The shape of things to come?

Not only reduced to buying a copy of Elle, but because of nail biting boredom, a long wait for my train and a lack of tobacco for my nicotine craving lungs am also reduced to reading it from cover to cover including the plastic surgery adverts in the back. It always amuses me that a magazine claiming to empower women, and containing heartwarming articles telling us to love our curves/wonky noses/droopy bosoms (delete as appropriate) likes to sell its advertising pages to the cosmetic surgery market keen to cash in on altering these very imperfections we are supposed to love. In a poem by Denise Levertov she highlights this dichotomy with the wonderful last line 'and with what frivolity we have pared them [our dreams] like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair' In this post-modernist fall out of doing whats right for you, a collective feminist ethos cannot stand the ground to comment on this irony, instead falling into the trap of stating that it is ok for woman to have plastic surgery as long as it is for themselves and their own self esteem. We are incapable of resisting the gloss of these adverts, the inherent message that to hate our bodies and wish to change them by going under the surgeons knife is an acceptable method to feel happier in our own skin. Society seems to have lost the ability to see beauty, when we look with the aesthetic eye ( and that is not a critical eye), and the same is true of viewing other peoples creative output; we can begin to revel in the tiny variations which make up the unique beauty of humanity.

Brick Lane Babe

You would have been so beautiful,
my baby, with skin of Kashmiri cream,
and eyes of glaring green intensity
My exotic Indian babe

I knew that moment,
he let the tug of love
loose within me
that this was a doomed affair,
You, a tiny bundle of atoms
would not uncurl a fist at the sun.


Your father was a man of three continents
Broken apart by their past.
under an arduous weight of
existence
he could neither choose you or me
so you were not born
i walked away
from the torrid heat of love

I let your grip on my womb be torn asunder
broke the union
of mother and child
felt you slip
Into the recesses of my mind

Only these scents of spice
As i walk down brick lane
can call your memory back
In my ghostly motherhood
i hold your fat little hands
and let your grandmother oil your head
and give Allah praise for your birth

Only Asia's unwavering heat,
this aridness,
can awaken these dreams of you......

St Pancreas

Watching wine bottles,
gently swaying,
through steamed glass
in wavering heat-

The tang of red wine
lays heavy on langerous lips
which try to remember
the taste of bourbon and tobacco
which hung upon yours-

A taste was all i had
a mere sliver of saliva
flesh probing flesh
velvety smooth over liquid heat
fleeting yet remembered-

I need to return to that kiss
as moment in time
fracture it
seal it again
with everything that has now come to pass-

To imbue it with meaning now
to imprint it deep
and change the course
that history laid at our feet.

Flood

Sunlight filtering through your hair,
was how my dawn arrived.
It was a strange way to awake
My chin in the crook of your neck
And daybreak a haze of chestnut brown.

Stranger still,
it had wrapped round my mouth
So that i came up like a drowner
gasping for air.

It was as if you were all a flood
Your waters overwhelming me
And it was then i understood
That you and i were doomed
And in you i had already drowned
Lost at sea, never to be found.

On 12 inch

This whirling mind at 2000rpm,
spinning in vivid techni-colour,
Is wearisome sometimes,
In it's giddying speed,
However i need constant propulsion
to allow me to re cooperate
I want to be on a journey again
in a moving vehicle
wheels spinning under me
Travel and movement
not of my minds making.

As needle turns gently in its groove,
this music slows the soul
to a constant 33rpm
And fluidity can be finally restored.

Ratawicka 104

Warsaw rain,
and a wind whipped up in my hair.
In clouds of smoke,
i travel now,
through metal clanging doorways,
i step out of this skin.

In this dust filled space,
thick with the sound of another era,
i am the foreigner now.
In burnt light
our heads are haloed,
like the saints that watch from the walls.

Steam arises as hands wash like a child,
this head of mine.
Cradled close
Madonna has not held
even the head of Christ,
with such delicacy.
I take off my clothes,
let the straps slide off shoulders,
feel the soft silk of skin on skin,
Waiting for the thrust of flesh into flesh,
in the cobwebs of night.

No longer a desert,
which we failed to traverse across,
but an intermingling,
an ocean with tumultuous waves.

Arms and limbs entwined,
sleep still evades,
heart thunders a tattoo into the night,
one cannot soar without falling...

Our shadowed present

There are no great gestures left, no-originality in the grandiose, the magnificent. All virtue and value have slipped together. Nothing is true, nothing is fresh. So i shall take my place within these small gestures, the little details, those which are ignored. I can only express the expanse within the minutia. i can only find meaning in this feather touch, the way the rain makes your hair curl, the way the smoke catches and plumes- Only in the smallest detail can i find it.