Tiresias

Picture the scene:

A boy of fifteen.

With the usual dreams

And the usual routine.

Heading to school with a dullness inside

Borne of desires left unsatisfied.

Is he stifled or is he just

Learning the ways of his times?

Give him limbs that are awkward

But know how to climb.

Give him a gait that you know.

Give him hopes.

His days are so painfully slow,

But he copes.

This morning

He wakes to the same old alarm.

Slumps in the shower

Like a frog in the rain.

Winks at the mirror – does cool, does charm.

Shaves soft skin.

Nods at the pain.

No hair yet. Soon though.

Headphones on.

Last half of last night’s joint in his lips.

Bass so loud it feels like a movie.

Scuffing his trainers.

Swinging his hips.

They’re always laughing,

The kids at the bus stop.

He tries to ignore them,

But it doesn’t help.

Hood up, he walks past them.

Blowing out smoke rings.

Singing out Wu-Tang.

Hating himself.

Into the woods, he takes the old path.

There is the rope swing,

There is the bath lying broken.

There is his name in the bark.

There are the trees,

So slim and so stark

In the thin little woodland.

Hardly a forest,

The last of the green washed clean by the grey.

There is the bike chain that nobody wanted,

There is a child’s shoe

– hope they’re ok.

Out of the damp leaves and mulch in the pathway

His eye is caught by a glittering flash.

A dark moving something,

A mess of bright muscle.

Ore in a forge,

A deep, billowing gash.

Snakes. Two snakes!

Coiling, uncoiling

Boiling and cooling

Oil in a cauldron

Foil in a river

Soil on a mood ring.

He stares:

They spoil each other.

They do things

He has only dreamt of doing.

His blood’s alive inside him, fizzing.

He shuts his eyes and watches blotches

Underneath his lids for minutes.

But peeks before he knows he’s peeking.

Clutching his knees, he squats on his haunches

Watching the scales as they bounce and contort

And before he has thought he has reached out a fist

And picked up a short stick that lies near a ditch.

He swings from above

And breaks open the fortress.

The snakes, now apart,

Seem smaller, more awkward.

They flee for their love.

The boy, swaying and nauseous

Falls to the floor

More raw than before,

More tortured.

He feels himself shiver, contorting.

A current is coursing within him,

Shorting his circuits.

He curses,

His curses are perfect

The trees bow their branches in worship.

His body’s responding to something beyond him.

Swells where before there were dips.

A crunching of muscle, the hips

Opening up, bones roaring,

Beneath them, boyhood shrinking, falling inwards.

Thinking nothing.

Feeling new blood rushing.

Scuffing ankles on the forest floor

As his shape moves

His body pours itself to puddles.

He fits and starts.

He will be more than the sum of his parts.

He shakes and shouts, a screwed-up mouth.

A pain that only women know

Grabs him in the guts.

He slows to gently stuttered breaths

He stops.

He feels.

He’s still.

He rests.

And slowly, with caution

She climbs to her feet.

Wipes tears from her cheeks with her sleeve.

Frowns at the trees.

How could you stay so calm?

Places a nervous palm

Against her new face, her new chest,

The new flesh of her arm.

She approaches the school gates,

She can’t face her class.

She can’t go home, not now.

She is glass

Amongst sand.

She turns and retreats.

Finds herself deep

In the smog and the heat,

The fog and the meat

Of the bodies that beat out their lives

In the throb of the street.

She learns to be small and discreet.

She learns to be thankful for all that she eats.

She learns how to smile

Without meaning an inch of it.

She learns how to swim in the stink

And not sink in it.

It’s as if this is all she has known.

Give her a face that is kind, that belongs

To a woman you know

Who is strong

And believes in the rightness of doing things wrong.

Give her a body that breathes deep at night

That is warm and unending; as total as light.

Let her live.

Brighter every day

That she was not so young and desperate.

Bigger every minute

That she settled all the restless

Urges in her chest

And when she woke from nightmares, breathless,

She would piece herself together

Like some relic found in ash and clay,

A precious, ancient necklace.

When she was complete again,

She’d wolfwalk into town.

And drink down every wave that came

To break her spirits down.

She was wild and wonderful.

A star throughout the district.

A red light dreadnought.

Queen among misfits.

And yes, sometimes they sneered

When they glimpsed her in the gutter.

It made her crack her knuckles,

Shake her head and start to mutter

To herself under her breath

You posh pricks don’t know fucking shit.

And they would look away

And light their cigarettes and spit.

She liked to giggle with the pretty boys and kiss the lonely addicts

And weave exquisite curtains for the dismal little attics

Where they lay their heads at night,

Out of beads and string and plastic.

Each corner she inhabited made warmer by her magic.

She grew expert in the field

Of love

She learned to see and feel

The deepest secrets lurking in

The hearts of those who came to swim

In her dark waters.

She knew things.

She knew Kings

And she bore daughters.

She knew love, she made her fortune.

Till she met her match.

Exhaustion.

He was an older man,

A man who liked to hold her hand

A man who made her feel like she was rolling round on golden sand.

A man as soft as any girl

A man as hard as any luck.

She understood what life was for

Each time they bucked and came unstuck.

True love takes its toll

On souls

Who are not used to feeling whole.

They tangle limbs and feel the shudders,

All the world is nothing.

Lovers:

Promising each other not to take the vital parts,

While even as they mutter it, they’re giving up their hearts.

It is a new moon

In late May

She gives way

To his weight

They are laid out flat by a lake.

She can feel

His blood in her veins.

He can feel

Her pulse in his wrists.

And they kiss.

And the moon hangs open and orange

Like a wound in the mist.

He asks her to marry him.

Have him forever and never be lonely but only together.

She thinks that he’s taking the piss.

Throws him a scowl so sharp his darkest parts are shafted, blasted, ripped in half,

She starts to laugh, she hits her palms

Against the grass. He lifts his arms, I mean it.

Shining cheeks, his garments creased,

Naked skin on cold damp heath. I mean it.

Silence. Let it land.

She cannot breathe or stand.

She crawls towards him, smiling.

Takes his hand.

Of course.

They kiss and both expand.

She decides she must go back,

Seek out a past.

A mother, a father,

Whatever she has.

A blessing or something,

Maybe an answer.

She packs some things and leaves at dawn, alone.

And heads out North. For home.

By dusk she’s walking the woods of her youth,

Smelling the air.

Is this where I’m from?

Who was I when I was here last?

If this isn’t home

Then where has home gone?

She sees a small clearing between the trees.

She’s rocks in a river.

She’s leaves in a breeze.

There is a shopping trolley

There are some keys

There is a hawthorn

There’s a horse chestnut

There’s a used condom

There’s an old desk lamp

There’s a nice conker …

Is that blood or ketchup?

Birds in the branches

Light in the darkness

Like sand in the toes of the bushes.

There!

Right there.

There in the path. In the leaves and the bracken

Two black backs untangle, dragons.

Coupling, shuffling, grappling.

She is staggering.

Can’t stop looking. Strange unravelling.

Something from before, something forgotten.

Someone she used to be.

Some rotten something in her darkest somewhere,

Scale and danger.

Nature, sunglare.

Faint, she takes a branch and holds it

Steadies herself. Stills her shoulders.

Snakes and sex and innocence

And nothing really makes much sense.

Who was I then?

She watches awed.

And grips the branch like it’s a sword.

Believing.

Believing.

I should be leaving.

She breaks the branch with sudden force.

She swings the branch, and knows its course:

The snakes, no chance, are soon divorced.

A sudden dark and squelching tension.

She panics, sweats, can’t breathe. Head pounds.

Her body writhes and juts.

No sounds.

The image of her lover’s face

Begins to shake and wilt and fade,

She loses him, there, in the shade.

It hurts. She’s felt this once before.

She knows this pain, this change, this awe.

She feels herself retract and harden.

Feels her bones enlarging,

Moving, arching.

Something charging,

She’s old milk bursting from its carton.

Shaken, floored, a body heaving

Writhing, smiling, something’s pleasing,

Finding her throat open, screaming,

Hoarse and full of light

Her body stops. She feels his might.

His veins thicken in intense delight.

A man again.

He stands, confused.

And walks away.

Too much to lose.

This poor once-boy, sudden-woman,

Who’d lived so long and done so well

And kept so much so deeply hidden,

Now found himself before the bell

Of some new door in some new town.

The pain of new beginnings.

Everything that went before

Gushed in him.

Water overfilling.

Smash the cup and let it happen.

Tiresias.

A full grown human.

Moves on from what he cannot fathom.

He swears his past will not consume him.

And so the man with many pasts

Matures into his present,

But he feels his waters move

In the last arc of the crescent,

And as the moon expands to full

He feels his blood respond,

But as all humans know to do,

He holds it in

And soldiers on.

Imagine how it feels

To walk so far away from life and love,

To know that all you’ve known

Is now

No longer enough.

All the blood they’d bled,

All the children they had borne,

All the mouths their mouths had met,

Behind them now.

Forlorn,

He staggers knee-deep through his pity

Sadness grabs his shins.

A stranger in a strangers’ city,

Where new strangeness begins.

In distant god terrain,

Mount Olympus, pink and milky,

Zeus and Hera fight again,

Raw and honest, foul and filthy,

Hera with her eyes screwed up

I swear you’re out to kill me.

She weeps and screams and he enjoys

The feeling of his power.

He froths and paces, thunders, pleads;

Tempers frayed, their bodies need

A break from fighting –

But none comes.

Not after this – another tongue

Roasted in his total blaze.

Surprise surprise, old Zeus has strayed.

The fighting carries on for days.

Down on Earth the weather’s mental.

Hurricanes and ancient heat.

Sudden freezes ice the deserts.

Rain leaves craters in concrete.

Hera’s ripping up her dresses.

– Am I not enough for you?

Zeus is melted, stares intently

– Sister, you are all I love.

– Then why?

– Because these others tempt me.

And unlike you, I lack the guts

To turn away and know my path.

Hera swigs straight from the cask,

The nectar’s strong and soothes her heart.

She sighs in disbelief, don’t start.

Zeus, bored of being wrong and sorry,

Puffs his chest up, shows his might.

Hera knows his godly body

Well enough to not take fright.

I don’t know what the fuss is for

Zeus begins, playing wounded.

Women like it more than Men.

I don’t even want to do it.

What you get from me is more

Than what I get from you.

Red rag to a Minotaur.

What? says Zeus. It’s true.

They row like it’s a holy war,

The Earth suffers their anger.

Finally, when neither has

The strength to raise the anchor

And the ship of their relations

Is broken-keeled and sinking,

And they’re fighting over what the other

Might have just been thinking,

They stop for ragged breaths.

The sky is bruised and black.

Hera won’t be pacified

Until he takes it back.

Tiresias, at peace at last,

Is older now than ever,

He’s found a lovely partner

And they’ve made a life together.

He won’t walk the woods alone;

He’ll only walk the heath.

He blanks out all the lives he’s known,

But they survive beneath.

He’s started doing pottery.

He’s joined the local choir.

If he thinks about his history

His heart is set on fire.

There’s no way back,

There is no track

That leads to his past lives.

He sets himself on forwards.

And he loves.

And he survives.

His lover is a gentle man,

Together they are free.

They enjoy each other