not for me
those clouds that fluff the sky and
shift their shape like ghosts
*
haunting heaven,
inhabiting while whiting out
our snowy floating formless hopes –
*
not for me
the worn-in practised phrase
that targets
*
some soft weakness of our stricken hearts,
but always misses,
misses
*
tittle-tattling flattery that bigs
us up
yet disses, disses –
*
o not for me
those chilled and flaky
trout-lipped puppet tendernesses
*
nor for me
those strung-out wants that need yet never do,
they’ll never do:
*
not for me a life that’s lost for lack of you.
*
for me then what is left to make my day?
for me your hand and head and heart and kiss
*
that permeate
the mark of love which others miss,
miss
*
mashing us while world spins on around us in its feckless way:
*
but all those flakes
who flurry through the sky, who
flourish infelicitously
*
without a touch from you
to ground them cannot be
a thing for me.
*
**
*
omm
november 2018
Further adumbrations: clouds – shadowing, fluffing the sky like assiduous, nimble-mouthed porn-star assistants, haunting heaven and, most intriguingly, “inhabiting while whiting out” our hopes.
This metaphor of clouds taking possession of our hopes, whilst concurrently wiping them out, is profoundly disturbing, and the words of a narrator seemingly disaffected, cast into brooding shadow by aery nature’s impacts.
The image of hopes “whited out” carries some eery incidental punning, combining weather effects with pornographic effects, and so further fleshing out the porn-film metaphor to which you allude, Amaya.
The narrator says such things are not for her, James – leaving it open whether they do not affect, apply, or appeal to her, or whether their operations are actively uncongenial to her.
It is at this point furthermore in the balance whether she is excluding or raising barriers, or whether they’re being imposed on her. This has obvious feminist implications in terms of interpretation.
And fittingly, at this very point, the focus shifts: to language, and it’s (mis)use to flatter, deceive – ultimately in a way that disses, with insincere “puppet” tendernesses, which may also miss the very weaknesses they target.
The puppets – or rather, their strings – reappear in the next section as the “strung out wants that need yet never do” – desires repressed, incapable of action.
Language is at once a means to express this repression and a tool or means for its enforcement.