Tiresias witnesses another time
Ahead of the end of the days
In which Echo was a boy,
And in which Narcissus was a woman.
Who am I?
Who am I?
One cries out loud,
Whilst the other merely repeats and cries.
Tiresias weeps at the unfairness
Of his vision,
The conundrum of what befell
Them both, unsolved to sightless eyes.
Though unsighted, Tiresias is moved
By the plight of the Echo boy
And the Narcissus woman.
The sound of the Nordic God’s anger thunders in my ears
as Freya plays with seduction a song in which to entrap
My O.K. Internal Haze and give rise to the tricks of the mind.
The Nordic Gods play havoc with the landscape, the boundary
between my vision and the vast sea that was crossed by Freya in search
of someone to take notice of the gentle notes of joy, despair and anguish,
the dominant emotion of love for the guitar she wields with a shy smile.
Her weapon, simpler than the Ax favoured by more aggressive
Time softened the edges
Wore down the dangerous demeanour
Blunted the horns on top of my head
Little trace of that famous defiance
On the outside of this monster
That walks amongst you
But inside?
Still blazing
Still nothing that you are
Ear-aching i-pod buds
Thunder his howling
His raging luminescence
Fires up the beast inside
Has me swaying
Snake-hips twitching
Contorting my face
Silent-shrieking every line
On this morning tram
Surrounded by shoppers
And assorted poor meek souls
Trying to get to work
I am that thing
That crazy in the corner
Wild eyed and mouthing
‘No, I don’t have a gun’
‘No, I don’t have a gun.’
Bright blue sky day far from home
Met an experimental performance poet
Who likes to say words that rhyme with ‘an’
And make tiny sculptures from the wire cages
That hold corks onto champagne bottles
Swapped our books by a sunlit forest waterfall
Something mutual and unsaid in that
More than the gift of words on paper
Wandered around a secret Elizabethan garden
Clipped formal hedges and geometric forms
Collected a handful of fallen rose petals
Crushed in my hand they smelled like heaven
Spare some change, alright thank you. Spare some change Sir. Yeah right of course you have, completely out, you say that every day! Just speak into this you say? Yes I’m homeless, it wasn’t my fault, I probably didn’t help myself that’s true enough but in a world where it has become…acceptable to look down upon someone lower than yourself for fear of being spat upon as well, for the dread that sits inside you that you might find yourself being pissed upon by a Friday night reveller, the party goer who finds the inside of the entry the perfect place in which to let go of their hard earned cash and curry mixed with vodka, that dread is only ever three pay days away and unless you are lucky, I mean really lucky, then the spiral goes on and on until one day you manage to find a mirror and you wonder what happened to the girl with dreams.
The mistake inside the lines…
Or perhaps more the blunder of birth, the errors between the margins
That are crossed out, erased and deleted with anticipated glee.
Like a master Historian paid by the winner to paint the pretender to the crown
As the Devil incarnate and the cause of all Humanity’s woes.
Any good they may have done assigned to someone else,
The credit of a lifetimes work expunged and made worthless.
The error between the margins, the deviation of the norm
Of the designated mechanical drive that makes the worker Bee
Waiting for the last finishing
line of the day; what are the odds
that this is a race worth running?
Which one will he be gunning for
at five to four or ten to three.
Unexpectedly, he’ll lean in,
growing shorter; ought to know now
that this counter is not bound by
his starting orders, so I’ll wait
and contemplate a ciggie break.
Did someone say he had a tip?
Because I’ve forgotten mine. —
Ian Miller 2014.
There is a sense of sensuality attached to what I do. Playing the piano in the semi darkness and ill-lit rooms of various pubs, clubs and saloons of this fair city for the price of a good meal and of course the money I receive helps keep me in clothes that I could not afford to buy on the salary as insignificant as mine. Apart from that I do it because I can, because somewhere the extrovert needs feeding and if not to the wolves then to my own self-worth.
My Last Words…
So these will be my final last words. They won’t be recorded; they won’t be repeated in history as in anyway being famous and they will never know of my story beyond the walls of this…prison in which I have kept my own counsel for the past five days. I will say to you now as they offer me a blindfold in which to avoid the staring eyes, deep blue on one, so blue that I could swim and frolic amongst the stars that are reflected on the top as they too dance and shout with a hope of the future to come. They have my future deeply locked within them, he or one of the others will take my life and extinguish it forever. Not for any other crime except for not wanting to fight anymore.
Reminding me
of temptation accompanying the draught of a
Trans-Pennine non-stop
through Stalybridge Station, she drifted
past.
I stood still, watching the clock
taunt my expected departure time;
standing in line for a seat on the next one,
haunted by the
last.
Ian Miller 2014