THE INVENTOR OF BUTTERFLIES
Hanging by mortality’s fraying rope
in this reluctant hurry to grow old
is the last and saddest surprise of all.
Regret is a freed slave turned dictator
who passed me on his road to power
and waits at every corner, reciting
a history of things that never happened.
Birds flying backwards through my life,
those thoughts that swarm like internet bots
feed me constantly on darkness.
Sometimes I escape and find my way here,
where everything has gleaming facets
with gorgeous insects flitting inside
displaying wings of gold and diamond eyes.
UNCLE JACK
The bare room did not recognise him
and the furniture was full of spies, he said.
Each visit passed quickly into a silence
glaring and evil carrying on
a nonsensical, maniacal monologue.
That war – which he had not understood
at twenty-five any better than he did now,
and maybe even less – had wiped him clean
so his face was an expressionless wall
that forgot itself a little more each day.
He had nothing of his own, not really,
except that amnesia of the soul,
a beach on a barren promontory
strewn with scattered shells of comprehension.
But you cannot measure degrees of reality;
perhaps, unseen, his imprisoned life
emerged occasionally to stride,
roaring and raucous, round the room
and his mind was a mill grinding emptiness
into brilliant colours and spices
while he folded and packed his memories
before the mysterious journey.
The world had fled, but maybe dead things rose
from the bottom mud of that earlier life,
tugging at a sleeve to get his attention.
I don’t know how the war made him collapse
and curl up, but it must have been fear
that dispersed into a hundred spiders
spread out in scuttling clusters
while he grew smaller and smaller inside,
a piece of smouldering paper
that turned into ash and crumbled away.
His eyes still bled that darkness with every beat
of their lids and the night that had glided above
for so long was resting on his shoulders,
a black train long as the world racing
through an endless tunnel and beyond.
Published in The Exacting Clam
S.C. Flynn 