Between Chapters
(And an ebook giveaway today!)
1.
The long months of their little wars,
their games and stratagems,
left me hostile and heavy.
I couldn’t care anymore.
Empty words filled my belly like granite headstones,
like stone serpents — writhing to escape,
spewing a vicious, viscous flood of poison
from bowels and skin, like sin.
A sick and bloated cynic,
seeing only broken things,
demented machines with human parts,
churning out non-solutions for short-lived futures:
Band-Aid the cancer!
Dose the corpse with aspirin!
But, I run on …
flux of belly begets the same within the brain.
And so, in short, we came away:
to convalesce; to sleep again;
to hunt out what was lost –
retreat.
2.
We drove in a storm towards the mountains,
circling the missing centre.
Six-hours groaning and dozing and starting awake,
panicked by suicide-trucks and every rain-filled pothole.
Through the chill and streaming window, I saw nothing.
No hills, no fields, no skinny schoolkids
leading tiny siblings, dripping home from school.
No stout-striding grandmothers surging stoically against the wind,
balancing the weight of the world and their weekly shopping.
No freshening green of thirsty trees, washed clean of summer dust,
drinking deep the rain.
No sleepy villages, harbouring bedraggled hens
with shining feathers and citrine eyes.
No roosters, no goats.
No world weary cows or curious donkeys.
So trapped in my skin and the cage of my skull,
not even the encircling mountains could reach me:
lumps of rock, ostentatious obstacles,
postponing the bliss of arrival, the peace of stopping.
Only a great and looming emptiness,
and at the centre of it, the grey ribbon of the road,
and my small, tired will, clenched against the world.
When the end came at last,
I fell alone into dreamless sleep,
like welcome death.
3.
We woke in a new place.
Clouds unveiled mountains,
bloody then gilded in the morning.
We drank steaming cups of sweet tea,
before the clouds rolled back,
dragging hard rain across still water.
The lake, a TV-screen wild with hissing snow:
nothing on this channel, just the roar of the rain and the great,
grey-green emptiness around our small cabin.
It was peaceful there.
Later, the rain departed,
fly-fishermen performed their rites in small boats,
doubled in the mirror of the lake,
reeling in and paying out invisible lines to cajole fishy gods.
The silence smoothed the bedraggled feathers of my brain,
back in line, pin by pin.
Brains have wings that need tending:
a thing to remember.
4.
My love says, While you slept a whole family was jogging on the lake.
I can see them: pounding hairy-legged and red-faced atop the placid water,
puffing up a storm, raising wavelets and a wake,
their running shorts lumo-yellow, violent-orange, impossible-green
their trainers pink, sky-blue, and a scarlet like scandal.
They wear 1980's sweatbands instead of haloes,
and tread the deeps with confidence, as good disciples should.
This is not what he meant, but I see it and laugh.
I like to hear you laugh, he says, it’s been a while.
Flick the veranda switch at 4 a.m. and summon a hurricane of midges.
At 5 the spiders are drunk on the largess of the light,
nets heavy with a bounty of thousands.
The dawn takes a long, slow breath in.
The webs shiver with the breathing.
Anansi accepts her morning offering with delight.
All is well.
So, it comes back to me: a poet’s eye that answers.
Seeing possibilities, and the magic in ordinary things.
I will care for it better from now on.
5.
Another morning:
War-kiss, War-kiss, War-kiss,
unknown birds call gruffly, pre-dawn,
and are answered in kind.
And, why not?
I do not want to live at war with myself –
time to kiss and make up.
This is what it is like to come alive again:
to row badly, in circles, across calm water,
because there is a boat and time,
and nothing urgent to be done.
6.
I finish the draft of a poem
(is it good? does it matter?)
as the morning geese come
demanding to our door,
all the way from Egypt.
Mother, loudly acquisitive,
all honk and swagger — she’s the Sergeant Major.
Her adolescent brood scrum keenly around her,
eyes beetle-bright over puffball bodies, gangly legs, clown-shoes,
while father waddles serenely behind, above it all –
the General besotted by bread.
Every day needs something of this in it.
7.
So, a new chapter begins.
Begin it with geese, with spiders,
with rain on the water,
with a storm of dancing midges,
with fire on the mountain at dawn.
These things do no harm.
I invoke them now:
Let fall the armour. Unlock my heart.
Teach me how to be, and how to sing.
It is how I know I am alive.
Warren Justin Banks 2019
Ebook Giveaway — for Review
Hi Medium connections! (Not sure what else to call you — “Mediums” seems sizest and just plain wrong, what with its whiff of séances.)
Anyway … I wanted to let you know that I’m running a giveaway of my poetry book, Stories from the Space Between, on Saturday.
It’s got everything — sex, violence, intrigue, war, life on alien planets, you name it! (OK, that’s not entirely true, but maybe it got your attention?)
Actually, it’s about change, recovery, love, loss … All the big (and small) stuff of life that I could pack into a short volume. The poetry is mostly free verse, narrative and, to an extent, confessional, though there is one longer prose piece at the end. And the whole collection is a compact read: 68 pages = less than 2 hours. Though I hope you’ll savor it a little more than that. ☺️
The giveaway starts at PDT 00:00 (in a bit over an hour’s time) and ends just before midnight on Saturday. If you’re at all interested, please download. And, if you’re up for it, I’d highly appreciate an honest review on Amazon.
Here’s the link again: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QHWWLHV. Enjoy!
Wishing you a happy, and slightly literary, weekend!
Warren
