self-proclamation

ascension MARTIN HÜBSCHER PHOTOGRAPHY © 2016

Calico

Please don't ask me how I feel.
In the garden of how I feel
nothing grows
but tears and sighs and bitter aloes.
I cannot speak my sorrow:
it swells inside me, fungating tumour,
choking words and ulcerating thoughts.

In the garden of how I feel,
there is no light; sunken corner
of mind's eye
diseased, where knotted stems writhe and mould,
mandrakes scream, torn out of earth,
and the angry rustling of ivy leaves
sirens that rats are tunnelling through.

It’s their garden now; dead ones stink
where lily and rose used to be.
Memory
by violence of absence mutates,
past and present are displaced -
love severed, nothing looks nor feels the same
that once was seen and felt by her, too.

Please don’t tell me, then, to “move on”-
raw amputee crawling towards
a closed door.
Let me journey in catacombed mind
to resurrect the garden,
replant her flowers, released,
in sweet disorder, out of stone and clay,
ancient art of heartbreak colours mixed;

rare slender straight-backed gallantry,
supple as swaying summer stems;
make-believe
like her the most while having little -
her calico mystery -
I see her - quick - she’s climbed the tree again -
she stands, laughing in the dappled light.

Written after seeing a photograph of a woman in a garden

contrablog:

 

A fine dose of revenge is in every complaint. Nietzsche

WORLD'S END GARDEN

 ...I am re-begot

Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

John Donne, A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day

Part One GARDEN
Part Two PUNISHMENT
Part Three RE-BEGOT
Part Four BOUNDARIES
Part Five SWORD
Part Six BESIEGED
Part Seven BREACHED
Part Eight GARDEN
© Pippa Rathborne 2012

 
Like all histories, this is a product of the imagination, based on real events. Every word is true, but, except for the first person singular and plural, the characters are fictional composites and any resemblance to living persons is unintended and purely coincidental.

I think that whenever one has something unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest