We Still Got The Taste Dancing On Our Tongues

Is….is….…..is it you? Come closer. No! Don’t turn on the light! Stay away! You scorn me, you taunt me with artificial hope! Who are you?... I remember those days not. I only remember snow. Snow. All there is now is the white sheet of slipshod snow.

The long hold of winter did more to me than I could have imagined. It sucked my spirit out of my eyeballs and tossed it to the rain clouds. It chewed desire out of my feet and fed it to the frost. Will this ever be over? Has the ice age taken hold of our land? Is this Armageddon? Has the holy one who I have always denied finally remembered his role and reaped vengeance across the country for our fornication, and our binge drinking, and our breaking of dear old Britain? Retreating to the log cabin, bolting the door, surrounded by tins of pineapple, I pull the winter furs around my chapped neck skin, forehead to my knees, to the safety of the foetal, forever. Hibernation is dedication. It involves the removal of motivation. I forget the need to shave. My legs become a terrain of hostile helplessness. My armpits the place of demons. My upper-lip, Jolen starved, form the dense paintbrush shadow. All is lost. All is over.
Winter has won.
Winter has won.
Winter has won.

And then, as if from the fair throat of Liberty herself, comes the lowly cry of the defiant starling. 'No,' he calls, 'No! We cannot give in. We cannot allow this damned season to win! We'll wait for Spring! We'll wait for Spring!'

I, lost in untold folds of grease and despair, stir. The noise of birdsong rustles in my lank tresses like fresh sea water.

The Venetian blind cancels out the day. I have circum to a defeatist state of mind. There will be no spring, there is no such thing, there never was, only winter, perpetual, consuming winter, with his toothy snarl and his drippy, snotty nose.

‘No!’ Cries the starling, ‘Awaken, girl, awaken, gaze beyond your window… go, go, gaze beyond the winter girl, the window!’

And so I write this, in blessed happiness that all is right in the world, that we have not been forgotten, that spring has sprung across the lost broadlands of our hearts like a big, happy orgasm of peace.


The long hold

Awake! Fragranced space pours pithy through the pours,
See the spirit that winter weathered, frost dishevelled pelt adores.
She’ll awake; she’ll awake, to the whistle clear of day,
Childish roots shoot under mantles of a distinct, dormant delay.
See how the crocus is buoyant beneath the hanker of the framework fall,
So awake and alight and engage with the seamless beat of the call.

My grey eyes felt the feeling of the steady
Seedless peeling of the second skin I owned.
Yet to wake from dreamt indolence, a delusion
Dampened scene, I’ll follow him with the infant faith
of springtime’s summer dream.

Stepping out of the sepia, winters hold undone,
My grey eyes laugh patina at the exultant heat of sun.