Published 'New Hope International' 1993

Blocks of breeze took the wind from my sails. Yet allow me to start from the beginning, as opposed to the end or even to an undistributed middle. I ate my heart out over Pizzy from the day I first met her. She swayed into my life, a pirate brig flying a skull and crossbones, dressed to murder, a warpainted figure from all my déjà-vu dreams. As thin as a rake, her hard edges were indeed plain to see, yet revealing a heart of beaten gold along with all the sheer-nylon bravado and false economies of self-confidence. Yet none of it made sense at the end of the day. Why would someone like Pizzy take even the slightest notice of me? I suppose the answer did lie in the unanswerable realms beyond death's hymen. In other words (for surely these can't be the only ones), she anchored herself in my soul's seabed—having an intimation that I was immortal ... and, thus blended in bliss, her faith was grounded in mine. She was a virgin and I was not man enough to dismantle her. Our affair was so Platonic, we conducted Socratic dialogues with others of like mind. There were, of course, many in the current world who eschewed the physical sides of themselves—a sign of the times stemming from anxiety rather than spirituality. We formed circles, merely hand-in-hand at metaphor's diktat, oscillating without osculation, simply celebrating the cerebral passions, screwing minds without bodies. We were pure thought, an ecstasy of self, onanism made manifold. But then, Pizzy, one day, told me she needed to fall and rise in love with another—and would I, could I possibly unsnag her ankh from my angst? I looked as askance as someone without a face was able. Would, could any potential lover possibly offer the same degree of immortality? She shrugged without shoulders, laughed with tears in her blind sockets, scowling rips in her face. Love was evidently to outweigh life for Pizzy. She was now of an age when her various sightless instincts wanted a child of her own, embodied by her body, crafted in her humous halls. Such consummation elsewhere implied my abandonment, a pluckless pizzicato upon staccato seas, tacking the empty waves of chance, voyaging the vasculature, cresting the cruciform crescents and breasting the breeze blocks to find my mooring and my berth. Yet an end entails its own endlessness, whilst middles and meanings are nothing if not metaphors. The only hope is that the Child is Father of the Man and can ease ankylosis in angel-fish.