Collection: 'poetry 2'

Written around March - June 2021, poetry 2 is a collection representing a very particular time in my artistic expression, before I was quite conscious of my direction or aesthetic ideals. Whether juvenile or lyrical, all of it is concerned with the degree of unreality that I felt in my mind at the time. The person who created this brief collection is very much lost to time now - this here is all that remains of them. 

'poetry 2'

[ all rights reserved A. F. Fitts 2021 ]

Washing blood out of clothes in the bathwater – 1/3

On Friday nights they tear down the washing lines where
Hung up in orderly rows like teeth in the metal maw
Are the clothes they would rather burn but instead wash,
Wash the blood out of in the bathwater in the dark.

Left to dry by moonlight the stains barely linger,
Droplets still on sheets they leave covered up –
The entity, the hull of the ship where a young man
Sits and shaves his sun-roughed skin

And by accident slices into his cheek with burning blade
The red slick trickles down over skin
He does not cry out but feels the caress of ghosts
Men who threw themselves overboard, hearts still beating.

On warm tile floor the hands scrub through fabric
With eyes searching for next victims and fingers
Letting those burning blades run over and preparing
For next Friday, and washing, washing away blood in the bathwater.

 

* 

Little gold fish – 4/3

The little gold fish float in their bowl –
There, on the shelf, tiny fins flapping
Uselessly against the current
Beyond the glass in the pale blue dark.
Like the waves of an ocean drawing in
And out – sucking salt as two hands
Hold tight to clear curved, shaking
Beneath their scaled skins quaking –
The little fish, their eyes are wide,
Round and searching, but the air fades.

Left on the mantle to stew in tempest
Waters now stilled, the fish hide
In plastic fronds and technicolour pebbles
And in all their oceans petrified.
Gold in the light from the sun,
Seeping through a shuttered window
Are their scales, touched by a king cursed –
The hands outstretch, each moment closer
Ready to take and in the tumult shake
Until all the fish are frozen, with fear, and dying.

 *

 

I set fire to a moth until it burned and died – 12/3

There are always moths in my bathroom.
Small creatures, their wings like the lace curtain
My mother pins across the window –
The same lace they cling to, or the glass –
Reflected, little narcissists, in mirrors.
Happiness is a butterfly beyond the bars,
But a moth alight between my fingers with
Candle waxing poetry by waters is a brand
Burning skin, leaving blisters
In the shapes of their wings, casting shadows,
Irrecoverable, along the white-painted walls.

 

* 

Weight – 30/3

Bearing down on us – the ravages,
The stopped clock on the wall,
The pure ice wind which savages –
In the cold night she would call and

Rest here, within my reach –
Unmeasured by any man,
My wife, a woman who, in death,
Became more than we had planned.

I found her – a body, frozen,
In her worn-out whitewashed clothes,
A creature in the woods so earthen –
Away from those she loathed and

Yet time remained in senses, and,
That I should bear the storm
I left her lying, living still,
Amongst trees to fix, and form.

 

 *

The first day of June  – 1/6

There’s a sign on the door today,
Written plainly in black pen – DO NOT ENTER
The chasm within, incomprehensible,
In its depth, the colour of its density.