Angelspit (A-H)

Angelspit is a collection of poems in 3 parts. You can follow it from A to Z on the website. Feel free to post your comments and likes at the bottom of the page. NOTE – The right of Dave Young to be identified as the author has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright designs and patents act 1988. Copyright 2012.

—–

‘Angelspit’ is not an appeal for understanding.

‘we set about acquiring one another urgently. But on a temporary basis, only as guests – just guests of one another’s senses’

from story of a hotel bedroom by Rosemary Tonks.

—–

Angelspit

The contents of Angelspit – page 1 – A-H  

1. Angelspit. 2. Broke. 3.Court. 4.Drip. 5. Edge. 6. Flash. 7. Gunslinger. 8. Hurricane

8. Hurricane

Summer made her final bow, exit stage left.

The tinny chimes of ice cream vans,

greensleeves battered into submission.

Trees undressed, isobars narrowed,

the wind picked up and with it the leaves,

scattered and tossed, kicked and crunched,

raked and piled, turned to mulch.

—–

‘someone phoned to say there is a hurricane on the way’

No need to panic.

—–

Lip bit, I watch you slip from the house,

into the sleeping streets,

past stammering florescent light.

It’s only a short reprieve, the door flung open,

you return with cigarettes and wine, the weekends staple diet,

and head to your retreat of cushioned floor.

Fingering glass and gulping between whispers and mock laughter,

phone glued to your ear for an hour or more.

Something is brewing –

suck inhale exhale, suck inhale exhale,

again and again and again.

You keep downing glasses of  paranoia

building those anti-clockwise thoughts,

a gateway to your secrets,

like the hollow eyed mask silhouetted against the wall.

Verbs and nouns snagged on bitter thorns,

Adjectives struggling to make sense of the darkness.

Then –

with your weekend staple emptied,

you emerge barefoot from your sanctuary,

pushing and shifting against horizons and introspection.

Your mouth ruptures, spitting, whirling and cyclonic.

Away she blows –

words gather pace, racing around your head,

 like laboratory mice, blind with rage.

Sentences surge with destructive energy, tearing up trees,

snaking down your chin, across the curve of your shoulders,

down through the veins of your ghostly arms,

converging at your outstretched splayed finger tips.

A maelstrom of lycanthropic howling that blights the sickle moon.

Familiar, repetitive.

To potent for my butterfly net defences.

—–

‘someone phoned to say there is a hurricane on the way’

They were spot on.

——— ♥♥♥ ———

7. Gunslinger

Another gunslinger rode into town,

wearing her scars with pride.

In the last chance saloon she clicked her heals and tipped her hat,

tasted three fingers, leaving a lipstick shape on the rim of her glass

and sucked on the tip of her smoldering cigarette.

Her eyes ricocheted of walls with all the fury

of a high velocity bullet, nickel tipped, trajectory perfect.

Her impassive poker face cornered a wounded beast,

down on his luck, the dust of the trail lingering on his clothes.

She smiled him an enigmatic smile and called him out.

Chairs scraped across the floor,

gamblers hid behind the smokescreen of their losing hands,

nervously eyeing the creaking swing of the slatted bar room door.

Her finger cocked, target locked and set to stun.

The wounded beast felt the dryness in his throat

and felt the impact of her nickel tipped kiss,

from the mouth of her smoking gun.

——— ♥♥♥ ———

6. Flash

We are like an audience, standing in frozen silence,

listening to language dissolve.

Free of your self-obsessed coffee house talk,

and the bottle of reasons you left uncorked.

I am at the beginning of my third act,

like ice cornered by the sun,

I must ride on my own melting.

—–

The trains shadow outruns its body,

Its compulsive rhythmic nursery rhyme patterns

of metal on metal, vibrate with energy.

Perhaps it was my tired limbs

or the empty seat beside.

Perhaps it was the faded cow hide colour of patchwork fields

or the steel glint of the sun as it ripped through columns of trees.

Unfolded and cohered,

before my eyes,

like the first sighting of the curvature of the earth. Flash.

—–

The lightening rod strike had eluded me

standing in the safety of the audience, a campanile of foolish pride,

my shadow on parole.

And I watched it separate, a mysterious force

unmasking the whole facade.

Flash. Ending years of shadow play that stalked my soul and heart. Easy,

as easy as a coin tossed in a buskers hat

——— ♥♥♥ ———

5. Edge

(for Tony and Nathalie)

Staring out of the thirteenth floor, unlucky for some,

my head swims with the sound of an ocean roar,

a tidal wave of traffic below,

with a myriad of city lights in tow,

surfing past columns of steel and glass,

in pursuit of mammon, like false Gods

searching for treasure in a darkening sky.

My hand reaches out like an orphan child,

to the pulsing laser on the tower roof,

that masquerades as a guidance light, teasing my optic nerve

flash after flash after flash.

And despite or because of the distance between us

I stand motionless on the edge of my uncertainty,

seduced by the lure of natures gravity,

nervously anticipating the degree of difficulty,

urged on by the pull of the redemptive beam, I execute my dive,

body piked, perpendicular,

then extend and straighten to form a single vertical line.

And with my outstretched hands folded in prayer

I splash into your turquoise eyes.

Your eyes as wide as a Duchenne smile, rolling away my wretched years.

If only I had measured your resistance

and listen to the words of my my captive heart,

beat after beat after beat.

——— ♥♥♥ ———

4. Drip

In your very own room with a view

of grassy embankment and wire fence, frustration mounted.

With the idea that your body could let you down,

(ignoring years of excess)

a salty tear navigated a path over your cheekbone,

your thumb poised in the hope of instant relief.

Click click click of the morphine drip.

You paid for that.

You cursed in your mother’s presence,

tossed restlessly in the privately owned German tank of a bed,

its tubular sides stacked three high to incarcerate your frail body.

Tubes connected to a clinical array of instruments, flickering dials

and digitally pulsating numbers, alarmed and ready to ring out a warning.

And when it came, the frenzied emergency room rush,

down corridors of uncertainty you sped to urgent faces cloaked in masks,

deep deep deep into your own personal war zone.

You paid for that.

At night your tangled dreams crawled

through the darkness of a cold shaft,

cloying and claustrophobic,

painstakingly shuffling along a carpet of clay,

desperate for daylight and birdsong,

wrestling with the hatch you battened down.

You paid for that.

My ear pressed close to your parched lips,

‘help me’ you whispered. But I was helpless.

Someone had thrown an invasive spanner in the works.

No one owned up.

Somewhere between the gowns and the swabs

and your swollen organs tucked neatly in place

like some anatomical jigsaw puzzle,

sat a legal team waiting to deny culpability.

They came to tick their boxes and adjust drips while you bled.

You paid for that…spanner and all.

The escape route was more orthodox.

No tunnel maps or bags of earth to dispose of by the wire fence.

The strobe of hallucinating red light racing through rain soaked streets,

to undo what had been done.

Angel of mercy and me…and you,

your urgent breathing through the oxygen mask,

your cold slender fingers intertwined with mine.

Blood stained sheets covered your lifeless legs.

The growl of the engine drowned out the

drip drip drip of the glucose bag.

You paid for that.

My ear pressed close to your parched lips,

‘help me’ you whispered. So I did.

I thrived in the role of nursemaid as you convalesced.

I spooned nourishment into your bird like mouth,

fed you words of love and encouragement ,

listened to you patiently between mouthfuls.

I wiped tears from your exhausted face,

watched you climb out of that cold dark chamber,

step by step by step.

You paid for that.

We spoke little of the injustice,

the masked failures, the invasive spanner.

Repercussions and blame kept well below the parapet.

You and your ‘God’ had brokered a deal.

‘look to the future’ you said,

with all your inner strength and defiance.

Body and symmetry restored, status quo, chapter closed.

You let slip the Samaritan in me

I searched down many a cold dark shaft,

but you let it slip.

It was the first time, it was the last time, it was the only time.

You paid for that.

——— ♥♥♥ ———

3. Court

A last embrace

for pity’s sake.

Pity, once my stock in trade.

I bought into your time,

seconds and minutes

boxed into a gift wrapped hour or more,

your fingers delicately coaxing

the ribbon from its bow.

Fingers interlaced,

then furtively withdrawn,

when once they were blessed,

caressed, when once they lovingly

helped to to unhook the pearl buttons

of your ivory wedding dress.

A final kiss, a lipstick shape of sultry gloss

tattooed on my cheek like a rag of scarlet cloth.

Your branding iron kiss,

this keepsake, this stubborn mark.

The jury ran out of sympathy,

and I am led away.

Guilty of heart theft, a larcenous act,

that carries a minimum 5 year stretch.

From the corner of my eye

I clock your widows look,

bathed in fake humilty,

of wide brimmed hat,

of crocodile tears and crimson gash.

A femme with too much fatale.

——— ♥♥♥ ———

2. Broke

He patiently sat by April waters,

 awaiting her steady stream of cryptic clues, a third rate

                                   detective, his limp eyes surrendered to daylight

with time running down the clock.

Candour was not her strongest suit in times of stress.

His interruption had only called a temporary halt to the breaking news.

She posted her final words across his eyelids,

a hurtful narrative embedded into the circles  under his eyes.

and when he cried, the sting of column inches

flowed like ink on paper in the rain,

his face chequered with the bitter prose of his own obituary.

A speechless moon, a pale outrider to his broken world,

sat like a ghost at his open window.

A human shape piece of sky shattered,

raining a million shards of ice cold jet.

Cloud dust settled in his hair, clung to his clothes.

He could taste it on his lips.

In the morning he looked up to find his body shape chalked out,

a gaping hole above him,

a crime scene of sky lay ankle deep around his feet.

Forensics waiting in the wings.

And all he said was ‘finish what you were about to say’. Mistake.

——— ♥♥♥ ———

1. Angelspit

The coffee bubbles on the hob,

its sultry smokey perfume

swirls and swims up my nostrils.

A teardrop escapes the worn rubber grip of the filter,

sizzling a path down the blackened metal face,

and I am tempted,

oh so tempted to save it.

I look out of my window, surveying a low grey sky,

a hovering nimbus without end. Inactive. Soporific.

Where only the angels

stampeding across the heavens, rouse me.

On days like these I discover subtle reminders of you.

A thumbprint on a photograph DNA would prove was yours,

the cold glass jar of arnica

and the indentation your scooping finger made.

For a million skies like this,

clouds billowing like swollen bellies,

yearning to be burst, I harbour my love for you.

In the walled seclusion of my courtyard

I try to catch every drop that falls,

knowing each one will burn a hole in the palm of my outstretched hand.

Tamed by a hovering shroud

and the relentless unforgiving spit of a fallen angel,

 a little of what we were disappears.

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