Delirious the sapphic

Fifty shades of humiliation. Or under the curling wave of delirium stands delirious the sapphic, unfurling petals & dancing in the wind. It's hard to remove that which is ingrained. They say time heals but some wounds retain the original infection. Can you here my inflection? The umbilicus of self destruction is never severed, only the steel grip of elongated fingers stems the flow from one to another.

Eyes open.

No one knows the depths we have sunk too, or deliriums true intent when running reckless in my heart. I cannot respect this body or swim in self denial. The emotional corpse keeps twitching. I edit or enlist a spare blank page, hopeful or desperate for it to heave a final breath and die. Or seek clean air avidly sparking new life. Ego drives the urgency of survival. High heels sounding at six am ring with a new urgency, shame and showers make uncomfortable bed fellows. Considering the dilution of memory, it's dilation in time and verse is representative truth. Ink under skin and breathing remembering. The outrage of my anxiety turns black, blasphemes, burns shards of sunlight to ash and leaves me blind. Weary wanders seek a subtle silence.

In my dreams they're all...in my dreams they are all & everything. They are all in my dreams.

Subtitles of a Nightingale

Sweet lowly divinity, hold out your fragile hand.

Intervention of breathing leaves me weightless.

How bright morning illuminates your twisting halo. Into these arms allow yourself to fall, slowly, drifting on winds blown from the Sahara. Sand dunes have swept across continents, I have tasted their grains ina parched mouth.  Walk barefooted overfields of forget-me-knot. Into my arms I have folded love, wrapped into tissue paperand closed with sealing wax. My thumbprint, my heartbeat.

A body crosses over an imaginary line. Soon the sun willrise from deep heavenly slumber. A cosmos, shrouded in darkness becomes illuminated in heated glow of magnetic flares. Gilt angels slip beneath waves so I can depart. Destination unknown. Cry me a river of salt water and magnesium, potassium. Teach me the periodic table until I am fattened on elements. Learn me my own atomic weight.  I should have been happy and bleeding, serving servilities servants.  Butterfly wings caught in fishing nets cast upon dry river beds. Cracked, dusty earth coats feet, settles with an asbestos menace in lungs. Glass slides are coated with saliva and secretions of cellular biology. There is history in histology. We have become (or I) a study of cryogenics, no heat exists in love soured by interlinked genetic spoils.

Amber waves lick the shore, liquid glass. If we stop moving quick sand cannot lay claim to a physicality of memory. Every quiet step leads a dance to a rhythmic heartbeat. No deathly cold glaciers drive nightingales west. Open palms release their spring of remembering. I have not forgotten, but practice the patience of forgiveness. Of the self, or the soul. Galileo counted out sin, to mark mathematically dimension of my cage. On parchment, in numbers he drew my naked body into the stars.

An age may pass, my language seeps through fear until I grasp the sibilance of truth. There exists in vocality the essence of freedom.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2012

Sealings

A voice becomes hoarse from swallowing gravel in efforts to scour an abrasive taste of words. I do not wish to write of you anymore, for I am tired of living in the shadowy glacial chill of a corpse.

Mourners should have left you to scolding June air. Where feasting infants beating wings could have gorged sustenance from your spleen. Or become intoxicated on your swollen liver. Or worse. No one needs a lesson in patriarchal biology.

My utterance transcends unto this,
a state of silence. You inhabit a pill box casket of ash and littered bone, nameless through expressions of a faceless man. Fingers have beaten stakes of refusal. Of disinclination to acknowledge billowing gusts of air wasted in your efforts to enrapture my soul between your cupped hands.

Love is loveless when defiantly taken and I will, if I must, steal back time and body and blood.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2012

Heron Wings & Angels

I am not really here, simply a figment of an over active imagination that sees things in scales of grey and hues of blood red.

When herons roost in tree tops the wingspans of angels lay still against the heat of the sun. Dancers move to a silent music heard upon a spring breeze that lifts rain across open fields.

And as you imagine all these things I slip towards long shadows cast by deep woods, walk back from where I came and leave words humming on your lips.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2012

Regressions: IV

About the room lay the remains of another day
abandonment looms underneath shadows,
toys discarded and nimble hands
sleep now- as fists ,
a mouth sucking them furiously.

My child often displays cannibalistic tendencies
yet the delicacies she shows
are foreign to me,
her father cannot comment
having drifted out to sea
on the wreckage of a marriage,
never made but marred
over two borders long divided.

Dis-ord-er-ed

I am (our) burnt carcass
turning in dim light
of a diminishing day,
my shadow thin-
under nourished
a ring finger bare to the bone.

There is a shift in time
splitting
spitting
I lay
head buried under
a scent of remembrance,
the sickle moon
moves across my abdomen
tracing lines from where she came
and he left an indelible mark.

What am I if not a woman-
a belittling cry of motherhood
rests trapped in a ring box
high on a dusty shelf,
always out of reach.
My fingers are stubs
wrists arthritic,
my skin has turned
to hues of grey-blue.
This heart resent the effort
it
must
undertake
in beating.
The bleeding cornice of thorns-
stinging nettles and willow- sits beautifully
atop a head that hangs limply to the side,
the tide drags out another breath
as I am pulled under -
into a savage unconscious slumber.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2011

Confession: III

It isn't late
only about eight
I'm in bed
avoiding,
propped in position
by a credulous number of pillows
and over-stuffed cushions.
I am not full of feathers
or food
or wine.

The baby is sleeping next door,
every now and then shifting
and I become still
a breath lingering on my lips,
then she settles.
I exhale and cast my eyes back down
towards words
spilling over words.

I am surrounded by sustenance;
notebooks,
crumpled newspapers of the day
books - half written poems,
confessions scribbled on scraps
of paper.
I shall curse myself later
when I realise I threw them out,
or that they have been sucked to death
as I pick the pulp out of her mouth.

Her need to taste the world is foreign to me.

I am waiting for the evacuation
of myself
from myself.
Later...

The clock flashes
through an orange glowing dark,
street lamps bruise the curtains,
I can't make out the time.
My eyes sting
ears straining in case the baby is stirring,
needs milk
or comfort
or me.

I can hear my insides ripple
a crippling grasp of cramp
runs from sternum to pubic bone
and back again.
Ah, here it comes,
a sense of relief
washes over me,
tiredness pulls at my bones
weighting me ,
gravity refusing to give up her possession.

One day I may be weightless
like the woman
who always dreamed she was flying,
I was always jealous.

Here it comes again
my demon and her vengeance,
my body turning on my body
as if it has done itself a terrible wrong.
I regret for a moment
my earlier choices,
before the pain comes
and its reward seems too far away,
a vision on the periphery
of my reality.
Sunrise is hours away
and I never did like the dark.

It's early
too early and I am spent,
exhaustion has crept into the spaces
I have made,
claws at the empty pit of my stomach
irritated and irrational.
We are strange bed fellow
but cannot stop sharing my bed
in our bare nakedness.

She is stirring,
cooing to herself
she'll be wanting breakfast soon,
my daughter sounds happy contented,
practicing her voice.
I listen and smile at her fullness,
close my eyes for a moment
to feign sleep
to drift away,
before setting my feet on the blue carpet,
before walking to her
to say good morning,
before putting my demons away.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2011

Sugar Skull & Death Masks

I never cared to lay in sunlight, alone and exposed to rays. Never crept above deck but to bathe in violet light of the moon. He walked forward in his death mask as I held my sugar skull in symbolism of matrimony. Fingers fall to mastectomy scars wrapped beneath mottled rags. Their removal never did serve the purpose intended. I am still, standing, delinquent, muted by  a singular stitch in my lips.

Roses &  velvet & lace knitted together by seventeen pairs of hands and sixteen pairs of eyes. Veils dipped in reddening dye. Eyes hidden by puckered skin, drying since removed from its head.

Heathen voices call out mockingly as we waltz along our dusty aisle. I had been agile in my youth, now stiff with lethargy and melancholia. Vocality stifled in a malformed vocal box. I have not sung aloud in the catacombs when walking alone since I was a child. I have not walked alone since a sun set upon a distant shore. Our witnesses remain static, impaled where they stand, evidencing two shadows merging under a bitter testament.

Until death shall part us

To dishonour and obey

Two corpses laid shrouded in their marble sarcophagus. Silent but for hushed sounds of laboured breathing. I am birthing his fantasy under a weight of virginal lace and taffeta. Wrapped in tissue paper a list of lies I told...

I love you.

Mourners do not weep amongst themselves, fall to knees begging the Almighty for why.  He, He lays next to me, stoic, solid, clasping a frail hand in his. Faithful. To keep safe, to keep silent. The blind are leading the blinded. My lips have turned blue and the sex of humanity leaks from my mouth.

Stigma did not manifest as I imagined.  In spite of my bringing my own nails and handing him the hammer. Sweet kisses touched my eyelids and words stung as sung in baritone vibrations. There is no salvation for sinners

Nor penance. Not redemption.

I say Revelations lied, he laughs steadily. Deafening tone echoing mockingly from stone walls and lid. An airtight grave does not whistle with wind, rain may not seep into my bones, but I sense a sentiment of suffocation setting in. He smiles again and says something I cannot hear. His teeth are missing, his teeth are missing as the last note of morning passages is played on a piano. Low notes drifting down or up or across, I have lost a sense of space and time move back and sideways and from itself.

A Full Metal Armour

Cripples are confined by cages

of bodies miss-grown from source

or malformed under weight of circumstance

This vessel (physical) uncontrolled

out of reach

torn from tethers I had

weighted to the ground

Fists bloodied from pounding stakes

snatches of time teasing rust shards

from blistered palms.

A salient wind has risen

squalling ‘cross fields North to South

barricades are crumbling.

My solitary Centurion abandoned her post

and I have lost strength to carry

full metal armour

Exposures oracular intent

hangs loosely upon

a fertile air.

© Samantha Ledger 2012

Twister to Jordon

Desire has burnt itself into states of ash, white and hollow. These simple dreams once laid bare under a vulnerable sun have turned delirious. Chime saccharine beauty. There are bells ringing out in a cacophonous peeling. Listen though deaf, a heart cannot discern if they call out in worship or warning. Fires have been lit with tinder dry willow and birch. Burning acrid stacks to guide home weary weakened warriors.

Once they claimed Crusades were directed by Christ.

They lined us up to eat his flesh, one by one. Storms rolling over horizons. Old women lowered themselves lowly to earth waiting for dust to lift them skyward. Off in the ferocity of twisters coming to claim only the holy. There are no chambers deep enough to contain my sins and bone marrow seeps its substance slowly around the skeletal frame.

Doves beckoned, broke formation to swoop down amongst sinners. There are no saints sleeping here, each sacrificed in a letting of blood.

Blankness

Or blackly moves shadows about the page. Here weep I scriptures meaning. Leviticus has demands I stone myself to rid an essence of evil. No other hand will raise rocks despite laying my head at their feet. Prayers of forgiveness still themselves upon bloodied lips. Nothing shall sing me sweetly back to God, shout me to salvation. I have never travelled to Jordon. Going nowhere to meet the naked etching of myself. Hollow. Unclear.

I am only a stranger to strangers with no map to guide me home or back to Jordon.
My body made to lay under
and then blindly to roam.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2012