![]()
After ‘IF—’
If you can loose your heart from headlock,
and touch it, puggish and stubborn
as it is, stunted fist, and keep its company,
and learn its tongue, half-mute, unbuckled
from its bridle—if you can taste the flavour
of mistrust, metallic, and transfer it from yourself
to those who placed the rules in metal struts
across your mental shoulder blades, before you knew what rules
were—old rules—and yet knew—
if you can overturn
the virtue formerly known as waiting, its precious pointless shiny end,
the child’s Big Day ahead; and if you can dig out—with townie hands—
that undulating fungus, sickly nub of anger, three-quarter-strangled
infant, kept terminant in a bowl underground, mouldering and not quite
dead, enduring years of patient schooling from ersatz prophets
who offered a pre-packed resealable bloodless creed as food—and that
in crumbs—swapping the birthright of fire and wind and earth and sea,
which kindled you, for teaspoonfuls of pleasing pottage—
syrupy inducements to surrender self before possessing it—
which, like a shivering cur, you gobbled to pacify your hunger (your fathers
weeping); if you can forgive
those who clothed you in a tragic lycra mantle of this vale of tears,
but there’s hereafter, little one, just wait and see, and forgive
yourself for listening—if you can clamber like the child you never were
into that moment where present is, and see it spacious as an eye, a cave
with wallflowers and rampant peonies, and feel safe there, for that second—
for the first
time—and begin to maybe
play—
if you can take the sword to people-pleasing dragons,
without apologising, accept your dreams
as signals, smart invites, small disturbances
from elsewhere, rather than unruly mongrels to be restrained,
retrained—if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
and be glad and affable with the one and not so tea-and-scone-
bearing, spare-room-lending, with the other—
if you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken be repeated back to you
verbatim, and watch the things you broke be mended by-
and-by by grace’s mad reversal, with tools you never used
before—if you can gamble all your winnings like your father
and your Father, spindrift, spendthrift as the wind, and advertise
ungrumbling all your losses and your gains—if you can force your nerves
and sinews to try less hard, and let go of will, after all this time—
if you can stop making a virtue of bleedin’ virtue, bleeding
white ghost bleeding you, and all the men who courted you (but not
too much), for the moments which remain—consecutive
eternities—discovering the Mother-King we have in common;
till yours is heaven and everything that’s in it—
and what is more, all this is too— then you’ll dispossess
the angel and the demon, and own living, as woman-made-man-made-
woman,
bashed in but unabashed, unpicked and yet unpickled, conditioned and
matured in countless asks, now shed, mutated, without whatifs.
![]()
lemonjim hour: brittle england
the muse, here to amuse, brings a clock.
my hands and brain are chapped from taking her notes.
glimquist and sunkissed on a burgundy chaise longue
she turns phrase after phrase on the lathe of her tongue
until fluted and threaded, drilled, joisted and planed, she produces
five flights of solicitors’ banisters to snake down the staircase,
hemming me in and
she is truth-pillowing everything out so that I’m breathing as
shallow and stinky as rockwater, anemone-blind, choking on her alien
mouthwash as she bats me from pillar to post, copper-manic,
feeding me what she calls ilk milk, squeezed from white cliffs of dover,
she a sovereign autonomous rose, till she drops
like a poppy, one ochre petal for each bong of the clock
at tea time, drumming the carpet
with glee...
