White Out

A claw closing in around us.

And waiting.

As it always has been.

Waiting for a reverence,

I cannot give it.

I can't understand,

Let alone be it.

It is too strange for me and

I am too far away.

There is a moment when all is lost to it.

We are an island surrounded.

And we are too difficult.

It is a pleasure.

It is a loss.

To be so cut off.

To be so stranded.

The white has eaten the green.

There is nothing left.

Even the light basks in its glory.

Even the light is not its own.

We all have to be difficult.

We all have to be strange.

But most of all,

We all have to be lonely. 

A Comet Born

At first I thought you invisible,

As I struggled to see who you would be to me.

I couldn't place a person in that first glimmer

Of starlight.

The phosphorescent haze solidified

Into a single angle of diamond light

Holding an entire microcosm

Of human life.

Held in my hands I can detect

The coiled potential strength

Tailing the tiny body like an aura

Of independence.

The Smoke Dragon

A Smoke Dragon sits on a mountain.

Crawling curlicues of smoke circling

The mountain top

Colliding and colluding with the clouds

So thinly stretched they are transparent;

Tears appearing as in old worn sheets.

The people lived in a dampened form of

Permanent terror

Caught in patterns of forgotten fear inherited

From unmet ancestors:

No one alive had seen the smoke Dragon.

No one alive doubted the existence of the Smoke Dragon.

At the foot of the Mountain

Lived the girl who ate books:

Onkei had begun life

Caught on the currents of curiosity

Catching knowledge like the sails of a

Boat courting the breeze.

She lived a heightened life of

Brightened discovery.

Curating the skills of generations

Of unmet ancestors:

No one alive knew as much as Onkei.

No one alive was as aware of their lacking knowledge as Onkei.

As inevitably as time moves through moonlight

Onkei became aware of the dragon

Dancing thoughts drifted up the mountain to tangle

With tails of tepid smoke.

Dragon smoke.

Silly slaying soldiers

Enigmatic exorcisms

Were rejected

So she continued consuming text

Until the answer drew clear

Clear as a smokeless mountain

The dragon lived on fear.

Epilogue: there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Books are good.
Onkei continues to eat books. The smoke Dragon is gone. 

The Moonlight Is Just for You

Bewildered, foreign and lost

You lay across

The arms of your father.

Unsure of where your

Breath had come from.

And unknown to night

You'd watched light

Seep out of the world

Grown silent and empty

Of activity.

Unaware of the split

Between the twilit

World and the stars,

You watched the night turn

On Daddy's shoulder.

Moving to and fro

You passed the window

Noticing the slim white

Disc of the moon

Who's light follows only you.

A Walk to Hestia's Temple

An aborted morning,

Dawn lost to mist,

We went ahead anyway,

With the walk,

A four miler planned weeks ago.

I waited first in the car park,

Muted by mist and mud,

But backlit by mellow torchlight,

waving on the branches,

Of a Gingko tree.

The family drew up,

Sister, brother, father, mother,

In a selection of toffees,

Mulberry, burgundy and grey.

Hats: flat and rounded,

First gloves of the season.

Greetings exchanged, the,

Dog set us off.

Sturdy ankle boots crushed,

The fragile open wounds of the grass.

Soon the clouds drowned,

The path we'd forced.

As we pushed onwards,

Emboldened by having,

Done this so many times before.

Only once had it,

Defeated us.

Circular trails through,

Fattening mist had led us,

Closer only to darkness.

But salvation in sighting,

The floating tower,

Had seen us home,

By the fire for tea.

Older and wiser, today holds,

Complacent ease.

Until one of us mentions barking,

In the distance,

Can you hear it?

No. Not yet.

It grows: the sound lengthening,

And stretching to tether all of us.

It wavers, holds,

The crisp, fat gunshot of a

Shot gun

Unanimous flight,

An unplanned narrative.

We leave the invading sounds,

In the bodiless mist.

Sure of where we are heading.

As sure as we are wrong.

Destination imperfect.

Soon I am among the Japanese maples.

Burning and bleeding.

Unashamed by the sky.

Unput-out-able.

I know we can find our,

Way back.

But I'm uncertain if,

We want to.

If I want to.

Perhaps it would be better,

To stay.

Enfold my fate with the,

Trees.

And be consumed. 

Bones

Music's memory holds me strong,

A cutting current owns my bones.

Like a hoarder of aged bodies,

Giving up his dead to dignity-less exposure.

Unnerving flash of white,

A blunt sword buried within all

Gives itself up with decomposure.

I didn't know you were inside me.

Disovled of myself those empty sticks,

Are all that I've left.

Ippon, nihon, sanbon.

Memories I didn't know I had,

Bind me to you.

Through old man's eyes I see,

My death reflecting,

Our second youth.

That we can never go back is clear,

So let's go on 'cause the future's all we've got.  

Packing Boxes

Emboldened like worker ants we move,
Storing away brown box after borrowed box after broken box. 
'No, wait. Not enough tape. This is storage, not removal. 
We might need to ship it out or bring it back.' 
Back to here or back to there?
Where, now, will be home?
Empty out the saucepan, cheese grater and measuring jug.
I see a rethink coming on.
We're paused in our black armoured convoy of practicality.
Someone asks me: 'could you not just buy some over there?' 
But we might come back.
I might come back.
The convoy shifts, lets go its defences.
We all know that in this moment,
These boxes aren't coming back. 

A Life Raft of Books

This year I made myself a life raft.

I built it from books:

Added touches of glamour

                             and largesse,

Using, sparingly, expensive bricks of

                            fat new paperbacks,

Still with the tangible thrill of fresh,

                                           ink and print.

My mainstay was the sexy enigmatic chic,

                                   of bohemian second-handers,

All bent corners and creased spines

                           from a previous, perhaps dubious, life.

Of course I needed the practical, uniform,

                                           files of e-books,

Proportioned as lightly as wardrobes,

                                  with hidden worlds.

I took my raft to sea

Or perhaps it took me.

Through familiar scenes of:

                          Tokyo subways,

And elegant cups of tea.

To the foreign vastness of Ivy,

                                 League intellects,

In the empty states of the New World.

Allegories of our souless consumerism,

                                          in fantasy lands,

Where war and terror still link hands.

Hot African countries I've never seen,

       Full of sun and foods and family dreams.

Of course, as an aside, all the women,

                           Found meaning through men.

So I've travelled through seas no stormier

                                               than any other.

Learnt new language, new skills and rediscovered.

Next year I think I'll make myself a life raft.

I'll build it from books. 

The Crows on the Road

Splayed and splat like mud flung fast from a tractor's wheels,

One matted wing grasping outward,

The only discernable sign.

I drive cautiously through the sordid scatterage,

Not wanting to feel the sickening, soft bump through my wheel.

The abandoned crime scene dressed as a hit and run,

On an implausible victim,

An immediate giveaway.

Murdered scavengers shot at the scene and moved,

Laid like a warning to all; don't take what you can't afford.  

My Fit Lemur

A little obscure but I was inspired by a picture of a man in the rubble in a small town, Namie, within the nuclear exclusion zone in Japan. In the foreground is a coffee shop sign: My Fit Lema. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2013/mar/11/fukushima-abandoned-towns-in-pictures#/?picture=405181746&index=5

My Fit Lemur

We're two years in,

And still no Spring.

The Matsuri resurrected,

New P.Ms elected.

While cast aside,

I did not die,

But in the shadows reside:

Me and my fit lemur;

A social stigma,

That marks me out,

As contaminated.

This time no allies,

But our own side.

Were we decieved,

Or did we fail to believe?

There is no leak.

Even as the hydrogen exploded,

As our futures corroded,

That dice was loaded.

With two years gone,

The world's moved on.

But as the ghost towns sit,

Making the country sick,

On radiation and the bitter row,

Over what to do now.

Remember: my lemur and I,

We did not die. 

The Owl with the Broken Wing

He knocked once and came on in,

The owl with the broken wing.

It had been a while since he'd been,

We exchanged tales of what we'd seen.

As he settled down in the brown armchair,

Removed his glasses with a weary air,

I brought him tea and a custard cream,

But he was gazing ahead as if in a dream.

I sat opposite on the blue setee,

And asked softly what the problem might be.

Oh it was nothing save a few odd words,

Struck him as strange this old, broken bird.

He'd met a man at the Gatekeeper's Inn,

Who numbered in hundreds his kith and kin,

But told my kindly listening friend,

He'd achieved nothing at all, in the end.

The tawny fowl gave a large sigh,

Said he'd accepted long ago we all must die,

But his sadness was the man's unreadiness,

That he hadn't been shown what mattered less.

He had achieved it all and I told him so,

Said my clever old owl as he prepared to go.

Thank you for listening he said as he made to depart,

It is true that a good friend will lighten your heart.

The Day We Knew Keith Died.

We follow the path like a brown tide line,

Etched in the shape of the last wave.

Still trees turned from brilliant bronze,

To a broken brown at the backward turn,

Of the autumn clock.

Lifeless like a patchwork tableux.

Stuck where we're supposed to be,

Man, woman and dog.

The quiescent railway track hems us in,

Under Sylvia's jar, encassed,

In the glass of a paperweight.

Inevitably with your frozen scene,

We are connected.

Condensed Earth contracts to leave us,

Breathless at how life could have turned,

On an Aussie's word.  

Language Learning

Language Learning:

It is painfully slow but,

gradually, glorious.

These shapes are all new.

Super-imposed over them;

Allusion.

Me: Scratching out the meaning,

Black lines I can penetrate,

Like an equation.

Vague essence with too many

Full stops.

Time travel for the writer.

Watching the invention of,

The light bulb moment.

Creating, recreating,

Old words.

I linger to watch the day;

Misty clouds kissing Stour trees,

Dewy eyed lens for,

Fanciful wakers of the,

Equal night.

I want to create this view,

With my new black pen scratches.

Casting illusion,

From dancing whisps of smoke that,

Fade out.

It's all I can conjure to,

Seduce the English text with,

Signs for Tree, night, day,

Symbols for now and fire.

Baby steps. 

Foreigner

Foreigner

When Grandma sold a painting she said she knew who she really was. It was dark when Aki landed in Japan. Leaving the airport by train left her feeling claustrophobic from all the hours of recycled air. The first step from the platform was like a reviving for slap. Her face stung with cold and even late in the evening she was assaulted by the sheer business of Nagoya station. A dazed jet-lag forced her mind into autopilot as she dragged her suitcase towards the central area and from there followed the english signs to the Marriott. She couldn't read the signs otherwise and when the bright-faced receptionist greeted her in Japanese she managed only a polite greeting before asking him if he spoke English. Her American accent surprised him and, she was sure she was just paranoid from tiredness, offended him too. He lost his smile for only a moment before switching to a neutral east cost accent. She smiled.

“Where did you go to school?” She asked. He told her quickly as he tapped in her passport details. The only other information he gave her was regarding her room. When she sat on the large bed her mind began racing. The Japanese word for foreigner better translated as alien and she felt it. It only surprised her in its familiarity. With the angle of her eyes and her strange name she had always been different at home but at least that was expected. Her smile and her all American upbringing challenged people's assumptions much more positively than this way around. She looked the same here but there her sympathies ended. Her Grandmother had done all she could to bring up her son as American. A challenge to a post-Pearl Harbour immigrant. Or perhaps not. She wouldn't have had a chance if she'd gone any other way. Aki's grandmother had never returned to her country, had given up all but a few ties. She kept one Kimono and wore it only on special family occasions celebrated within the home. She drank green tea in her art studio but coffee in any other location, including her own home. And she called Aki by the fond term chan. That was all.

Aki woke in the middle of the night to loud rattling sounds. The mirror catching the light from the undrawn curtains shook and the light fitting swung from side to side. Her heart was beating heavily and she managed half a breath before the shaking doubled in intensity. As she forced herself to accept the panic in the situation the movement stopped. The stillness was hard to perceive as her body shook from the double shock of being woken and experiencing her first earthquake. The world was abruptly not at all what Aki had always believed it to be. She felt the loss of her grandmother so completely that it was suddenly raw once again. She curled up this time under the covers and cried to herself until exhaustion reclaimed her.

Return

Like a cavern my mind was waiting,

Stripped down walls and a bare floor.

Emptiness surprised me like a well laid trap.

I never see it coming.

The long evenings are new to me,

Fresh, white-pale light stretches on,

I feel very northern and European.

And a little bit foreign.

Looking at the map I am startled ,

I could've lived anywhere else.

Weighed down by these places in which I have dwelt,

Like tent pegs they hold me firm.

Stones in my pockets to stop me from,

Wallowing in that hollow room.

I can use what I learned whilst I loitered there,

In order to fill myself.

I find that there are books on the shelf,

Sharp pencils and drawing pads.

A picture that I didn't see on the wall.

This room's not spare after all.  

Memorial

Inspired by the ice sculptures made to commemorate the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Rikuzentakata. Photograph seen on the Guardian website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2012/mar/11/japan-earthquake-tsunami-disaster-anniversary?intcmp=122#/?picture=387194335&index=10

Memorial;

Made of ice,

Frozen bird.

Frozen time,

Speaks one man,

Of his heart.

Two-forty-six:

Time of start.

End unknown.

Caught in flight,

Silent birds,

Now cast in ice.

Waiting

Waiting:

Exhilaration.

The countdown starts.

Energy in my feet,

Spreading from my heart.

Floating thoughts in a head,

Occupied by change.

A favourite notion.

Worn like slippers.

I fought it once so hard,

It broke completely.

Consumed me and now rules,

All my decisions.

A promise I made,

Or an old song,

Either way this is me,

Coming back to life.

Kiyomizudera on Christmas Day

A samurai dog,

Small, white, posing,

Enjoying the attention,

Tourists snapping shots,

Calling kawai.

The postman passes by.

Crispy, burnt out leaves,

Hanging on in the cold,

Waiting out the snow,

Shielding the drop,

From the floating floor,

The postman darts through a shop door.

Pottery and green tea shops,

Ice-creams, sweets, biscuits,

Steaming bowls of macha,

Clerks calling in the tourists,

With tasters and a bright grin,

The postman revs his engine.

Kimono and small zori steps,

Bright silks and grey clad men,

Kyoto spread out below,

Grey snow clouds gathering,

Around the surrounding mountains,

The postman dodges a tourist and drives on in.

Castle Cary Station

Sunshine and a strangely crowded platform.
Same old sinking feeling,
Although it was never you before.
Neither of us wanted me to wait for your train.
Remember the old push down windows?
Beeping automatic doors aren't the same,
Though this is the same game.

I used to put my hands over my ears,
As the engines roared and gathered speed.
While you relished the whoosh and rush.
Waving goodbye until it was out of sight.
The empty car unwelcoming as we returned to routine.
You'd be chatting, chatting, chatting.
I'd be watching, watching, watching.

We knew however regular this goodbye it wasn't quite sane.
Parceling up our tiny heartbreaks into ribbon normality.
Twenty years on we remember that practiced neutrality.
Stoicism is key. A smile and a casual see you soon.
Connived pretence that you'll be out to visit.
Not daring more words; that same quick hug,
Since we began living apart.

For a jealous moment I hate all those genuinely casual,
Goodbyes happening around us.
But as it is I turn before there are tears.
The waiting car a sanctuary for temporary insanity,
Before I return to family reality.
In the first few days I don't utter your name.

Now we've turned the corner;
Half way point. We know this bit well.
You; head down, focus on the job in hand and,
Before you know it; normality has returned.
Me; sociable, planning and counting. Anxious to,
See that you know,
I'm coming home.

Christmas Eve

Tinny bell,

Secrets and the dark;

a dusty smell.

Love sketched on my heart.

Santa Claus,

As played out by you,

Second-hand call,

Not that we ever knew.

Powder scent,

Your voice on the phone,

The day you went;

Only the past on loan.

We were made,

To be left behind.

This past decade,

Thoughts of the Christmas-kind.