during the week when noa is finally born,

huge, and giving her mother a pounding en route,

i keep bumping into you around the flat

sat stock-still and wearing an expression

precisely halfway between spacey-stoned and zen master,

so that i can’t fathom whether you have suddenly got it

or are pondering eating some oreos.

we two have both had psychiatric meds coming out our ears

this past month.

i love your stillness, your buddha wisdom face,

and don’t wish to burst your bubble

by enquiring what’s going on.

heading east, we overshoot our turn-off

and end up on an old-fashioned country jaunt

taking in wilmington, alfriston, and the view across cuckmere haven.

we spot a white horse on the hill above litlington

which i discover was cut in 1924;

today it looks all brand new.

i’m writing this with the red pen they gave me at the sanctuary in hastings

turning point, it says on the side.

i keep thinking of the film “perfect days”:

the beautiful apartment, its beautiful exterior,

koji yakusho tending to the baby trees he collects at the buddhist park

and plants in exquisite handmade origami newspaper pots.

since i was sprung from prison

each tiny liberty equals a whole planetful of joy:

crossing the road alone with my mobility aid;

hanging out at the cafe solo.

on my return i meet two tourists

photographing my roof garden. i thank them, and am ambushed by childlike pride:

i made that; i can do that.

my life is my message

gandhi

in twenty years will the people who currently get impatient/cross

when i mention the climate emergency

say you told me so?

will they wish they hadn’t got on so many aeroplanes,

or will they defend their choice to take recreational flights?

a lot of us are broken now. perhaps our best hope

is to own how smashed up we are,

inhabit the catastrophe

with as much consciousness as we can bring to the table.

residence in a psychiatric facility

is a good excuse for skipping the news.

there aren’t any words

paint drips

apostrophes

which escape your attention. (i only had six nights)

the federer fan asked why i thought “st george’s day” was a poem

rather than a prose piece.

the answer is i didn’t:

that is how it presented itself to me

who was it who said writing [poems] is like taking dictation

[c s lewis said writing] poems [is rather like taking dictation]

when jarvis asked leonard about his creative process

he eluded or elided the question

best not dig too deep into that soil

if some words arrive as a poem

if poems come as a by-product of the other kind of writing i do

who am i to argue.

the man said your life is none of your business.

sometimes i get muddled between dragons and dinosaurs
forgetting which is imaginary and which actually used to exist.

someone told me that the way i write, erratic and spiky,
rushing to arrive at the next letter,
indicates fast thinking:
but it strikes me as the opposite of quick-witted
that i need to take a moment to remember whether
a fire-breathing mythical beast once roamed the earth,
regardless of how improbable a triceratops might seem.

i complain that no one has explained to robert plant
that he is singing wrong by screeching in that pained and painful fashion.
a stranger concurs, remarking that proper blues singers don’t find it necessary to shout.

the white flag with the red cross heaves and sucks in the wind
on the pole above the town hall.

don’t say this                                                                                                                                                                                             say that

 

but don’t say it now                                                                                                                                                                          say it later

 

                                                                                     and in a different voice

 

someone else’s voice. you have to guess whose voice to use, and what we mean by “later”.

 

i wouldn’t talk about that if i were you, or at the very least not to them.

i think you should wait a while before you risk bringing this matter up again.

 

sit in the corner. no not that corner! the other corner!

and speak loudly enough so we can’t hear (whisper whisper whisper whisper)

she’s so stupid she doesn’t even know which corner to sit in!

you must have known this about that. but not that about them.

and by the way you are the wrong size anyway. and shape. what a silly shape.

didn’t we tell you that you had to squeeze your squareness into that round hole?

i’m sure we warned you about the size and shape stuff right from the start,

when you were so little you hadn’t had the chance to put your great galumphing foot in it

then tread the mess all over our immaculate carpet.

we are the arbiters of reason, and we are legion.

you look at the moon in the knowledge

that all those you love live under her

flimsy like a rainbow. just a change

of direction, or the weather, and they’re gone.

manifold pigments shot into space.

*

in this neck of the woods

at this time of night

bleeding red plonk and pharmaceuticals

my little white star misses me

elle me manque; my stella.

and there’s a hole inside

this whole wise witch

who casts not spells but curses.

i’m lost without you, stellar angel.

wailing into the moonlit sky

my husband has gone missing again

perhaps taken this time by an opportunist sniper

and the children don’t come home

though i keep calling

into the darkness; hello little bear,

ursula, my second daughter.

hello half cut moon lying

on your side rocking as a boat without anchor

with no sight of shore.

someone tied me to the mast

resolute figurehead

so that I could paint that same storm

over and over as if I hadn’t seen it

a thousand times.

*

and what it comes down to is this:

that no number of clumsy lines of verse

or clumsy lines drawn near dawn

or how much paint daubed in passion, or anger,

all this counts less than a little piece of crap

when my husband has gone awol

and my babies never come home.

and all the love in this feeble heart

beats without time

when there is no table to lay for supper.

*

if you came this way under cover

cloaked in darkness, lady of the night

who would you meet down this dark alley

lined with raw eggs and used prophylactics?

only me, mae west with a pistol

pleased to see you

pistil and stamen minus fertilisation.

*

such a pretty open flower

with all her life ahead

my children beckoning, smiling

from the untaken snapshots.

what a piece of work is man

so noble, so brave with weapon drawn

take forty paces, turn, misfire

shots falling on empty ears.

i never thought it would come to this

in the half light half life

staring down the barrel of a half drunk bottle

being half bleeding clever

keeping mum.

yesterday a neighbourhood child,

i’ve known her to “hello” for years but don’t know her name,

rushed home to get me a plaster when this tiny cut on my finger wouldn’t stop bleeding.

the blood messed up the edges of the pages of a book,

got on the biscuit i was trying to eat, kept needing more tissues to soak it up.

i was trying to keep things tidy. i had so many things – too many, really –

i didn’t need that quantity of books or medicines or tissues, plus

i was weighed down by a lot of other stuff i hadn’t even planned to bring,

things which i’d tried to shut inside a cupboard whose door doesn’t fully close

and one handle falls off in your hand almost every time.

something somebody had said kept worming about inside me.

as fast as i could remove it,

and i was using all my powers to do that, as fast as i worked to get it out,

it found its way back into my empty spaces.

i think i’d hoped, i mean i thought i’d thunk, i had this idea that if i sewed

roughly a good amount of words and tidied around them,

and remembered to water them frequently if it didn’t rain for a while,

attended to weeding and that sort of thing, that i could keep the not-wanted at bay,

and fend off at least a proportion of the deeply unpalatable.

i realised i could use the paper bag which my biscuit had come in.

i’d be able to shove all the bloodied tissues into it, the sticky bit off the back

which you detach in order

to apply the plaster to your skin;

it was too late now to do anything about the edges of the pages being blood-stained,

but i could bury most of the rest of this mess

push it down into the far-off shadowy corners of the paper bag

(which must be mine now, since the biscuit was paid for and had come in the bag).

i would hide all the unsavouriness in the bag’s corners,

put the smaller bag into the recesses of the bag which i’d brought out with me,

get the whole ungodly mess into my bin once home

and nobody would be any the wiser.

and today i keep thinking that i wish i had kept my eyes on the child and noted

where exactly home is for her.

that i didn’t seems careless now. i wish i’d paid more attention.