By Mick Cunliffe.
[1] Cylinder
You see me as an empty shell of a man.
Not entirely wrong, but
I am a cylinder. Cold water pours right through.
You rebut, “there is a funnel
borne upon you. It channels His light
unto you.” It is a silly hat. I am a clown.
At my core there is no holy sponge. My sponge
is poorly-written fiction: dirty and worn, gnarled pieces
breaking off. Eventually it will wither to nothing.
Your Trinity – eternal in nature –
would surely not have placed such a grubby thing
at my core. Would they?
You truly believe that I have an eternal soul,
and it is a sponge?
Absorb. Absorb. Absorb.
That is the true me? The real me?
Not these keyboard-soft fingers,
these kitchen-baking-aching bare feet?
[2] Layer
Omelette-soft, pancake-stacked layers
upon layers crammed inside my skull
called my brain,
pulses of electricity flowing
between layers – an alcohol thumping
through as a soothing beverage.
Cognition. Awareness. Perception.
Thoughts. Creativity. Dreams.
A magnificence of my own pancake-stacked madness.
I crawled from a womb,
butt-smacked – wailing – howling –
a sprinkling of baking powder and castor sugar,
a pinch of salt into very plain flour.
If this were the work of ‘Him’
then ‘He’ is no more than
a celebrity chef peddling a cheap recipe book
for dusty and mostly undisturbed shelves
in the kitchens of the pious. Idiots!
Uber Eats and Menulog and Doordash
generate a far greater turnover nowadays
than celebrity chef cookbooks.
[3] Fizz
In my garden, eyes squeezed shut,
I stand listening.
A rat scurries across the leaf litter floor,
under shrubbery – yet I am still.
In that simple moment
poetry materialises.
This is a moment of still water meeting
a static spoonful of sodium bicarbonate.
BOOM. One into the other. FIZZ!
I did that. It was me. Adding ingredients, I stirred.
I don’t know much about chemistry. I possess no fizz.
But one into the other – I know – FIZZ! FIZZ!
This is a moment of solitude – of peace –
of tranquillity – of meditative contemplation –
in the garden – suddenly…fizz!
Bubbling and bursting and foaming
exploding imagination and idea and creation –
poetry, poetry, poetry!
The impetus was not a third-party pouring
not a funnel, not a sponge,
not a recipe book, or a hymnal, or a prayer.
