The Unutterable Chair
1
Before everybody cried about
everything ...
nobody cried about
anything.
Illicit heaves
escalated up-gut to eardrums
beating a retreat
forging composures clamping
brow to chin.
Letting it all out
was not an opt or
twist of card
face.
Voluptuous with disobedience
a beauty fluted torrential tears
outstripping arid stratospheres
with breathlessness the
organ struck up a chord.
Prophetic reconnaissance
climaxed her anticipation.
Maying blossoms did we bring
swanning aisles with preen of clean
knickers next to godly stiff of starch.
Filing past she lets
inconsolable sopping-
wet her cotton hanky
rosary queen
white ‘nd
red ‘nd
gold.
A rare bird on a dull
day her speckled tears pearled
our austere post-war world
our guarded schoolgirl hearts
supping her
sweet lips
so naked
so raw...
...she had
to go...
2
Orpheus-sad her young
husband strummed his
doorstep grief after mass
we – my mother and me –
tried to pass by the house
with shut curtains
naturally
his falsetto throat
caught fast our faltering.
Come. Please. Come!
With no way back we
followed his beckoning
entranced our
hostage state.
Look!
Our hanging-back eyes
roundly lassoed
pulled between deep
rutted glyphs and last gasp
scrawls. The heavy leather arms
snarled with spectres of
ruptured nails
scoring her final
autograph...
...would you like a cup of tea?
3
He vanished for an unquiet age
to the bereaved and hostile kitchen.
We - mother and me -
sat in polite company-mode
straight-backed
knees together
faces on hold
eyeballs transfixed on
the arms of the
very
chair.
Incremental rifts
grew audible her
asthmatic clutch
at
earth air
at
her earth
at
hurt air her
bare
voluptuous
face disappearing
into an
all consuming
opening
mouth...
...sugar?
TIMED OUT
On catching whooping
cough it snowed heavily for days
burying scraps of infant-headed putti
deep in a biscuit tin...
they emerged some time later
acting oddly a new breed of
cherubim with festers of
eyes plaguing their hands
their bodies their wings.
A sprouting of guttural
neck-spasms
panic tropes
paroxysms.
The undying tedium of illness.
To prevent starvation
I’m fed pabulums of white
bread after every
whoop and puke a medicinal
slice of Mother’s Pride.
More than anything I want nothing.
In the biscuit tin my cherubim grow
extra heads on their four disturbed faces
brash and doughty. A spate of soothsay at
high noon. Noon? Time warped sentence.
Heavy weather. Disinfectant.
More white stuff arrives
attempting to reverse my emaciated
state. On top of this I’m
stifled to hell against the
curative fire. Sweated to begs
going a bit crazy from
remedies I flee to the
outside lavatory. Through a
newly dug tunnel I suck up
the arctic cool.
Untrapped time.
Unbreaded snow.
Geraldine Monk is a thwarted stargazer living in the light polluted city of Sheffield. She is a keen swimmer but is constantly amazed by the substance called water which puzzles and troubles her. When not swimming and stargazing she loves to visit old English churches and ancient pagan ruins.
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