#sdheath

She despised the nightly banquets

of the Milky Way

too cold and timeless -

there was always an understanding

no matter how tiny

that her life was like a mayfly’s

one day under the stars - to find a love

to find something, anything like contentment

but she was tough too

her blood was full of metal from a meteor

no dull blood iron for her

every atom of her was exotic

There’s a moment when… we ask — how did you do that? I know your face — the reply — so well I could’ve done it with my eyes closed. I’m happy now because I love you; they say our love won’t pay the rent but anything different is good. This could be real — good. Why are you here? I bought you — I own you.

Stay stay. Today is tomorrow. It happened. You’re here. It’s so beautiful; let’s live here. We’ll rent to start.

What a day this has been. It’s almost like being in love; like a bell that’s ringing (just) for me.

This poem is entirely made up of lines from the film Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie McDowell.

Look trillions and trillions of years into the future and there will be nothing to see - every star in this big beautiful universe will be dead and cold with no more element production - just black holes swallowing each other and growing - always growing.

I want to talk of origins – of how I stood between  the doors of Heaven – and of Earth – chose carefully  and walked through. The change was seamless –  like a tree fattening through its centuries.

Naked on the frost-skinned soil I argued with a field of rooks running circuits in a flooded ditch screaming for my tongue to be ripped out.

I became the breaker of demonic codes seeing every word as evidence of ancient cants, conspiracies an auspex drunk on secrets from the sky..

Embering dusk-light put signs in soft relief: constellations pecked by hens – the freckles on a barn owl’s face – pulse-clouds of starlings shoaling in the bloody currents of the winds.

When midnight came inside my father’s house I burnt my little finger down to bone. It didn’t hurt, it’s never healed – an alchemist, he tried to turn my burns back into words. 

I poured myself a whisky fire – lay burnt and drunk – becoming something – and then nothing on the floor. In the end I took his pill – falling steeply into sleep.

Morning came like polaroid blue and green. Yellow peonies held us both on course until he stopped, and by the sundial told me what I’d always hoped was true.

Then two genial healers questioned me with gravity and smiling eyes. To send me back they needed two – by law it’s always two.

And I remember almost nothing else just the buzzing of a yellow sun the smell of poisons from the car that drove me quickly to that place

And how I blazed down arc-lit corridors and spat at rings of green-scrubbed men with acid drops in needles from their caravans of mind-detangling spice.

And how I asked the strangest question “What is yellow, green, and what is blue?” They are colours – words – they fade – with time,

I was at – sea – could hardly feel the slightest reel – the softest rocking that bent my knees and made me wonder where I was –

I was inside the sea –   fathoms down and  looking quite self-consciously  at a bioluminescent squid – 

white silken skin and puzzled eyes in his domain – his navy night the faintest wobbling stars – a puddle moon and me

The lost soul sounds of buzzards in a downlit sun-pocked glade It cleans, somehow – I think of a knife Going in, and it doesn’t even hurt