirled a dervish worth of madness
a spun out spinning wheel
when you turned the crank to wind me up
I told you that you were hurting me
but I never know what’s real.

So keep me in your toy box
tell me what I am
I don’t have the strength to be a woman
So I’m a ragdoll
in your hands.

Is this a home?
Or some gilded prison?
In the dark dullness of a dead eye
that watches from the limen
I work the loom,
I cast the dye
I jig the spindle.

I wish I was beneath wild skies;
drinking in their visions.
Free to be unclothed, unwove, untangled
and drenched by the decanting
of their stormy wisdom.

Instead I slip between the morning and the afternoon
and each step rings a bluebell
that I pray might wing
some sanctity in you,
Yet you are glassy as a dead lake
Where I shatter upon reflection
empty as church echoes
invoking absent genuflections.

I cry at the closed doors,
and howl at the hollow hearted hearthless
Imposter I call home
Cuckoo
Fucked you
Still I raise you as my own.

Aye feral daughter
I scratch and scrawl and fill my maw with
butter wishing it wouldn’t melt so quick
The fear of being split between
howling holy anger madness
Or angel caged and sick
Sliced by either one wise dagger,
Or a thousand subtle nicks

And boychild you
cry, cry for the hurt you cradle
As the wild horse you thought
you’d wrangled
couldn’t be stabled
I bucked, I bit
I kicked and reared
Your bridle inspired nought but fear.

So go now to the apron
and cry
tend the cut i scored on you
As though a babe were born of the wound.
Give yourself fresh reason not to do
Anything, for anyone unless somehow
It favours you.

I am a mare,
we both knew
and on the page
etched by my inky wrists that once you gripped
my shadow is tattoed


So I’ll leave you to your paddock
and your fear of the untamed
the world is here to serve you
at least that’s what you say
So that’s why your world is locked at
five foot squared
full of fleece you can call home
and no place for a mare.

Today I became a world destroying god
and broke the rain
and ate the sun from the sky
and flipped the storms up from the sand
tornadoed and volcanoed
and pelted the land
with hail hail hail

And I was not phased or furious
nor shamed
my action methodical
never spurious
nothing to venture
nothing to gain.

A world destroying god I became
when I said your name
and stated I no longer
deemed necessary the fulfillment of this shared destiny
and no longer
cared cared cared
if we ever met again

If we ever loved one another is no question of mine.
Nothing that you said or did can be frozen in the glacier of my heart
or trapped in the ambers of my mind
I am nothingness
in forever I don’t have time

As the world incinerates
and from the nothing nothing creates

Zero is the place
and the place never was.

Today didn’t happen.
And today is when I became
A world destroying god.

I see in the eye of my sister,
her hair wrapped with seaweed
and the flagstone shore we are walking;
The songs of first people
her skin is singing.

I see in the eye of the needle
the hawthorn fish hook,
the hollow in the spindle wood
the spungham and moons blood;
the fingers, ebony and ochre
of first people.
The hazel tree is laughing.

And the bent backwards blackthorn
slow and sloe collapsing.
The berries and shilleleagh
The tick tack tapping of the
suck on the shore of smooth stoney
cove
clacked by the tide retracting.
First people chitter chattering.

I hear in the caverns of sky
and lilac heights of
rock left behind
When the steppes fell down
the mountainside
and I listen
to the folds or wrinkle
beneath the ears of my elders
and in the spiral on the perriwinkle
The words of first people.

And by an Bó Bheannaithe
I smell her breath at night
dragging the starry plough
across the world’s
reflections
decanting divinities connection
and
unearthing
the Síog stories
the gods beyond the allegory
the mirrors for
first people.

In the grikes between
the flats
we catch
the flash
of orchids and of sprats
As the fertility of scars
shines out to
us between the cracks.
And I hear the healing chants
claps and whistles
the soles and souls that dance
with first people.

And I ask the trees
the streams
and mountains
that if it is that we would
surrender to their wisdom
and dance within their rhythms
and stop battering
bartering
for cash
to clash with them
and turn the cracks to schisms
That we can receive the truth of what we’ve been given
And be first peoples again
And accept what this land isn’t
and learn from our past,
be present
protective
and honour her provision.

Oh land that kept my ancestors
Let my grandchildren
hear the hazel tree when she is laughing
and feel the red fox through the briars
blazing
let them plait my hair
grown grey
and notice the stones we sit on matching
Let them live and dance as first people
and sing the songs and stories
everlasting

I am a horned woman,
who stands with bleeding palms,
berryful and beauty stricken by the wind and weather that is unconditionally ours.
I stand at the edge of your desires
and tend to your ember with the rations,
the onionskins and paper kindling to slowly bring you alight.
layers that peel,
I unsheath sheet by sheet,
night by night

Not so you can
immolate me
in the blazes of industry
but that I may be driven by my own heart
between the heights of twin bonfires
once I’ve beaten the bounds and know,
and know by my own hands;
The breadth and breath of virgin lands
Between us.
What is untouched,
can you
let it
embrace us?

But you’d swear
I am bleeding to feed you blood pudding
and unsheathing to prove to you something
and needing to knead down the dough of my worry
to give rise to your shallow company.

Do you think I ought not to be any
more than milk and honey,
and that I am intentionally less than what you want me to be?
Am I a disappointment by my own volition
and stubborn bullery?
Or, by your expectations of
domestication?
Do you find yourself
disappointed
when I don’t slaughter
myself to fill your plate up?
That you have to do all the hard work of exploitation?
Then, little brother,
why don’t you don the high heels and make-up?

Wake up.
Wake up little brother.
The Old Gods are Rising
and your Sad Ways are tiring.
Wake up.

Wake up to remembering the rain on your face
and how the sky filled with grace came
to soothe the land that’s been raped.
Wake up and remember that She
is not some petulent shrew
but the holiest temple of healing
that never once
denied you.

Wake up little brother
And be driven to your own edges
Find the threshold
Grasp the nettle
Realise
You’re not dead yet.
You’re not dead yet.
You’re
not
dead
yet.

If you look
you can tell
that the road back home beckons.
And the threshold is the reckoning
of learning to recognise
yourself
in all that you’ve been given.

So wake up
little brother
And come back
Back through the hollow at the back of your head.
Wade through the shallows
of the spiritually dead.

Wake up and remember
berryful palms and tender breath
the love of a woman with horns
and the plentiful breast
of the water that falls
and the wild skies caress.

Remember
Who You Are
little brother.
Wake up now.
With a fire in your head.
Wake up
become a man, little brother,
and honour what you said.

She, the saint of wild things.
The one that we monthly bury.

She, the kin of den dreams.
She, the one who kens me.

She, the blood of the well, the faint metallic smell, the heave of the still horned heifer, the grief of the still born’s mother.

She the saint of dying on the earth, in the sea, the scent descending from the blood and marrow memory.

She, the sprite of Spring bitters, the stolen egg, the first mewls and twitters.
The twig of the nest, the babe at the breast, the solar stretch to the west.

She, the outcast, teetless runt in a litter.

She, the uncanonized, for she the one cannibalized by soil and mycellium scavenged by bacterium, bleached by the fiery skies kiln.
She is sainted by the sanctuary of perpetuity denied.

She, the potency of the liminal, the badger culled as criminal, the placenta ate for minerals, the hedgerows boundary medicines perused by browsing animals.

She, the coughs and tickles, the spring time fevers we have to deny.

She, the ineffable chaos of inconvenience and dying in order to give life.

She the boundary keeper between what it is to live and what it is to survive.

All reverence to you,
She, Saint of the Wild.

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.