Content Warning: drug use, self-harm
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Carl Griffin – Three Poems
Unwanted Earth
One haunt is an old train yard.
We’re drawn to the abandoned
double tracks, my line crushed
down into the mud
by extreme weather and the heaviness
of my freight, by a man’s nature
readjusting its innards,
while your line’s perfectly intact.
‘No’, you kick up a stink, ‘my ties
are dead and buried
while yours flash in the sunlight.’
The yard is eerily still.
Trains aren’t for travel. They’re built
for time-lapses of contemplation
of collapsing, of landmarks
for the lost, each carriage designed
for fresh hallucination.
I’ve studied the literature
on how to thread you into my dreams
but never do you roam my dreamlands.
Cannabis is a locomotive.
We take life blunt. Smoke the unwanted earth.
Now we lie in liminality,
between the double tracks.
Add weather to your visions
and I might touch you inside them,
for I have traced you in mist,
built you a country in snowfall.
As now, in the high weather,
where my dreamscape is a feared lake,
you pass me the binoculars
and we discover the one
hundredth way to describe a mallard,
and the world tastes delicious,
and we are disappointed
when no beasts surface.
We are together in two worlds,
even upon waking.
Why escape being you?
The idea baffles me.
I kiss you until I catch
the blood from your nose
curdle on your lip.
A group of patients self-harm
A pirate staggers up onto the night’s
main deck, churning smuggled rum
into curses aimed at both the swaying ship
and a sea not visible in the darkness.
From our cabins, we hear the slash
of metal hook against the wrist
of his working arm, the misshapen razor
digging at the soul in his pulse.
A phantom pain, it may have been,
that had shaken him from his berth,
but I fancied it was us, his shipmates,
fellow corsairs, maimed from the heart onwards.
It’s his screams – vocalised loss of hope
echoing through the ship, across deep waters –
that tickles our own severed nerves
‘til we’re up on deck, digging our hooks
into despair, into the night, into ourselves.
The Drifter’s Altar
An orphaned boy prays
at a fountain
of travertine stone
and elaborate sculptures
as if the mystical
waterfall effect
holds the power to shelter.
I do not know his prayer.
I pray to be rid
of recurring memories
of makeshift boneyards
in the backwoods,
of blood trapped on my skin.
I do not know if the boy
is really an orphan.
He does not know who I am.
I’ve never crossed a bridge
that has taken me
where I’d wished to go.
This secular square
has caught me by surprise.
The orphan washes his face
in the religious fountain.
I just see water where his eyes should be.
Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. In 2020, his book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain.
Photograph: Emerge Like Wraiths (Troubled Water) by Paul atten Ash
Paul atten Ash is the pseudonym of Bristol-based poet-photographer Paul Nash, whose lens-based artwork has been published by Deep Adaptation Forum, Oscillations, and Where The Meadows Reside. Website: https://campsite.bio/northseanavigator