 |  |  |  |
The Poetry Warrior (c) Abigail Beaudelle - 2008.
All Poetry and artwork (c) the respective artists.
All Poetry and artwork (c) the respective artists.
Back - Issue Two - Next
There are scars in the kitchen; blood soaked into the bare floorboards; cupboard doors with fissures so deep that they
threaten their very being; tiles cracked and pitted by other ceramic once thrown in their direction. There are dark
rectangles on the wall where pictures used to hang, but do not anymore. There was once a row of elegant glass jars
containing pasta and coffee – a wedding present from your aunt – but now, if they exist, it is in fragments only: broken
glass, and remnants of pasta, underneath the cooker, coffee powder between the cracks in the floorboards; and your aunt
too, if she still exists, then she is just bone and disintegrating flesh in the cold earth - or a memory only. Whatever
laughter there was, is no longer: frozen in time perhaps, or hanging like a ghost, or something buried alive – bricked up
behind the walls – a ghost then, certainly.
It was not love that changed, but what that love meant and represented. What once was easy, innocent and carefree,
now stifling, restrictive and painful. You were not to blame, but neither was I. Whatever we shared so effortlessly and
naturally, like two bodies fitting together as one, became forgotten, or - more so - imperceptible, like how one has to
concentrate to hear the tick of the clock, or the beating of the heart, so that even though we may have been in the forest
we still could not hear the falling of the tree. But how can there be here and now, if we were not there to witness them?
Do we seem as familiar, yet strange, to each other as we do to ourselves?
It was my grandfather’s father who burnt the stillborn baby on the fire, and scattered the ashes in his garden – families
were large, and they drowned kittens in sacks then. Some kind of love must have created the child, but some things were
never meant to have permanence. And it was my grandfather who I can still see hitting my grandmother with an iron
poker; bringing it down, time and time again, on the hands she used to cover her face with. And they too must have had
love once. I knew I would never be those men, and I knew I could never be that cruel. But if a tree does fall and does
make a sound, even if there is no one to hear it, can those roots, back through our fathers, exist invisible to the eye, but
present and real, nonetheless?
They say that if one were to wear lenses that inverted the images on our retinas, that after a short time, the brain
would invert them back again. And we can look at ink lines drawn into simple, but outlandish, caricatures – even upside
down, or at an angle, and, faster than conscious thought itself, recognise with ease they which these images represent. We
see more than we realise, and less than we should.
You were on the floor, lying in the broken glass. And you were crying and screaming, and smashing your fists into the
wood and the glass, and there was blood too. And you had done no wrong, except ask for the love I could no longer give.
I could not deal with your pain, nor my own, I could not translate the confusion of intense feelings inside me to anything
other than anger, and I could not impose the man I wished to be over the fathers inside me. I hit you hard, only once, but
hit you I did. And although I grimace at the memory of that - and the sickening acceptance of who I really am - it was the
words shouted as I towered over you that penetrate deeper.
There are scars in the kitchen, and there is silence there too. There is coffee powder in between the cracks of the
floorboards, like the ashes of a long dead child. There are absences and voids where things used to be. And there are
ghosts, falling like silent trees, over and over again.
threaten their very being; tiles cracked and pitted by other ceramic once thrown in their direction. There are dark
rectangles on the wall where pictures used to hang, but do not anymore. There was once a row of elegant glass jars
containing pasta and coffee – a wedding present from your aunt – but now, if they exist, it is in fragments only: broken
glass, and remnants of pasta, underneath the cooker, coffee powder between the cracks in the floorboards; and your aunt
too, if she still exists, then she is just bone and disintegrating flesh in the cold earth - or a memory only. Whatever
laughter there was, is no longer: frozen in time perhaps, or hanging like a ghost, or something buried alive – bricked up
behind the walls – a ghost then, certainly.
It was not love that changed, but what that love meant and represented. What once was easy, innocent and carefree,
now stifling, restrictive and painful. You were not to blame, but neither was I. Whatever we shared so effortlessly and
naturally, like two bodies fitting together as one, became forgotten, or - more so - imperceptible, like how one has to
concentrate to hear the tick of the clock, or the beating of the heart, so that even though we may have been in the forest
we still could not hear the falling of the tree. But how can there be here and now, if we were not there to witness them?
Do we seem as familiar, yet strange, to each other as we do to ourselves?
It was my grandfather’s father who burnt the stillborn baby on the fire, and scattered the ashes in his garden – families
were large, and they drowned kittens in sacks then. Some kind of love must have created the child, but some things were
never meant to have permanence. And it was my grandfather who I can still see hitting my grandmother with an iron
poker; bringing it down, time and time again, on the hands she used to cover her face with. And they too must have had
love once. I knew I would never be those men, and I knew I could never be that cruel. But if a tree does fall and does
make a sound, even if there is no one to hear it, can those roots, back through our fathers, exist invisible to the eye, but
present and real, nonetheless?
They say that if one were to wear lenses that inverted the images on our retinas, that after a short time, the brain
would invert them back again. And we can look at ink lines drawn into simple, but outlandish, caricatures – even upside
down, or at an angle, and, faster than conscious thought itself, recognise with ease they which these images represent. We
see more than we realise, and less than we should.
You were on the floor, lying in the broken glass. And you were crying and screaming, and smashing your fists into the
wood and the glass, and there was blood too. And you had done no wrong, except ask for the love I could no longer give.
I could not deal with your pain, nor my own, I could not translate the confusion of intense feelings inside me to anything
other than anger, and I could not impose the man I wished to be over the fathers inside me. I hit you hard, only once, but
hit you I did. And although I grimace at the memory of that - and the sickening acceptance of who I really am - it was the
words shouted as I towered over you that penetrate deeper.
There are scars in the kitchen, and there is silence there too. There is coffee powder in between the cracks of the
floorboards, like the ashes of a long dead child. There are absences and voids where things used to be. And there are
ghosts, falling like silent trees, over and over again.
| There Are Always Reasons Pablo Vision |
Pablo Vision occasionally updates http://pablovision.blogspot.com with feckless
meanderings, inanity, links to recently published work, and information about
stuff in print, audio, art, reviews, and films. He has remained faithful to the same
woman for a number of years, but he is always eager to test his resolve in this
matter with attractive gothic girls.
meanderings, inanity, links to recently published work, and information about
stuff in print, audio, art, reviews, and films. He has remained faithful to the same
woman for a number of years, but he is always eager to test his resolve in this
matter with attractive gothic girls.