Mirror of the Son

Open sweated palmed hand, outstretched
Suctioned, still, against the joined spread-eagled fingers
Echoed in a flaking silver apparition of fear
Waiting for memory’s blood to smear reflections
Of a younger day of vivid green wet grass
Bending alongside child-like songs, meandering
In a meadow where satanic birds with curled talons
Seek the weak, oblivious to death’s closing shadows


Smash the frail mirror that laughs through glass
Release the shards of forgotten murmuring dreams
Time-warped in the Son’s ageing mirror




Harry Mills
Boracay Island, Philippines
1st January 2013
Dedicated to Harry, my Son
From : Departure Lounge

America

Silently sitting, clumsily in a lacquered wicker chair
Outside the once fashionable restaurant, waiting for her


Waiting for the morning’s daubing colour, jousting for street space
Smeared by sun, fighting shade along the waiting white walls
Where market sellers gather, like grey smudges
Below the gaudy faces of enamel fascias, smiling at lazy gazes


‘ She’s gone’
Her acid tongue spits sweet revenge, between pouting painted lips
Ice cold, like a sudden frost killing a frail summer
‘Gone? .. gone where?’


Her vampire blood- red varnished nails, preened for the clean kill
Outstretched vultures talons, tantalisingly, creeping closer
Along the starched Irish-linen white tablecloth, suddenly stopping
Like a pulse
‘America’


Harry Mills
English Bakery, Boracay, Philippines, 31st October 2012
From: Departure Lounge

Puzzles

Sunlight, morning bright
As a frightened rabbit’s eye dawning in the dew
Fidgeting, feeling, light’s touching fingers
Lingering across the bed’s defiant black shape
Arching it’s silence along your naked back
Birthing a new promise, a new day
Yet to be named and numbered in your brass clasped
Secret diary of coded names and puzzled numbers




Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines
17th January 2013
From : Departure Lounge

You

I think because of you
I painted the bedroom you never slept in, pink
Because of you


I sleep your sleep
Creep, weep, count endless sheep
Because of you



Harry Mills
Philippines 15th January 2013-01-15
From : Departure lounge

Marian’s Box

Crinkly, sun- aged in hump-backed flooded fields
Silent, as folded forgotten brown paper in dark draws
Weathered olive brown behind a lone caribou’s tail
Year after year, shedding brown babes at every furrow
Of promised rice shoots, failed, to a praying sun


A surprise box ! a daughter’s offering
In a quagmire of existence, of logos unknown to eyes
That cannot read, only to breed more mouths open
‘’Spaghetti Mama , ice cold Franchetti
Corn flakes and Spam to bake ... take !
Dried milk to boil, some cooking oil, Mama ‘’ 


Sweating now, behind the swishing ox
She dreams of another Christmas box
Of strange tastes and memories of children
Gone with kissed promises never to be fulfilled



Harry Mills
Boracay, Philippines, 6th January 2013
From : Departure Lounge

Tarnished Chrome

Pale smogish smoke over Embercombe woods
Creeps it’s slow spiral, like a glowing, smouldering
Charcoal perfumed ciborium, circling Benedictine ankles


Clamped in her two- wheeled chrome and leather coffin
Arousing penitence from pungent clinging blue incense
For his rampant incest behind ramped, iron belted doors


Now crooked leg-irons, concealed, covered with scorched blanket
Of congealed woollen fibres warping the weft, as deftly
As her dead dream to rise majestically from her wheelchair prison


A Phoenix
Arising, with pure white outstretched wings, flying free
Flying free




Harry Mills
Apartment A10 English Bakery Boracay Philippines
3rd October 2012
From: Departure Lounge

Crossing the Chasm

The eggs of quails, like Bedouin’s creamy cold peals
Roll the turning tongue’s treasure of twirled Burgundy
Feeding the absent senses of a kindled light perpetual
In a Southern night of toothless soothsayer’s prophesies
Of an open fingered outstretched withered hand
That will sooth life’s bended brow of a troubled ending
Crossing the chasm of spilt wine and fumbled pearls



Harry Mills
Apt A10 English Bakery Boracay Philippines
28h September 2012
From : The Departure Lounge

Sad, Barking Mad

‘They breed like fuckin’ dogs !’


The dogcatcher’s bamboo pole and wire noose snatches
The back leg of a whelping pregnant bitch
Whose dangling teats dance for freedom from the van
Destined for the short howling trip to the municipal tip
To join the other canine delinquents who feed on each other
Before starving in the faeces infested cage
On their last journey to the incinerator and bone crusher


‘Not many this week’


Grumpily observed the entrepreneur who sacks the grey remains
For the keen gardener who purchases the colourful five kilo bag :


WOOF –WOOF !
Bonemeal Fertiliser
It’s the dog’s bollocks !




Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines : 9 September 2012-09-09
On reading that the council have no budget to put-down or feed the captured stray dogs

The Orinoco

The Orinoco


Some mind pictures
Engraved, as cave dwellers ochre memories
Cold, oblivious to time or death
Unable to erase her light-filled bursting gaze


As she unfolds a new secret in the old woods
Scraping clean her wellingtons, encrusted with the morning mud
From releasing the little reservoir of spring water
Damned from its meandering to the lake, by dead Autumn debris


Pointing to the escaped leaves, swirling around the Canada geese
Gobbling up their caviar breakfast of jellied frogspawn
With an almost childlike beaming face, she declares
‘The Orinoco flows again !’





Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines 29th August 2012
In memory of Jo and Embercombe, Devon
From : The Departure Lounge

The Long White Wall

The Long White Wall


Another early morning gift, from above
The steady sun climbs up the cold long white wall, assured in its ascent


Dancing its shadows between the grateful sparrow’s spindle legs
That bob between their breakfast of boiled rice
Thrown onto the asbestos roof, hunched in clutches like kids snowballs



Quiet as sleep, except for a distant barking dog reaffirming its territory
This is the time I wait for the kettle to boil
Submerging the drowning tea bag that surfaces for air, its sepia stain
As pale as Irish bog tainted rain, swirls clockwise


The bald-headed sun now sits on top of the long white warming wall
Defiant, smiling down as a peeping ‘Kilroy wuz here ‘ linear cartoon





Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines : 26th August 2012
From : Departure Lounge

Another Day

Another Day


Today, a heart will stop beating
Cheating the joke that stopped the time
Another, surrendered to a God unseen
Green fields, snow on wall, frost in fall
Now, another’s life dream mystery begins


The black hearse purrs a last lament
The cradle sways into a new bright day




Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines 22nd August 2012
From : Departure Lounge

Extreme Unction

Extreme Unction


Watching the rain
Again? I’ve seen it before, watched the pouring gutter
Muttering to myself
Was it an Easter? Trying hard to remember her name
Before the afternoon pain
Down Daisy Nook, clawing squeaking grass, I took her


My first Original Sin
Not now very original, not that it now matters, scattered
Across the earth’s crust
Another ‘must’ to confess to priestly red ears of fearing
Excomunication
Without any explanation or re-direction from habitual lust




Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines 20th August 2012
From : Departure Lounge

The Fridge

The Fridge


The cold cream and chrome
Fat boy, wedged in the kitchen corner
Like an outer belly groaning with edible crap
An open mouthed one-eyed beast for the feast
Of the inner belly, processing the absurd
Into shit-house blocking turds





Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines 22nd August 2012
From : Departure Lounge

The Bridge

The Bridge


Silver fish dart like dancing spoons
Showing their brazen scaly bellies for her to see
Beneath the bohemian gaudily painted arched bridge
Of chrome yellow and flaking red
Leading to the bakery’s pungency of morning bread
Observing her watching the motions in the curling
Water’s sheen, as green as emerald ruffled silk, unfurling



Harry Mills
Apt A10 Bolabog Apartelle Boracay Philippines
20th August 2012
From : Departure Lounge

S – 21

S – 21


Fourteenth day of May ‘78


Chan Kim Srung, with child, fated before the Rollecord, quarter plate
Her sleeping baby taken to Crow’s Feet Pond, beyond the rusting gate
Somersaulted in the Summer sunshine against the twisted killing tree
Gnarled, barkless pain of spread baby brains, raining Khmer Rouge red


Fourteenth day of May ‘78





Harry Mills
A10 Bolabog Apartelle Boracay Philippines
14th August 2012
From : The Shadow of a Dead Child

Decisions

Decisions


‘It has to be your decision’
Scared by the young doctor’s white coat pocket
Scarred with a series of blue biro skids
‘He’s our only kid’
The life-support drip slips out of his life
Soon to cease being, soon to be deceased


‘It has to be your decision’
The pea-green strobe straight-lines
No more drips, no more blips on the monitor
Rising and falling like electronic hiccups
Then the tears and conversation about organ donation
Papers already signed, sealed and now to be delivered


‘It has to be your decision’
Our last goodbyes, last kissing closing eyes
His small dead body to be surgically dissected
Elected, by his mother to save the lives of others
His body washed, his blonde hair combed and parted
Departed, to the cold waiting kidney bowls




Harry Mills Boracay Philippines 12th August 2012

Taphephobia

Taphephobia


Awake the afterbirth of blood, without a kiss
Of mother’s clawed, gnawed twisted wrists
Her bitten tongue, her babies only silent song
A voice without breath, without breathing
Leaving their souls, her womb in casket tomb
Buried alive, their last eternal cries for death




Harry Mills
Bolabog Apartelle Boracay Philippines
8th August 2012
From :The Shadow of a Dead Child


In 1901 a pregnant Madam Bobin was prematurely buried alive.
After being exhumed by her father, an autopsy showed that she had not died
of yellow fever, as diagnosed, but from asphyxiation in her coffin
where she gave birth to her baby before both dying an horrendous death

The Strawberry Skirt

The Strawberry Skirt


The monsoon Bolabog morning wakes below an escaped moon
As silent as Sunday sin, promising as a floured rolling pin


I see from the balcony of geckos, watery reflections
Emblazoned warriors names on young backs for the heavy hod
Saunter behind her strawberry coloured school skirt, swishing
Below the matted black intertwined communication cables
Wet, shining as new shoe laces above her pretty brown face
Walks her daily journey to learn the tables and hear the Filipino fables
Of concrete statues of heroes eternally pointing a crooked finger
Across a Manila bay, polluted with discarded flip-flops and condoms


This is her life, a life of hope and day-dreaming for a foreigner
And her half-caste baby girl that will inherit the strawberry skirt
As she, in turn did, from her elder pregnant sister




Harry Mills
Bolabog Apartelle A10: Boracay Philippines
6th August 2012
From : The Shadow of a Dead Child

Dream of Regret

Dream of Regret


Asleep, in her wide-awake eyeless faces
That know all her names, know her shame
Now, as a child again, unforgiven without penance
Naked, running through a lazy hay field
Briefly glancing at his blurring outstretched hands
Slurring a scream, choked silent in her throat



Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines 3rd August 2012
From : The Shadow of a Dead Child

Townsfield Woods

Townsfield Woods


Windscreen wipers, relentless as black snipers
On the raining streaks of invaders, in vain
Hearing the descending electric window, smooth
Assuring, as the strangers voice


‘ I’m going as far as Townsfield..Ok ?’


Fixated with his blue-bird tattoo that flew
And landed on her black stocking leg
Trying to remember the car’s logo, his accent
Then, his assent to her palpitating breast


Breaking News :
The short Police Statement informed the TV viewer
That a girl’s body had been found, strangled by black
School stockings, in Townsfield Woods 



Harry Mills
Boracay Philippines
31st July 2012
From : The Shadow of a Dead Child