POETRY: 4919m

4919m

Wires pick up my voice and stretch the countryside,
humming my words to stellar hands, their palms open.
My whisper travels to your ear and yours to mine,
and back again. Reality can’t end this dream
and neither could logic doubt that, though we, distanced
by vast tides, couldn’t be any more unified.
At seven I wake and speak to the global past,
hear your bed sheets rustle, and have you speak your mind.

I make believe I can hold you in my arms, and, for
a sublime, lethargic moment I feel your heart
against my chest, and smell the perfume you wore
today. We laugh in secretive hush, and convert
sensation to voice. We defy our circumstance

And exist, abreast, together yet separate.

POETRY: Trichotillomania

Foreword

Trichotillomania is the act of compulsively pulling out hair, and it's something that I do. I don't have it badly, mind. Sufferers that have it worse often pluck until they're bald. But I do have it. My left index-finger has a small nub of hardened skin from where I pinch at hair - facial hair in particular. I didn't realise for a long while that I was doing it, or that it was so unusual a thing to do. When I'm asked about it, I can never quite put to words the spine-numbing sense of desperation that comes with seeing or feeling a hair that needs to be plucked. It isn't just habbit, but a compulsion that can be really distracting. That's what I wanted to get across in this poem: how each plucking begins as something idle, done without any consciousness to it, then gradually becomes an uncomfortable obsession that will only be sedated when the hair is plucked. I thought it was suitably weird enough to write a poem about!


Trichotillomania

Pluck the ruddy brown facial hair
from my chin, dismantling biology:
these easily removed attributes, their
itchy linger, their idle restlessicity.
Apparently, the body does this when it’s bored,
But just how bored can a body be?

So without thinking I unroot my hair.
Thumbnail denting into my finger tip,
the only thing that wakes me from my reverie
is the dull pinch of the crossfire,
which draws my eye to the lonely strand
that falls into the palm of my sweaty hand.

POETRY: Milk Label Epiphany

Milk Label Epiphany

I found myself growing morbidly depressed
over a milk bottle.

I looked at the use-by date, and it wasn’t
that the milk was off – it was fresh – but
the fact that it was there turned my stomach.

Because somewhere they’re printing off
these dates thousands of times,
over and over,
they did it for the date of my birth,
they’ll do it for the date of my death,
and they’ll keep on doing it with dates
that will never exist to me.

The magnitude of this
over such a simple label
put me right off my cereal.

POETRY: Lines written of an Oil Painting of Skiddaw

FOREWORD

Passing through town yesterday, I spotted an oil painting hung in the window which stirred something in me. The journeys to and from University and my home in Cockermouth would take us through a route in the lakes, passing through Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, and Windermere. I’ve seen the hills and lakes of that journey countless times in my life, but I never get sick of them. The painting in the window, however, was of Skiddaw and Derwentwater; more specifically, a particular part of Derwentwater that would always catch my eye where a fence submerges into the water. I was never sure if that was part of some design, the purpose of which eluded me, or whether it was an old barrier that had been waterlogged through the natural growth of the lake.



What I wanted to get across in the poem was the emotion of comfort that the painting brought to me. Skiddaw has been a presence I felt through my childhood. Skiddaw was the mount of home, one of the circle of mountains that enclose the town. The sight of it would always signify a journey’s end, but, in later years, it would also signify a journey’s beginning as I embarked on an academic career. Now I’m setting up a home outside of Cockermouth, to have something which stirs this emotion makes the house seem more homely. The oil painting itself is by the wonderfully tallented John Wood. Whilst I'm ashamed to admit that, three bent nails and some grumbling later it was my girlfriend who hung the painting, not I, the piece has pride of place in my living room.




Lines Written of an Oil Painting of Skiddaw

It was a landscape seen and never touched,
but driven past at 60. Fence posts flicker
like film reel, surrounding the lake’s body:
oft calm, oft vapid sheen of sky’d water,
within which the once-cited lofty heights
of Skiddaw loom both bold and earthen brown.


There, captured with canvas and oil, descends
that weather-worn, inconsequential fence,
submerging in its depths at twisted slant
whilst overlooked by that stark mount of home.
That soon-gone scene was pledged to catch my eye,
Each time, coming or going, we drive by.


That mount of home, ambassador of calm,
a symbol of both voyage and return.
A million, million places in the world
could not imitate the emotions stirred
by this sight in me: sign of home nearing;
home departing; of venture yet to come.

Michael Kilburn
2009