This (or the beginning of it: 'Come back,/Nothing is forgiven,/But my lifeboats have all blown up') wove its way into my head this afternoon. So I gave it the benefit of the doubt & let it fold itself out.
(A picture from all of three years ago, which seems an eternity.)
What is it about? What background information do you need for it to make any sense? Well... It's about the disjuncture between the present & the past. It's about an old (& sometimes - far too much of the time - fairly horrific) relationship I was in in my early twenties (it stretches as far back as five years ago, in the buildup to that catastrophicness) and (yet) is very much from the point-of-view of me now, over a year after it was terminated, looking back at it like a run over cat looks at the stretch of road on which it was run over. Is it a peon to a lost boyfriend, or a peon to the former half of my twenties? I'm not entirely sure. Both, perhaps. But writing it made me sad, & reading it makes me sad, so it's like a sort of dirge, I suppose. *shrugs*
Come back,
Nothing is forgiven,
But my lifeboats have all blown up
In a hundred storms in teacups
And the end
Seems like a sink at
The unplugging of the washing up –
Unclean! Unclean!
A filthy dream,
Wash it away
With UFO-beams.
Screams,
Unuttered in the day,
Come out at night to play like Poe’s
Conqueror Worm,
Remember when
We shouted it
Into the air?
The Barbican
Was beaten bronze
The darkness seemed
To rest upon
Like the water
Had melted down
From out of the night,
Plymouth Sound,
And the pushed my
Hands into my
Coatpockets hard
And tried to keep
My head as both
You and another
Man said you’d
Take me to bed
And all my future
Flashed before my
Eyes as I
Walked home alone
And laughed and talked
Into the air
About you,
You’re a
Fatal snare,
From here to there’s
A thousand years
And you are somewhere
I am here
And crying out
Years-older eyes
Under the same old
Sea-side skies
Reprise reprise,
A lullaby
That gets louder
As life goes by
To drown it out
To drown me in
My mind’s own merrygoround din,
And cry it out
And shout it out
And talk to you
As though you’re here
When you’re not here
You’ll never be,
Torn out of my
Great symphony
That has ended
Decades too soon,
Unless I crawl
Into death’s womb
So premature
That I would have
To bleed into
My boyfriend’s bath
And be found there
Amidst the paint
He’s smeared on all
The walls, my blood
Matching a shade
Of the wall’s blood,
Perhaps, when it
Is done and dried,
My life beside
Me like a towel
Draped on a chair,
To stay right there,
Abruptly stopped
As a fucked clock…
But I’m alive.
And I take stock.
Like the old brain
Of an old woman
Harking back
To hear the past
Because the present’s
Just a waiting
Room for where she’ll
Go at last.
