Category: Uncategorized

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.

Bite my lip
Until she bleeds like blossoms from the cherry tree
I stay awake all night for you
I am a hive of bees
The juice of wild strawberries
I am the quiver
on the arrow
Pull me back towards you
tell me where to go
tell me what’s good for me
Let me give you all my honey

It is the wilderness of my body
The rosebuds on my breasts
the briars between my legs
and the blackberry that you bit.
where first you meet the spirit.
In the pale spectre of a rainy morning
we watch each other undress
and I taste gentle dawn in the virgin night,
in the milk of the moons surrender
on your lower lip.

I am at home
between the indentations of teeth marks
on your forearm
fingernails dragged down shoulder blades
“do no harm”
that maxim keeps on waxing
with each phase of us;
it illuminates the cuts I score on you
as if it were to see my scars
you must be made to suffer too.

I am an elk
a basket weaver
I am a keeper
of ritual twisted together between sorrow and ecstasy
I am a weaver of the strange unseen tapestry
Still when I slip between
the warp and weft
and fibres split to cleft
when I submit bereft
You are the rough ropes
that bind me
I am suspended by your limbs
You are the ash tree

The holder of the parts of me
my wrists above my head
my waist above your hips
my body across your bed
my hair in your fingertips

my rage and my ravishing
my truth and my insanity
my power and my tragedy

I want to be your good luck
I want to be your best thing
a sign, a synchronicity
I want you to write your name on me

Keep me in your wallet,

hold me when you sleep

I am a keeper
I want you to keep me.

My wrists are duckegg white
and the water from the tap is warm
my lips feel bitten and awake
maybe I am dreaming?
I watch the mirror attentively and notice how colourful it feels just to see
I squint to remember the lights that smashed the wet streets of Galway city
I am struck by the skylit hues through the frosted glass in the bathroom window, the amber gold flaked out beyond the skies knee deep indigo is like a carp filled stream at twilight
Or the lights when you narrow your eyes at a neon sign
I am only here in shampoo and conditioner
Being normal
I am in this body and watching out the window
I am scented like Australian gum and rosewater
A million life times later I think that I am still somebody
and indigo and amber are the colours
and your eyes are like van gough stars
in pale yellow and green grey
and there’s a smokey coal coloured ring around my iris
and we just lay together in my bed since yesterday
and the sky is changing colour
and grief is a feather on the inside of each of our arms

I am held by you and feel nothing
Maybe I am selfish?

A butterfly lives in our kitchen.
I wish I had broken plates and dishes,
not trust.

I am killing myself
because I hurt you
I am selfish.
I hold and help no one.

My suffering is sacred,
I treat yours like a nick
a scratch
a graze on the knee
I deify my own.

God help me, I am Jesus.
When storming is more honest,
instead I chose the cross.

The moon bursts me open and
I love you
and the butterfly in our kitchen.

I am fearful and needy.
Even wanting your forgiveness,
is all about what you can do
for me,
me
me.

I gave you my bones
to have
to make things from.

You took the bag of them.
I gave myself grief and misery about houses and friends, about the bitter and willful end. I mourned my parents though they are not yet dead.
I sat with the rain and let the thistles sting my feet.
I let the stones cut me deep and the granite bruise my heels.
Heavy landings for a burden beast.

Past an eclipse a sweet ether emits from me
and I become another person.
Some scripture burns in my fires
and I am suddenly unburdened.

Some colours ignite
and I see my horizon
Maybe you can’t be crucified
if there is no hill to die on?

I guess I gave you my bones
to get you to see what I am made of.
Now I give myself back my body
my own soul
my voice
and everything else that I am afraid of.

‘No one dreams like you.’

I am dancing in a meadow
I pull up my dress and let the sun reflect on my lunar skin.
I am striped like a white tiger in pearlescent lines
camouflaging my arms, breast belly and thighs.
I am singing out in sacred sighs
and robins come to watch.

‘No one dreams like you.’

I recall the mountainside shattered into blue does,
streaming down a desertscape, until they became one and formed
a lake.
I gazed into it and saw a whale.
My pelvis bloomed like a cactus.

No one dreams like you.

Your breath escapes into me when we’re sleeping
and in the dark
the luminescence of car lights on wet nights
play like shadow puppets on
your back and your chest
and your arms.

I watch your eyelids flicker like moths

No one dreams like you.

I am crying in a thunderstorm
arguing with a trickster god
telling me to swim now
now
now.
I am naked but never alone.
Lightening strikes the water
and trees grow from the scars.
Transparent vagabonds encircle me.

No one dreams like you.

I can feel you pull away from me
I am here deafened by your heart beat.
My lips are like a poppy
your skin feels like their milk.
Let me lick your wounds
we humans have cut us deep

Remember that you love me.

Let me dream again with you.

Human
ribcage

human
ribcage
I’m being watched and seen

What do I have locked up?
Breathe.
breathe
Someones coming…
I’m scared of everything.

I wish bone myself again and again,
let them snap me in two,
make a better woman for this one,
be a better friend.
See who would get the best of me
be a wish come true.

In a dream we make love facing one another under a
yew tree.
My legs lock you into me and the ferny brush of the fronds
drifts over the notches on my spine;

We reel back in time
and on a cave wall there’s the outline
of our hands
the smoke and spark
the elemental tenderness of the breathing dark
in a cavern that
surrounds us
like a
human
ribcage.

Breathe.
breathe
You look into me.

I burst into pomegranate seeds
you shatter into starlings and devour every
pulsing ruby piece of me.
Their murmurations
script out in a
caligraphy of secret incantations
that
the truth
bleeds from the seeds
of this fruit

Shiva keeps on dancing.

And I catch on to nothing
Human
ribcage.

It is not fair how close you perceive me.
And without the salt from your eyes
without your blood in my mouth
and without some strong hand at the small of my back
I am liable to collapse.
You saw the fear within me.

I cracked up what’s been there to protect me.
I tried to snag you on the edge of my own suffering.
So I could taste your blood.
So I can be reminded that you too
are human.
They say god made me from your ribcage
lets say that’s true
Breathe now,
breathe easy
it’s seems I can be spared for now
as I remain a part of you.

 

Jam happened on your sleeve
and i cottoned on to your secret misery, so you fell in love with me

Jam happened on the bottom steps of the stairs
When I swung round my hips rolled my shoulders and shook down my hair
Jam happened when we danced on a Slovenian rooftop
afterwards I watched you walk around in thunder and fuck yourself up
I tripped lightly over the pieces of a poured out gut.

and I tried not to care

and I tried not to care

And I couldn’t help but care.

Oh and jam haggled at the wall
came bedraggled through the hall,
sucking chess pieces with his maw
left a dear jane note in scrawl
while his blood dripped down his mothers wall.

And so I sucked another stamp
and fucked me up some more.

Jam got crushed out on the trampoline
tried to make a tramp of me
but that’s the nature of competitive insanity
there is no truth when love comes through profanity

Oh and jam showed up after a snowstorm
when I figured it was long gone
with no shoes on
came to my room
and held me in his arms
cupped my breast
and called me mom.
It was around then I decided it was best that I move on.

Damn jam you’re a sticky one
sickly
bitter
falsely sweet

Ovaries trapped in the sugar
the preservative of a summers worth of memories.
Jam you know that I know that you’re no good for me
you were
Worth a taste,
but your consistency doesn’t sate
when I’d rather something real to eat.

I

The bird was confused. She flew into the window and broke her neck.
We buried her in the garden by the tomb of Nano Nagle, near some Christmas saplings.

Little light, tiny thing.
Darling.

He calls me darling. He keeps from raising his voice or whetting his words.
I am crazy.

I bury the bird with a handful of nuts.
Maybe she’ll take my confusion away.
Maybe she’ll peck out my insanity
celestially.

I am scared of me sometimes.
I am scared of everybody who might take advantage of me,

although I beg them to.

II

I precipitate and surrender a torrent of
sleet statements
sent to ice over the pavement and
skid us off this path.
Outside as starlings constellate
I sit under stained glass
and wait
for the light to change
and all the saints to say their names
tell me if I ought to be ashamed
or
is it just that people are this way

and there is no one I can trust again?
And was it all my fault for trusting in the first place?
I light a candle under Mary’s gaze
and pray

III

Later when I talk to you
I am cowed and humbled

You soothe say to me
say everything will be ok.
I sigh back at you and
mumble

There’s a significance in our murmurations

You speak to me of the starling you buried
who broke her wing
up in the roof
and as you tried to tend her
she fought with you
and died exhausted.

IV

For now we are alive like this
to ebb and flow.
To shimmer, shatter and trick switch
with zephyrs over heathers
while the mountain side is gorse-lit.

I know I can be coarse lipped and
salty
My reputation is such that
the cowslips pucker up and cattails caterwaul to me
I am lilac gloved and foxy
I line my shepherds purse with parsley
while reciting the roman chamomile, holy basil, rosemary.

Still I have been cut deep
and many lives uproot me
I shudder at the thought to be a sheep
while a wolf still howls within me.

Yet for now we are as starlings.

For now we are in constellation.
and so I let you call me darling,
let you hold me to our murmurations
and calm my consternation.