Author Archives: donkeytoddler

Cumulonimbus for part Helios

And his sea washes down

Onto us, lounging; enamoured

We lie supine, under your spell.

To write anything substantial one must act as the excavator, or, the archaeologist, of one’s own mind, tracing the genealogy of thought, feeling and memory.

Mania, frantic nervousness, moves and pulsates my throbbing to a point of nail-biting procrastination instead of steering my focus towards a productive port: safe, sound, cradled under the stars and resting atop the waves, now gentle, now rocking me back to the sleep from where we come, and to where we are headed now and in a second.

To experience a second in all its fullness, to feel it pass, to inhabit it, is … what exactly am I thinking? Death in every second, every heart beat, ha! To write is to watch me watching myself squirm and wriggle in a labyrinth of feeling and thought and notion under the deception of being’s potion. It has all been thought and written and published and failed and succeeded and nominated and won and nominated and lost and why don’t you just stop now?

“These lines and margins and pens,” permit this dance between myself and myself. Everyone else enclosed in my unstable wooden book case has had a crack at it, at this, for exactly the reasons they did, and I don’t yet know my reason(s), maybe they never knew their’s?

All of these fragments, all of these and more: this pen, these letters and words, great Russian epics and ancient Japanese haikus, are just fragments of a whole, shards and shrapnel scattered and dispersed from the unity of one. We all grapple. Some minds are vast, some IQs are a marvel, some people are born stupid and die stupid, but we all try to grapple.

People are alone
when you look at them long enough
on the bus on an evening cold
with slapping rain kissing
crumpled, worn faces.
A phone call ends with the glare 
of a lost conversation;
the searching eyes trip over 
thoughts searching for internal resolution
within the orbit of unexpected dissolution. 
A kind request of departure
is not enough to dissuade 
a blissful rapture in the house of a royal parasite;
lies, lies, lies, piled upon
a counterfeit belief in the lies you snivel to yourself 
in the gloomy dark 
of a cold forgotten chamber. 

There is no past time quite like reading,
save only, perhaps, peeing in a puddle
of rainwater, in solitude,
accompanied by a soft summer breeze
that steers your liquid left from your sprout 
into an obscured hole
relieving the insects of their drought. 

I carry you
on my back 
because I must,
because who would I be
without your unnecessary weight?
I have bestowed upon myself a persistent ache,
a painful search for the profound,
for that ultimate fact or sentence written by
someone now rotting,
their body, at least, 
with their essence elsewhere displaced
among the cracks in the pavement,
in the trees and the stars.
I'm addressing you, Clarice,
I'm calling upon you, Vlad; 
grant me more than just a fleeting climax
from your deepest nook and cranny
and, please, bequeath me with something like
a truth. 

It had nothing to do with sex,
but a light tap on the shoulder,
a purposeful rap on the table with knuckles white, clenched,
(two times more it took for the rabble to realise):
it was a signal for mass suicide 
over plates full of spam and scampi 
before necks were cut and 
blood red was spilled in jugs and 
water glasses which, when clinked, chimed
at the motion of a connecting chink
in the name of pretend happiness,
one which is communal, shared, 
necessary for jovialities to always be
part of a staple diet of
civil interaction: 
"happiness is never an end, you fools," someone cries,
"be sad and embrace the coldness inside your ever-changing 
skin home!" 

It takes time to 
recognise ourselves. 
It takes time.
It takes time to recognise ourselves in
each other. 
You, 
and the person silently standing
under the lamp-light, amidst the fog and mist,
heavy feet planted on the wet cobbles
in a town long-forgotten, are the same:
clueless, confused, attempting comprehension
whilst being lost in a hall of mirrors, 
a labyrinthian daze. 

Now I am out from behind the veil,
but only for now...
From this watch-tower safe I can look behind and,
wide-eyed, fresh-faced, trace the
twisted track I have of late 
hauled and heaved my feet.
Beside the pillar, resting, leaning on
the ghosts whose bodies once
floated and shook hands and exchanged formalities,
you looked at my shaking, confused form: 
I could not look back at you.

It's not going away, 
this feeling of daily decay.
A sheet is floating over my forehead
and is fastened tighter each day. 
My talk and my speech, my chit-chat, is:
pointless
worthless and
draining for me, stripping my resources to
something quivering - a pulp.
Ninety-seven percent of the time
life gives me cheer, 
but the remaining three, 
mother dear,
I simply cannot bear.