Angst Cycle

1. The Door

A door was never really opened
just enough to trap my heart.

Watching wind blow rain around,
white foam build shapes of Henry Moore,
green trees hide sky from eyes below,
humid sleep and light too bright.

Grey wind blow rain around.

2. Father

A lively young man in old photographs
admiring the gifted coffee-pot lamp,
suffering your only cigar for the sake of celebration;

you inhabit so many people's memories.
You stood my six-year-old self in the corner
when I wouldn't tell you about my day at school.

You played with my train set
while I sulked in an island of track
safe under the table's solid roof.

I remember peeking through the crack
behind a half-closed door, looking down the hall,
when mother came back, crying.

Father, why did you die?

You send advice through third hand tales,
you star in fondly remembered anecdotes.

I can still hear the disapproving shock
watered down the years.

3. I've Always Had Steep Mountains

I've always had steep mountains
barring the road to my soul.

I've tried to dig a few tunnels
burrowing with words, not touch,
but honesty written on paper
with face to glacial face
with shock at invitation
with wishes and later regrets
just festers, slowly,
like a bug that just won't go.

I'm trapped in betrayal's valleys
old rock from long ago
when early emotional plates
which formed the map of my mind,
before the map had relaxed,
quaked with the fullness of horror
building the biggest of mountains
leaving no easy pass through.

The castle which houses my heart
is protected from winds of love
no breeze brings scents of elsewhere
just rain, and drizzle, and mud.
The senses may send out their beacon
like radio transmits the news,
but I cannot climb the moutain
or burrow a secret way through.

Like a cloud, you blew past my valley
showing yourself a while.

Goodbye
cloud of lost hope.
One day, come back my way.

I loved you.

4. Watford Gap

Claws of vague, white fog
tense over the motorway
waiting like a fisherman for the fish.

The sharp orange of the streaming lights
are lost in that glowing cloud;
the claws, a suffocating fist
bunched over the carriage-way;
the red lights of your predecessor
become smudged in the snare ahead.

You slow, seeing few white lines:
the prey passes at seventy.

5. Why is England so full of fools?

A year of dreaming:
burst.
A year of hope.

A bubble of sweet wishes
like the last bubble blown:
it seemed to last forever.
As the other glitter
reflecting dead dreams
died around
dissolving,
one survived.

But all the looking,
all the wishing,
all the hope,
a drop of hurt,
splattered on the floor.

Hell welcomes me again
another trip round the tourist sights:
the wishes of "What If",
the fire of "What Should Have Been",

those mountains of silence.
Formulas belong in the dying dreams of science,
in newly filmed repeats in the television desert.

I said nothing,
like another rusty machine,
another rational logic gate,
another dry processor
in the statistic age.

Yet your look was "Yes"
and my dreams were you.
I waited for you to say what I saw,
you waited for me to come anyway,
and the bubble sank.

Why is England so full of fools?

6. Untitled

Her beauty clasped by twilight
     the widow
          gently wields her fan
                    - Basho

Showers. Red eyes,
"mummy, why did daddy die?".
Years later, I still ask.

7. Letter

A long time ago
when the trees were learning to be green again
you wrote in a humid, high summer
saying you would be in England's grey cold
so soon from now. Unless Australia's
next season of sun, its summer Christmas,
holds you more than legal bindings,
or that old address is not the place to write,
or the unions repair their broken threat,
Hi!