Dream Blacker, Faceless Engineers !
Fionn Coughlan-Wills -1-
By the same author:
Tumbleweed and a carrier bag‌
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Contents Stitch That - 3 Family Triptych - 6 Un love - 7 Pyramid Scheme - 8 Herd Mentality - 10 Spirit of the Staircase - 12 Holding you like I might a bottle of wine - 13 The Loveseat - 14 Valley - 15 Postcards of the Mentally Ill - 16 Coping Ugly - 18 Rolling Hulks - 19 In the Sun - 20 Voyager on the Heliopause - 22 The Spectacles - 24 Bright Side of a Black Hole - 25
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Stitch That
I’d had a go of it, he’d hooked me up, chucked me up, threw me over for the femme fatale type. Had blown my brains out with tedious conversations on the terabyte, fed him tripe, fed me tripe – had no excuse to cancel the milk that night. So when he showed up, all apologetic corduroy and humility turtleneck to say we’d had a go of it – he’s sick of it. I felt obliged to stick him with it – stitch that I’m thinking. Milk bottle bust, landed on the floor made the opposite of a chandelier, took his dead-weight to the crypt of the car, saw milk, and blood, and bile mix become ambergris
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I had done with him, popped those clogs shod the funeral loafers and bin bag attire, to drive the motorway and dump cargo body, clothes and baggage – into the river. And as they say, Officer, I never looked back. It might be this reason, that I failed to check my blind spot, cut you up with the motor – blues and twos - hesitated, then signalled to pull over.
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Family Triptych Up a gangplank through the land between house, home and road three of a family tree trod, one in front of the other digits trellised dovetailed together a linked length of pedigree. First Father, grandpa, clergyman drew Mother, their grandmother, philanthropist up. Denied purchase from spent years caring. And steadying the give, behind The daughter, granddaughter, the student. Brogues, slippers and walking boots. Tapping, gliding, clumping. cosseting the altruist, with age – under the weather, weaker between the strength of the others over scaffold bridge bonded a chain-gang of love of life.
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Un love
You eat munchies When you greet me The work you undertake: are opinions You fail to recognise Your Laugh I could forgive you
like a horse masticates on a carrot, it is as hospitable as Zyklon B, obsolete like male nipples, to you unwanted as childhood memories, the opening bars of ‘All you need is love’, is a prerequisite to migraine. But the boredom jars.
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Pyramid Scheme
She took a bronze saw nine feet long, set with sapphire teeth to business carving life into a Pyramid of manageable blocks. Descending to the largest of jobs, leading to glitches eventually larger than life top down organising, placing the smallest in a pocket of time five minutes from now. Now the miniscule, later the monument. She began: scratched her itch, made a meal of it left the dog the bones, put things in order, settled her affairs, got the job done shattered sugar-glass ceiling, left him holding the baby, almost one time met her maker. Performed the remit of
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Serial Note-Taker. Scrawling every last hiccup into submission Mason to the stones around others’ necks to build Until after a whole tome Centenarian Charleston beckoned home. Hung up the world-worn saw, reflecting her hair, her eyes, the sapphires now the size of amoeba fear, Set a final gargantuan slab, the foundation stone for those to continue by example. And Pitched back on her heels to see .
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Herd Mentality Within the picture frame of a tea-caddy valley an airborne lottery wheedled its way to the nostrils of the sheep, selected the club night in the cow sheds promising cuts of cut-rate sweet-meat. Animals grazed as clan for millennia, hailed by their thousands, into the news reels and word processors of the Dictaphone media: no Nazi propaganda, no furnace in the street the four-legs had reached their zenith and were a jewel in the peaks. A party was thrown, from the depths of our hearts onto the celebrating heap, warm animal bodies pirouetting together in the bedlam of kaylee dancing cattle, heralded humans in droves to douse the god-like livestock in champagne and altar fire. Indeed fireworks: multi-shot aerial displays formed night into day, Roman Candles set the bleating from black sheep shooting at the youngest jumpers the gunpowder smell of acrid pleasure, Catherine Wheels likely to fix landscapes across the nation with a micronova of prescribed carnival burn. In their new-found importance, ablaze with screaming laughter, aware that carnival antics are in ewes, rams, goats and bovine inborn. Anything with cloven hoof apple-bobbed, splatted-the-rat, given a prize: A shout-out over tannoy, a double-barrelled loud-hailer, a lit sparkler.
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Every moment de facto Shangri La, each species a nomadic caravan, all congregations a vigil. Sung out in all crevices The King of Love my Shepherd Is. Epicentres of the crescendo were identified in Essex, Northumberland, Cumbria and the North York Moors. Weeks died – breeds cross-pollinated - until fetes, galas, events ceased. Fires were extinguished; food was off, entertainment encored. Perpetual motion machines, every animal body a top another, on their backs, ashen, asleep. A lottery spent. It was later found that rather than announce Lent early (commend critters to respite, quadrupedal Butlins and organised fun) Tiring them out throwing a party now would cost fleecy market pockets less in the long run. Carnival abated. skies no longer alight. Bleating eulogy silence. For months after aside dry stone walls before entering the hallowed grounds of the sacred feasts our sign of respect was marked by a blessing: to wash our hands with buckets of water and disinfect our feet.
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Spirit of the Staircase
That night we smoked cigars and broke onto the roof of a seaside diner just for a better centre of the sky, the night when someone became half-cut under inspiration, ran screaming headlong into the canopy night, a life ring around his head, an illicit halo keeping him buoyant through the air, how we gave chase, regained a friend, wasted no time inundating arcade high-scores with our initials, we shouted from the dark cove of the seawall stairwell (themselves a rock pool) to strangers passing in the twilight 'we aren't thugs, come this way', impromptu guiding lights in a black world of human reefs. That very day we had skinny dipped in the North Sea, not one hundred yards from where I and my family have ritually placed our infant feet, generation after generation, from various walks and an orchard of trees, for the first time, in salt water.
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Holding you like I might a bottle of wine On my favourite sofa. both eyes reflect over my shoulder your mother, left. your father, right. Each one separate and both combined Your father’s face, a pride you cannot fathom yet through blurred vision people become the air. And hers, simply in disdain of your furrowed brow to do so. Outward from those gleaming irses, micro-film to read under a voice projecting later, in my hands, one cradles your tiny head, the other on the small of your back, no wider than a handspan. I hope, for years to come, it is impossible to watch your developing repertoire, without seeing one, or the other, in either eye.
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The Loveseat While She shaped the pyramid, spending an aeon crafting for others, He whittled a select timber shaft Each season scrimshawed his digits into the grain. Fashioned an X-brace marionette’s soul to rest on spun struts, a giant’s cane, cross-hatched the skeleton frame with upholstery. Her choice, rested. Only to spring the leaves, decades on, to recede under worn, time-drawn arses. After filling the chair’s bladder filaments: horse hair, peacock feather, phoenix mane, barguest tail, complete the swan’s neck of wood between them hands laced, A third presence giving them away. only one. Their loveseat.
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Valley
Home. Home is in the hills. Among valleys where flora turns emerald ice dead winter, Where water tastes of dew from the strands in a duck’s moustache. House is the habitat. Home when breath breathes ‘welcome back’ a ghost-hello, condensing words in air. ‘kettle’s on’, or ‘put kettle on’, steam birthing brew. The brick and mortar, the tile and plaster, carpet and cutlery can be dust For trusting limbs, natural smiles, are crux to kitchenware teeth.
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Postcards from the Mentally Ill
Let fly a culture of Freudian slip between the legible black on white indelible ink, imperative: I was not involved with my cousin Carol. as though the recipient has power to endow dignity lost to diffraction patterns in boyhood mishap otherwise a foul in genealogy Yet heightened amiability, the fact you know the middle-name, despite the impossibility licks my stamp but perhaps is perturbing Ominous • your still using telegram stops • as big as squashed flies • on a square no bigger than • a chapbook fly leaf • One mind in staccato rhythm
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A simple admission that quirks are not faults despite harm. Stability is a priori the human condition: a smidgeon of grit to the egg and the chicken
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Coping Ugly
You were a rubbish dog and all I could think about; never came when called, scared of the stick when thrown, would lurk in the dark of the stairwell – where I still step over the memory of your fury body ready to turn tail and bite under pressure of a foot, didn’t like children, had a mind all your own. You were an absolute dog.
I honestly think something in my mechanism went, when we weren’t allowed the formality of burial. This is me attempting ‘goodbye’. .
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Rolling Hulks
Exibit chesspiece, Leviathan, foreigner, imported, cast iron, steel-alloy, turntable, turnpike, contacts ignite, piston rupture. Walking around, tripped by invisible wires between men and their cameras. Iron giants – immobilised, geriatric, asleep.
Oil on the air, in the lungs sorry, excuse me – Finley, come here! Excuse me. Stephenson’s over here, Gresley’s grizzling in the corners, counting the lubricate spots on drip-trays and the days until fire breathes in the smokebox, pending steps on the footplate, shattering pressure to release, to accelerate.
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In the Sun In the sun somewhere, anywhere, dusty a man, no name, anyone digs to divine water’s loci. In the sun there, everywhere, all over an opaque hand, bigger than the Cayman Islands salts the earth, drives water deeper, undermines his spring quicker. This limb, spanning the hemisphere incubates expenditure in its palm half a world away, thinking of it as offspring - hatchlings Justified by this view, obliviously watches the world over, - this new mother – fleshier bodies, younger than a babble, weaker than a cry, be spent as walkingdollar.
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It is said they are developing. Really they bide time, choosing to preserve the truth of the matter, opting out of a world so ready to mortgage humanity happily to uphold the spectacle of a filing cabinet, draws akimbo, haze of paper aflutter, balanced perfectly on the snout of a pink, pot, piggybank. the size of jersey To expose this manic circus trick, replacing marble and brick with glass, and air, and window polish. will cost a mint in sweat and dough To refrain from doing so? May cost the earth, but nothing more.
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Voyager on the Heliopause
A particle to cure the common cold passed me by 12 light-years ago and teased me for my metal-flake paint within its orbit, I didn’t feel less parky and if I gathered it up with my monkey-puzzle-tree limbs It wouldn’t benefit the sole of a soul. Like my dish feels less dishy than 35 years ago I can only compare it to the sun which without fail, is brighter, more circular and has featured in more chart hits than myself but Supernovae are beautiful cracks in the heavily-rouged makeup of constellations; so I will play the waiting game recording nuclear death throes with a satellite lit by wilting solar buds sun, sun, sun – here it comes. My partner and I parted ways at Saturn. Since then I am girlishly attracted
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to anyone with an immediate gravity. though I think companionship is a form of poorly interpreted Stockholm Syndrome. solitude is the way forward Filling time via a method of entropy, I take sick-days, to indulge a passion for amateur photography. Travelling nowhere at thousands of metres per second, I seize the ultimate holiday snapshots, but keep none. An orange-rind neutron star collapsed on the walrus back of the universe, giving my lenses a little-death, as they suspended its entirety. But developers lack business on High-street Heliopause, so I beam every bit and byte along a wave, through a keyhole of space-time home I wonder if they receive my postcards.
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The Spectacles
Are a pair of transparent con men, thick as thieves. Through their obscuring prescription, we take turns to wear and rent our eyes. Not made for us, but for another long dead. They are framed for something they have not done and cannot do Warping the world as through departed eyes Death’s personal kaleidoscope. Impossible
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Bright Side of a Black Hole On the Brigg, an old man shifts past, barely walking for the shake. His are no longer legs – like yours – but reference points for gravity’s centre. You spot the bright side of a black hole, then, pulling us through it, whisper; That dance will ne’er catch on. Now at your hearth, rd three squares to the right of your 73 birthday, you tell us all, with head like a weathered eggshell that from a defunct brain, your shake has shimmied in its wake to the tips, of the tips, of your arms. Someone sheds a tear for your heyday, to remember a privateer discreet in drink, Cultivator, in small quantities of marijuana. Growing green in your greenhouse, among the innocent tomata, Master Cropper; Heyup, Cocker. Back at your hearth, the hub of your warmth, your oven a tray of sand dries, cracking, blackening, like hands mummified with living. Why, Dad, bake the Brigg? One wry smile, a grain of grit in your humour Am makin egg-timers.
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Interstellar probes called Gladys, Telegrams from schizophrenic philanthropists, Wine bottle babies cherished as though they were made of glass.
This is for everyone I love. Thank you.
Dream. Blacker. Faceless. Engineers.
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