Paper
The thinness of it levelled as an accusation. As if it didn’t
absorb many times its own volume of grief;
diaried chaos; words for the the burn and sting of loving,
before their tame cousins are scribbled lightly, just on to the
surface, sent on unspoilt occasions.
So many jobs: sucker up of secrets, sponge
for the dreams that have nowhere to go.
Intimate (noun).
Frightener: vacant, not to be placated with trite gestures; airy
doesn’t feed its potential lust.
Pens score, stab, ensnare it into flat servitude; mediumship
of the kind that could be laughed out of court easily enough;
fake news; faked signature; a words-only sentiment sent
the old-fashioned way.
Reduced, near redundant – maybe still feels its
roots, limbs, branches: torn from life, saggy with leaf,
swaying with a creak and a rushing.
Readied, with violence, to make fiction possible and heated
elaborations, poetry, better reworkings of older lies. Many.
I hesitate, start with a safe word.
You scratch in haste, get the Dear and the Happy over with.
S/he angles letters sharply, the better to be believed.
We fiddle and idle around the subject; always do; sigh.
You, all of you, wait for some devastation. Nothing till then.
They are quite happy to remain neutral/ official/ mute.
Mute like the complicit substance
that takes the pen, the printer, the blame,
the tight fist and throw, as if to atone
for a savage dark-wood history
inside heads, yours, ours.
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Angela Arnold lives in Wales and is also an artist, a creative gardener and an environmental campaigner. Her poems have appeared in print magazines, anthologies and online, both in the UK and elsewhere. Her first collection In Between: ‘inner landscapes’ and relationships was published by Stairwell Books in 2023; her second collection, about the power of place, is newly completed. She enjoys her synaesthesia and language/s and is currently learning Welsh. Twitter @AngelaArnold777
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 