I like the condensed nature of poems: they’re great for capturing a theme, a moment, an emotion. Many poems I write, I’d never show anyone. I use them as sketches to express something I don’t understand, and often find they help me gain insights.
This is a poem I wrote during the process of working on Cooking with Bones, to get me connecting with the ‘raw material’. I felt as if I needed to get to know ‘bones’ as objects from a closer angle.
So with that in mind, I decided that I needed to:
a) attempt to understand them by writing a poem
or
b) pick a suitable target, perform a murder and subsequent extraction.
The latter was far too gruesome, and a little bit wrong. So here’s the poem..
BONES
Death
isn’t peaceful.
each heartbeat, as it stops
continues as a drumbeat, in the
skeleton.
We bones ache to move out
of the living bodies we’re buried in.
We’re locked in and lively
slyly sheathed by
periosteum.
When we’re naked
bones
we’ll dance truthfully.
Under any kind of light,
sun-stroke day or fluorescent night
we’ll glow pale as we clobber
shadows
build drum rolls; our echoes
will scramble through clouds,
as we ricochet
longing.