BEGGAR WOMAN
I am withered and shriveled, and weak in your eyes, invisible, inconspicuous, faded, faceless, drab and dreary, biding my bleak days in the charity of your scraps. I prattle. Sly and carefully I creep, shuffling, slow, hunched and brittle within my tight band of sorrows. Stooping, low, I cast the smallest, shapeless shadow. Hag am I. And I have wandered; hungry, into your glittering town.
You tribes, who once were my own people, I was watching you, ravenously from a distant hill of dripping mists and grasping ferns, and I perched upon that mildewed mound of an enchanted garden of outcasts, shrouded in a mountain of maddened minds, completely quiet in some mottled forest…
Yet I did see you, parading the spurious spectacle of your glittering glamours, polishing the purchased, passing lustre of all your prosperities; feasting upon your languid lifestyle of ill-timed illusions. I stayed so long in such dank, dark places; I was stilled, witnessing the glory of all your frantic dreams come true.
You tribes, who were once my own people, now, I have clambered down upon you.
I am whispering; cackling in words that swirl and drift in circles-sounds that ebb and flow, ebb and flow, and I stitch, each creaky, crooked stitch, late and spidery, follows, one after another, inexorably, I whisper and stitch.
I see the ruins you have built; I see bruised and battered, outcast and wounded, raped and neglected, ignored and discarded. Gladly I gather your precious, tiny, torn shreds and I cosy them into my creaking cart. My back is bent but somehow still strong and growing stronger. Now I find blinded and hurt, traded and sold, I collect worn, sick and uncertain, joyfully do I lug angry and wild, here’s fallen, misunderstood, here’s kicked away, wicked, useless, burden and needy, ahhh, liar, come, you’ll see, I have room aplenty, abide with me.
You tribe of fools! What glory have you lost to the duplicity of greed? I have tinkered hard to harvest and cherish such jewels as you have tossed and discarded, and I have found your stunning children, and gladly would I claim all your forsaken treasures. What joys have you missed in your ignorant, sucking, desperate clutch for some temporal, plastic, personal bliss?
I will surely lure your young; piping such pure and flawless people home to their own sacred groves, where they may heal and shelter and share the radiance of the light that yet dwells in them all, natives again to the integrity within.
You tribes! Tend carefully to all such beauties as you may come to lose; I see all of our children dimming in the blight of our cruel rejections and self-serving stupidities.
Here now, look long upon your perfect mirrors, else I shall whisper more, and prattle to stitch and witness them to stride and boldly surge in the magnificence of their deepest heritage, such beautiful, brave, brilliant beings; victors of truth and love in action, word and deed. Changers, champions, challengers…
Teone – Wednesday 14th September 2011 ©
from the SERPENT’s BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS
…unashamed of seething darkness, I curved in raw arcs, borne on the whittled spine of an alien genius. I bartered hard for my place at the mystic moment, I roamed under the world and found what others chose to lose.
I knew your limbs, ever the tentacles of your hedonism. Did you feel my soft and promising coils? Could you take me into your self, delivered unto your deepest need? Your flesh hurt, that proud and persistent hostage to fear and I would not inhabit your sour temple of ugliness, your bleeding tomb of terrors. I slithered, free and sweet, fresh in earthly gardens of wild root and wondrous loam. You showered me in the wetness of your scorn.
Now you are weighed down, stoppered by an indolence of soul. I grimace at the wickedness of your foul and pious march of destruction upon the glorious path, and yet, I am deaf to your ecstatic madness. I banish the buried, muffled cries that whimper from under your savagery, I sever my eyes from the sight of you. My Earth quakes at the blight of your days. Make way, dispassionate wisp. Victim to the illusion, you are truly Fallen! My end is a silken fold of purest drifting shimmer. I devour me in the void of your heavy silence.
Mother! I am returned unto your stone. Bury me in this blanket, dead as they who walk, drugged upon artifice, startled by the elegance of allusion. I feel your body beneath me and I know an ocean of loss. Father! I am the Path! Following none but the voice of my own creation, I am here and well away. Not once upon this skin did I find affliction, nor do I hear the snarling of your monstrous rage.
See me! I am a radiance of emptiness mind, seeking guidance from furious light, onwards and upwards, breathing, clear, fostered by a dream of compassion. Resting in such vacant joy, I slide into the skies.
WITCHING HOURS
Maerla “Black it with brandy and soot, rub it on, get going, the light’s about to rise and we have so far to run. Be quick.”
Myffanwy “Gaa, sister clip yer tongue. This night’s ours to run and howl”
Maerla “You’ll howl as the wind tears trees apart and roars through the black holey stone, and yeh’ll scree with bitter madness under the sky as the sabbat calls, but ye’ll no see the light o’ day, Shut the door now and whisper only to yer shoes.”
Myffanwy “Yer making too much of it, Maerla, too much of the old times have stuck in yer craw. The burning times, and the drowning days are gone…..”
DRAGONBOAT in a TYPHOON
1989. I travelled to Hong Kong to play bass in a steamy little nightclub that was permanently packed to the rafters with US marines and English ex-patriots in a seven piece jazz combo with my dad for a few months. His regular bassist had just died from a heroin overdose. The gig was six nights a week for a couple of months until they could locate a new and permanent bass player.
Nervous, lung-sour smoke filled the foreign correspondent’s club on Tuesday nights and that’s when Alan delivered his hip, lip-service jazz and black gospel routine.
He was cool, customarily perched on the piano stool, stylishly blue upon the warm, chunky terracotta floor tiles that just lay there, lacquered, slick with puddles of a glistening adrenal secretion that rolled down the leopard legs of so many half-cut journos, those feverishly languid few, bar-posed and pissed on each other’s jet-lagged gags, crusty with the foul flecks of toxic spittle that shrivel-cast their lipless faces over Carlsbergs and clutched cynical claws around their wrinkled smokes.
The long, low, luxurious foyer lounges testified that, right here, within all that high-brow temerity, even the bonsai survive these noxious gases and just for our arse’s sakes, we murdered our brothers for a deep skin seat, just for plush and clammy landscapes of cold, hairless carcass coverings.
“Oooh, what soft leather, let me guess,…. cow, sheep, goat, snake, deer, rabbit, kangaroo, fish, chicken, elk, buffalo, bear, tiger, panther, elephant, frog, dog, cat, koala, emu, horse or hippo? Human?”
The dining room was filled with studied sufferance. The maitre-d’ brandished fresh linen napkins as the staff practiced pleating their internal organs in fanned elegance, just to be sure, just to guarantee that the late walk back to the Star Ferry terminal would remain clear of humiliation and sudden facelessness. The walk was already steep and convoluted around the British pubs and the cancerous Hong Kong minutiae of sales pitch glare.
I needed to get off the island and make it back to Tsim Sha Tsui. By the time I arrived back at Central, it was really raining and the harbour was turning evil. The dragon had arched her back and belched a long slow stream of virulence into the Pearl estuary and all the way across the flight path into Kai Tak, and the signal nine typhoon warning had closed the airport with a snap of her jaws. Smoke curled around me and the grim faces of tired locals stared straight ahead on the gangplank as we disembarked from the ferry.
The humidity had formed a dense fog as tiny particles of south east Asia drifted in on the grey monster’s back. Hefting my bass guitar onto my other shoulder, I crossed Nathan road and slowed in the thickened wave of hurriers. The typhoon winds had streaked the green harbour with an eerie darkness that pressed us into a tension of congestion, beyond the usual pushing throngs. I was tired and desperate to get behind the doors of Chatham Court no 8.
The sidewalks were unusually difficult to manage because people were lying in the spaces outside of shops, and large white sheets were draped around, splattered with the shouts of Chinese characters, hastily, passionately painted by an urge to speak out.
Trucks and taxis banked up into the narrow side streets, and the drenching rain made it virtually impossible for a gwaipoh to get a ride anywhere. Gwai poh? White foreign devil chick. Ghost. Not from around here……”
The demonstration had begun. Every road was blocked by a river of bodies, surging endlessly through the underpass, flooding and drenching the streets of Hong Kong island with humanity’s next new kids on the block. I joined in with the flow, and unseen hands took mine as we marched, touring for democracy, caught up, captured, inspired and stepping the way for Deng Xiao Ping to follow, brandishing a powerful young club for old, tottering, cultural revolutionaries to kowtow before, a bright and awesome banner for change.
I momentarily entered a Chinese symbol for youth, witnessing their vibrant dream arouse itself with an unquenchable thirst for freedom, and I watched it fall, facedown and bleeding in a whirling darkness that swelled and shaped such a gross error of judgement.
I twisted my eyes away from the sickening images of those tanks and soldiers devouring lives, crushing personality, savaging hope in the fires of Tiananmen Square, images that burned into my cells like an emblem of futility for every passion, every hope, every revolution of change.
The whole world of us looked on, powerlessly, as the broken heart of innocence and every lantern of that bright dream burned, then scorched, until tiny spark-wisps and ash fragments scattered, drifting down in an icy breath of slaughter, swallowed up by the jaws of corporate communist power and it’s own brand of social control and face-loss revenge.
The Hong Kong gig finished, after which I quit playing music for a while, came home to Australia and auditioned for my next life.
LITTLE DRUMMER BOY
An arm-wrestling tournament commenced in my bed. I sought worthy components to drape across my sheets and then systematically gave away my spine. Oh, I did it in little sections at first…
“…here, have a mid-thoracic vertebrae, please, take my cervical bones, care for a sacrum?”
I always found discarded and chewed bones rattling around on the floor after the parties had ended. I folded the opponents away and got on with the business of learning to love myself. I needed some practice at that, and I certainly got some.
I could have sworn we’d met before.
I furtively watched his dumpling mouth move so luxuriously, in rounded, temperamental caresses of words until the slow and husky textures of his voice doped me and I plummeted, wildly, swimming into an abyss of erogenous longings.
My eyes surgically sliced into his neck and my nostrils prowled his wrists for the milk-scent of his essence, and the lustre of his skin pierced me with a hunger pain, so terrible, so tangible that I willed him to notice the violin concerto of my breasts and to waltz me immediately under his quilt.
He toured me elegantly into his personal space and I stroked my hand along his sturdy wooden foot-board and discovered myself draped in endless velvet afternoons, dozing, purringly familiar with the terrain of his linen and my lust.
Later, I found him touring his bed with my worst best friend.
