the insufficient song

I am sung like a sodden bell
would sing. My tune
the disquietude of a dead
man’s room. I am
an abortion of a tongue: a
crumpled bud amid
the short shadows. There was

a time of melted paths,
footprints future tangible, seedlings
drifting a soft freedom like the dreams
a human cannot have. God
was stuffed into Sunday hats
while only cats were ubiquitous
with easy autonomy. Now,

such a weak straddle and
still no settlement. The blades
no longer white plastic
and so many more machines.

I am not designing dishonesty
like some, yet straight lines
are armaments, and why not
live in the curve of ambiguity?

The veins are strings that haul
the blood. Push,
push your music onto me,
as if I am piano keys.




all that has dark sound


She died in the shudder of a haunted child,
thin-limbed and unwitting, beautiful as being born.

The evening became a solid black marble distilled
from the music of decades; one single sound hitting the floor.

Mostly, existence is an incomplete fugue; all of forgetting
a cheat’s suicide. How slowly we die sometimes.

We left her there.
It is the done thing.




time of the old women

After Goya

Forgotten wives; disintegrated girls.
A haunted coalition of swallowed
nights, and their days inert jewels.

Of course they are afraid: it is
their only beautiful thing. Deep

beneath their silk cowers the exiguous
outcome of a collapsing prognosis, and
their frowzy folds hanging anguished
and derelict. They have fragile

children, called Nostalgia. They are
yellow mostly, like jaundiced fog,
ungraspable and ruined.

The mirror is nothing to them.
It does not visit them with truth
any more than a painted bird
has a sweeter song, or a garland
makes a grave into a garden.

Their faces the wreck of a sour pantomime,
now is a time that they have not imagined.




La Gâcheuse

after Magritte

She is dead, of course; already
her heart stilled to a stone.

Breasts lush in the Elysian fields
of her skin where summer burns
the mystery of collision; this outcome
of ingenious interaction; this pathology.

No line defines anything.

She is still sex. She is
the bridge and its traveller; the insistent
vibration of journey. She smiles as
an extinct enigma; a more fully
realised Mona Lisa. And more

...she laughs
because she has read the philosophers.

She is a painted transience - a memento
mori for the mirror-bidden blind. Those
who look upon her should see everything in one:

one grotesque hybrid which, because of
the truth it contains, can
be nothing other than beautiful.



cruorem radix

after Elizabeth Soroka

Blooming medusa,
free from the charge of stone, her
buds bleeding before the orange fist of sky,
her rage silent in the defiance of her outstretched tongue
she thrives in a fragile twist of bark and bone. Black,

black birds among
and on
stealing her sorrow as if
it is their own. Below,

her blood,
her anguished origin, deep
deep where the cells of life are born
passing on
the wounded fruit with the gnawing worm. She,

the graceful bleeding tree, her history
the pull of an ugly root, holding

out its dying edifying flowers:
an effort of insubordinate beauty.




at the mirror

after Otto Dix

In the glass
the indeterminacy
of light, thin
and sour
like old breath
and memories.

She is our silence,
tipping loosely
the lapse of her
breasts from
her jutted bones.

The rosette
that parts her legs
acquits
the impulsive
crimes of men, and

we cannot help
but look.




excursion into philosophy

after Hopper

Sex is philosophy asleep and automatic. It is
the shadows on the wall, black and bottomless.
Light is the reckoning of the real: the fast trip
to reflection. The unflattering morning mocks
flawed skins and faulty thinking. It demands
more than a caress. It laughs at clumsy fumbling
and shines on our time so cruelly. There is no
compassion with the day. It cannot love even
like sex. It cannot move a body to its moment
of enlightenment nor charge the mind toward
the Other. Her buttocks are bare by his book. His eyes
are cast to the floor where the shape of his confrontation
is rectangular. He is a tired man with all this living, yet
love lies at his back, and his pages remain open.




seen


The elements do not grieve me
- nor the sun,
whose keenness is thwarted by the north.
All day the bulky sky
a cinereous shroud
which does not hide heaven
and claims nothing
on its behalf. The birds
sit heavy on the fence. Cat
crouches by a damp bush. The path
consistently reaches the door but
few walk on it.

(published at Calliope Nerve)




the death of poetry


All our colours demand circuses. Only black
is humble; it collects itself discretely and
remains silent when the laughter
is viole(n)t. Blue is beautiful but
wants to conquer the world in swathes
of drowning. Our words are red and
always slaughtered. Their little deaths
make us smile and feel less alone.

All our cancers are stones
heavy and impenetrable
claiming white from the rainbow
where each bird wraps an untold wing
around frozen number
the thin of bone
the calling hours
in graceful murder
choreographed
feet over feet.

All our corpses coagulate
a bleeding past
a foreign church
moving away from language
into the worship of
The Act.

All our coins are for spending.
There is nothing left beautiful
enough to be free.

(published at Poetry Monthly International)




the size of gloom can grow


We are a mourning version of the sun, clear
as a cloudy eyeball in the drip of age
all our shadows in the shape of disquiet
paging the sea to hear our skin
and why not drink it with the rain?

All the skill is in living, say the dead, as
they try to preserve a dignified memory.

We are undeniable unless doubted.
We are unimaginable unless imagined.

We are human...

or something else.

We throb with the stings of generations
and the dead bees not as dead as us.

We are the size of gloom but grow; poems
but not of words; love but always loss.

(published at Gloom Cupboard)




Currently living in Argyll, Scotland with her partner, two children and a cat, Gillian Prew ditched philosophy in favour of poetry even though the former still haunts her. She has three collections of poems and has been published at Full of Crow, Counterexample Poetics, Gutter Eloquence, Gloom Cupboard, Calliope Nerve and The Glasgow Review among others. Her blog, growth of the blood, can be found HERE.