Division (2)

This is the second part to the poem I posted at the end of March. It didn't take five months to write, I just left a draft stagnating for a while and have only recently thought to actually finish it.

Division (2)

Look through the lens of a compound microscope

and see the fabric of all living things.

With dish set down

and lamp clicked on

it is visible:

a parent cell,

magnified 100 times,

with a cellophane cytoplasm

and a nucleus; a womb that nurtures

the chaos of chromatin.

From this inert interphase to prophase:

The paired centrosomes part,

linked by microtubule arms

that stretch across the cytoplasm,

clasping hands tightly, making an arch for dancers.

The chromatin then coils into chromosomes,

condensing scribbles into four stringed worms.

In prometaphase the nucleus splinters

like a broken glass bubble,

and the strings morph into

butterflies with DNA wings;

they fly out and

stick to the spindle flowers.

Metaphase is simple:

the butterfly chromosomes are

pushed in line,

and in anaphase they are

ripped in half, the spindles

snapping them back like bungee cords.

In telephase the cell divides,

reaching the final stage of this

split story: cytokinesis.

The two daughters drift apart and

piece themselves together;

the chromosomes wrestle

until they entangle,

and an envelope

curls around them like a shell:

one nucleus, one heart,

and two living cells.

Canned Heat

They were on what must have been one of the last trains to nearly to arrive at Oxford Road Station. Outside the day was thinking about a turn toward a darker form. It would start off from the hills and then take the long road back into the city just as the last of the traffic raced home to beat it. Outside it was the still the great sweat of the summer that just wouldn’t leave off. But it wasn’t as muscular these days and not so demanding of one’s time. People had been wrestling with it for months though. They had hated it and loved it and now they seemed to pity it. Sorry that it had to go, but accepting of that fact as something quite inevitable like run-down batteries or slipping wallpaper. It had been welcomed, especially at first, but like many welcomed too readily and with too much zeal it had soon forgotten itself, got drunk on its own self-involvement and stayed far too long. It was self-inflicted then and was all anyone talked about anymore. They couldn't help talking about it. It waited all day long on the pavements demanding to be addressed. It dozed on park benches so that no-one else could sit down. It ranged across entire buildings so that windows seemed to melt away in giddy shimmers. It sat on cars and then inside cars. It was immobilizing. It was diurnal but waited up all hours. And now even at its lesser strength it still blazed a way into ‘C’ carriage making everyone tired and irritable. Now, looking out of the windows the passengers had nothing but shear jealousy for those hazy houses that came galloping up close to the line with what seemed like instinctive knowledge that a great rush of wind would follow that train and drench every swollen brick in diesel-coolness.

Pastoral

They ask for a pastoral scene
so I give them an industrial wasteland
with a bluebell growing out of the rubble
clutching the concrete like a child crying out for its mother.

Patrick Perrysloe

Sat low and glaring through bent fingers he watched the unloading

of the blossom tree blown utterly naked by the wind.

He thought his father’s hands were now his own

and he used them as a mask with which to watch behind

what seemed to him to be the ending of the world.

Nothing would hinder the pink lot becoming dark.

The loss of the white flaking bundles.

Flowers wet and teeming, seeming to aim just for him

his cloth hat, his strong calfs and for his mouth, like confetti might.

As if all the world was shaken up yet glassed tightly and filled full

of this stuff, this air filling blossom.

A single button made-tight but by time made-loose

sprung-free from his coat when he stood.

Hitting the bench and rolling under.

See how these fixities can all of them fling themselves from you

at will, with something like that wicked button-confidence.

Patrick Perrysloe: world forgotton.

His door was dark and peeling pale.

Letters behind it gathering for him and one other. 

He was a strange sort of sad like the bee 

that stays too long to see the death-show

of all that he had once begot.

Nothing for it now but get drunk on the fallen fermenting fruit.

Or die close-curled within the yellow flute of a daffodil.  

See his wooden table all waxed in that particular and beautiful brown.

So clean but for one corner worn soft and dull by his nights

of smoking pipe-tobacco or listening to the radio

or to his CD’s: Gieseking, Bach, Mozart, Mahler.

History books piled high even to hide the laptop that some son had

bought for him long ago promising to show him how.

He stood and prepared himself two cups. 

Opened the door into the backyard

where he’d built a small shed eight years ago.

Where once he came home and found a crack-head almost dead inside.

And now he checked it all the time and imagined inside 

what was never there again.

His thoughts turned back to the tea.

   

First cup he took milky, the other tea brewed in its black leaves.

Ripped tea-bags halved and fainting and fainting over in the breeze.

Her old pills there by the china bowl, still.   

Eighteen 500mg capsules of morphine, 

15gms of Fucidin Cream for the scars.

For a long time now he’d a sneaky suspicion

that this, her last dosage went to the toilet.

Replaced with sweeteners or paracetamol or both.

That she’d wanted all the horrible pain of it in the last instance.   

He opened a low unit and stepped a foot inside to reach better.

He found the plastic lid and felt the embossed script and numbers there.

But he slipped, fell and hit the floor.  

The medicine tub tumbled and split apart despite all the seals

And hard white bits of her came out and dropped like blossom

Against the unnatural kitchen sky.

Or so they looked from the floor to him, Patrick Perrysloe.

Each one pill a little white hill of her for him to climb.

He tasted one expecting sweet, but no – better, like morphine.

He tasted more as they came rolling by.

If they touched the blood they stopped dark and vanished.

She’d died in no pain at all and the good pills had killed her well.

And now they killed him, not fast but very slow. 

Manchester

Manchester - somewhere between Salford Crescent and Manchester Piccadilly is a house that has been there forever. Long enough to watch the city unfold for miles around it. From canal-ways to motorways. It's been watching from its privileged vantage point. Not so tall as to be noticed much by anyone on the street, yet not so small as to be smothered entirely by the ever-growing city. It gets just enough light. The train-drivers know it. They cannot remember a time when they did not know of it. They eye the house suspiciously as they near, changing gears, slowing down even to a crawl half-dreading the dark mass with its puckered brickwork. They imagine how the constant vibrations of the trains might be forcing away the dry cement, making it crumble and move and that one day it could all come tumbling down on top of them, taking the raised track with it. But it hasn't yet and they forget about it as soon as they pass, for though it is a-part-of, it stands apart. Like how trees sometimes have gates erected too near and since the stubborn gate metal won’t budge and the tree just can’t help growing the tree ends up absorbing the gate. So the house seems absorb, to crouch quite underneath the railway but lean in dramatically as it nears the tracks and then rises above it so that the two structures almost meet or even do meet. So passing-by the train windows darken in the shade of the house and though they are not conscious of the reasons why the passengers stand and ready themselves to leave. What they do know is that something old and strange has passed and that they are now more or less in Manchester.

Division (1)

Look down through the scope of a God

and see the canvas of your creation.

Backlit in bright light

on a plastic square

it sits:

a single cell,

a bubble, an eye,

a dimpled drop of life

outlined in black.

Its shadowed centre

stares silently back

and across its soft surface

are moon crater marks

where atom-sized astronauts

have cell space-walked.

This comet, this planet:

inert and unmoving

yet born from nothing.

Now its boundaries are bulging

the cell it is growing

expanding

ballooning

but squeezed in the sides,

pinched in the middle,

and still it gets bigger

but its body is strained

and a rupture rips downwards,

tearing right through it,

and splitting two cells

slowly apart

now only a bridge

connects them together

a stem, a bond,

a hand holding on which

bursts in a last bubbled kiss

as the parent gives birth.

Two cells, two hearts,

a beginning, a start:

a child, a cancer

a mother, a monster.

Stargazer

 

 




A young man, old;

Silent, and thoughtful

On a hard chair, cold;

Smiling, but weary.

Breaking, the flow

No work, no play

Detached, limbo;

Not worried, not restless.

Thinking, ahead:

Glazed eyes, glazed mind

A long way, to go

Through dreams, through hopes.

Drifting, away:

Past planets, past stars;

Not lost, in space

Just travelling, afar.