Day 13 - Phobia

 Fear

There was a thing I was scared of, absolutely,

a thing that made the world stop around it,

shudder to a halt.

On the smash pavement, a still bird was a dead bird,was a bird whose wings froze time. What I was scared of, what shuddered me inside, what made me vibrate, was it might come to life, send the air and everything in it shivering and jolting, frankenstein's creature.

Who would have guessed, the small thrush's stopped heart set us ticking? Who would have guessed, a museum of this- lamb and threadbare lion, strange dull birds, misshaped birds, encephalitic snow hare,

tiny purse of mice, pulled skin of specied weasel,

haunt of phantom chimpanzee, misremembered dogs?

The child I was, the teacher dared the class

to spend the night among the specimens

and part of me was crying- bird dead, monkey dead, tiger dead, butterflies pinned, dead. Nothing would make it better, no electrification of the sawdust,of the joints , of the scooped spoon brain , rewired.

Everything was safe, limited in my imagination-

nothing would break the glass, it never did,

and even for limping reenactment of the ark, for the toyshop resurrection. I didn't want it to.

Here I am, that child

The skin of a poem, empty

Stroked to a frame

Or the poem fell from

the sky. The poem stopped

beating gravity

Someone took my poem,

Hided it, hid its song

put it into the cabinet of curiosity

The plaque reads, poem, shot on this date.

The poem has been placed in a diorama

of its habitat, British trees and self doubt,

stiff like judgement ,dead glass eyes

Or, the poem was a familiar

Or the poem took the hunch

in its back, the tear in its flank

and limped away, a kind of life

I am your poem, it mewed-

you loved me once.