Trigger Warnings

For those reading this post who have not seen the earlier ‘episodes’ of the story I am telling, here’s a brief résumé. Just over a year ago, I was in a new relationship. My ‘partner’ was attractive, amusing, intelligent, talented, and – so it turned out – a compulsive and unscrupulous liar. Whether people pity me or despair is neither here nor there. She took me in, and I fell for her lies. Yet in my poetry, it was clear that something was awry.

 

Night-Closure

He comes to her softly in the night

placing his life in her trembling hands
– for what cannot, or can be, or might –               

She opens to her ephemeral delight      

and though her heart at best is contraband        
he comes to her softly in the night.        

Though the moment is passed the demands      

of invisible, inarticulate delight 
for what cannot, or can be, or might      

find their place in the sweet indictment

of stepping stones or sinking sands,
he comes to her softly in the night.        

In the opposite window a woman stands

naked and swifting the curtains tight
for what cannot, or can be, or might;                     

he sees a silhouette of dreamt delight

return to his impassioned form again and
he comes to her softly in the night
for what cannot, or can be, or might…

 

After she cruelly dumped me I began to dig for the truth. I realised there were many things I had chosen to ignore. She wore at first a ring on her wedding finger, allegedly to deter the men in the office where we worked who were, she claimed, aggressively coming on to her. The packet of contraceptive pills she showed me when we had sex in her flat I now know were not what she claimed. Why she told me she was pregnant, I will never know. After we first had sex, she asked if I’d had a vasectomy. It was the strangest question: neither normal nor sensible for someone her age.

There was some truth behind the story of her eating disorder, since there was a newspaper article about her and two other young women who had come close to death through anorexia. This is not publically available online; only the picture and caption can be seen. I had no intention of subscribing to that shitty paper. Instead, I accessed the article through my university library, and discovered something significant.

 

The Facts

Given that papers rarely tell the truth
she told The Sun his age was thirty-six.
Needless to say, they didn’t ask for proof,
nor had an inkling this was one of her tricks.

He was, in fact, over 50. Perhaps she feared,

since his years more-than doubled
hers it might look dodgy or a little weird.
From the start, it seems her heart was troubled.

 

I learned that her eating disorder was all about ‘control’ – she attempted to regulate her body-weight through over-dosing on slimming pills. Despite her recovery, she continued to attempt to control other elements of her life. Frankly, I feel sorry for her – and for her husband, who might now be being strung along for another reason. She once told me that, despite never having craved a relationship, she wanted a child, and longed for a daughter called Olivia. I suspect she chose that name to flatter me after reading my ‘Olivia’ poems. How could I not feel flattered?

 

An Artifice

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways - E. B. Browning

                I' benedico il loco e 'l tempo et l'ora - Petrarch

How can I stop myself from loving you?

How many ways can I deny the pleasure?
Could I delete each note, each beat, each measure
until the rhythm of a lie beats true?
There’s not a single day compares to you,
nor gem, nor jewel, nor glint of hidden treasure;
even a season or a life of leisure
curtails what poetry must fail to do.
If I could emulate his love for Laura
that Petrarch could achieve in fourteen lines,
contain it in a sonnet; see it more
a fantasy for love achieved in rhyme,
would I rejoice that day, or yet deplore
a longing for an encore one more time?

 

This (un-named) women said to me, ‘Do I seem like the sort of person who’s only interested in men for their money?’ On reflection, having found out so many other things about her, my answer now

would be, ‘Yes.’ No wonder she didn’t want to commit to a relationship with a penniless poet with a difficult past. Having shared so much of my personal history with her, I had made myself vulnerable. And this woman, who I thought I had been falling in love with, was about to play her dirtiest hand.

 

 

No Apologies

My book of Cautionary tales, Charlotte & The Charlatan, is for ‘adults only.’ These days we have to molly-coddle people with “trigger-warnings” as if we must first apologise for the fact that art, if it is true to itself, might cause a reaction. So it should. The Tales of Charlotte took a sinister turn as I wrote about the strange experience I’d been through. But one story in particular, although fictional, was based more closely than anything that had come out of my liaison with this perfidious woman.

A few days before she withdrew ‘from our intimate relationship,’ she told me that, while on holiday (on her honeymoon, although I didn’t know it) she had had a miscarriage. On reflection, she didn’t seem too disturbed by this; only saddened that she hadn’t been able to make her own choice about the situation. As time passed, I concluded that the pregnancy was probably another of her fantasies.

But then I discovered the biggest shock of all. She excitedly announced on Facebook, with a picture of her 3-month scan taken a year ago today, that she was ‘going to be a mum next March.’ Though I was blocked from her page, she didn’t consider that a friend might see that post. I wasn’t told about this for a while; around the same time the Royal Pregnancy was announced by Buckingham Palace.

At least one may be sure of that child’s paternity (unusually for that family.) But I had good reasons to believe that this child may be a result of my having (as I now see it) unwittingly impregnated her. Or perhaps I was not the only man who she was screwing around with. She was, after all, a highly proficient adulteress.

When I wrote another of my Cautionary Tales – a fictionalised account of this story – and posted it here on this blog, it didn’t go down well with her and her dolted husband. My claim that all my work is “fiction” may seem flimsy, but I strongly maintain my stance. And I refuse to apologise for my art.

 

In Years to Come

You kept it hidden from me; even so

I sensed it long before you knew.
My chief regret: I never saw you grow,

I never saw when you started to show;

never got to paint the nursery blue.
You kept it hidden from me; even so

you told me. Exactly why, I’ll never know.

Left to my imagination, naturally I grew
my chief regret: I never saw you grow.

My banishment from you, a heavy blow,

yet separated, still I felt a part of you:
you kept it hidden from me; even so

I suspected you would bloom and glow

and so as time ticked on, each day renewed
my chief regret: I never saw you grow

or got to choose a name but, even though

I had no choice, I saw it as a gift to you;
you kept it hidden from me, even so.
My chief regret: I never saw him grow.

 

I know that this woman’s husband reads this blog, and may be reading this story which I now conclude. Not that’s it’s all over. Their reaction to the whole debacle was deeply unpleasant. With all the information they had about me, they proceeded to publicise, through social media, emails, and direct contact with my friends and associates, personal details about me that were misleading, defamatory, and potentially damaging. In doing so, they revealed their guilt and complicity. I also suspect – though cannot prove – that he, or they, did other malicious and unspeakable things too.

This man had been cuckolded and wanted revenge. Claiming, on twitter, to be married to an angel, he was/is clearly in denial, or being as deceived by her as I was. I know what it feels like to find the person you love has been fucking someone else. It hurts. I had done nothing but show her tenderness, unflinching love and utmost respect. By attempting to make my life miserable, he has made himself look foolish and pathetic. She is not the ‘angel’ he thinks he married. She is a ruthless liar.

Her mother had not taken her own life – this was just a sick deceit. The email alias she had used when writing to me turned out to be her married name-to-be. I found her vulture picture on someone else’s Facebook – it seems she had plagiarised that, plus the ‘dreamer’ video she made for me, passing it off as her own. She was married in the Church near to where we used to sit and kiss in Princes Street Gardens, although she claimed at the time she’d never been inside. She sent me a picture of flowers for her mother’s funeral: they were in fact her wedding flowers.

The stories about her university, her near-rape when working for a dodgy night-club, the parental abuse she suffered as a child, her brother’s premature death, and a string of other mendacious tales I will never know to be true or not. Her claim to own a sandwich shop in the midlands was inflated: she no more than a night duty-manager at that shop. My hunch is that everything she said was, at best, spurious. The rest, I can put behind me: it is for her (and her deluded husband) to consider whether her invented life is just as much a part of her controlling condition that led her to almost destroy herself with dieting pills.

What I am left with is the knowledge that I will have nothing to do with the child she had towards the end of March this year. It was born within marriage, so legally it belongs to them, whoever the biological father is. There is a poet who, having recently discussed the issue of trigger-warnings in performance poetry, issues an apology before one of her pieces. It is in the style of a letter written from a young person to an anonymous sperm donor. Perhaps, one day, I will receive a similar letter.

 

The Letter-poem

He writes another letter,

but like a poor deluded fool,
it turns into a poem.
With mock poetic sentiment
and dirge he writes
the trite old phrases.
I see you now,
or, I remember you,
or, I imagine you...
And right away, there and then
the love he once thought
true, or pained, or beautiful,
turns into cold emotion,
reminiscence,
or the product of imagination.
It is surely a nonsense,
to make a rhyme, lyric or romance
of something that was only in his head?
He writes it to her,
the long-forgot,
the one who left him,
or the one he never got,
and sated, but not
satisfied by his drivelling words,
he turns to find another in his bed.

 

My fear is that I may make this mistake all over again, like the person in the poem above. Maybe I’m completely mistaken about this strange episode that has taken up five long blog-posts. So be it: I still have my poetry – and a whole lot more. I have many friends who stood by me, and still do.

It could be said this unpleasant story has fuelled my pen, and that the woman who I thought I loved was – though far from amusing – a muse. I have written many unsent-letters, and tales, poems, stories, dramatic sketches and a play based on this upsetting experience. Much of this work has been published, although I will not yet acknowledge where. Despite their campaign to hurt me, this couple (and perhaps their child) have to face the truth. And that will hurt far more. I pity them.

 

Un-titled

It’s not the dying that bothers me

but the death I want to get right.
I don’t want to be hit by a bullet or bus,
or slip peacefully away in the night.
I’d rather be surrounded by friends
and loved ones when it happens,
to cheer my achievements, clap
or commiserate, forgive, make amends.
I want to go gentle into that good night,
not greeted by the kiss of death
but the releasing caress of life laid on mine:
the inquisitive lips of the child I never had;
the intoxicating tongue of unsavoured wine;
the familiar touch of a lover;
palliative hands of a nurse.
I don’t want a frog to wake me into death, or God,
a pope or a judge, a prince, a priest or worse –
I’ll leave all that shit to the living
to haply remember or haply forget.
When it comes, I want to embrace death
as the cherishing earth takes me since that –
and these lines from time to time –
is all that I have, all that I leave
and, in dying, all that I’m giving.

 

As a post-script to this long story, I will post one of the Cautionary Tales that didn’t make it into the final selection for my art-book, Charlotte & The Charlatan.  As Charlotte told the Charlatan: “To your own self be true, and be true to yourself.” For some, however, Truth is a puke-able Feast.

 

 

 

from Charlotte & The Charlatan

              – and other cautionary tales

 

 

Percy the Prowler

 

            “For she was wild and young, and he was old,

              And deemed himself as like to be a cuckold.”

                                                                      The Miller’s Tale, Chaucer.

 

‘He’s on the prowl again,’ the People said.

            Although they gave him all the facts he needed, this information went unheeded by Colin the Constable who, more a paragon of vice than virtue, said that Percy’s behaviour was “not very nice.”

            ‘While he may be causing alarm to some,’ the copper corruptly suggested, ‘there’s no harm done.’

            The People disagreed. ‘Percy has made it his personal aim to maim any woman or man he considers a threat.’

            The Constable said ‘If a person bears a grudge, it’s best not to grudge the bear.’ Percy was more of a bungling bear than a ravenous lion. While he considered himself a stealthy hunter, the People thought him a cunt, a cretin, a fool – and a cuckold to boot. ‘You can’t shoot a man when all he does is prowl,’ said the constable.

            ‘Even if his behaviour’s foul?’ said the People, ‘not to mention the manner of his intention.’ Everyone knew that Percy’d had wool pulled over his eyes regarding family issues. Although it would’ve been wise for him to use discretion, keep stumm, not talk to anyone, instead he chose to stalk with aggression and target those who might expose complicity with his domestic perfidy.

            By posing as a poet (though if you read his rhymes you wouldn’t know it) Percy posted lines expressing hate of perverts, pests, and any poets who met with his distaste.

            ‘His behaviour is disgusting,’ said the People, at a loss to know why P.C. Colin didn’t give a toss. ‘We can’t allow someone to prowl upon people who’ve done this man no wrong.’ United, if not universal, in their quest to put Predatory Percival to rest, the People decided he was simply a pest.

            Their first aim: to assess whom Percy felt needed protected, and from what. A committee was formed, a leader elected. It was quickly agreed his rhymes had bugger-all to do with verse; the lines were utter doggerel or worse, whose only slant was against other poets. It was apparent they had the greater talent.

            ‘He wouldn’t know a half-rhyme, metaphor, or sympathetic fallacy,’ the Chair concluded. ‘His words are governed by his own pathetic jealousy. The only thing the People need protected from is this man’s vitriolic pronouncements which are far from poetic.’

            There was a saying in Charlotteville that “your lies and misdeeds, your foibles and fears and worst nightmares remain if you try to be something you’re not.” While it was clear he wasn’t a poet, Percy wasn’t a lion, or bear, or hunter either. This masquerade was a front; a disguise to evade the Truth that all the People knew, and had known all along. Percy had been cruelly strung along.

            He cloaked himself in denial, thinking his young wife angelic. She was in fact demonic, adorned with claws and tail and horns. Poor Percy the Prowler, returning from his pyrrhic battle, ignoring the Cuckoo’s prattle, failed to spot he also wore a mocking set of horns.

 

 

 

Begged, Borrowed, or Stolen

There has been a bit of a stramash concerning plagiarism of poetry lately. It’s nothing new – poets have pilfered from other poets for eternity, and some of the great poets are impenetrably hard to read simply because the obscure referencing is far too deeply-layered for the unenlightened. But when a poet takes another’s poem and, changing just a few words, publishes the thing as if it is their own work, alarm-bells ring in the offices of intellectual property lawyers.

Sometimes we are influenced by other writers, or hear words or phrases that get so under our skin that we re-use them without realising. The 20^th Century composer, Vaughan Williams, used the term ‘cribbing’ to describe the skill of using another’s musical idea. He said that cribbing was permissible as long as you knew that you were doing it. Music and poetry, however, are rather different forms.

One of my Phone Box Tales, which I performed at the 2013 Fringe, was about a man who spied on (or, more accurately, stalked) a poet and, stealing a bunch of dis-carded drafts of her poems got them published. I stole the idea for that story from a friend who happily permitted me – as long as I acknowledged her in the dedication! But the character in my story knew exactly what he was doing.

Other art-forms present issues when they are stolen or appropriated. A friend (now ex-friend) told me last year that her Masters Degree (in Creative Industries) had been jeopardised by someone who had plagiarised stock-photos for their project – a collaboration between students. My hunch is that it was this friend who had done this, since she only graduated recently, nearly a year after the Degree Show. The university must have given her a second chance. But theft is theft.

When I was doing a Creative Writing course with the O.U. I made the mistake of sending in a poetry assignment with one-too-many poems. The tutor, thankfully, discarded the extraneous poem in her marking. However, it meant that I couldn’t submit that poem in a subsequent assignment because it would have been picked up by the system. It seems that students can’t even plagiarise themselves!

I asked my erstwhile friend why people would want to plagiarise: surely artists and creative types strive for authenticity? She mumbled something about laziness, or hope that they wouldn’t be found out. She never uttered anything stronger, or voiced concern for the other students on her course. Her main beef was that the cost of the course would be wasted.

To be a good artist, or an original creator, you have to develop a voice of your own. To do that, you also have to soak up all available influences by reading, viewing, learning, and listening to everything there is. I get irritated by young poets who think they are teaching kids about poetry by presenting their own take on the form (which is in fact performance art, not poetry) having never studied poetry themselves. Simply passing off the great masters as ‘boring’ is arrogant, and ignorant.

Some of my earliest influences, from school-teachers, continue to feed my poetic voice. I latched onto the pop-poets (the Liverpool Sound) when a middle-school teacher enthused about Roger McGough, but I was 19 before Brian Patten impacted on me. We were fed the War Poets, but it was Pat Barker’s trilogy that brought them alive years later. I got the Sylvia Plath confessional stuff, yet it took decades to understand her universality. As for the Romantics: I’ve barely scratched the surface.

All these – and many other – styles affect and influence me, and if I steal or crib or pilfer from any of my favourite (or even, less-favoured) poets and writers, I make my official apology here. Sometimes, however, I write poems that are nonetheless based quite closely on existing pieces. I think this may be called pastiche. That said, at risk of plagiarism, here is my take on a Roger McGough poem.

 

Dining Solo

 

When Roger McGough bought fish & chips for one,

He felt like a priest in the chip-shop cue.

And it’s true: sometimes, when I sit in a café alone

I wish I had someone to share my pot of tea-for-two.

 

I’ve also learned, on the subject of plagiarising oneself, that there is a tricky problem when submitting work to a publication or competition if it has already appeared on a personal blog or other form of social media. To publish = “make public.” However, one is allowed to use a 10% sample. So here is a wee taster of a story that I am currently sending off for publication:

 

(extract from 'Revenge' - a short story)

 

                We did all the things that new lovers do: the furtive glances led to casual coffees; texting became frequent; we’d meet in favourite places. The glances led to kisses; the rapid-fire texts turned suggestive; the places we met became ‘special’ and – finally – we consummated our relationship in a way that no film can. She was, at first, reticent to commit, but I let it pass. On my side, there was a secrecy to which we were both sworn. My position in the University gave her a frisson; me, a vulnerability.

                As summer lingered, I knew time was on my side. If money can’t buy love, it sure as hell can’t buy time. Once, as we sat on newly-mown grass in the Gardens, she suddenly said: ‘I’ve got a secret.’

                ‘Oh?’ I sat up, curious.

                ‘It’s a biggie,’ she added.

                Quietly pleased to be let into her confidence, I said, ‘Go on.’

                ‘I’ve always secretly wanted to have a child. On my own.’

                ‘On your own?’ I pointed out: ‘Impossible!’

                ‘Not so,’ she explained: ‘You can buy the means off the internet.’

                Perplexed, ‘But…’ Touching the fingers of her left hand I said: ‘You’ve got me.’ Her hair dropped over her eyes as she lowered her head.

                ‘I know,’ she replied, a half-smile breaking on her lips as she moved to kiss me: ‘I know.’

                By autumn, it was over. Not a word, explanation or reason. Not a hint of the season which had warmed our bodies was to be seen. I dropped by her flat one evening, but looking through the bare windows saw the room was cold and empty. She was gone.

 

If it doesn’t find a home, and I have whetted your appetite, I guess I’ll let you have the remaining 90% at some point. Unless someone else steals it from me first. Next month, I will conclude the story of the past four blog-posts and tell the truth behind my poetry.

Secrets and Lies

Anyone reading this blog for the first time might want to read the two preceding posts, since this is the continuation of a long tale. This is a story of secrets, lies, deception, and control. In Anglican liturgy there is a sentence that precedes the rite of confession: ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.’ Avoiding theology, I prefer to use ‘wrong’ rather than sin.

A few months ago I saw a short article on manipulators. I wish I’d read it twelve months ago – although I had no idea at that time that I was being duped by an unscrupulous, frighteningly duplicitous person.

This woman, who I have been at pains not to name or identify, had no concept of wrong. She showed no remorse for the wrong-doings in her life, and was equally dismissive of my difficult past. When I opened up to her and shared elements of my personal history, making myself totally vulnerable, she expressed nothing but unflinching support and respect for me. Expressing her thoughts on love, however, apparently scared her. I never imagined that she had an ulterior motive.

How could I do anything other than believe that she was scared of love? Or was reticent to name it? Like the queen in Suzanne Vega’s song, she closed herself up like a fan. She spoke of a ‘bird in her chest.’ Sometimes the feathers fluttered pleasurably; other times, this thing threatened to angrily burst out of her chest. How could I interpret this? In poetry, of course. Since I assumed she had some knowledge of classical music – she claimed to be giving violin lessons, though I never heard her play – much of my poetry was based on song. One was after a beautiful song by Delius:

 

 

Twilight Answers

With a lowly rumble of chords and a spiky tritone

Delius evokes the forest’s misty floor, from where
a herd-boy lifts his horn and, calling through
the enveloping dark, gives ear to the reply.

He senses through the throbbing harmony

the shepherd in a clearing in the dying light;
his horn-call as it penetrates the canopy
calls out to someone, somewhere, hearing,
as the silent sun goes down.

He knows she’s there, can almost hear

the evening breeze like feathers in her hair.
But in the fading light, with drooping semitone
he, lowering his instrument, loiters yet alone.

The composer conjures another throbbing

expectation and although, in the distance,
the shepherd now hears a yearning sobbing
his lips remain unlicked; retaining his stance
he sees the sun going down.

So Delius repeats the now-familiar strophe
as if to tempt, avoid, or coax catastrophe;
the crackle of twigs in the early glistening
gloam assures the shepherd she is listening

but will not, or cannot, or perhaps, chooses

not to answer. He lifts his horn a final time
and as darkness falls the herd-boy refuses
to hear the piano’s final diminishing  sigh
that saw the sun go down.

 

She was, it seemed, creative. I’d seen some of her photography when idly googling her name on the internet. She made films too, apparently. She sent me a short piece which she’d put together, based on a poem. In the film-captions, she credited herself as the writer, dedicated it to me, and put the name of the voice-over – a university colleague. For this reason, I cannot post the film on here. But I can put a link to the film which she’d taken, cropping the ending and passing it off as her own.

 

Morning, Noon, and Night

The cuckoo, according to the rhyme,

allegedly changes its tune over time.
As a chick, it starts out with a semitone;
a tentative chirp in its burrowed home,
then expands to a whole-note interval
to celebrate its fledgling festival.
It’s not long before the minor-third
becomes the adolescent bird,
then, brighter still, comes major next
as the cuckoo attempts to flee the nest.
As the interval grows ever-wider,
the cuckoo finds it increasingly harder
to establish itself with its broken voice,
and nature gives it little choice
but to steal another’s nest (or lover)
and repeat the same tune over and over.

 

During this time, the cuckoo kept on cropping up in my poetry. I had no idea that this woman who I was becoming more and more besotted with was not only too good to be true, but was stealing more than other birds’ nests. It would be a matter of weeks that the cuckoo’s call, with its ominous warning, would be heard, too late. ‘Oh, bird of fear, unpleasing to the married ear,’ as Shakespeare says. Having shared much of the poetry I was writing, my ‘girlfriend’ (not that I was able to call her that) sent me a picture that she had been working on. It was a vulture: sinister and macabre.

If this was the bird that fluttered inside her chest, there really was something strange going on. But, as I said in my previous post, there was also something far more important developing deep inside her. Then, however, at a crucial point in our relationship something shocking happened. Despite being estranged from her family whose religious convictions she did not share, my ‘new-love’ was dealt a strange blow. Her mother, allegedly prone to extreme mental ill-health, took her own life.

Around this time, my parents were due to visit me to hear a poetry reading I was giving at the National Library. I wanted to introduce them to the new person in my life. Unfortunately, she had to travel to England for her mother’s funeral. Seemingly in shock (but coping admirably) she ended up organising everything for the funeral – she even sent me pictures of all the flowers she’d bought.

She had booked a holiday with friends, due to leave the day after the funeral. I’d planned a trip to England too, so this meant a brief separation. First, we had to discuss the tricky issue of her pregnancy. We agreed, given the early stage of our relationship, that we were not ready to have a child in our lives. My fear that this bombshell would seriously undermine what was going on between us was unfounded. She professed her love for me; we made love (if only that was the true term) for hours and then, she departed for the funeral/holiday.

During that holiday, only a few weeks into the pregnancy, she had a miscarriage. I was hundreds of miles away, and could not have felt further from the person (so I thought) I loved. Then a bigger bombshell dropped. After many “wish you were here”-type texts from her holiday destination in the Western Isles, I received the message that no-one in love wants to hear. She wanted to withdraw from our intimate relationship.  

 

The Cuckoo and The Nightingale

 

                And the King…

                harkened to the Nightingale’s sorrowfulness

                ’til all his own was gone.

                                                - Walter De La Mare

 

Handel penned an organ conversation

between two lonely, disparate birds.
The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,
though seldom seen or heard together,
met in a Garden where a King once walked.
Though tentative at first, they talked and talked.

‘Your song is sad,’ the Cuckoo said: ‘Why so?’

The Nightingale recited melodies
relating a thousand sorry stories
of love lost, slighted, or unrequited;
of Knights-at-arms, and shepherds-in-thrall
to merciless, mendacious maidens;
of Cypress trees and a lonely King
with unexplained sadness; and willows weeping.

The Cuckoo was appalled at how

the Nightingale regaled the sadnesses
that filled the early evening air.
While she cuckoo’d her ostinato
Nightingale whistled and trilled,
and repeated his tune in a modulation.
Cuckoo continued her cliché, rejoicing
in all that was unpleasing to her friend.

‘You’re a funny little bird,’ said Cuckoo.

‘All your jargon sings of sorrowfulness
and yet you pepper it with turns and trills
and ornaments.’

                                ‘I beg your pardon,’

requested Nightingale. ‘My song goes on
while yours – little more than a cheap thrill –
is spent by June or – at latest – July.’

‘That may be true, Cuckoo replied,’

since I must fly the nest. I refuse
to waste my song in elaborate catches. I
adapt my interval to fit whatever music matches.
You move in modulation while I cadence;
your sequential passages are smart,
but I provide a satisfying answer
without elaboration of intellect or heart.

The Nightingale noticed a flaw in the argument.

‘I hear that basic tune you pipe without
emotion, simplistic. While you augment
your vocals I remain bel canto.

                                                ‘You fantasize,’

accused Cuckoo, ‘that I am common and stupid.
Though classically trained you’d be wise
to remember the potency of cheap music.’

At this point Nightingale halted his song,

although neither was out of turn. Cuckoo, however,
had seen her chance and focussed her notes on a
trysting couple who met in the Garden.
Nightingale, silent, observed as the courting
occurred and the new lovers kissed.
The Cuckoo transgressed; her melody turned
from melancholic minor third to a perfect fourth.

Nightingale chirruped and warned them

of this cheeky bird’s deceit. But cuckoos
never give a fuck whose hearts are broken,
or who may be tricked by a fleeting melody.
While Nightingale revelled in bitter malady
and analysed every single conversation,
Cuckoo adapted to whatever was wanted
and summed up the simple sexual situation.

But Nightingale, noticing that Cuckoo’s notes

were (like the lovers) already drifting apart,
introduced a tone that some describe as ‘blue.’
Cuckoo, completing the movement, instigated
a musical rendition of “I love you”
(contestable, of course) at which
the conversation of the lovers was through.
However, the birds still had to settle a score.

Said Nightingale: ‘You started with a minor third,

but by the end a major fifth was heard.’

                                                 ‘I know,’

concurred Cuckoo, ‘But don’t imagine I don’t
feel guilty myself. Most of the lovers I court
fall apart and end up unhappy as yours.
All I do is laugh and jest and then
fly off again in search of another nest – 
in fruitless pursuit of love and happiness.’

As Nightingale half-listened she went on:

‘My sorrowfulness is never, ever gone.
While I am stuck in perfidious, invincible spring,
your sorrow (or the lovers’ you console) is done.’
Nightingale noticed Cuckoo had changed her tune.
‘I know,’ said cuckoo, sadly. ‘It’s what I do.’
So Nightingale continued his melancholy song,
while Cuckoo said again: ‘I know. It’s what I do.’

 

To say I was devastated understates the damage she had intended to cause me. Something was seriously wrong. The person I had been in an intimate and ecstatic relationship with for several months had dumped me by text, blocked me from Facebook, and deleted her twitter. It was at this point that the elaborate web of deceit that she had strung me along with began to unravel.

 

Jigsaw

               

I tried to piece together

   the puzzle of our love.

But you’d placed your

  pieces upside down.

 

You claimed we

   didn’t fit together.

Only when you left

   did I begin to see

 

the fuller picture

    and the missing

piece you took

   away with you

 

After she abruptly and cruelly ended our relationship, I began to dig for clues. The question that plagued me was: why did she do this? I wanted to get to the bottom of it – to know the truth. As Hannah Arendt said, ‘there is only one truth, but it is alive, and so has a constantly changing face.’ I was in a desperate state of heart-break and confusion, and at that stage, still concerned for her. After all, she had just lost the child that we had supposedly created. But was this even true?

In my desperation, I went to her flat to deliver a poem in person. I’d printed it out on tiny slips of thin paper, stitched together with a feather. It was originally titled with her surname which, so she told me, meant ‘little bird.’ I’m sure that, whatever her own understanding of truth, she had been as taken in by her own mendacity as I had been deceived. But I had also managed to deceive myself, as I discovered when I knocked at her door.

 

Little Bird

 

Against all probability
and expectations of weather,
I discovered a fancy, a charm:
a tiny, exquisite feather.

I gave it to my loved one
but she wasn’t that impressed.
She said she felt it flutter deep
inside her delicate chest.
 
As it grew against her wishes
with teasing and with tickling
the thing became a little bird
with uncontrollable wings.
 
My love was, first, beguiled
but soon it turned into confusion,
for a single lucky feather
quickly grew into profusion.
 
It would, she knew, develop
from fledgling to fully-grown;
she felt it was far more
than just a feather I had sown.
 
In time the bird grew desperate,
and flapped and pecked and clawed.
It neither sang nor carolled,
nor chirped nor karked nor cawed.
 
It was as if the bird alive
was trapped inside a cage;
with no way of escape it flapped
in frantic, pointless rage.
 
I asked, what type of bird is this:
a pigeon or a dove?
A cuckoo or a nightingale;
a bird of prey or love?
 
She couldn’t say at first but then
declared it was a vulture.
It wasn’t quite what I had wished-
for in this wingéd creature.
 
She feared its wings would open wide
and break out of her frame.
Consoling her with soothing words –
she panicked just the same –
 
I said, this bird is real, I know:
a creature of our making.
Embrace it, place it in your heart:
it is yours for the taking.
 
But if she took, I’ll never know,
for the feather faded away.
The bird, disturbed, disappeared
without word in a single day.
 
It was at the hottest time of the year
that we came together as one.
But, as Icarus was mortal, we also
had flown too close to the sun.
 
The charm I gave my love was
little more than a waxen feather.
And as the sun went down, the bird
melted and slid right out of her.

Against all possibility,
in meaning beyond my verse
I discovered how a blessing
quickly turns into a curse.

 

If you have been following this story in the previous posts on this blog, you will know that I once saw her with a grey-haired man, about whom I knew nothing since she was careful not to reveal his existence to me. I found a link between him and her on Facebook.  She claimed he was one of her ‘best friends in the world.’ Their picture said otherwise. This man answered the door. I then learned that she hadn’t been attending her mother’s funeral two Saturdays before, as she had told me.

This man, a so-called best friend, was my ex-lover’s new husband. Her mother had attended their wedding on the day she was supposedly being laid to rest. As secrets turned to lies, at first I thought there must be some confusion. But when the penny dropped with a loud clang, I told this man exactly what had been going on. Understandably, he asked me to leave. And as I did, I swear I heard the cuckoo’s mocking call.

 

If I could leave this story here, I would.

Love or Death?

Anyone who has been in love (and let’s face it, surely everyone has?) will know how vulnerable one can become. Unlike the snail in the poem posted below, some retain an unbreakable shell to hide in. And anyone who has a relationship with a poet must know that they’ll end up ‘in these lines, from time to time,’ to quote Joni Mitchell. In that same song, ‘A Case of you,’ Joni takes a line from Julius Caesar: ‘I am as constant as the Northern Star.’ Having cited a play about horrific deceit and betrayal, it’s time to continue my tale about the person I thought I had fallen in love with last year.

When I first began to perform my work on the spoken word scene in Edinburgh, I found it nerve-wracking. Despite my experience as a performer, I discovered that reading or reciting one’s own words leaves a person exposed. It’s not the same vulnerability that falling in love brings, where one can risk being exploited with utter devastation – as have I learned to my cost. Edinburgh audiences are warm and supportive, welcoming people no matter where they are from or at as writers.

As I performed more, I became well-known for using props and pictures to accompany my words. I sometimes invited fellow-performers to recite with me. Playing my best hand, I sang in between poems, making my performance memorable to some. For one poem, I got a member of the audience (prior to performing) to flip a fifty pence coin at the end of the poem. This made the audience believe the poem’s end is decided by the toss of a coin. Not the case, but I like the conceit.

 

Decision-Making

 
They tossed a coin.
She had to leave the next day, so,
as if their love was purchased by
a simple ‘heads-or-tails,’ they tossed a coin.

They met by chance,

so why not leave their parting up to Fate.
They tossed a coin before it was too late,
before affairs internal intervened;
decisions better made by flip-of-coin
than flutter-of-heart or flicker-of-brain.
 
Before they feared all hope of love was lost,
before she caught her plane, they tossed –
although she’d bought the ticket with
the same process; heads, return;
(or was it, single?) tails, one-way.
That lucky coin had much to do to earn its pay.

It seemed a flippant way to choose

between a part-time love, long-distance,
or a momentary muse.
They tossed a coin and left to Chance
a future separate or separated;
a fifty-fifty abdication of
decisions doubly complicated:
What if either was to disagree?
Should they try for best-of-three?

They could, of course, ignore Fate’s fickle hand,
and do whatever Love had planned:
Love, that faithless mimic of Fate’s random.
It was Love had thrown them both together, tandem.
And so, they tossed the coin the one time only.
It was that coin that held them both together, lonely.

 

This poem was published in one of the Blind Poetics pamphlets. When I performed it at The Blind Poet last year, I asked an attractive young woman sitting on the sofa next to the stage area if she could do the coin-flip thing. A grey-haired man, old enough to be her father’s older brother, said ‘She won’t be able to.’ I gave him a look that said, I wasn’t asking you, and handed her the coin. I hate to admit that her companion was right. I ended up tossing the coin myself.

The un-named person at the centre of my current tale was, I later learned, that girl on the sofa. We met, by chance, a few months after and began ‘seeing each other,’ to coin a phrase. I subsequently gave her a second chance to flip a coin in exchange for tickets I’d bought to see something together, and she succeeded. It seems the grey-haired man didn’t know her so well after all. It also seemed that fate in fact had a different ending in store, although I didn’t come to know this for some time.

I had no reason to think the newly-forming relationship that I was in was destined for the disaster that occurred. Since I have indicated that she was a manipulative schemer, I’m not sure it was down to fate at all. Were there warning-signs? Oh yes, but when you are newly in love with a person who is a figment of their own imagination, even those romantic composers can be quickly dismissed.

 

Neue Liebe

Mendelssohn began where Schumann left off,

took a newer, or ‘renewed’ love,
and set off on a pacing steed into a night
of moonlit passion and speedy quaver passages.
Did he think he’d found the key
to an eternal mystery that Schumann
attempted to bury at sea?
Old Felix liked the water, true enough,
but couldn’t stop the floods from drowning Love.
His diminished chord on ‘Tod’ proved it was not,
as the Bible claims, as strong as Death.
Maybe he was expecting something truly
novel out of Love, not just a dull repeat.
But this was a man who claimed he could
see Fingal’s Cave from Arthur’s Seat.

 

As I have said, our relationship wasn’t straight-forward. She was a busy person, with her tutoring, studies, and business arrangements (although I’ll never know how genuine these were.) I have to admit I was upset when she didn’t come to see me performing my work, especially since the poems were inspired by her. But I’m not a possessive type. Once, before we were formally introduced to each other, she asked if I was going to a particular poetry event. I had forgotten our first encounter at the Blind Poet, and was surprised to find that she knew I was into spoken word stuff.

I attended the event in question and, naturally, looked out for her. She wasn’t there. It seems that, from the start, she was plotting her connivance. The first part of her plan was to ensure that our social paths never crossed. I guess it was important that I didn’t see that grey-haired man again. Lately, a friend said to me that this story has become the stuff of myth; we can never be sure what happened or did not; what was true or fake. I put her behaviour down to the fact that we wanted different things from our relationship. Yet she made it clear that she wanted me in her life.

 

Mixed Doubles

I tried to explain polytonality

to a student.
It’s two opposing modalities
played at the same time.
He looked confused.
Don’t the differing tonalities jar?
No, said I: it’s about what you feel,
not what you think you hear.
It’s a four foot stop
on the organ,
or that bit in the Bolero, you know,
where the high winds play
the same tune in a different key.
I could tell he’d never seen
that dance made famous
by Torville and Dean.
At the same time? said he.
Yes, said I, consecutively.
The pleasure principle, doubled?
said he, clearly troubled.
So I said, it’s like two lovers
who want different things,
and yet their love still sings.
He looked at me quizzically.
Why?
It simply is,
said I.

 

Of course I’ll never really know what was going on in the mind of this person I was dating, if that’s the right expression. I had no reason to believe that the texts, emails and conversations that we shared were anything other than genuine. I knew that the expression ‘love’ was hard for her, partly due to the difficult up-bringing she had been through. That said, I don’t know how much of what she told me was actually true. Either way, she seemed unable to express those three magic words.

Fickle Daisies

She plucked another petal, then

another when she found it true.
And thinking she’d been fooled,
she plucked another petal. Then
presuming luck – or fate – pretend
to know the answer over-ruled
she plucked another petal; then
another when she found it true.

 

I’m going to end this post with another song, by Genesis. After Gabriel and Hackett left, there were only three. It seems there were at least three people in this person’s life. And I had been lured into a waiting trap that I could never have spotted. For all her reticence to utter the words, ‘I love you,’ this person who shall not be named was quite able to say another three fateful words.

‘I am pregnant.’