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a nebula snakes its way
across my face
like a veil
a rosy trail of gases
upon my cheeks
lonely planets and
dark stars
trace down my legs
up and over my hands
to guide me home
star charts drape across my shoulders
up my jaw
across my arms
old white galaxies
new red dwarfs
maybe someone
someday
will draw me constellations
from these blemishes
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No one will care about this poem
until I am long dead.
Isn’t that the way of it?
Here I am to make
some impression
a ghost of a difference,
but it’s 2012
who the hell reads poetry anymore?
I borrowed an anthology of poetry
looking for inspiration.
I get more from the little inscription
on the back:
“Academic deconstruction
and intellectual dissection
are the death of poetry.”
or something like that.
The point is, I think,
that analyzing poetry to death
is desecrating the body
of the work
and missing the fact that
poetry
is a work of the soul
and who the hell even cares
about whether or not form is dead.
I forgot my point.
It was going to be brilliant,
life changing maybe
even revolutionizing the genre.
Doesn’t that sound so pretentious?
No one will care about this poem
at all, I figure.
They sure as hell don’t care about it now.
© christine DINGLEY 2012
The marching of thoughts sounds like Morse Code
lined up against the measuring tape
and black tape to telegraph
photograph them.
They are banished to a vacuum in a queue
though is it a void if there is something
even two ‘you’s in there
to fill it?
The queue and the double you collide
mid-clash and are suspended
in mid air
stepping on each other’s feet.
And while the embrace is glorious, eternal
a meeting of fairytale fate and chance,
the universe stands still
and that is not good.
While they are entwined there can be no
questions: who? what? when? where?
the all important why?
No answers.
So I disentangle the ‘q’ and the ‘w’ and keep on typing.
I am an impatient thing
with a lot of nothing to say
so I take
and take
consume the media.
something in there has to mean something.
I look up on the internet
how to pray the rosary
because either they didn’t teach us that
at sunday school
or I forgot.
it’s sad when both are equally plausible.
I devour my parent’s life stories
and my grandparent’s nostalgia
(this is why I took my granpapa’s typewriter:
I never knew him, but it’s part of who he was)
to craft a name for myself.
a name they can be proud of. a name I can be proud of.
as much as I sometimes dream
of the stardust
of my name up in lights
what I want more than anything
is integrity
so that I can live without labels without breaking.
looks like I’ll have to take scissors to those tags.
I drown in choices.
the world is my oyster
but I remember how my father
could pry them open with a chisel
serve them up with life’s lemons
and we would swallow them whole.
I’m not sure I like that analogy.
maybe I’ll create my own.
© christine DINGLEY 2012
Esse ce la langue
batarditz ox ben
la langue ansenne?
O ben Scripta
ta biautez tujour
un schart nevax.
Esse ce la langue
batardiz ox ben
la langue purifees?
Bel meschine chimere
moz selment compri
quant lon parles.
© christine DINGLEY
Mother (Photo credit: racineur)
tending the garden
of her daughter’s hair
she hums a music box tune
and spins it into gold in the lamplight
her hands are soft
as she smoothes the wrinkles
from her mother’s hands
starched from holding the sheets too hard
countless rains
on her ironed blouse
water the roots
that keep her daughter close
oh mother
let me take the bags
from your shoulders
and take my hand in yours
i can carry enough for the both of us now
Sunken sailing ships (Photo credit: Boston Public Library)
I will break the face of my compass
and set the needle
windward
I will align my sexton
with the sun
and stare until my eyes
turn to dust
o merry dust
blown into the waves
and let the shadows steer this wreck
for I have cut the line
to the rudder
and let the tides sink my ship
when it is my time
this merry old dust
and her stalwart tub
let me sink with my colours high
© christine DINGLEY 2012
it’s a curious mixture
of melting hail and freezing rain
so distinctly Canadian
that makes waiting for the 96
horrendous, in a word.
to get there
my boots become covered
in salty sandy slush
the colour of rainy days
and toxic slurry
only it glows a little less
and there’s no chance of accidental superpowers.
i take a window seat.
someone sits next to me who could be
either another student
a wanna be hipster
someone born without taste
or maybe an inter-dimensional time traveller.
meh.
i think i’ll start reading now.
i only have an hour and
a quarter to my stop.
© christine DINGLEY 2011
I feel the rhythm in my neck
my chest my thighs my wrists
the rush of haemoglobin
the pressure of plasma
in my brain
Oh life!
I live on a tide of oxygen
brushing through my veins
defying gravity
rushing out at incredible speed
to my lips
the tiny pools in my fingertips
oceans in my feet
the water tower in my brain
Love collects
in the atrium
slithers and waits in the ventricle
for a mighty push
once
twice
tha-thump
back out again
to pick up the fire in my lungs
the notes encoded in my brain
(love letters, wonderment, defeat)
the great red telegraph
I listen to my life at rest
never truly resting
dancing to its own beat
I dance with my pulse
tha-thump
tha-thump
tha-thump
© christine DINGLEY 2011
I listen for a heartbeat
in the jade-green vein,
touch it through the shifting
skin of rhombus glass
that catches the sun.
I listen for a heartbeat
in her ancient bones,
the copper and olive age spots
flake under my touch
and smells of damp.
I listen for a heartbeat
in the fresh-washed body,
the black velvet wrinkling folds mould
around my fingertips
and broken tree nails.
I listen for a heartbeat
in the creaking sinews,
groaning as she breathes a sigh
of a thousand symbols
green-gold above me.
I listen for a heartbeat
in her daily musings,
the chittering of squirrels and
the stuttered rapping
of woodpeckers.
I listen for her heartbeat
in her blushing face,
I light a dancing fire to warm her
she dresses in her finest
jewels and perfume.
I listen for her heartbeat
in the fire
in the moon
in the dark
in the loon
that swims in the river roots that pass me by.
She beats
in my blood.
© christine DINGLEY 2011
