Wednesday 17 December 2008

Some Words

Silver threads
Scissors
Holding on tight
Banisters
Tower
Brass
Half
Light
Top
White birds
Suspension
Toes
Prickling hairs
Just too cold
Buried rivets
Upside
Down
Foundation stones
Feeling cracks
Marble
Eggs
Smashing floors
Height
Decision
Made

Friday 12 December 2008

The Great and Unsettling Adventures of Little Lizzie Literature: Part One

Once upon a left handed argument, Little Lizzie Literature decided to take her bread and jam upon the southwards side of the Search-lit Sofa Sea. The Times had taken their toll on her paper pulp skin and the roaming light intermittently illuminated the dried up edges round her little written nose.
She munched her meal as the lighthouse span its head, accruing a most circumnavagatory view of the landscape. The jam was strained from the pulp of Pickwick Pears, which grew on the branches of the Dickens trees, found in Library Lagoon. Their flavour particularly full of character and cockney aromas.
The Sofa Sea undulated in a most somnambulant fashion – sending Little Lizzie Literature off to sleep in a beating of a bibliography eyelid, wedged precariously between a recliner and a beanbag. The Sofa Sea was now contributed to by the unfortunately named Stray Fluff Leakages – which had begun to descend from the Extra Stuffing Heights after the Great Rearrangement of the Second Sitting. The Ocean, once pure of all alternative seating plans and renowned for its two and three-seater clarity, was a hotch potch of cushioned intruders. Sofamen sometimes had to wait for days before a catch took hold of their lines and the effect on throw-cushion fish stocks was untenable.
So Little Lizzie Literature slept and ruffled her pages gently in her slumber, unaware of her predicament as she slipped down the back of inaccurately referred to Sofa Sea. Little Lizzie Literature bumped her paper-bodied way downwards until she rested gently on the bottom - atop a layer of biscuit crumb sand (and narrowly avoiding a stubbornly positioned depositation of forgotten-penny choral). She slept there until an uncompromisingly bristled hairbrush crab prickled it’s was across her chest, causing several of her pages to turn.
Little Lizzie Literature had been informed most vociferously by Old Grandma Gallstones that those who fall down the back of the Sofa Sea do not return unaltered by their experiences, if the do in fact return at all. The Maple Syrup Men travelling from the Great Rock Candy Mountain swore blind as a sugar rush that the Weave Witch of Worsted kept her lair company down there. And her lair was not to be reckoned with.
But Little Lizzie Literature was not a fluttery binding of pages. She had a belly full of bread and the hard-back spine of a dictionary. Little Lizzie Literature took a deep goose feather breath and set off into the darkness of the bottom of the Sofa Sea….

Wednesday 10 December 2008

Tea Set

“Please do come round for tea” said She to He.
They sat in tiled and painted spaces and considered each other’s faces.
He was the carved frescoes lost heroes.
She, the painted and gilt goddess on the ceiling –
Tempting Fate to a snake-bite bed.
They sipped coloured liquids,
The lightshades of stained glasses above His head.
Their hands brushed over fumblings for silver spoons.
And the clink of bone china made etchings on their soundscape.
They had entire histories described for them upon the walls.
But He paid no heed to prior mishaps in relief.
They sipped until Her finest set was dry.
She swept it to the floor
Where it expanded in a flurry of footprint clouds.
She scooped the settling dust and softly blew it into His eyes.
The tea-set powder burned and stung.
He flung his bones against the marble scenes protruding at his spine.
Smothering moments of woe and war.
Of love and lies picked out in compacted debris.
She pressed in and kissed Him once and twice together.
Cold touches of brittle cartilage
That made his blood run dry -
Like the finished tea upon the floor.
They were swallowed by ceramic.
Light span through tinted glass to illuminate Their stone set faces -
Locked in a kiss of composite shells.
Trapped in calcium compounds.
Wrung out leaves remained upon the terracotta tiles.
Perhaps they spelt the shape of misfortune.
Or desire and loneliness combined.
A ribbon of text inscribed itself about Their heads
A Roman-fonted message to those taking tea unchecked:
"And the Thirsty crushed beneath their weight to stone.
And the china turned to china what was bone. "

Monday 8 December 2008

Ramage and Bean

Ramage and Bean
Provided the scene
From which their story was told.
They gave us the setting –
A place suffocating
In a god, at the cost of it’s souls.

Ramage was the keeper
Of the Princely Sleeper –
Locked in the tower above.
Bean was his lover,
Kept tight undercover.
Hands tight through the skin of a glove.

When the boy fell to dream,
Ramage would shine a beam
Of light to the gate-lodge sill.
Bean would come to the ledge,
Drop down to the hedge
And progress, led on by his will.

Bean would then climb the stairs
To the tower, unaware
Of the danger he faced each night.
For in love one is blind
And he left behind
His reason in place of his light.

They would meet in the chamber,
As the fires turned to embers.
As wood turned to ash in the night.
There they’d embrace,
The other’s kisses they’d chase
And set their humours alight.

So entranced they would be,
That they failed to see
The boy, supposed sleeping next door.
He’d creep out of bed,
As hushed as he dead,
And sneak a look through the crack near the floor.

The boy had been preached,
To a god he’d beseeched
To forgive his sins great and small.
He knew what he saw,
Through the crack near the floor,
A sin – the worst if them all.

And so, Bean and Ramage,
Unaware, undisparaged,
Continued to meet by the stars.
They hushed their kisses,
Kept quiet hearts wishes,
Only stole day lit looks from afar.

One night while they met,
The Boy Prince crept
From his bed and down the back stair.
Along torch lit galleries,
Sweat drenched and heart hammering
With the weight of his God-given care.

The boy told the King,
Who sent bells to ring.
Sent the hounds to smell out the sin.
They were found in the tower,
And overwhelmed by the power
Of men scared of the passions within.

Ramage and Bean,
Closed down their scene -
They were hung at the first light of dawn.
Their ropes swung side-by-side.
Bodies flung to the tide.
Their love caused their curtain to fall.

No applause for this tale,
No “Lights up!” no hails
For performances beautifully played.
For this God fears the might
Of loves forced to the night.
He’d rather an empty, cold stage.