friendship

Eth

Eth was a dreamweaver, one who could leave her body and step across the stars, in Louise Lawrence’s 1998 young adult novel, Dreamweaver. I read it sometime between the ages of 8-10, and Eth has stuck with me ever since.

Red girl – and I mean girl, for I
was young and could only begin
to imagine you – red dream girl
projecting yourself into me
from the page, but also across
galaxies, to warn me not to come –
You were held in supple halos
of redness. Your smooth hair was long
and now I see it in the hair

of my friend, who is a bullet of
a woman. I see your hair light
until all the hair I now know
or once knew began in this thought.
I remember you so vaguely –
you are the first friend who I lost
and the first one to draw from me
the structures of love. I was young
and now I am young again. Old

is the way you recur to me.
I half expect god to return
in your form. I sat with the books
on the blue grey carpet, felt it
drain the blood from my palm leaving
the impression of weave, and you.
Did my teacher remark at this
sudden silence brought on? Sighing,
I remember you. Please come back

Against Metaphysics

Do not debase yourself – you are gold, and you know
you need only find the ones who will hold you as standard.
And see how we die, how we weren’t designed for this living;
or designed at all, apart from a certain sketching.
This earthly fact need not ashcut our hair with sorrow,
though of course it may do for a moment, a haunting phase:
learning the blood and the tears that rest in salvation
not dropped from above, in a white hot holy inferno
of passionate revenge. No, these great tears are ours
believer, as we bear up the world on our backs, and build
our commune here on earth, our only connection
where we tie our authority, where we decide on our lives.
Not alone; these golden souls around us glimmer
as we pile together in a vast open treasure of days:
supporting each other as water clings to cold water
thundering slow as a star, and frantic reshaping
it glints – over the falls and out into darkness;
this thunder is pure, this thunder is gold in its forging.
Our blood belongs too, born in a mythical foundation
of life in the dawning of sacred human electrics –
we do not need more, we only need thriving, and others
a group of bright people called wonders who help us our way
to shore up our breathing, our justifiable madness
at having to live in a world that we have made,
which teaches us we lack the spinning centre: We.
The people who beat the heart of humanity’s pace?
This is the horror, the shock and the shame of those
who project with intensity, blinding sovereign light
on the walls to blind us, this is why it takes time –
so learn we can float, calm on our backs in the sea
of a disc, on the back of four elephants, looming calm
on the back of a turtle, ponderous floating through space.
And yes there is violence, but here in the gaps inbetween,
which like air are so hard to avoid, and yet so hard to see
lie the softer gradients of all of the earthier pleasures –
a glass of water, a book, a handshake, a look in the eyes,
a cuddle, at dawn, a song, a joke, or a poem,
a long conversation, a cry, some faith in your friends.
Ask not for justification, for there is no need.
We are great enough. This you can believe.