Black Hole Love

Your Rain was tears on my window pane - the first poem of yours I had seen - pain-drops spattered a snow-blank expanse, grief-blue with regret and what should have been. I thought mediocre. Bad omen for you. You who attempted to pour the blue, to quench the amber arid air and quell the mithering mistral. I needed that oasis: sea spray words to drown a desert of parched poetics. Hints at a darkness beneath. Hieroglyphic glints. A calligraphic trance-dance of pen. I was struck by that and, later, struck by so much more. Black dagger words. Your chirography slash-slanting, stabbing the page like little knives - transfixing, somebody said. Trance-fixing. I was entranced by you. You gave me an art-effigy: your failed book that bled its heart in pink and red and shed the blood gobbets of brutalised childhood. I saw: Pictures of Silence crying for blue, weeping for water, and demanding more water-pour from every pore. Just months before, the future fanned out in mystical tarot predicting long-distance love: the tower tumbling, and the chariot hauling two hundred miles across country, coast to coast. We were falling through a chasm of long-distance words, falling in love, and both of us knew. Passion so intense it made each finger a flame as we sweated fever-beads in a burning bed in a sizzle-tangle of gold thread bedspread in a room that cracked like kindling. I understood little of your Beds Are Burning but heard its furnace-roar of trauma as you recoiled from wound-raw red and reached for Aquarian blue-cool, the page giving voice to the child who had no voice, no choice; words bursting to blaze in our flamery. Court Green evergreen, grieving under thatch, and the slatted sun warming moss-skin on old corpse walls; the mouths of corpses suckling dark roots in earth heavy and thick with omen. You were away God-knew-where while I sweltered in the burning bronze of hot North Tawton sun, and sweated over stagnant, stilted stanzas. That end-of-summer was stagnant. A thick silage pall shrouding land and the spilled puce guts of blackberries rotting sadly in hedgerows. We floundered and foundered, deaf ears tuned to your father's coffin-creak, blind eyes turned to the gothic yew rising and presiding, its spire stabbing sky. Too many battles fought for too long - both the blood-scrapping external ones and the even bloodier internal ones. Language shards lodged in shrapnel sentences when words were all that remained like blood spots on the floor: poetry's stigmata, hot clots of our heated exchange, gunshots in a word-war where there could be no victor - just us, together-apart and alone with our heart-art.