train driver
A train of horses, propelled by the harmonies of a ghostly choir, gallops towards me. Carriages filled with Roman warriors close a gap on my view.
They are all women and I am swept up as one of them as we tear around a racing track of mammoth dimensions – a dirt current circling a mountainous anthill in the centre of a Colosseum.
Curves feel straight.
Chants of “We are alive! I am alive!” stamp their way from the women’s mouths and I know what music means.
All is awash with purple.
From the halo of my head a man cries louder echoes of the party’s song. “We are alive! I am alive!”
He is the driver of this train of women and horses.
I have this vision before I fall asleep but after my eyes have closed.
It plays on stereo tracks alongside my thoughts.
It haunts me – the music – from 2am till 5.
I become irritated and get up to write this.
My eyes sting and my hamstrings have been swallowed by the fluid of my dreams.
elpis ellipses
Hope is necessary evil.
Drying gum
Welded to underside lip of a Grecian urn.
Enough herb retained to freshen outlook.
Enough chew remains to lessen hook hold
On hanging nails.
Tooth-powdered antidotes
Awaken spitting acid hunger.
Comfort or curse?
Temptation withheld or
Treasure preserved
In Pithos,
Incarnate curve of cunning?
Womb of original sinning.
Posters for children
Long missing
Pasted with pissed-on placebo
To peeling telegraph poles.
Erected misdirected honour
Of mortal control
Over fate’s lightning bolt.
Elpis ellipses end…
Lines…
Lingering…
In sand,
Swinging golden key chain from curiosity’s neck.
Turned lock ejects curses.
What’s left
Clings behind liquid ears.
Greyed and grotesque.
Indigestible swill
Fills whale belly bloat
With polluted krill
And toymaker’s wooden star
Wishes
Only made real with human guts
And gritted grimaces.
Fuelling will to go on living.
Perpetually expecting.
Precariously constructing
Pyre of unfledged bone-kindling
For fire never ours
From the beginning.
la petit mort
As I die little deaths,
Successions of la petite mort,
Remind me of my name.
Or better still, bestow
Upon me a new one.
One that sounds like scarves
Of purple turgidity
Blooming violet violence
Seeded from the strength of benevolence.
Leave tender tokens
On the flesh of memory
And woodwind songs
On the backside of collapsed eyelids.
Seizure whites drink
Mountains of shoulders
That feed teeth
With fragrant bread of majesty.
Lift the skirt of obscurity,
Join me on this bed of death.
We are ghosts.
Pale-eyed and O-mouthed.
Blinded to fallacious phantoms
Of light and dark tunnels.
One plus one is a third.
Yet one.
Yet none.
Infinite
Silken time unspun from the envelope of philosophy.
Cassie Jayne Fielding is from England and writes poetry to explore the nature of consciousness.
The Literary Forest Poetry Magazine 