Twenty-Past Three
Authors: Sarah Gibbons
© 2009 The Author
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the author.
ISBN: 978-1-907179-20-4
A cip catalogue for this book is available from the National Library.
Published by Original Writing Ltd., Dublin, 2009.
Printed by Cahills of Dublin.
HIS
I
S
W
HERE
I C
AME
F
ROM
It’s funny a conjugal union,
that to a wider audience,
bore the verisimilitude
of parenthood.
For this little one
that found herself
deposited in their care,
the order of the day was
to proceed cum grano salis.
Her, implacably ruthless,
Him, surreptitiously lustful,
Collectively they personified
the paradigm of coffering abuse.
I was deft at imaginatively escaping
this temporal existence,
to a being incorporeal,
skilled in the power of inviolability.
This aegis may be described
as an ephemeral one,
the return to the reality
of a crepuscular darkness
inevitable.
Literary adjuvants
offered further succour,
and are now the most
familiar of friends.
Determination and an angel
Betty purged the affects of this
misappropriation of innocence.
The past now but a cadaver,
redolent with decay.
Future is the chalice, the Topkapi
of this closing scene for
that is where I came from,
this is where I’m going to.
LOOD
O
N
M
Y
M
OUTH
Blood on my hands,
Now awoken from my torpor
Induced
By three decades of
subconscious vacation.
Swollen limbs,
the containers of shame,
astute in the collected art
of secrecy and silence.
This body atrophied to a kind of amphigam,
a city of the world’s desire decimated
to a mass of occluded orifices,
a pilfered cornucopia
nauseous with the pungent yearning
to become the sort of place
That means to detain you
F THE WIND WILL TAKE YOU THERE
Austerity is the aesthetic,
It began with early-morning hallucinations,
blisters appeared ominously thick scars
bathing me in the blood of another.
The body wears its’ shame
heavily, remorselessly.
My abiding memory…
hemmed in by white-coated technicians
with startling efficiency,
foraging like eager hunting dogs
deep in to the path to the womb
to their expected course.
Tradition dictates that this
assault is accompanied.
The final push, dark and relentless
We didn’t shake hands officially.
Yes for those who pummelled
our soft bodies we remain strangers.
The rising sun is warming the tops of the trees.
We are not is Shakespeare’s Arden now
but through the branches it is just possible to see
the endless sky stretching out before you,
If the wind will take you there.
