The Bearded Lady

The bearded lady shaves off her beard

what a strange sensation

her skin tingles

the upper lip so smooth

she is almost cold

as erotic as a Brazilian wax

feeling naked she strangely misses

her fuzzy covering.

As strangers look at her

she realises no one knows

about her beard

only the subtle lines

of her pale face, dimpled chin

and a strong jawline.

Beneath her mask she is beautiful

but she never acknowledges it

or feels her power

she is always hiding, meekly behind

her overwhelming insecurities

she had left it too late

to be free from her plumage

past her prime, she rubs her

smooth cheeks and wonders who

she might have seduced

in her youth

if she had the courage

to shave before

then she suddenly desires her beard.

The trauma of broken things

I carry my fear like a heavyweight

many kilos of fat

pushing down on my bones

making my movements slow

and wearing down my momentum.

I'll never allow fear to make its

home in me

I hope it moves on

I push it away.

A violent act forced fear into my life

like so many random accidents,

which happen when no one expects

so much bigger than any one person

forcing us to live with

the trauma of broken things.

Paperback Love

When words are all on the screen,

everyone forgets about

the love of paperbacks.

The love of softcover paperback books

shows how much you adore the written word.

Like vinyl shows a tangible love of music.

They show you are hungry for books

how you don’t have the money to buy the hardcover

and are resisting ebooks.

Lovers of words should touch them, write them,

caress them, hold them in their original form

smell them, know them as you recognise a human

as they come from the ether,

from whatever exotic country they are born in

to the writer, editor, to read them out aloud

then onto their home through the ages

to their final destination in some readers eyes, souls and dreams

to then finally, return from whence they came.

Battered covers are well-loved and re-read

crisscrossed calligraphy shows

classroom notes and learning

while yellowed pages are

a long-lasting love affair,

My paperbacks are like sunburnt Sienna.

I’m frightened to touch them else they will disintegrate

their tiny print was once easy to rip through,

but now they are difficult to read

they seem like spidery footprints

who gives me a headache

The paperbacks on my shelf are a time machine

they take me back to when I was young

voracious and wanting to read everything

now I still want to satisfy my appetite

I know I cannot read everything

so I’m more selective

I have moved onto a virtual text

which is as fleeting as a thought

when I finish reading a book

I often wonder if I actually read at all

I miss my book stacks

holding them and turning their pages

swiping on a screen is so mechanical

while touching, smelling and devouring each word is bliss.

Put it all in a song

I want to put it all in one song

but it won't fit

So many things keep me awake at night

vivid memories of regret,

something I should be doing and don't

endless what if's and perhaps

never quite happy with what we have

we torture ourselves in our sleep

Do you remember when we talked our way

into the new millennium?

A 2,000 filled with promise, just needed

to take a step outside of ourselves,

we felt we could eat the world up

but now there is only hurt

I ran away too fast and fell over myself

I didn't realise I was still attached

Tore me into pieces.

Now I'm humming along to the music

pretending to know the words

and trying not to piss on myself.

Is it just me or is anyone else feeling kind of lost?

Do the super-rich disgust you

and the poor make you feel guilty

of your plenty?

Is there strange serendipity when you read the gossip

as if you live next door to Miley Schwarzenegger

and are complaining about her irritating trashy pop music

being played too loudly

have you heard it all before?

Do you have nightmares of having your head chopped off

because you don't follow the right religion

or of being gunned down when you are sunbathing

on a remote beach

Kalashnikovs are arriving on rubber dinghies.

Does online seem more real than every day?

We post, postmoderns, Xennials

With an analogue childhood and digital adulthood

and virtual Millenials

are all lost in our heads,

 and it's making us all morose.

I persist

These are my many lives

lived in one lifetime

tired of re-inventing myself

all the blood and tears

who's going to notice a

little lisp on the tongue

mixing up the words

forgetting some names

a little white lie

some worry lines

slightly battered and bruised

by life,

but I persist.

On seeing an old photo

Was I ever so young?

I don't recall being so fresh and new

I feel so old these days

like I've lived a thousand lives.

I have an older partner

live in an ancient country

all of those decades, centuries and epochs

of delusion have become a part of me.

I've always been shy

but my eyes were once filled with possibilities

now there are no new tastes

and I've heard it all before.

I'm feeling so very weary of this world

even if I've still got time to live.

I wonder what Twain, Lawrence and Woolf

would make of these days?

Would the modernist wit, energy and wisdom

Give us any solutions?

Would they hold the paranoia in check?

Or would Virginia drown herself again

After witnessing the first beheading?

Are we reliving the Crusades

or is it the madness of history's

fanaticism spiralling out of control?

Will the Jehovah's witnesses rule over the world

after we all die from a new pestilence,

or finish killing one another.

Promise me you will remember me

when I disappear into the heavens

without ever coming down to earth

blown to smithereens …

at least I died going somewhere or

coming home, rather than lying in a coffin,

an octogenarian with a tube down my throat.

Why do you write?

I write because I can't help myself

it's an itch I must scratch

a craving I want to satisfy

I'd be lost without words

my companions on this journey.

As I read, I need to write,

my mind ticks over at many beats a minute

the brain overflows onto the page

despite the torturous process of giving

my thoughts some logical sense

we are as irrational as hypertext

leaping from one idea to the next

faster than thought, to hand, to page.

Still, I insist on putting pen to paper

I tenaciously grip my pen

even if I have a hundred incomplete ideas

who are all screaming for my attention

submerging myself into my thoughts

it is my meditation

a prayer I say to myself every day

to remind me to be true,

to exist despite every heartbreak.

Words come out from the ether

as if my grey matter is filled

to the brim

with a vocabulary

which needs to be liberated

the words would suffocate themselves

if I didn't write them on the page.

Writing saves my life.

Forget your heritage

It is destiny to forget our heritage

life makes us grow in other directions

like a shattered tongue

ancestors are our Babel

we crumble apart

away from our origins.

Knowledge of where we come from

reveals our origons and helps

to define who we are

but then life takes us beyond our roots.

Pathways through life are random

work, family, friends and our hearts

determine the moments beyond ourselves.

We grow our own branches

beyond the family tree.

Part of who we are is formed by our ancestors

the murmur of their struggles

are a piece of our own voice

we are a part of them

and they are embodied in us,

a continuous spiral of milestones

twirling on through and beyond us.

Even if we forget

their stories are our stories

their faces are in the mirror

each hand holding onto the next

reaching up to now

raising us up and

pushing us forward.

A Babel of words

We are a Babel of words

where once stood a tower of fluency

now lies the remains of Babel

a lost tribe with a fragmented tongue

there was a time we spoke

the same voice

a single extended family

with the same vocabulary

as the creator

A choir building itself up

with a deafening rumble of unison

a body of voices whose swarming

made the Seraphim look down upon the earth

A Babel of words uttering the one desire of all

to build up to the heavens

to reach the ear of God

The sound grew louder with a resounding arrogance

that pricked the ear of Lucifer

and sparked the anger of the almighty

Humanity felt superior to God

building up to the celestial dome

to reach to the highest point

Until the sound was silenced

as the monstrosity came tumbling down

 everything was crumbled into pieces,

nothing remained but dust and rubble.

After the sound of an echoing universal language

first came silence as bodies were muffled and crushed

while others fled like ghosts coated in grit

then came wails of despair, muffled calls for help

that were misunderstood in the confusion of disaster

no one could hear one another

the speech of human kind had become

A Babel of words

Fumbling to rebuild something of the fluency

stumbling over ourselves

with shredded syllables

and fragmented cultures

a lost purity which crumbled with the tower

into undecipherable debris.