The Howl

She gives her everything and then nothing, holding the full weight of her heart in a mouth.

At night the silver birch illuminated by the full moon moved with a rhythmic ebb of a river running from itself. Running to a greater sense of goodness that only a sea could promise. She etched upon her back the coordinates of home, and ran red ribbon from it to her heart. Tied with a double loop and sealed with wax. The needle is kept under the skin of her left palm. This way she is always closer to her God.

It grew under the exposed delirium of night and came to be birthed in the first light of a morning on a Saturday. Houses laid silent among the hedgerows and the scent of chlorine wafted in the air. Only one other woke as the birds descended to dance in long grasses. The nightjars had become silent.

Burning coasted on clouds of dust. She lifted her head from the cooled ground to sponge the watery dew from her lips. Ferns clung to her pale skin leaving their delicate veiny imprint on her face. If she listened closely, she swore the sound of God was about her, the sound of the sea raging with her infantile womanhood. This is the substance of visions and delirious veracity. Feverish the earth moved within her. The broken thing, yet to emerge rested on the tip of her nose. Let the earth invade crevices. Let her bury it, let her entomb the conquest within the concavity of her childish ways.

It would emerge soon, dancing upon the rays of light that filtered, fractured, through the chestnut tress heavy with the burden of their fruit. Soon the fields would fills with many hands to make light the heavy work of harvest. Unmissed, time was hers, to ravage the shore of her imagination, to search for driftwood to build her cross. Let her be crucified and resurrected. Say a prayer and all is forgiven. Suffering is selfish when driven by redemption. Everyone longs to be loved.

Hands cupped together, they catch her as it falls like rain. Searing from the sky to drown the seed and she, no Noah, cannot bail fast enough to stop the rivulets of the sin running away. She dug the hole to bury them. To keep from view herself, and another. The horror of the morning and the night. To lay to rest the dreams that had long run into waking. Chestnuts fell from the skies split in two upon rocks sprawling open the pregnant state of fertility. Scorched by the sun, dried to hardened flesh they rotted soon enough, back from where they came. Not every seed becomes a tree. This much is true and she learnt as witness to the horror. Her own part she played and played it well.

There are many promises made across blood lines. Each one has been smeared colloquially by fingers and thumb. A bed, unmade tells many tales and the shadows hold onto the sounds trapped there. Her voice lower and deeper, is animalistic. Hear how the rabbits howl.

Anyone can be a refugee, in their own country, in their own family, in their own hearts. How far you travel for salvation depends on how unforgivable the sin. There are only so many lies that can be told until the truth is spoken.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

Passion of the blood

Spiders spin their ancient web of sin and salty incubi. Expectancy rests in the bud of their abdomen. The contrast of a true masochist is that he sees his endeavours as a mean to an end.

He flogs the broom of nettles across her back, digging deep into the open wound of her femininity. Her fingers bleed with a death grip. A single bloody tear trickles from her lips. A silent prayer loses itself in stale air of an enclosed space. Not all sarcophaguses are marked with a name and date of death.  Some are merely rooms within rooms whose occupants are still breathing. Cobwebs cling to the corners of rotting windows, paint peeling from wood. Histamines sink deeply into skin. The flagrant air of desire and sweat lifts from two bodies broken in an anfractuous dance. Passion of the blood.

Compliance is no matter for intellectual debate. It is the unjust duelling of brutally with another’s heart. He ate hers. Upon his workbench are rusted screws and unused tools and whiskey bottles carelessly hidden. Oil stains the carpet, the slick of morality. Mortality embedded itself into the lining of her flesh, internal. The lullabies of childhood silenced.

Catkins hang pregnant, swaying gentle of a heated breeze of summer. The iridescent green of newly strung life is beginning to turn under the oppressive gaze of the solar flare. Realities slip further away with the madness of summer. The oppression of learning is not long enough forgotten.

She cast herself into the water, headfirst from the stones steps. A glory of weightlessness overwhelmed the sensation of capture. The magnolia tree cast its shadow in the corner of the pool of water, petals peeling in surrender to the sun. Water flooded her mouth, cleansing the pallet of sound and substance. It is the beginning of a love affair. How many times do you have to drown yourself before you learn to swim. How much brutality must your taste before you see the beauty of violence.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

the dark umbilicus

Fragments of light change as we pass through space and time.

Dance phosphorescence, to your own iridescent melody. The memory of who we have been fades quietly into the silence, some of us have more to say than others. This is a universal veracity of biology. The mute girl articulates in a language of glances and ravenous leer cast towards the distance. Or fingers have touched the void of humanity and passed back again to the reality we have spun for ourselves.

Love lingers in the recesses of hope. Until hope consumes itself within the flames of famine. We are the dark umbilicus. Rain soaks the deck of our ship as we cast away from all we have known. There is a pronounced vulnerability in staying as there is in voyaging into the foreign. My mother stands but does not smile, her face fixed for fear of emotion. I have transcended beyond her body to my own. There is a sense of redundancy about her shoulders. We all make choices. Mine are no different from her own.

My fingers ache with disuse, I have not mastered the state of idleness and my dreams screech violently of a distracted mind. Not all love needs confirmation, not all love ends with heartbreak. This is a lesson she has not learnt and time has conspired against her. Not every ship will dash against the rocks, with all her crew dragged by sirens to their sandy beds. Above, circles the wings of an eagle, never seen so close to shore. The shrill call of the wild reverberates in bone marrow, my teeth have aged with my tongue. My lexicon is all I have.

Where are the colloquial maxims, where have they been. Long gone from these parched lips. Dehydration brings beautification of hallucinations. Delirium sweetly seeps. The navigator has left her post, my well wishes kissed upon her forehead. We are only alone when we are surrounded by those we love.
I am to journey anew, as sure as sanguinary is in my blood. I only hope, I remember where I can find my hearts sanctuary.




Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

the instinct of discovery

Across the ocean sails my body, led to worlds of dreamscapes. Internal rests a compass needle pointed to my own north. Hallucinogenic fever has passed, clouds dissevered to invite shards of light to irradiate the sky.

I am sailing home to a land I have never sojourned. My feet have not touched its littoral, my eyes not cast across its panorama. But it is home.

We are wonderers, explorers, fearless and fascinated. Time has stood still to allow us this inexhaustible journey. Life travels back and forth within us, we are static yet in constant oscillation.

This is real life, this is living.

Love rocks me to a gentle slumber, tucks my head into the nape of its neck. I am bourn upon waves to the past, to the future. I am everything I am and all I shall be.

This is the instinct of discovery.


Copyright:Samantha Ledger 2013

Shards of light

I. Dawn. 

 

The negative inversion of light changes, charges. That face, unbearably frail, had once held fractiously reflected images of their former selves.  Sense the sensation of fear, it precipitates in bone marrow; from limb to limb she ravages herself in cannibalistic rituals. Consuming the consumptive, it is the nature of inhumane dreams. She drank the elixir of his aged passion and found she gagged on the truth presented in her hallucinogenic state.

 

A stench of diesel lingers in the caliginous air, the unelemental nature of their love burns behind her left eye, a sensation of electrocution. The executioner wears a red dress. If they were to be bookish and return to the first principle, the breath he had just taken was meaningless. It does not exist. Nor does hers. Therefore her veracity can take on a more violent nature. He took his aim, she was unarmed and guarded not the path to her heart. It is marked for his blade or arrow, or the slingshot so favoured in his infantile period.

 

The grass around the edges of the lake is overgrown, time stood still only for her.  Captured her long enough to leave her behind in the bending shards of light cascading from a mouth of a lover she did not take. Passed down, faulted eugenics with silver tongues, silent promises and leather. They bequeathed her something of flesh and bone to remember them by; it calls her name in the mimicking tone of her once sequestered voice.

 

This is how it is.

 

Raise her from the furrowed glebe, to revolute in the luminescence of dawn. Make her not ethereal inside the plasmatic constellation. Her night has retreated, she is conscious in the defiant birth of her own aurora borealis.

 

II. Noon.

 

They crossed the celestial meridian at dusk and then again at noon, as the light pitched down from the heavens with the calefaction of Satan. She knew it was the serpent from the taste on her lips, the fat pink thumb that brushed at the stain was not her own. Sex is good for the body, truth is good for the soul. So it is written on the leaves of the trees that shade the fortunate. Beneath their feet the voices of heathens sang out, each footprint leaving an indelible mark upon the skin of an unborn infant. The shins of weaker women split open, exposing bone shards to air. There is a folk tale, passed from mouth to mouth that tells tales of those that have walked in the midday sun.

 

Mad dogs ran themselves ragged as he foamed at the mouth. If you drink freely from the fountain you will pay the consequence. They taught this at school before milk, she drank it down thirstily. She is the water bearer, but the elders have yet to realise the strength of character sequestered under her breast plate. A pain stabs in her middle finger having spent too long pouring over ancient texts in a language no longer spoken. Above her stand a figure carved of iron, bone, swathed in a blanket of flesh. He watches her decipher each syllable, kisses her full on the mouth in reward. Some punishments are metered out with love. Some only wear it as a disguise.

 

In his calloused hands, black with soot from the bags long slung over his shoulder, he holds her heart. The kettle whistles early calling the workers too tea. Old women kneel in the grate of an open fire plying kindling with paraffin, lest the devil should forget to send a spark to burn out the sin. Every child’s flesh will burn if touched by the fingertips of evil, unless she has already tainted herself. Then her hair shall be knotted with violets and ivy ready for her marriage to her mother’s father. To return to the source is the only cure. Everyone knows this. Oral language is stronger than the mutterings of the church. The priest no longer knocks at their door.

 

His teeth are missing as he smiles, takes her hands and walks her to the shade of dreamscapes. Opens her mouth to pour in the elixir from a dusty jar sat on the handmade bench. Reminds her again, that he built it with his own two hands, flexing the muscles in his arm. Not all threats are overt. Not all love is precious. In the distance reverberations of life mingle with one another in the torridity, coexisting, consuming one another until joined, a cacophony of silence clouds their bodies from view. God said he witnesses everything, but her God is not that of the parables told in Christ’s house. His teeth glisten white from inside the jar. Drink of his body, drink, drink, drink. Only Alice had the good fortune of growing in size.

 

Down into the rabbit hole she falls, down into anatomical penitence.

 

III. Dusk.

 

How did Noah know the rounded earth would flood? How can something circular swell until it bursts unless someone pricks it with a sharpened screw. People long believed the earth was flat, in which case, flooding would be impossible. Torrents of raging fluid would course towards the edges only to cascade into the cosmos. Lost. Forever. She was not Noah and did not know there was a flood to come. The burning animalistic craving of the day eased with the setting of the sun, the burning sensation of her flesh subsided less. The holy one retreated to the bottom of a bottle that did not contain a ship, sails unfurled, it held nothing. He too was empty, of regret, or guilt. A spent force waiting to again muster desire.

 

She slunk into the shadows as she had seen other animals do. Unlatched the window with a broken finger and dropped bare footed onto the cooling ground. As her bare feet padded across the parched grass clouds of dust wafted around her. Earth to earth. You cannot know what you are not taught, innocence is heavy burden when a body has been heaved into the romanticism of others.

 

Under the branches of a chestnut tree, leaves singed by the sun, she dug, until her fingers wore to the quick. Licking them, the metallic taste reminded her of a forgotten dream, relived to often to be erased wholly from memory. We fall back to what we know. In the trough she crouched, blackened knees under her chin. From across the meadows the sounds of slumber rolled like thunder. Stars pricked the sky, she waited for it to bleed a midnight blood. None was to come, not until morning.

 

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 

Biological Contrition

The biological references are falling away, peeling from the new skin that has grown beneath the fraying symptom of regrowth. The crooked branches of the trees seen from my window serve as a reminder, a reprimand to grown toward the sun. Never looking now at where we have stemmed from. This is a lesson hard learned. My limbs have been sheered only to grow back incorrectly countless times. The wood cutter knows me by name and the smell of my sap.

The leaves of winter have not been swept and now have begun to rot and fume their pungent stench of decay. It’s appalling to know how much life lives within the caucus of death, feasting on the remains of former glory. The rain washes down the smoke stained wall but does not remove the soot blackness.  Moss crawls slowly into crevasses in the hope no one notices it silent march towards conflict. There is something pernicious about its softness.

It seems I cannot be drawn from biology. Eternally I shall measure myself by the pulse of my own internal function. By the birth of humanity in the creation of a cell. And it’s death, through the destruction we inflict upon the innocent and impeded. We are only at the top of the food chain because we have harnessed the power of cruelty. We hunt for the pleasure of the kill, the rush and flood of blood to the surface. Some of us at least. My own body longs to lay across man traps to absorb the rust into my own blood stream, not as a martyr, more in an act of contrition.

Who are the dreamers and where have they gone, too far for all we have witnessed and the howling echoes inside the empty cavity of a heartbroken chest. The two bickering women become a droning sound in my ear as I focus on the horizon, watching the day slip further from view. Why do we face west, why never east. The moon turns upon itself to show us her shadowed face, there are, it seems reasons she keeps this side of her concealed. Deeply pitted and scarred I long to touch it, but my fingers do not reach that distance. Her haunting inhumanity dictates seclusion. How lonely to wake alone each night, how vulnerable to have the world watching your nakedness. We have all become voyeurs. Even me. Even you.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

Love for Sale

Love for sale is all she sings of. I hear it over the airwaves drifting hauntingly up the stairs. The function of my mind has fractured and words, dull and meaningless seep out. There exists always the fear that this will become a constant state of being. For too soon we find our place in the world only to lose it again. I have never known exhaustion such as this. Dreams have an unnerving familiarity about them, lead me to, when waking, question their veracity. Is this my reality or myth. A creation of an overactive imagination. No one answers when I call out to the emptiness of the night. Someone has left the search light on outside, it shines into my bedroom. How can I be the one they are looking for. I am too grown and my sex is all wrong.

My romanticism drifts aimlessly looking for a shore on which to anchor itself.  Sacred voices lilt between trees on a cold March morning, wafting through a deep set mist that has not lifted for days. Our feet are damped by steps towards the cemetery where remains lay untouched and unloved. We do not convene here for purposes of morning. The sun has yet to break the sky, to crack the atmospheric stance the clouds have assumed. Deep and rich plumes of emptiness. We forget the electricity contained with. We are all a source of kinetics. My movements are considered, poised, in my attempt to retain a dignity not afforded to me. Around my ankle rests the burn and bruise from the shackles of spent love. They have prepared the long boat, I heard this said, decked with garlands of meadow flowers and dried dead wood from the silver birches field at the end of summer.
We were innocent in the heat, draped in love and secrecy.

Confession. Father. Hear my confession. Do not turn your face from here towards the skies looking for answers that you know, soulfully, will not come. Do not seek the woman who bore me to offer your solace in her arms, they are spent with the weight of another. Do you not listen to her words when she sleeps, the sound carries along to where I lay as clear as the bells calling me to church. Faith belongs in flesh not matrimony. Some lessons are learnt too late but I have practiced forgiveness and offer you mine, untainted, without condition. This is love.

What words would I part with, if I held no fear of shame in my mouth. Do they need be said at all, for I have seen you at midnight, stood sentinel at my window. It is too late now, too late to charge as my saviour. The damage has been done. Punishments have rained down in heavy blows against sanity and skin. Only the scars remain and you confuse the perpetrator for she look and sounds identical to me. Puppeteers have passed, by the marionette still dances, like a limb still moves even when severed from a body.

I walk slowly, through fear and concentration. Finally, in this moment I have learnt the art of mindfulness. My tongue explores the taste of air, of possibility that exists even when we believe there is none. Smoke rises in the distance, they have lit their torches in readiness for the burning, in readiness for my skin to flail from my bones in some exotic dance. For them this is the ending.

We choose only to see what we wish to see.

Death is not an ending when we are still breathing at the core, this is not my first, second or third exodus. I have parted from my body every night in your absence under the ferocious gaze of another. But see me. I am still here. I am reborn. Our parting of ways occurred only to serve our reunion. My own voice spurred the inquisition, my own declaration of guilt, though innocence quelled the spilling of further blood. My own. I am not a martyr. Hold me in no esteem.

Only love me as you do, as I see through the thinning fog and emerging daylight. Dawn, in all is glory plays out its role for me. Offering passion diluted before midday draws me close to the flame. Watch me Daddy I am dancing. Love me for now, I long to be loved, across the divided expanse of wasteland, stitched with my inexperienced hand.  The Spanish guitars are playing. Walk not behind in grief for what we have lost, or ahead leading me to where you believe safety awaits. My destiny is my own, uncertain and open for interpretation. Walk with me there, to the harbour where I set sail, aflame in all my feminine glory, walk with me as an equal, sexless and free. As a father and daughter, as we are written upon my heart to be.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013