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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
October: I'm eighteen, shortcutting home
through an autumn-burnished churchyard -
copper-lustred leaves, moss-skinned stone -
a jaunty swing of skater skirt and arm,
college folder square-sturdy in my hand.
In the moment. In the last pale pulse of sun.
Hey, can you tell me...?
I halt. I turn...
Cold earth. Colder blade dimpling my skin.
My coral cameo earrings scatter,
daisy-dotting the green.
My back is spiked by needles of yews.
Sun skews, sky side-slides
until his face is the firmament.
I'm staring into the tumid blank-bloat of blue;
the ground hardening beneath me,
the death-spike trees stiffening.
Heavy Special Brew breaths.
Grubby, moist fingers
like grubs crawling over my breasts,
and, weirdly, I'm smelling pepper -
horror-spice of pungent lust,
its acrid nose-thrust -
and woodsmoke is drifting from somewhere...
lung-flame, tongue-flames
of searing words - his words -
blazing like the umber tumbling leaves.
Please...Please...I'll...
Fear-forced bargaining, but I'm beyond care.
And I'm aware
of the church steeple rising,
its phallus penetrating sky.
The tilting church could topple
as tears crystal-crush in my eyes.
Fear-faint, already half gone
in a soundless scream, my muted mouth
mouths silent goodbyes
to Sarah, to Mum.
Time slows to a crawl.
I try to call. Nobody comes
but the man who has me ground-pinned.
Bleachy stink of semen
whitening my ripped skater skirt,
but some things don't fade
and there is no clean in this, just dirt,
wet leaf-mulch, shame.
Ineradicable hurt.
Sacred soil is soiled, sullied.
Stunned, I stumble
shoeless, knickerless,
into the trees and heave
into the mud, into the leaves
strings of spittle-sick,
my thoughts strung out,
reality spun out.
From stinking, pulped leaves I retrieve
crushed coral earrings,
ground-grimy knickers,
my white court shoes
that whitely scream the 90s,
the scattered tatters of essays -
white, like fallen feathers, sunk in the sludge,
muddied, the red-inked words bloodied.
I gather them together.
Gather myself.
I go
forward into my future, stained from pain
and tainted touch, the smears of fear, self-disgust.
And oozing slime-soft into my ears
the mire of incongruous apology: I'm sorry
don't tell anyone - I won't.
I don't.
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2016
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
I'm fifteen darkwater dreaming or drowning
adrift and alone on the ocean of the bathroom floor
tossed on tidal waves of pain pearled with perspiration
a clattering clutch of shells contracting
shingle shushing stifled shrieks
the shucked shell of my womb
emptying like an oyster snared
by umbilicals of seaweed Far away
hazy-faint through saltwater mists I see
a little pearl glistening floating and rocking in red sea
I'm all at sea without anchor on tides a boat floating free
seeking a mooring in the harbour of the doctor's consulting room
her voice a deep dive anchoring me with subtle sympathy
through muffled underwater sounds sea-shadowy fog shawling me
I want to tell her about the dream submerged stories of a tiny pearl
maroon-mangled and foam-spangled slipping slowly from me
into scarlet sea drifting away sinking to darkwater depths
Driving home my mother's rings clink like shells against the steering wheel
and a shaming sea of silence fills the car pretty shells shucked and shocked
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2024
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
a lonely place.
It's nothing to do with that person
who asked how are you? this morning.
It's to do with staring through
fear-frosted windows
as snow sugar-sifts the street,
watching through dark windows
as firework flowers burst to bloom in a New Year sky,
or watching day-jaded mums
dragging snot-nosed kids to school -
and wishing it was you.
It's watching cacophonous YouTube family vlogs
because you're so lifeless, so ghastly ghostly-wan,
you feed off the energy like some hideous vampire or leech.
It's listening to people moan
about doing the bloody washing up
while you find joy in the rank sink-slops
of last night's rancid pots, giving thanks
when you're just able to do it.
It's sitting sweltering in 80-degree heat
under summer-scorched ashes
and looking grey as crematorium ashes.
It's coffee alone at 5 a.m.
waiting for the world to wake
or watching fluorescent clock hands creep round
until the hour is godly enough
to text or phone for help.
It has to do with rocketing house bills
because you're awake when the world is asleep
burning midnight lights and fuel.
It's the horror of an unexpected knock at the door or a visitor
because it's 3 p.m. and you're still slop-dollying round the house
in your dressing gown.
It's the horror of being buried alive in an MRI coffin-scanner.
It's taking comfort where you can with whomever
and seizing moments when or if they come.
It's the cliche of feeling alone in a crowded room.
It's about when they assume
the anorexia's back and you're on a f*****g diet.
It's about cancelling appointments, leaving restaurants early
or making excuses not to go out at all.
It's shutting off the laptop because you're too tired to see,
disconnecting the phone because you're so weary
you can't speak, while a filthy grey fog
creeps into your head and mind-twines.
It's reading their words while you fumble
to find your words or the right words,
or being suddenly blessed with the write words
to squeeze out a line or three of poetry.
It's about family discussing the plot of a film
while you're losing the plot in another room.
It's snotty sobbing, screeching at doctors
and mewling for the f*****g morphine.
It's that precipice where you teeter
awaiting the latest test result.
It's fear so intense you frantic-fumble
the phone book, scrabbling for a hypnotist.
It's a late night date with a suicide site
(you flirt but don't know if you would)
researching helium versus hanging
because you don't want to become a burden,
you don't want to lose your dignity.
It's about the outer you staying intact
while the inner you slowly disintegrates.
Illness is all this.
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2017
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
It's summer, and sunlight's syrup pours sweet into afternoon.
We've come to the bungalow's cemetery
to pick over bones of bygone days;
touch time's tender skin, lay flowers on childhood's grave.
The lodge is razed to the ground. We raise
our eyes to sky and take each big breath of blue.
Sharp lemon-light cuts through
the detritus of our days; the oaks once cloaked in dark.
The knotweed nooses and dreamlike domes of fly agaric
have all been cleared; the forest sentinels' leafless limbs
discarded - an abattoir of strangeness, sawdust-strewn.
But all dismemberment is a clearing of sorts.
The echoes of emptiness eavesdrop
on each reminiscence, as we forage for a few last remnants:
blue paisley swirls of 70s tiles,
red bricks from an 80s fireplace.
A yearning rises suddenly, slick sick-sour in my throat...
and yet, it feels cathartic, this purging of the past;
this merging of our then and now,
this blending of bitter and sweet.
23 February 2023
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2023
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
Breezes rock the park - a soft sway of sun.
They are rosebud-faced, floral lace-swaddled,
sun-smiley; rapt eyes watching butterflies.
Their fingers dance in air like butterflies.
They are plump peaches ripening in sun -
sweetest fruits of parent care, love-swaddled.
Little one, I think of you, heart-swaddled
but free to fly soul skies with butterflies;
rising in my mind each day like the sun.
Your soul flits with sun-swaddled butterflies.
in memory
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2023
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
Mauve sweetheart of mountains
your petals pulse purple twilight and scatter small stars
amongst scars, whilst wars rage on the world's dark stage
and the stage disintegrates, becomes a mass grave,
scissored by shadow and scythed by sorrow.
Yet graves are amethyst-studded with promises of tomorrow;
lifeless lilac revived by meandering kisses of mountain streams...
Sleepy sweet-scented stars dream delicate dusk,
bloom on hostile ground, birthed from rocky earth,
storm-swayed but unbroken, budding
through the longest night, awakening
violet visages unfurling from the heart of dark
to be reborn in gold-gifted dawn.
Tenacious you cling as morning sings
to the small yellow sun that rises
in each resilient heart.
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2024
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
- Excerpt from A Christmas Carol by Christina Rossetti
***
My mirror-face is pinched pallid as, colourlessly, I go over and over his last journey, and shudder like a train on a track. His last tracks...tracks in the snow...train tracks. Tear-tracks dampen my ashen cheeks, but tears, though summer-warm, don't thaw the bone-chill of alone.
his snowflake letter
cold on an empty car seat -
no explanation
Just sorry and people don't always understand I only hope you can and goodbye.
I took to my bed as the ripped days bled, pulled the duvet up over my head, shaken by a blizzard of dread. Fingers in ears, didn't want to hear about last movements, CCTV footage, forensics. My words fell snow-silent and, as people have pointed out to me since, now I only speak through poetry's voice, its mediumistic mouth.
I'm reading a book Coping With Suicide, well, I'm trying to read. But each page is a snowdrift muffling my mind; each word is a curled black whorl of iron-hard earth. I've stopped counting the days and nights, they've merged into a blizzard blur of winter-white. And the hoarded condolence cards all cry winter in snowflake whites and star silvers: In Deepest Sympathy ivory-traced, With Sympathy silver-etched.
Who would have thought grief had so many shades of winter? That death had a colour? Whilst others died with a heart attack's red squeeze or cancer's black rampage, he died with suicide's expanding white, its barren blank.
Poking food around my plate, staring sickly-numb, dumb, at the mounded joyful orange of carrots, the happy yellow smiles of corncobs. Ashen faces in sifting ashy light; voices ermine-soft in empathy.
friends coax-feeding me
at a table set for one -
his chair is empty
Sleeping with his photograph, well, feigning sleep, through each silent night. Nothing holy in loss and lonely, just a hole blown through the heart.
Remembering: winter woodland walks hand in hand, plans we made, foundations laid. Frost-framed photos, snapshot days: a memory mural. Each shared moment freezing to a cold grief-pearl. Blanched branches window-tapping, and I'm thinking it's him.
filigree window
vista of Christmases past...
heart-held memories
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2024
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
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.
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2025
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
after the painting by Vincent Van Gogh
Does she even exist? Doubting her own reality,
seeing herself vanishing in undulating undergrowth,
fading and merging into summer-scorched scenery.
But cold lurks there beneath shafts of sunlight, phallic trees...
He wears the night underneath, a fabric of dark and unease,
his hand heavy upon her arm, silver-tongued charm
smooth as the silver-limbed leafless trees,
disappearing now on a twisting breeze...
Sinuous stems suffocate, writhing and thrashing;
convulsions of shuddering green and yellow.
Enticed ever deeper into flailing flowers,
evanescing into foam of frothing flora...
Did she ever truly exist? It's doubtful.
The flower-frail faceless and nameless
will always be lured and laid, invisible,
dissolving, under bare, phallic trees.
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2025
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Charlotte Puddifoot Poem
i.m. Nicola Bulley
Mist-shrouds are wrapping
Around the River Wyre's weir,
Rain-swollen waters...
Currents of secrets rushing,
Hushing reed-wrapped daffodils.
Copyright © Charlotte Puddifoot | Year Posted 2023
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