Rising Writers #1 – Daniel Abbott

Sehnsucht

The parted lip in the rainbow veil,
the rose-tint dulling in time’s puddle pail
that you used to trace your gossamer fingers
through, dipping in and golden folding out,
making cradles for cats to sleep in.

You made the long dark night a hairpin,
stitching stars on your skin, plucking
fruits from the heaventree, blowing
moondust from your lunatic lashes.

You are just a shard, a shattered
thing in shuttered recesses of a mind unfilled
with yearning, a silver buoy
on a cloudless sea, a shadow on a beach
with sand in your eyes and salt on your cheeks,
the sun dipping golden folding low,
rays spread thin, warping like henna
on your hands.

But these are the fret and fraught
of ageing heads. You paint a cloud on
time’s blue sky and the rain will come.
This is spit and wish transformed,
malleable thought unchained,
the reaching out for memories already bathed
in the soft focus lens of recollection,
the creases ironed out, the flaws unstitched,
the needle straight and punching clean; unhinged.

Don’t hurt me. Phantom visions. Don’t hurt me,
here at the end of the rosy road,
a wall of glaze-eyed mist between
the world and we.

I’ve slashed the rainbow veil. Time shuffles the deck,
plucking out the strays and suits, and all
the smiling shadows golden fold away.

 

Roar

I will show you our years in a cock full of rust.
This ageworn cipher channelled through time,
petrified rock, cypress circles tenfold.

This sagging middleman, rigmarole Vulcan,
lamer than Claudius, no wiser than a flea.

Sit on my girders, my fat old sun,
my Havisham spectre,
rub your old bones against my steel,
melt it to copper, to tin and to stone.

A brittle little pebblestone with the memories
of the potentate ocean roaring in its soul.

My power is yours; whatever’s left of it,
whatever’s left of you that isn’t
ash and nostalgia.

Take it in your veinbone hands and
caress it gently back to life.

Your eyes are dwarf stars;
dying final flashes of glory.
We lie in the garden, heads together.
You rock me back and forth.

The ocean roars again.

 

Zimmerframe

A deep breath held on the
pivot of a zimmerframe.

Six legs shamble like misshapen
arachnids, monkey bars
hung

with old laundry.

Craneflies dance and drop, a lifetime
in the palm of a day.

Eighty one years may as well
just be a day after
all.