r.

“Blindness overstated, I can
..judge you by your mouth’s
..taste when we kiss; it’s like

..the cap of a baby’s head, or
..the milky breath of calves;
..I take your tread even when

..you creep; believe no bullshit
..about acuity, just (for God’s
..sake) learn to read the signs.”

:

..Being somewhere where the
..sun isn’t seen but more heard,
..bringing a blinding triumph of
..trumpets to the old Magdalen
..Green; yesterday was the richt
..hure of a city’s mourning white
..while today’s brah verdant is
..every inch gladrags, handbags,
..and Halleluiah hoorah reeling.

:

Break a pane of church glass
and whisper your vows in the
dark, witnessed only by the

elephant in the transept, old
Bloodwhiskers on the tiles, &
the poor, covert mice; do not

steal, but rearrange the silver,
reverse the pews, leave in chalk
suggestions to dancing heresy.

__________

©Marie Marshall

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q.

“Eternity and expectation: one does
..not need to have seen the other side
..of the river; one boards the boat in

..expectation of arriving, no matter
..that one is borne downstream; we
..are all blind in the future; we were

..all sighted in the past; so your sister
..lied – she would have needed a new
..language for everything dreamed.”

:

…Immense, the great Aleutian light,
…the same illumination here creeps,
…thieves peace, reveals the mountain
…that is, douses the conundrum; what
…the goal is no bugger can say; every
…law is bound in falsehood, is kith to
…its crime, calls to its wedded whip,
…bespeaks its punishment – even the
…statute of the photon has no escape.

:

Grandmother Eve birthed the city,
the smartphone, the sodium light that
days the snowed night, the pads and

pawprints of vixens, the poems drawn
at stickpoint, old shoon, roadkill, the
whisper of still sea on gabions, moved

from room to room in an inspection,
observing, recording, stopping by the
sudden, urban trees, and marveling.

__________

©Marie Marshall

p.

“My sister, she’s blind from birth,
..has dreams in colour, but no word
..for each until she made her own –

..kokol, mariganzo, fhey – limiting
..the shades by her own subtle mean,
..and shapes by changes, directions,

..the length of time they last; all this,
..the genius of her baby self, ruined
..when they gave her a norm to hold.”

:

..what does the damned wind mean
..by it all, the conversation that rolls
..stones, the scars, marks, and whorls
..in the dust, the drive and batter of
..rain defeating aluminium window-
..bars; rain, poverty, the desperate
..fingernails of beggars chapping at
..your glass, taunting you outside to
..come and feel their drench directly.

:

A destruction of foxes – you have
never known hunger, you take only
what is necessary for the day; if you

had known what it’s like to bite paws
and suck blood for the sham of a meal,
then you’d know why, when he comes

across two cock pheasants, he murders
both and knows he’ll be right for two
nights; he’ll not stop; why would he?

__________

©Marie Marshall

o.

“Psalms out of Africa,
..sung sotto; compel me
..to make plane places

..rough, and I’ll rebel;
..one more god dragged
..across the stage in a

..basket, the fake sound
..of thunder – read what’s
..on my board, life here!”

:

..The profanity we call light
..sauces our thin bread, the
..top of all we see, the land
..we eat, the river we drink,
..the salt on the air such a
..taste on our breath; click
..– on with the cold kitchen
..spotlights! – our light does
..not meld, shows our faces!

:

You hear the angelus bell,
a muscle memory stronger
than piety reaches for the

rosary; a near miss, chaos
overtakes the ritual; this is
the moment of life – yes! –

now you know that reason
is brutal, that chance turns,
twists, leads a million steps.

__________

©Marie Marshall

n.

“We live in the land of Nod, east
..of Eden, all of us, amongst the
..debris of murder, looking at the

..dream-images, forced to admit
..that they are examples of extreme
..control and no conversations with

..ourselves; we are armed, but only
..with false swords and wooden rifles,
..the cards we carry identify only sex.”

:

..Day paralysed, a holding pattern, a
..patteran skywards to tell us how the
..unfriendly live here, a coast, a tide,
..a come-and-go on the hissing shingle
..but only in our own minds, in that
..debatable ear, a knock on the door,
..and a request for alms not honoured,
..there’s bugger-all comfort but only
..cold, it might as well not have come.

:

Section by section (so you say, not
room by room) you comb and plan
the house, giving hue, image, sign

to the thought-play; today – coffee;
‘oversight’ can show diligence or
neglect, but seldom simultaneously,

each sits – a ghost – in a corner of
the room, each has his lure or trap,
you are to say what their section is.

__________

©Marie Marshall

m.

“True, I haven’t said I love you lately
..– some are struck blind, I mute and
..shipped away one night leaving only

..a hand and foot severed on the stoop
..of your monument; but the sentiment
..continues, you may say it endures as

..well; I pause to eat, reflect on the day
..being cold, before a spoon of breakfast
..I have a taste of your skin on my lips.”

:

…Night’s slaughter, half the world dead
…by gravity, stacked slaves, shelved to
…raw dreams, wreckage, prone, prey; a
…lone poet hunches, stealthing her lover
…into verse, a desklamp sole against the
…dark but nothing counters her madness;
…she is fear of day, starting, reluctant to
…the sun (such as it briefly is) who’ll no
…more than squat till dark comes again.

:

Your mind’s a hoarder’s house – credit
that! – with only sidled ways angling the
junk; you curate; there is a sure order to

pattern the space and the fill, but to say
it is fraught, to isolate one hallmarked
item is a danger, the whole mnemonic;

the exterior gives no hint; tell us what is
cyan, what vermillion, what umber, what
ochre, momentary before they’re refaced.

__________

©Marie Marshall

l.

“I was asked where I wandered when
..there’s no fair, and I indicated with a
..sweep of my hand and, re-indexing my

..wooden résumé, held it at such a level
..that they’d have to bow to read it; thus
..I forced a deference, saying the fool’s

..a king and the king’s a fool, but secretly,
..meanwhile mouthing today’s salutation:
..have pity on a poor, old, blind beggar!”

:

..Fair day or not, you await the insinuation
..of dawn, to pick out the shape of the obelisk,
..the chimney, the satellite dish, the roosting
..urban birds, to gauge the moment to visit
..the early-opening bar – that little, yellow
..sea of hope – where day and night are both
..equally guarded against; but the grey wash
..follows you (oh a day-dog it is that fawns
..and won’t leave you be!) to dim the lamps.

:

Our Cossack, our Kickapoo, neither falls
easily into stereotype, each wears a skinny
suit with an open-necked shirt, each checks

his device for texts, neither messages in any
lingo save the universal, each has shoes that
are shined but still speak dull, the wristwatch

they wear is the same brand but tells different
time; one, I see, has cufflinks, and they play a
music against his coffee cup, sip, sip of happy.

__________

@ Marie Marshall.

I have been a little quiet of late, at least as regards my poetry. But I have recently posted an atmospheric short story for you to read – please visit. Also, I reignited my weirdest blog, which you may also like to visit.

k.

“Where are you at? You’ve forsaken
..resistance for love, now you mawk
..and gowk and boak and make mouths

..like a gym slip teen clutching books
..below her bosom. Where’s your old
..dada découpage? You kick and kick

..and kick at a plastic cup till it busts
..but then you leave it lying for some
..other hapless wee bugger to stoop to.”

:

..We live in a box with a few random
..pencil-jags for air holes; every once
..in a time a random deity shines light
..– it could be yellow, it could be grey,
..it could be diffuse, it could generate
..little rainbows that keep up our slack
..attention for a few minutes – through
..the holes and persuades us to wake,
..so we all hail/hallelujah as if voiced.

:

I give emotions to skies, castles and
landscapes, weather, etc. with all the
lack of care of the jinky woman who

thought mulatto was a kind of coffee
[MEMO: ask for one and see where it
gets you!]; I’ve given over my pencil

for a usb stick; I’ll give time of day to
anyone who’ll read, let rot my letters,
litter the feus with my capital clerking.

__________

©Marie Marshall

j.

“The shape of things gauged by hand or
..lip or fingertip; the memory of musculus
..and nerve that tells me how to lift a piece

..of hot sausage (not a pebble or a button)
..to my mouth; the myths you have of my
..blindness; the beliefs of my beggary; all

..the ways and means of my meagre, old
..biography traced on this squared board;
..do you have a problem with falsehood?”

:

…We call it The Great Snow, the far, fair,
…few, deadening flakes that soundless make
…us, that make our walking there a guessing
…game and our walking back an enigma but
…leave the night-time streets with enough
…illumination to read by – a light of slick
…tangerine! – less feared than The Little
…Snow that’s too small to be hail, but that
…sustains a pit-pit-pit to your hard cheek.

:

A new feature of the tuppenny cirque is
the counter-clown, whose function is to
discourage laughter, imbue the audience

with a sense of the seriousness of life; let’s
leave the magnificent iridescent tag to the
white clown’s pantaloons, the sharp snap

of animal-stink to the acrobat, and see in
their stead the baroque gestures, the grey
suits, lapel pins naming common items.

__________

©Marie Marshall

i.

“Blindness removes unwanted overtones
..from my life, concentrates my thoughts,
..and presents my stories with a purity that

..you people with jazzed phenomena would
..find hard to fathom; I know rhythms and
..rhymes and reasons set in sundry seasons,

..cut in an arcane template; poet, your words
..(sometimes the lack of them) augment my
..blindness – for that you have my gratitude.”

:

…The big stone’s a cutout from the milk-ink
…sky and the ink-milk sea, a nonsense that
…won’t leave your eye alone, an uncanny
…boathop, catching at the brave backscatter
…as they do at the forescatter and false dawn;
…eye up to the hill they (Vikings) named for
…wind – the ferry takes us to a land of old-
…fashioned cutlery and curtains and a black
…cat that creeps through the open window.

:

..When they say ‘all the fun of the fair’ they
..have no idea of the terror, of how, for the
..fortnight or more after the taint of mud and

..trodden-grass is in the air, and the low girl
..remembers the showmen’s smirks as they
..make her try her hand or take a ride; she

..was bidden step up and see the camelopard
..and the Borneo man; she is as slow as she is
..low, the fair requires speed before anything.

__________

©Marie Marshall