P. Viktor

Magpie Lane

It is as inappropriate as June snow, all this white,
All this flour as though waiting for bread, scattered
On the cobbles. And eggs, shattered shells and yolks
Bloodied on the pavement, slowly frying in the sun.

Magpie Lane, the smell of a cake before the oven,
Now soured by the acidic scent of spilt champagne,
Like an old brewery, yeast rising, gagging the throat,
The pavement glinting with bright shards of confetti.

An empty green bottle rocks slowly back and forth,
As the clatter of heels echo off walls and the black
Wisps of a finalist's gown disappears around a corner -
As I walk in the wake of a celebration not my own.

Embers

Some embers burn too long in the darkness,
Bright orange flecks, like a bowl of satsumas
In the charred ground. They are surrounded
By wood twigs, ashen white as heaped bones,
Blanched against the badness of the night.

A slow wreath of smoke ebbs around my foot,
As I, alone by this afterthought of a fire, try to
Extinguish its low brilliance. I blot out this
Beacon that calls to the dangerous elements
Of the blackened neighbourhood behind me.

For a moment I know what it is to be fifteen,
To be drunk for the first time, the sensation
Of a swab of alcohol in the mouth, a smoulder
In the empty stomach. The wasteland here
Is a ship’s deck, encouraging a seasickness.

Three large moths suddenly surround me,
Only they are not moths, they are shadow-big,
And only when they speak do I realise they
Are people, three adolescents, older than me,
Smelling of cider, cigarettes, and sour sweat.

They do not like me being here, by the dying
Fire, in this square of grey-amber grass, on
Their patch. They say things to me, voices
Hard with the rind of hostility, the familiar
Thrill of the alien word ‘queer’ spat at me.

Stars suddenly unfold, a strange grey static,
The loudness of white noise that becomes
The dull throb of a tuning fork, the intake
Of a quick, raw breath, the sick sensation
Of spilling backwards as if forever falling.

A single punch to the eye ricochets down
The years. But they have already moved
Away, a crackle of sniggering, the bragging
Of the fist, the trophy of an eye socket
Now a fruit shrivelling to a blind purple.

A piece of charcoal flares bright beneath
My feet, like a golden coal, a brilliant secret.
I pick it up out of the dark debris, it scorches
The palm, and on swallowing this bright
Element, feel the moment inflame the heart.

School Photograph

They all held their mouths agape, waited for the bomb blast -
A camera flash of nuclear white, an elemental weight
That pinned them back - so fierce that they were stripped of
The intervening years of now since then, all of them sixteen
And implicated in their futures, their own blank unknowns.

This disparate conglomeration of ghost faces, that for five
Paltry years, converged around a redbrick centre of a world,
A place so small that none of us thought we would emerge,
Where all the battles of our lives took place, where a rawness
Electrified the nerve ends, all hearts close to implosion.

Some of the pale, open faces I still recognise, know of,
Hear of, ask after. Some names are etched like gravestones,
Indelible scars on the heart. Others have been wiped clean,
Chalk dust separating in the ether. Each one now living
Outside of black and white, outside this crisp moment.

My absence within the temporary knot is conspicuous, as
Much of my past, a missing protagonist. I engineered an illness,
Found some novel trick of disappearance, so that my sixteen
Year old self disentangles, unstitches my fate from theirs,
The ever-faithful revision that siphons my life into a vacuum.

St. Nicholas

There might I one day lie, amongst the cool grass,
So wearied and tired by thought, the ache of journeys
And the blunting of the heart, that I might say ‘enough,
Enough,’ and take the rest that I have always longed for.

There, amongst the long rows of the dead that as a boy
I leapt over in a game of tag, waiting for the grey Choir
Master to let us in, to let us empty the song from our lusty
Chests, as we panted, breathless from the summer sun.

Such was the golden music of young trebles and sopranos
Of which no chancel could quite contain, the pure sound
Of children with no knowledge of their wide open lives,
The many years that would quickly march before them.

Once the two of us picked blackberries from the bramble
And stained our hands with the dead’s blood, tasted sweet
As first love between two ill-fated redheads, hauled up on
The one great tomb with a flattened surface, a table

On which we lay back and felt the warmth of slow-baked
Granite on our backs. The Victorian church leaned over us,
Its softened façade of salmon pink sandstone would lightly
Admonish us, the black glass windows wink with gold.

And around us the whispered silence of horizontal bodies
That absorbed life’s busy noise of passing trains and traffic,
And birch trees that always seemed to billow in slow motion,
The sky sea blue, the gulls scavenging from the rubbish tip.

Here might I rest my eyes under cedar wood, body snug
Amongst the damp clay, a long life lived unravelled in my
Heart’s pit, not far from the small house of my forebears,
And settled stubbornly back in the land of my childhood.

Images: Copyright of Sutton Beauty

Image 2

Mirror Mirror

No mirror can have predicted this, oh fairest boy
Who appropriates my youth, the beauty that once
Was mine, deft decoy to distract me from the truth
Of age, from life grown stale as mildewed bread.

There is no need for gild frames, or the silvery dash
Of fish on a mirror’s surface, that screws up my eyes.
Simply you, or simply myself sat adjacent, solid as
Only molecules will allow, a rattling of selfhood.

For some time I have not felt this, an arrhythmic
Heart murmur out of sync with the clumsy beat of
The one I love. But here you are, and here am I,
With only water between us, a cleft of grey matter.

We are similar in almost every respect, of hair as
Polished copper, of brow, of nose, of lip recalling
The Nordic ancestry. And our slightness of body,
The rough hewn accents excavated from coal mines.

All but the eyes, of which mine are born of great
Ambivalence, hovering between obsidian and green,
Where yours are filled with clarity, so blue as to be
Moon-reflected, tunnels of lunar light to a black point.

How is it that we exist apart, yet cultivated from a
Strange seed planted millennia ago, two chromosomes
Uprooted from a cell, to find ourselves gravitating
Back to the other, but bound by such circumstances.

We somehow register this, be it in that brief but
Secret neck kiss, or the linger of the iris, the perfect
Way we are both reflected in the other, the quiet love,
Knowing always there is a plate of glass between us.

Daffodil Graveyard

The daffodils did not expect this, lying as they do
Under the heavy deluge of snow flakes,
A white unknown like the blankness of the future.

Their horizontal stems and speared leaves bend under
The countless weight of so much frozen water,
Having given in to a chill inevitability.

They lie uncertain, their once golden trumpets are
Shrivelled with frost bite, turned to a clumsy rust,
Their perianths like closed umbrellas.

How odd the warm April sun, that quickly melts
All white, all time into pure droplets, as trees
Relinquish their cargo into the Cherwell,

White pacts that disappear instantly on the dun
Surface. Soon there will be the lifting of a burden,
And flowers straightening for the resurrection.