Not Seen and Not Heard; and 2 no-poems.

   Sometimes I wish or imagine that several or many people would read the collection that is my blog. Sometimes I do not wish anyone to read it but am still conscious of writing as if to an audience. Right now I feel as I'm writing at a table alone in a universe in which the last person here turned off all the lights before they left.
   I wish I had the courage to say what's really, really going on.
   I would very much like one chance to be so violently and horrifically honest, so unafraid of consequence or judgement, that just the sheer emotional blast of what I really do feel would rip people's eyes around and force them to face what utter denial-addicted and lying bastards they really are, and then that the fire of it would burn and cleanse and change me into not caring a toss. I would like to be a real man, for once, and have the courage, just once, to scream into God's face exactly what it's like to have expected for so long that life would be otherwise than that  to which it defaults. I'd like to have the fearlessness to admit the incandescent rage  I really have instead of the love that I'm supposed to have, along with the shame I carry about the inability to kick my way out of the shroud of failure that has flapped and tripped and obscured since I was old enough to have memory. I would desperately like to really shout till I was hoarse about what it's like: to be dumped, lied to and abandoned; to be denied the woman, marriage and life I've begged repeatedly for; to have trusted so often yet still had my inner sanctum trampled over; to be perpetually unfit for real work; to be lashed with storms of depression; to experience life in my 50s as even more fixed in the daily horror of a solitarily-confining loneliness than it ever used to be.
   And to find that the difference is this: when I was a "fresh Christian", I worked so damn hard to force myself to believe that being "better", healed, whole, would actually come about...that there would be, though I couldn't see or imagine it, a future that would "prosper and not harm" me....and yet, though I now have a perfectly painful and acute sense of what features populate that future, not only do I not have that future, it seems to have receded so far off that it is year by year ever further away and impossible as I get now too old to grasp it.
    And I think this: that if what I sow I reap..then I must have been so, so crap, twisted and offbeam for so long, as to have made my life an out-throwing of such bad seed that I now am treading my bed down to sleep in the bed that I myself have made.
  As now my parents' health quickly and painfully worsens, I too feel I have only the same to look forward to.

   I would like to say all the above, and be a man for once.

    Time was, a couple of short years ago more or less, that I was in the joy of me being married-to-be and in a nuclear and wider church family, and in that joy of having my parents see me finally married and happy. Not blissed, not floating, not not having to work at it or me...just doing it.
  And now, they become more ill and old; the family I would have had surrounding me are growing without me, totally unaware that I could have provided anything for them, the wife-to-be who spoke of her Til Death Do Us Partness grows without me, and the church "family" that cants of love commands me to be silent if I dare tell them what's really going on, tells me I stop them worshipping and accuses me of disunity if I complain. And never once has it seemingly turned its "discernment" upon itself. It of course loves my honesty. Unless I point it at them.
    So, I hope no-one read this, that there is no-one in tha vast and silent auditorium. Mind you, it doesn't matter, as I'm glad I don't have the courage to say what's really, really going on.
   And because I can't, I'll do the snidy, dishonest thing that creative people do, like do a poem or a photo to in some way allude to the truth without having the balls to actually say what it is.

   So, for nobody, here's 2 poems.
 I wrote them ages ago, hoping to God I'd never be in the position to identify with them, hoping with horror that the vague and momentary fears of so many years ago would never actually coalesce into reflecting what it really might be like some day.
  So it really is a good job I cannot say now what it's like.
 With almost laughable synchronicity, can you believe there's an Ingmar Bergman film just come on the TV as I write?

Forces Of Habit


From the moment we declared love
My armies awoke from deep and Arthurian sleep,
Swore allegiance to do or die
And would rescue you now from the land you have gained.
They man my battlements still,
Skirmish in the no-mans land, and watch for attack;
They do drills, lay traps, set fuses and I often hear them in the long and
Moaning night
Digging in their ditches and scratching in their mines.

But for long years now I've manned a watch,
Beacons ablaze behind my high walls
And my guards are so well-drilled now, that not even I am allowed to pass.





View From The Edge

The estuary at night; slow, huge, fathomless and inescapable blackness; a somewhere that if thought about
would stir and shift in some thick and blind purpose
to sink deeper
into an awful and bruised nothing, far below hulking dead ships, whales, planets or forgiveness.

Yet in some slack and loose time of night
slow  swirls eddy upwards from these deeps as black as oil
to twist, pop and gape at the stars.
They rise from below the most terrible deep, through the dark layers of
old bikes, bedsteads and suicides;
things formless since separation unnameable
whose only hunger is the taking of shape so as to loll and suck with wet and shapeless mouths,
being born and seeking names;
urging, slow  swirls gathering form from joyless collision with the rusting frames and the silent O and seaweed hair of drowned lovers.

And above
up they come
tired and torpid things urging at last to become
a dark manshape
that looks over the edge
to search without goal and
to moan without voice