Publishes,

Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, Daisy Watkins-Harvey

I
There is the moment that’s been waiting for you.
Your hand is not in it.
It is not, could not, be of your own design.
Here it comes
riding slipstream the warm jasmine breath
of night,
gliding through your open window like a vapour spirit.

Outside the streets are demented by noise.
The rabble runs riot,
drunk on summer,
emboldened by the miracle of Friday.
Singing out, screaming out,
drowning out the city
until nothing remains but a primal forest,
alive with the raucous discord of a thousand
birds at daybreak.

Your youth is animal in you.
A shape shifting menagerie.
Soon something will stick and settle,
but for now you are pure horse,
unbroken,
flighty as fuck,
electric strength flickering beneath the skin. Dreaming in perfect long distance.

You have run yourself ragged today.
Pillar to post,
long, thin fingers at work:

pencil, cigarette, chisel, cigarette.
Shavings, ash, splinters of stone.
Slender silver lines of possibility traced on the future.
This is not it

The long forever moment before the partition of your life
into before parts and into after.
This then,
before the then and now.

The computer’s screen
throws up its cool glow against the hot dark.
Outside the night’s on fire.
Was it John who said that life’s
what happens when you’re busy
making other plans?
But daytime is to planning
what night time is to dreaming
and darling you were only
sleeping.

II
The body compensates for what it has lost.

III
Remember this — before I was womb
I was spine.
As the unformed earth
yawned and stretched
in its amniotic mess
I was its first hard certainty.
Before the dust settled,
before the wind unearthed me,
before the water sluiced me clean,
before man first modified me to his needs, I was hard.

Remember —
that I was weapon first,
the grinding stone,
the flint that struck the dark ignorance of your being.
I was the fortress wall,
the foundation.
It’s a long history, isn’t it?
Full of forgetting.
The truth is diluted,
the wellspring poisoned with diminutions.
The baby girls,
the broken dolls
the rolling stones.
Instead, think bigger.
Monolithic.
You don’t even know how immense. Monotheistic.
All god, no servant.
You will pray
that you never felt me.
You will pray
that you never pushed your chalk bones against me.
Excalibur is a myth within a myth
about a king who never lived,
and as far as anyone knows
you can’t draw blood from stone.

Carly Rawson
2017

Daisy Watkins-Harvey
Me they shall feel while I am able to stand
30 August – 23 September 2017