Man and Woman

Part one: Man Loves Woman

A man loved a woman

In fear she fled to an empty church,

That had long been deserted.

Love had found her.

It had sent birds crashing up into the air,

Leaving everything to be seen and smelt.

At loves coming, a great mouth had opened

Vomiting out a swarm of words, none of which made sense;

They vexed the earth and called the ancestors from their graves;

Old buildings quaked.

Man, vulnerable, vibrating with loss

Has a heart like a compass.

He finds woman shivering all alone.

He holds her and brings water to her mouth.

He lifts her mouth to his

Woman breathes new life in.

As she begins to stir he recalls

The first time she walked through the door.

That was the day he finally imagined a home;

He could see in his heart farthest north.

Man remembered her smile, a smile formed under eyes so blue;

A smile that she’d lost to eagle peaks of ice and stone.

He reclaimed it with hands that loved and touched her.

In the early light he had clothed her eyes with deft kisses.

His private thoughts curled around her ears.

‘You’re just a woman,’ he muttered,

While playing with the tails of her hair.

Before the porcelain curves of her face his eyes kneel.

Desires attending this service cling in desperation to their pews

As they skirt around lips dry and chilled. Man thinks

‘Despite your war, woman, I want you still.’

By mistake he had discovered her beauty, denied and hidden.

Her honey dipped soul, star fired, had slowly seduced him

Back when the days were short and the nights were long,

He listened to her continually, from a yawning hollow inside.

She was his only song.

He built in his mind a glorious museum

To the delicate art of her being

In which he displayed a kitchen twirl,

Next to a button nose that twitched and tweaked.

Eyebrows that strained under thoughts heavy with dark matter;

A lower leg she refused to shave;

The feel of skin was cool and soft as snow.

Every detail was carefully marked and stored for posterity.

Man looks down at her and sighs.

Using moth bitten words pulled out from coat pockets-

Over which his pride had lately chewed-

He whispers into her sea blue eyes.

‘Woman, I am so in love with you.’

Part two: When Man Found Woman

Things can go from bad to worse

And even though I can’t bear to watch you go

I’m prepared to wait a mile,

To offer this paltry smile,

To a life of circles, turning round again;

For the beginning of something is found at its end.

Milk white, thin and cool, her mesmerizing ice

Soothed the acid inside of me,

Attended to the bile that eroded me,

To the waiting that warped the bones.

I buried myself in her perfumed neck;

The galaxy of nerves at the end of my nose breathed her in.

How I wept; for she smelt like home.

I traced, with an attentive finger, a moon struck line

From the curve of her shoulder to the slip of her thighs;

Inhaling deeply as she cooed and sighed

Exhaling sounds mellow and sweet, yet cruel, so cruel,

For the dream of her child was inside of me.

So I lay with her all night but in the morning

I was frightened, lying naked on the sheet.

I didn’t want that child anymore.

I searched the clouded marble of her eyes.

Would I be diminished?

For on her own she hit the ground running,

Hunting in the first light the echoes of the stars;

Although I tried to follow her I could not reach up

For the laws of physics tied me and

In the ochre fold of dawn a simple lust bound me,

Because in the thickness of her,

The sureness, the warmth and the hold of her,

In the freshness and depth of her,

Though I am cynical,

‘Woman, I am insatiable.’

Part three: Man Leaves Woman

This malignant lump upon my heart; this tumour,

This infected tissue, septic and gangrenous.

I cut it out with a knife by candlelight, alone in a dirty kitchen

I cut it out to be done with it; making clean the flesh and bone.

With a glass shattered face, alone.

I had a pocket knife and some rusty utensils

Cleaned in boiled gin;

Fresh tea towels stacked to one side.

I stopped to feel one last time the fat worm of sorrow as it

Gnawed inside pink chambers; once innocent.

It was all I had left inside the oak of my heart,

Burned and abandoned, like a body in the dark.

I heated the blade on the hob until it was singed and hot.

I stuffed a piece of cloth in my mouth,

Torn from a shirt ripped from my Back.

Then I bit down hard as I felt the heart hurt, echoing outward to the world;

But a process had begun that could not be stop.

My mind was made up and the knife was hot.

I steadied myself, gripping the handle of the blade

My hand quivering above a guiding line I had made;

The heart that hurt, that ached for the last days of a golden world,

Whimpering as it did under the threat of the surgeon’s knife.

I was frightened. I took a swig from what was left of the gin and then made my mark

So it was, in that dirty kitchen, that the kingdom which had stood fell apart.

I carried out the unimaginable, enabling the unbearable.

Though not without medication taken with wine,

Those French vintage enzymes that washed down pills

Of a Torpedo shape and powdery design,

To null the voices of the bitter, half baked crowd

That screamed and screamed so loud

Warning of the worm that had at last burrowed down

To loves magnificence; feeding on vulnerable light.

As the blade slit the skin I screamed;

My scream was for the fact that there was need for a knife at all,

That the drug of a kiss had led me to war.

I screamed as I cut through layers of fatty flesh,

Down toward the poisoned organ.

From green veins bile sprang forth;

swampy juice running down hands and wrists;

Running down my arms into the sink.

I screamed and fell to my knees.

Consumed, I could not think.

With a taste of iron in my mouth I screamed,

Spitting out through shaking teeth a brain quaking din.

I tore open my chest until the dark life inside of me,

Near extinguished, was clearly exposed;

The cancerous worm could finally be seen,

Attached by tendrils to near crushed ribs;

The Infected chambers of the gangrenous heart, clinging to the bone. 

I sucked myself in with gulps of air, envisioning the end of things.

I had to get it out; the throbbing slug asphyxiating future possibilities within. 

I screamed the scream of those that wail and gnash their teeth,

The torn cloth, bloodied, hung from my mouth as a dogs tongue.

The stench of live matter, sick and butchered, effaced me, confronting me

As I screamed down into the foundations of the house,

Through layers of mud, silt and clay, to rock and mantle,

Screaming deep, right into the volcanic core of evermore.  

I reached inside and gripped that suckling tumour between bloodied fingers,

Muscled and terse and ready to kill the secret murderer of beauty

As it wiggled and writhed; there would be no reprieve. I would not give in.

Yanking it out I screamed again,

Ripping it from the heart that had been Ripped apart.

In a final act I cast it to the floor,

So I would know sorrow no more.

A bloodied fist came down hard on it, as though the fist a hammer,

Squashing that filthy life. Then I screamed the scream

Of a man who can take no more.

Nursing and cleaning the heart with alcohol and gauze,

The heart thumped beating and warping walls and doors.

I washed the wound with clean water.

I sowed my chest up with a needle, threaded with guitar strings,

With blood running, smudging, crusting,

I smeared salt and herbs into the tear.

Then I screamed the scream that gurgles and breaks

From the belly of the world;

A scream that knits and pins the tongue to a worn mouth, curled.

I then passed out in squalor on the floor,

Lying on a watery film of blood and bile.

As the gift of sleep came to me I lay there mumbling

Dreaming the dreams of those betrayed

Yet, as I lay there exhausted and spent.

I knew that I would scream no more.

Copyright©Robert Ursell 2008