I.
My breath unravels,
a tortured sigh caught in barbed wire.
It streams through wounds
and the wounding things.
I came back to the old haunt
to be kissed and caressed by ghosts
but I have revisited these reminisces
too often.
In my hands – cupped – blood
and old tears.
They touch on spectral images
stain them,
dilute them.
Beneath the weight of hot liquid
memory falls apart.
My thoughts unreel
traversing abysses and rent ground
They scurry through keyholes
and the vein-cracked walls
They go searching out the dream
and faded fantasy
meeting only the dying
and devestated.
In my hands – cupped – blood
and a tiny corpse unrecognisably human.
Seven weeks since waking
to confusion
and shock
horror
Seven weeks since
hope fell apart.
I kept the secret
even as it escaped in gasps of breath
sobs of uncontrolled thought.
I know your dreams do not run
to things of blood and tears
and I would give anything
not to have brought them here to you
but we have been dancing though barbed wire
for so long now
that it seems inevitable to find one of us
ensnared, torn.
I cup the blood in my hands.
I hold a secret funeral.
No one attends.
In my heart
within me
life fell apart.
I let go then
and cannot let go now.
In my dreams
hope fell apart
life departed
in the slow run of blood
and so…
So.
II.
I do not know
will never know
how it feels to look into innocent eyes
carried within vestiges of your face
and mine.
Could I find you in such a being
or would I see only
the dimple which is mine (yours)
the blue eyes which are mine (yours)
the compact body which is mine (yours)?
I do not think I would recognise anything as being
uniquely yours
in a child of ours
until I heard him
her
laugh.
Only then would paternity be revealed.
Your laughter is unfettered,
your easy joy
and unrestrained happiness
are wild
where mine have been tamed
and remain guarded.
Your smile has no descending tilt,
no edges.
I do not know
will never know
the delight of your laughter
bursting forth from a face
that is mine and yours
co-mingled.
Dreaming carries me through brief moments only
and cannot compete with waking
to fingertips which return to me
bloodied.
I understand you
turning away.
Reality scares me too
and I can’t see the beauty in it either
at times
and I know
you would be every bit as afraid
had I held out my hands
cradling a life
with your eyes looking back at you
instead of the death I give you,
the mess of blood
and tears.
In the curve of your spine I find fear now
in its barest arch is the knowledge
that you won’t turn back again
not to kiss
not to touch
not to talk
With the slow slide
of blood and tears
hope fell apart.
4:14pm Sunday
9.February.2003
© Melinda Chambers. All posts are the creation of the author and, as such, remain the author's property with all rights reserved.
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Two weeks from now ~
by now I would be swollen
heavy with life
two heartbeats
two brains, four eyes,
four hands, four legs,
sixteen fingers and four thumbs
a tangle of toes
two heartbeats
two lives, inseparable, entwined.
Two weeks form now you would begin
the drawing away
the endless days, endless dance
of merging and separating.
Mouth to breast
we would continue the joining
Mouth howling, spewing a new generation’s words,
milk and food vomited
rejected
we would continue to part.
Two weeks from now I would look into your eyes
and cry
for your terrible beauty
and terrifying dependence
and I would wonder
will you learn the piano
better than I?
Would my love of language have passed
through your umbilical cord?
Would the cutting of it
amount to a separation, abandonment
beyond redress?
Will you forever hate me in a tiny corner of your heart
for evicting you,
for teaching you to stand
on your own two feet,
wobbly and unsure
afraid of the alienness of terra firma?
Will you hate me for holding on?
Hate me more for letting go?
Two weeks from now
one of the animals will have departed
the Ark.
Would you be bewildered, dazed and lost
forever seeking the twin of the pair?
Would you, like me,
know yourself as complete
and yet still long
for Noah’s myth
Noah’s guaranteed continuation,
the immortality
of the twosome?
You were the only one ushered into the Ark,
my littlest one,
and you debarked long before
we ever reached port
And two weeks from now I will arrive at the appointed meeting time
and you will not be there.
You were never evicted, little one,
and it is I,
not you
left feeling abandoned
and utterly rejected.
If your father could only see me now
would he feel anything
but sick
with relief
that you are
not?
5:10pm Monday
18.August.2003
© Melinda Chambers. All posts are the creation of the author and, as such, remain the author's property with all rights reserved.
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You’re a room filled with nothing
but echoes
glancing off the walls
screaming,
“I want!”
“I need!”
“I wish!”
You’re so empty now that even longing
can find nothing to latch onto.
You grasp at it and it trickles from your mouth
warm air of desire leaving you.
You’re so cold now and everything
is an ache
a piercing scream that slices your skin
from the inside
but can’t find its way out.
It’s been so long since…
You can’t remember.
Was it…?
No.
There has been nothing for a long time now.
You’re striving to remember you’re female
trying to recall your humanity.
You try to beat some sense of it
from the walls.
You’ve got your fingernails buried in your heart
shock treatment
trying to jump start it
All you can remember
is that it’s been so long
and you are forgotten.
You are an unmade memory
and it’s been so long….
and the only reminder you have
of yourself
you, girl, woman, human,
hurt,
the only thing you have
is the thought
that the last thing you let inside you
was a tampon.
It doesn’t stop the bleeding
it merely hides the evidence.
8:04pm Wednesday
3.December.2003
© Melinda Chambers. All posts are the creation of the author and, as such, remain the author's property with all rights reserved.
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I want to hear about your pristine childhood
how mummy and daddy watched over you as you fell
into the sweetest dreams
how the last thing you remembered before sleeping
was the brush of their lips on your soft, soft cheek.
I want to hear about your bewilderment
when you first saw tears on a stranger’s face
how you didn’t understand what they were
how you didn’t understand what they meant.
I want you to tell me how laughter
never found its way to you
with razors embedded in every hysterical gasp.
I want to hear how you were voted most popular,
most likely to succeed
and you did.
I want to see the cardboard cut-out, the perfect role model,
the one standing straight and proud
so the rest of us can measure
just how bent we are
and how much shame
to assign ourselves.
Don’t tell me about the back room of your next door neighbour’s house
and how your parents’ friend lured innocence out of you;
fish to bait, baby to rape.
We all were.
Don’t tell me about the special knife you set aside,
the one you bought especially
for the purpose of becoming the cartographer
of your hidden pain
~ and the white lines down your wrist
signify rivers
and the red line down your thigh
is a new highway
and the blue lines…
the blue lines are for later
when you tap the arterial depths
and drown us all.
Don’t tell me how you cut yourself, girl.
We all do that.
Don’t tell me how your daddy beat you with his soft, soft slippers
across the back of your legs,
the back of your head,
the back of your heart
where the bruises won’t show.
Don’t tell me about the time you couldn’t go to school
for days
because daddy drank down the last cent
and there was no petrol for the car
and he was too drunk to drive
anyway.
And don’t tell me about mummy turning a blind eye
quoting the bible like a mantra to make it all go away
mumbling prayers as though anyone was listening
cooking meals, baking and roasting
burning and burning
as though anyone here
was alive enough to hunger.
Don’t tell me about the years you wore braces
and glasses and took up two seats on the bus
and how food’s a comfort
and you’re now in denial.
Don’t tell me about the time you blew
the most popular guy in school
hoping to swallow down the stars
and become one
only, you choked.
I want to hear
from supposed normalcy
I want to walk the straight lines
that won’t end in blood and tears
I want to witness a smile without a twist,
virgin, unscathed wrists,
a soul without guilt by proxy,
the perfect he, the perfect she
I want to know if they exist.
Don’t tell me your tears and your terrors,
your almosts, what ifs and nevers.
All I want to know is if you can remember
the last time you held your mother’s hand.
Tell me a story
and make it good.
I’ve been too much of the bad.
8:56pm Wednesday
3.December.2003
© Melinda Chambers. All posts are the creation of the author and, as such, remain the author's property with all rights reserved.
- Infomercial
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- Connections and Fragmentation
- Final Analysis
- Up In Lights
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A freak but moist flower
tangles my lungs, knits into my heart,
crawls up my throat
and sucks like octopi on my tongue.
You planted it happily last summer
and I let it take root with my moon-hope,
not knowing it would come to crowd me out,
to explode inside me this March.
All winter trying to diminish it,
I felt it enlarge.
But of course never spoke to you of this,
for my sanity was awful enough,
and I felt compelled to think only of yours.
Now that you have gone for always
why does not the plant shrivel up?
I try to force it away.
I swallow stones.
Three times I swallow slender vials
with crossbones on them.
But it thrives on their liquid solution.
I light matches and put them in my mouth,
and my teeth melt but the greeenery hisses on.
I drink blood from my wrists
and the green slips out like a bracelet.
Couldn’t one of my keepers get a lawn mower
and chop it down if I turned inside out for an hour?
The flower, this pulp, the hay stuff
has got me, got me.
Apparently both of us are unkillable.
I am coughing. I am gagging. I feel it enter
the nasal passages, the sinus, lower, upper
and thus to the brain – spurting out of my eyes,
I must find a surgeon who will cut it out, burn it out
as they do sometimes with violent epileptics.
I will dial one quickly before I erupt!
Would you guess at it
if you looked at me swinging down Comm. Ave.
in my long black coat with its fur hood,
and my long pink skirt poking out step by step?
That under the coat, the pink, the bra, the pants,
in the recesses where love knelt
a coughing plant is smothering me?
Perhaps I am becoming unhuman
and should accept its natural order?
Perhaps I am becoming part of the green world
and maybe a rose will just pop out of my mouth?
Oh passerby, let me bite it off and spit it at you
so you can say “How nice!” and nod your thanks
and walk three blocks to your lady love
and she will stick it behind her ear
not knowing it will crawl into her ear, her brain
and drive her mad.
Then she will be like me -
a pink doll with her frantic green stuffing.
~ from ‘The Complete Poems
page 527-29
© Melinda Chambers. All posts are the creation of the author and, as such, remain the author's property with all rights reserved.
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