You’re So Vain

The Bucolic in Its Purest Form

We are untutored serfs
On some great estate
The orchard is replete
With soft, summer fruit
And the pulp seeps
From a hill of ripe peaches
The villagers live
In ancient stone cottages
This is the bucolic
In its purest form

The fattened calf
Makes a sumptuous feast
It catches the hungry,
Glittering eye
Of the virgin bride
A slum hospital
Delivers fodder
For future canon
And the mother country
Gives birth to colonies

And we are not fit
To utter the names
Of dead generals

Underbelly

We were drawn together
Inhabitants of the underbelly
Of this great city. We witness
And perpetrate cruelty
In all its forms. Eyes narrowed
We look back once again
The stench assaults the senses
It is a silent death threat
We gather to confess
To a multitude of addictions
Withdrawal sets in

You sing of sweeter times
To me, the woman with no name
And no shame. We are
The afflicted and the powerless,
Estranged from the world
We have fallen through the cracks
Hands numbed, shivering,
In tumbledown shacks
It is a desolate scene
And the language we utter
Is quite obscene

More Interiors

The Church that Looms Over Me

On the Precipice of Spring II

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On the Precipice of Spring

My Niece 2

I  shall be the best auntie ever.

Small, beautiful and perfectly formed.  Last Saturday I got to hold my baby niece for the first time.  She looks like a small China doll with porcelain skin and thick dark hair that frames her face so neatly that it looked as though it had been styled.  Truthfully, I was a little nervous.  She was so tiny, so delicate that I was afraid I might break her.  ‘She’s tougher than she looks,’ said my brother’s partner.

I hope I will be a good aunt.  The sort of aunt she can confide in.  I’m afraid that I will forever be known as ‘my mad old aunt in Cambridge’ which is a fairly accurate description. Mother had told my brother that she resembled me and dragged out an old photo to prove it.  Poor girl.  I can’t wait until she is old enough for toys.  I love shopping for children.

If You Are a Mouse…

be afraid…

The Loss of an Imaginary Friend

Unreal Sister

She was full of life and laughter and light, like Blake’s Tyger, tyger burning bright.’ I would follow her everywhere.  I was devoted to her. She was my friend. She was my constant companion. She never betrayed me. She was never duplicitous. She was the kind of girl anyone would want to be friends with.  She was the kind of girl my mother would have chosen as daughter. The only problem was that she didn’t exist.  She resided in the long, dark halls of my imagination.

She was an my oracle.  She made the mundanity of everyday life magical.  But real or not it had been I who had invited her in.

My greatest gift became my greatest torment. I was losing myself. She grew more solid every day. I began to feel as though I were the ghost,  something insubstantial. A piece of blank paper blown this way and that by a capricious and ruthless wind.  For My Perfect Friend had adopted the voice of the anorexia .

She was my invisible sister. She was my keeper. She was my guide it and I would be the keeper of her memory.  She intercepted my every move.  She was the one who stepped in to stop me devouring that bag of salt and vineger crisps or that open box of luxury Belgian chocolates or that last thick slice of iced birthday cake.  She was the one who told me that emptyness was the sweetest feeling of all.

‘You are spoilt and undeserving. I am worthier of life than you are. You are grotesque. I am beautiful. I am as light as air.  I am nothingness.’  Once again my body became a burden. ‘ I am pure.  You are tainted.’  She whispered insults and profanities in my ear.

At first she was a pale phantom but as the year progressed she grew stronger until she was more substantial than the living.  She had been fully ressucitated.  I found herself hovering between twinned worlds that had become mutually antagonistic.  ‘Don’t let them fool you. They are your enemy.  I am your only true friend.’  She was sucking me into some desolate netherworld.  She cheered me on as I tightened the belt of her jeans.  ‘Just one more notch,’ she would say. ‘You’re not quite there yet. Tighter and tighter.  It did not occur to me that she was trying to kill me. She was the rent collector and she had come to collect her due.  ‘Just pay me what you owe me.’  Our roles had been reversed and I was now the one feeding off her. My Perfect Friend was unencumbered.  She was free.

Sometimes I loved her, mostly I began to hate her. And I discovered that she was a a fair weather friend. For when the storm closed over us she backed away. ‘I’m going now, little girl,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t need me anymore.’

But sometimes when I wake up in the night, afraid and alone, I would do anything to get her back.