Keeping Mum
At nine years old
she’d never had a chance
to know her father.
Not to know about his life,
his personality,
or his dreams,
Only that he loved her
and had been frail and ill
all her life.
“She never even asks how her father is”,
said her mother’s friend disapprovingly.
Her mother must have told her that.
“They won’t tell me, so there’s no point
in asking”, she thought.
No!
I think she said!
They wouldn’t tell her why
he was in hospital.
They wouldn’t tell her why
he died,
not at nine years old,
not until years later
when they were all dead
and more voices could speak.
Motherly Love
I have spent a lifetime
trying to break away,
trying to break out,
trying to find myself.
Always on the edge,
always on the outside,
not quite a part,
of it, not quite
a beatnik,
or a mod,
hippy, or
punk.
I was early to realise that
what she wanted me to be
was what she had wanted
for herself, about her, not me.
I wanted to escape such love.
I thought I could escape.
I thought I had escaped.
And I did, surely I did
escape
some
of it.
But not all.
Not enough.
So even now I feel tethered.
After all this time of leaving
her behind,
I remain
unsure
of my
own.
First published in Yellow Chair Review, June 2016My Sister Maud
I had a sister once.
Her name was Maud.
I never knew her,
never even knew of her.
No one said.
Not our father,
or his son,
not my mother,
no one.
No one spoke.
All were mute for Maud.
She never grew old,
never even grew up.
And her little life
became engulfed in silence.
My father cried
when she died,
I know it now
more than eighty years later
I know it.
When there’s no one living
who knew her.
When there is no one left
to tell me her favourite games,
her hopes, her dreams.
All are gone.
I know it now.
I even have a photograph
so that I can see her,
picture her as she was.
And I won’t forget her,
won’t forget that
I had a sister once.
Her name was Maud.
First published in Blue Heron Review, Summer 2018
Bio: Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud ‘War Poetry for Today’ competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Consequence Magazine, Firewords, Capsule Stories, Light Journal and So It Goes. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/
The art is hidden for now. I have obeyed too long.
I feel frozen. While my possession eats the heat.
Where have you gone? Slid behind the clouds?
Perfumed doors. Rooms go from stale to rancid blindness.
I feel bloodless. Accidental and lost a shine. Pale funeral songs.
The black dresses are now my misery
These, that dance above me twisting. Swing dancing into a hex.
All ghosts, all witchery.
Former waves that blew the knives over us and dared us to swim the lake.
Dim are my eyes and bones that have chalked.
As Jacques sings "Ma mort attend comme"
I hold all the flowers, I hold all the crippled photographs.
Elderly and young photos. Fortune tellers in the clouds.
Deafening light from outside. I want the puniness of a weak night.
No hardening storm. No flooding streets and screaming thunder.
They, the geese she'd use to fly over me. I felt lucky to have them.
A new direction. To escape them. To escape him. To escape the cage of screams.
Those 8 Geese of Hanover that kept hovering me.
My guardian angels I would welcome them to my melting wax home.
I wonder now if they were truly demon. Explosions, the apple and all.
As now alone and severed I feel that they are the same as these hauntings.
I watch 8 black dresses hover over me now.
But they in these garments, they bite. The geese have transitioned their colours.
I awake to scissor teeth marks on my skin. So they are heaving to me the curse. Still. The Curse. Always that curse.
Do holy bibles hiss?
Is my god a blonde bombshell?
Is my god a tornado?
Is my god a magical bearded fabulous genius?
Is my god a chirping cricket?
Is my god a newborn baby?
Is my god a morphine drip?
My revelation is a promise?
Le deuxième ange sonna de la trompette
befitting. closing eyes.
staring into darkness, rippled waters I feel in the air of this room.
Leave the lake, become my misery.
In this room that pain stares at me.
Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.
There he is
I see him under pelts of hailstones
A riddled mind and diseased by doctors
the icy rain pulsing little cuts
All over and over again.
I'm still in a quiet thought
We always felt the ending.
Or at least I have seen this ending.
In nightmares every night
The men festive from the jail.
Mother, a stereotype. Needing an exorcism.
There he is
My brother, a little hushed baby of 25.
Shoes as split as a peeled banana.
His coloring of blue, like the river nearby.
Like the breeze that blows through his long haired, daredevil boy.
He was hideous in his battle
Popping firework amphetamine pills, dragons watch the alleys.
The abusive and abused in corners and in jars.
Oh, lonesome traveler
a blood kissed jewel.
Some crows sing in their broken voices, they sit atop the bells.
They fly in the air, they congregate in the tree above. The sick hickory
I watch with no blink as they rescue him from the cold ground.
For only a few long hours and then they just return him back
to give him a comfortable dirty sack.
Underground, where they'll whisper out your sins to each other.
We can't escape the gossip.
Gossip clumsily falls like a slinky missing a step along the way.
The steps that are missed however, are remembered for coming up with the best stories.
Your best demise.
Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.
when flies walk upon my forearm hairs
proprietorial as landlords
and the land is ripe with roadkill
extreme weather scenarios
play out in real time
climate diplomats gather
but the plenary is beached -
delegates cloyed
as wasps in coulis
we sit around
the water table
with an ashen thirst
everybody wants to make a move
but no one does
like watching the bleaching of coral
the only thing agreed on
is that all this is unprecedented
unprecedented rainfall here
unprecedented temperatures there
unprecedented use of the word unprecedented everywhere
in high summer
the deluge
the canicule
the conflagration
ants grow fat
grow wings
buzz my ears
we pick at
the brittle wishbone
of consensus
wait for crows
locusts
to draw down the dusk
with a dry calling
We Are Green
One winter’s day
through condensation windows
I mistook a withered gunnera leaf
for a heron’s wing.
Imagined the bird
coiled, primal,
waiting at the water.
Months later,
in the veiled sphere
under a summer gunnera plant,
I imagined myself
small,
deep in zoological realms
below explosions
of virid strong-stemmed leaves
as wide as the sky,
blush flower spikes
pushing up and through.
Today
in seasons of indeterminate grey
when squirrels
do not know
which page
of the nut calendar
we are on,
it is the verdure
I return to.
I daydream of a kinder world.
Daylight and rainfall
elect a parliament of plants.
An upper house of trees.
We are green,
enfranchised.
XY (No Means No)
X.
Doctor Foster
went to Gloucester
in a shower of rain.
Fred and Rose
they quit town
but left a nasty stain.
That’s Fred West -
more than a sex pest.
Did unspeakable things
in his dirty vest.
Y.
Cycling past
the rape seed fields
brings it all back.
The yellow so vivid,
you lying on your back.
The yellow, the horror,
you want to be home,
but find yourself
involuntary, prone.
He seemed ok at first,
he said he’d drop you back.
The stony ground remains
no aphrodisiac.
You shut your eyes
your demon’s back,
slow, stupid in the sack.
And No Means No
involuntary
lying on your back.
Choose Your Own Mother(for Rhianydd Daniel)
I have heard it said
the yet unborn
can choose their parents.
A strange idea, this.
Although we live in times
when nothing is
beyond belief.
If it is true..
If it is true,
I ask myself
the reason
I chose you.
Indecisive as I am,
and daresay was
before my birth,
there is a scenario
in which I am at peace.
Wherein, unborn,
I somehow hear
your singing voice.
And from that time
I have no choice.
sand in your blood
I remember when
you scraped your leg on coral..
a rose rust bloomed raw
under your skin..the
sea was a blister the moon
was a bruise.. all night
your fever rose and
fell..lava tides licked feral
flames..sand in your blood
Ad Astra Zee
I am waiting for my blood
to clot. Broad beans
block green veins,
velvet furred.
I am ripe
for it.
One day my feet
will be corms,
shoehorned
in stony ground.
My soles are up
for it.
Hey Astra Zee!
I want my
second dose
already.
I am weary
of this solid flesh
my veins
so unimpeded.
Bring on the levelling dark.
I am ready, pale horse
for your clip-clop.
For blood clots.
Bolt, beauteous breathlessness!
Bolt, cramping throbbing pain
stampeded!
the paranoia shop
sells mini cctv
for the home or handbag
sells cctv any size you need
hard-sells hard knuckle dusters
and knives all shapes and sizes
beyond imagination
for your perfect tribulation
they say carrying a knife
puts you more at risk of a stabbing
but the stab-proof vests are on offer today
see the cute hand guns
to fit your hand just so
the paranoia shop
nestled between Gaultier and Kenzo
I love to window shop there
It makes me feel so safe
worm haiku
exit wounds out of
apples, soldiers, the worm out
of one the bullet
Perfect Bed
I dream I am at Bembom Brothers
Dreamland funfair park
with Tracey Emin.
Hard by Margate sands.
I know I shouldn’t drink that Vodka
on the Helter Skelter.
Apart from that,
a Day as Perfect as the Lou Reed song.
We Kiss with Fish and Chips Lips,
Join Hips. A Turner Sunset
Going Down.
I guess it is the Golden Hour.
Blair’s Babes
and even some of his men MP’s
are busy Changing a whole heap of things
for the Better.
Back in your room
we remember that
we even Changed the Bed this morning.
The linen soft and cool next to our Optimistic skin.
(This poem has previously appeared online in iamb-wave seven)
Going back
I went back, and it looked the same.
I was not expecting that.
Expected the usual rash of
New Builds, creeping up the hill.
I went back, thinking
it would all look smaller, like
when I came back from America
aged 19, and it seemed like the train
home had shrunk
in a B movie.
I went back
looking for what?
The muddy lane where
we skidded our scooters?
The neighbour’s garden gnome
one of us pushed in his pond?
The Fish Caves, where we played
explorers? Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
or at least
some way in
to that disused tin mine.
I went back, not to look for
my Dad, just some of the places
he used to take us.
Halfway between morbid
and curious.
I went back to the old conker trees
and the scraped knees. To the
broken fence on Bishop’s Wood Road,
where it said No Trespassing
but my Dad said we’d be alright.
I went back to the old quarry
with the pond we thought was a lake.
I’m channeling a half-
remembered sense of comfort,
danger. Somewhere between
Teddy Bears and Teddy Boys.
I went back to stacking
boxes of seaside rock
at Woolworths.
Each stick had writing all the way through,
persistent as memory.
From up on the hill
you can see it all.
The only thing different
is wind turbines out at sea,
turning like time.
I remember a school master who left.
All of a sudden. The smell
of that old classroom
at the end of the dark
corridor. Scuffed floor wax.
Thanks Sylvia for the Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton Challenge
You married Ted, slapped
cobweb faced British poetry,
long overdue
Bio: Ivor Daniel lives in Gloucestershire, UK. His poems have appeared in A Spray of Hope,
wildfire words, Steel Jackdaw, Writeresque, iamb~wave seven, Fevers of the Mind, The
Trawler, Roi Fainéant, Ice Floe Press and The Dawntreader. He has poems forthcoming in
After..., Re-Side, Alien Buddha, The Orchard Lea Anthology (Cancer) and The Crump’s Barn
Anthology (Halloween). .
@IvorDaniel
I long for magic in my life…
Does that sound silly?
I long for wings and wands
Instead of claws and sores.
Flesh strips, flayed
Vultures lay bare
A raw heart–
Rended
Shrapnel shreds sisters, mother, father
A familial holocaust
A bone tableau
Sylvia, Ingrid and Virginia
Weave their wounds into words
Spiralling down a well
I long for wings and wands
Instead of claws and sores.
I long for magic in my life…
Does that sound silly?
*Previously published on Elephants Never on (Oct 7 2019)*
Bio: Monica Kagan lives by the sea in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in New Coin PoetryJournal (ISEA, Rhodes University), Crack the Spine, and Anti-Heroin Chic, and among others.
Fevers of the Mind 