Drowning

Rain falls, so heavy
it seems the air is water,
and when you breathe,
drenching your numb lungs
with an inhalation heaved back
over the threshold of surrender
you overcome once more
the tedious impossibility
of being yourself in the light
and in the air that you inherit
from another life you lived.

Black clouds consume
the sun's attempt at day
leaving you in a darkness
you know already, inside,
and there, a forbidden love
steps from the shadows
finally safe to speak its name
where no-one else can hear it,
its words lost under the water,
in the sub-aquatic silence
while those watching you
synchronise their fantasies
to the movement of your lips.

The jacket

My wife bought me it
second hand in Stornoway.
My mother sat at the loom
where the cloth was woven.
Her father dyed and carded the wool,
like his father before him. And Achilles,
in all his glory and his grief, could not
have been provided with better armour.

Et infirma mundi elegit Deus

We don't ask people what they want.
We tell them what they want,
and we tell them it has been provided
but we don't actually care about anyone
other than ourselves. It's all lies.
He tells them one thing. I tell them another.
It doesn't matter. We say what we have to,
not to keep them guessing,
but to stop them doing anything remotely like that!
They don't know what they want.
They'll never get what they need,
but as long as we tell them that they're happy,
tell them that everything is fine
and they have everything they'll ever want or need,
and are better off than those other miserable bastards
who my counterpart tells the exact same thing,
they let us stay in charge and we take it all.

Secondary target

It should have been Kokura,
not us. But for clouds and cockups,
it would have been Kokura.
And after the bomber diverted to Okinawa
because the reserve tank pump had failed
and it wouldn't make it back to Tinian
and the engines cut out on landing
due to fuel exhaustion,
the newspapers even got its name wrong:
it was the Bockscar, not the Great Artiste;
and it's target was Nagasaki, not Kokura.

August 9th 1945

The sky inhaled the earth today.
At 11am the cloudy Kyushu sky
breathed in. It sucked the earth up
through a long sore smoky throat
into a lung of fire, 
and when it finally breathed out
it raised the city up on its palm 
and pursed its lips
and blew away the ashes of our bones.

The age of innocence

"We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves."

—François de La Rochefoucauld 

"As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From Nature, I believe 'em true:  
They argue no corrupted mind  
In him; the fault is in mankind." 

—Jonathan Swift 

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”  

—Oscar Wilde 

We struggle later in life
to dismantle
the elaborate masks of youth
as we try desparately to recall
who we actually are,
before we die,
suddenly becoming aware
of this last chance to be ourselves
instead of who we portray,
and struggling not to lay
a stranger in our grave,

and inevitably we fail,
but sometimes
we imagine we might find
some meagre salvation,
some mitigation of our failure,
in whatever grace resides
in the laughter of a child,
joyful, spontaneous,
not hollow as we have become,
all shop front and empty stock room,
one last penny rattling in the til,
run down, bankrupt, and waiting to close,

and it reminds us that we too
once enjoyed a world unmoderated
by all the interventions and pre-emptions,
the hesitation and second guess
that becomes our adult reflex,
a world we experienced
without immediately feeling the need
to recalibrate our every pleasure
to fit the narrow constraints
of all the wisdom we had received
and the expectations to whose burden
we have been conscripted
gradually, imperceptibly,
by the passage of time,

and we attribute this grace to an innocence
which we cherish and yearn for,
and imagine we protect

but is not this innocence itself an invention?
For was it not in the playground
—the first war zone, where no quarter
was given or received—
that we fashioned our first disguise,
and wore our first masks
to survive the encounter with others?
Think back to before that,
to when you were truly confused,
frightened and alone. It was then
the world recognised you
as one of its own,

and innocence resides only in the world
not in us: only in the world
which we turn into a toy
to distract ourselves,
and diminish and mock and ridicule
all the things that once terrified us
just as we are mocked and ridiculed

and we abuse and assault it
with increasingly complex games
which now threaten its destruction
as we subvert the weather
with the material expression
of our troubled souls
leaving future generations
with the innocence of ash
while we remain unknown to ourselves
and succumb to anonymity
in the mass grave time makes
of every cemetery.