5/20/2017 0 Comments Poetry by Tim GoldstoneThe Promise and the Shadow Weeks since his bed was fit for human habitation. If he was strong enough he would leave it. He would get up – go now to get what he needs to stop this in an instant – but his shadow has caught him up, and pins him down, shaking him until he hurts and cramps, would willingly die. As she died she’d told him she’d outrun her shadow – but he must let his catch him. “Promise” she said. So he lies here now, for her, in the horror between sleep and dream. He closes his eyes – Conjures against his will a rotting wooden cabin clinging to a putrid swamp’s spitting side where splitting skulls chatter and bob on the sour stinking mud. He slinks through a syrup of acrid mist, wades through a nest of waiting cluster flies to his overdosed lover’s algae-covered lair. He is wearing filthy rags once his mourning suit over which a dripping lace of bile is forming. He runs under grey sky so low he must crouch until the muscles in his back squeeze his spine until tears flood his mouth and he can no longer cry out. Bent double he passes crumbling facades where gargoyles of his face as a child hiss appalling obscenities and he bites the insides of his wrists to still the manically bumping pulses. In the slime his bare footprints scuttle ahead of him filling with rainwater that immediately teems with squirming larvae. He reaches a barn that clatters and groans against the furious wind spies on her through the heavy stale incense drifting low where she swings upside down from a fraying hangman’s rope creaking as it twists – the noose fastened around her ankles. She is catching rats with her teeth by their tails as swifts flap by with unusual and exquisite leisure spitting on him. She has put out her blood in saucers for fleas and he laps from them so they can be close again. Clots in the blood make it bitter and chewy. He swallows and retches. She has attached a cat to a church bell to prevent its’ creeping up on dragonflies on whose wings are tattooed ‘fuck’ and ‘you’ and because only dead flowers grow here in the permanent cloying gloom he is wearing hawthorn as his button-hole which gnaws at his clammy skin, waking him on soiled sheets where on a spool of looped agony he yearns for the days when again and again, hand in hand, their elongated shadows streaming out behind them, they ran across rooftops to score – glamorous, ecstatic, invincible. Jimmy (1933 – 2013) Powdery-dark salt-aired finger-aching pre-dawn sea-city morning-cold is what Jimmy – landsailor now – he hates that name but doesn’t let it show – walks through again to his shift at the mill on still-unfamiliar unmoving terrain with its vague orange glow his too big creased and crumpled socks scrunching his every boot-lead step until he hesitates just a second too long misses his opportunity to cross the road. While he waits again a docker flicks away the stub of a rollie that glows through the flight of its arc and lands on the face of Jimmy’s street-lit shadow and a better boot than Jimmy’s scrunches it out with it’s metal heel plate and Jimmy’s toes curl around lumps of wool like babies’ fingers as he’s learned to do when he needs a drink but isn’t going to have one. Warsaw Water, Aleska would shout at passers-by, doesn’t mix with vodka, and told me many times of her first ever vodka drunk around a fire of pallets and tyres on a toyless windy camp-site where copying the adults she covered an opaque glass tumbler with the palm of her hand to stop the rain getting in. A year later I saw her break both her wrists. She was drunk at the bus stop again but lively and happy that day and small and fully pregnant she held out her arms as wide and expansively as she could possibly manage to show all of us her blissful world. Then abruptly the pavement was tugged and tipped at an awkward angle lurching her sideways as she desperately tried to keep her footing on the deck of a boat in a heavy swell, and as she toppled face first towards the concrete she shot out her hands in front of her for a dear life not her own. Amongst the Atlas Mountains Too high even for goats although not their meat, dried in strips; each long day measured out in stumbling mules through air carved from the stored warmth of towering rocks, moving illegal harvests in bales under tarpaulins on rickety carts down to the plains. When camped at last suspicion fell flickering from eye to eye in the shadows from the quick fire whose flames crackled like interrogation, nestling in huge boulders under sparklingly clear star-pricked velvet black skies whose aching beauty shocked you to your sleepless shaking paranoid bones. Bones you are convinced every single night will never be missed will never be found. Bio: Tim Goldstone’s poetry and short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies. Prose sequence read on stage at The Hay Festival. Contributor to TV, radio, theater. Worked and backpacked throughout Western and Eastern Europe and North Africa. Born in England, currently living in Wales.
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