Poem My Wildish Child

Oh my wildish child
Let us delight
In the uneven edges
The betweens and the unseen.
Embrace the discomfort
Ignore the effort.
Dance in the storm
Lift up your voice.
Let your fierce savage heart
Shine, burn.
Drop all modesty.
Save the sanitized world 
By liberating it with mud and dancing.
Forgive those pale shadows.
Just don't let your colours run.
Be black and crimson and gold.
Be the lightening,
Butterflies
Don't worry about being afraid.
Just never let it rob you.
Of life.
Of living.
Oh my wildish child
You are nature.

Chapter 1

The Professor

Derek fidgeted then caught himself. He had been about to check his phone again. Secret service are used to waiting but he had been sat in some congressional back hall for over an hour. It was very odd. He had been reassigned this morning to follow some physics professor and his itinerary was all over the place. There were no threats he could see but “the boss” wanted him more secure. He had been in and out of meeting rooms all day. Some around Washington, some in New York, the back to D.C.

He began to hear raised voices. He stood up debating if he should enter. The door flung open and out came the professor sweating with a little fleck of spit at the corner of his mouth.

“You’re an idiot! Short-sighted slimy ass-hole!”

Derek followed him down the corridor. He studied this man. He was young and slender. Skinny even with shaggy brown curly hair. Some-one had brought him a suit to wear not long after Derek had been assigned to him and while it was an improvement Derek felt it gave him the air of panicked best-man. He walked with a simmer almost twitchy rage at present and Derek calmly ushered him down an access stair well to his S.U.V.

He sat opposite the professor as he muttered about some signal and took of his shoes.

“Can we stop to get Band-Aids?”

“Sorry? What?”

“Feet!”

He said waggling them in the air.

“My God-damn-feet! It’s something you never think about, I mean you work and study and research and then something amazing, something world shattering happens and you never think, what am I going to wear to tell the President? Or what then? You know? I mean I have weak arches and these are new shoes and I don’t even know how they knew what size to get me. I mean. You know?”

Derek squinted. He raised his com and mentioned to the driver that they needed Band-Aids on the plane. Derek figured it was a tactical decision. This guy couldn’t run if he could barely walk and who knows what might happen.

“That was real decent of you dude. Crazy day huh?”

It began to rain a little and Derek tried to stay focused. He had baby-sat some really difficult clients before. Diplomats, and dignitaries, royalty (though they often had they own teams) and he was certainly not his worst client. He did as he was told. Didn’t talk too much or pretend he wasn’t there. He didn’t argue and he wasn’t drunk.

They were stopped at traffic lights and Derek got this feeling. A prickle, something.

“Put your shoes on.”

He said it slowly and deliberately. The professor gave him a questioning look but he caught Derek’s tone and bent forward just in time to avoid the spray of bullets.

“Move, move, move. Shots fired. Repeat: shots fired.”

The car jolted into action as the professor ran his hand over the imprint the bullets had caused in the armoured glass.

“Get down. Keep down!”

The professor retreated hurriedly tying his shoes. As Derek barked into his coms. He was a team down, and the coms were being buzzed.  The car sped down the wet road and the grey of urban dusk. They weren’t far from the air strip. They weren’t far from a safe house either. Derek motioned to the driver. Safe house was an easier place to control the variables.

The impact of the truck was sudden. Everything seemed to slow down as the world span, glass and light seem fractured. Then blackness. The door was being prized open by someone dressed as fire-fighter. Derek could see the gun. Yet he was too groggy. His head was bleeding.

He checked over at the professor. Working on his words carefully.

“Professor, when that door open, I’m going to shot that man. You have to run, do you understand, you have to run.”

The professor was silent and grey but nodded. The professor took out a pen and wrote something on it, leaning forward and slipped it into Derek’s pocket.  

As soon as there was a chink of light Derek fired. The fake fire-fighter fell and the professor pushed against the door stumbling out into the street. The professor ran and ran. Derek did what he was trained for.

Back up arrived. Then an ambulance. He reached into his pocket. It said.

52 hertz. Follow the signal. They are coming.

The Ambassador's Dream

I had the dream again. The one where I am standing on a dark hill side. So dark. So silent. No stars or crickets and down before me I see it. It looks like a dark stone cathedral balanced on it’s spire or one of those strange float island you see sometimes in pictures of Thailand. Except for the rectangular door. The only light spilling out onto the valley floor.  In the spill of light I see figures standing.  I move closer (do I move?) and I see more light. Head lights from two or is it three black S.U.V’s.

The figures and there must be 20 of them stand motionless as the lights butt and jerk ever closer. As they stop dust whirls into the light. Men in dark suits and figures in restraints and grey track suits are ushered forward.

My perspective changes.

I look down at my handcuffed hands and shapeless grey clothes. The figures before me are blue. A strange sense of calm washes over me and as a blue figure approaches me my cuffs melt like quick silver and fall away. A figure at the front seems to have done this with a hand gesture. He (how do I know that) steps back. Then on some unseen command they all bow. Not like a Japanese bow. A full forehead on the floor. So I sit down, cross-legged in the desert dust.

Time passes. And I stand and as I move towards the door I brush my hand onto the head of the beings I pass. Just as I am about to climb onto the floating half-moon steps I see the figure more closely.  He is blue and hairless. With dark moist eyes. had longer arms than a human and they have three fingers and a thumb. He seems to have crescent dark marks beneath his eyes and a second bottom lip. Within my mind I suddenly know they are also like eyes, and the two mouths are so they can drink and speak at the same time. He raises his hand to me, Buddha style and I mirror him.  I enter the light.

Wildish

Wildish

How that the strange dirty children
Squabble and cry
Like the gulls at the water-side!
Or like the naked howl
Of dogs abandoned in the rain.
To hear the violent pain
Of all their parents
"go away's".
Like knitting needles
Raking through my brain
I was often told the same
My heart still remembers.

Confined by fences
Gates and and walls.
One voice rise another falls
Silent.
Yet I have no strength to complain
They only hear children at play
They are good at ignoring.
To you it must just sound like noise
Pink grubby glitter girls 
And such lost boys.
No sitting in their mother's arms.
No soft words. 
No time.
As though tenderness was not to bless.
Sweetness can not spoil.

Snow

Snow 

I have always loved snow.

My favourite kind is the angel feathers.

A whirlwind of white thick flakes

That stick to the sides of posts and trees.

The way it swallows sounds except whispers.

It transforms all things.

The shadows change colour.

You can not tell sky from ground or ground from sky.

Dancing one way, then another.

Like a whole world is dreaming.

All things familiar are strange.

All things strange familiar.

It vanishes with the hot touch.

Burns cold into hands and feet and noses.

It smells like left over thunder

Bitten tongue

And cold.

No matter my rage or pain it transform me too.

Smoothed away ugliness.

Cools the temper

Leaving something pure

Like snow.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn. - Thomas Gray

These Eyes

These Eyes


These eyes are sore from tears.
Again.
My solace in soothing strangers
Who will never know my pains.
Yet the wolf in me knows.
Growls and draws back.
Digging deep into the snow.
What is underneath this cold?
I am frightened of falling
Into the abyss in my heart.
Of losing my balance.
Cover me in the ashes of my burnt bridges.
Let me howl like the wind.
Can I be brave enough to be hopeful?
Can I?
Can I dream of the desert and the warm sun,
So it seeps into my broken bones?
My mother's corpse lies,
Small and fragile.
Black blood on snow.
What are my tears for?
The ghostly reflection of my own death?
The idea of love?
Or is it the cold in me that burns my eyes?
There are no words.
Only the wind
The moon
The snow.

Poetry is thought that breathe and words that burn. - Thomas Gray