Signs of loneliness: The childhood of a poet

I am just burnt out from life, I guess. If I could smoke my life away, believe me I would. If I could drink my life away, believe me I would if I could, if I was so inclined. I am poet gone mad. You’re all of me, dad, and I’m all of what you are. I think I know what I am. The psychosocial action of the black vein in a leaf. The dynamic that exists between mother and daughter. Winner standing in the milieu of the gap and her miserable daughter at being a failure at having no children and spouse. I’ll turn into an island, you’ll see. I think of you mother as I do of the flowers in your garden. How like them you are. How filled with focus and concentration you are knee-deep in your work. You’re rather something special, made of vital poetic substance, I wish you could love me the way that I love you, be proud of me the way that I am proud of you instead of you thinking of me as your mentally ill daughter. I’ll turn into a bird, you’ll see. I’m ink catching a fish catching a genius, and the owl screams while the bat twitches and the mole snitches, and the moonlight is zen. Zen. Tonight, I’m thinking of my paternal grandfather. I’m thinking of his smarts, his tattoos, his children, his alcoholism, his baptism, his restoration, and how I flesh him out now in words. How he spoke the language of the Second World War. How he was a cold sea, a waking child in the middle of the night. How much I loved him. How much I’ll always love him in the big night’s dark grasses, and mountain air. The valley of it all razed with guns and bullets. All the people I have loved are gone, or, are dead. Flung all over the world. Never to return again to me. America, Berlin, Swaziland, Johannesburg. They all tell me how difficult it is to love me, my madness-life from the glass ceiling to the chandeliers. It is difficult to love someone like me, they say. Grandfather, I’m a cold sea too. I’m Bulgaria. I’m Africa. I live within a hemisphere of social isolation, and fear and anxiety, and stars like fireworks inside the cellular network of every nerve fibre of my brain. You’re perfect grandfather. I’m rebellious. Your other grand-daughter had a Berlin Christmas. I’ve turned into an island, you see. You’re abundant, grandfather. In everything I do, I see, I know, I acknowledge, I write. You’re still attached to me like a wishbone. You stand in solemn-mode armed with a bayonet. Then, saint, you’re home with five mouths to feed. I never went to university. You never went to university. I never finished school. All I ever wanted to be was a poet and an editor like Ezra Pound. An admirer of Pound’s Alba and Sappho, Antigone and Joan of Arc. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. And the island’s name is Saint Helena. If you’re a flower mother, then so am I. If you’re summer good-looking, then I am wintertime’s bulbs stuck in gravity and earth. I am third eye wiser. I am the wheel, the spark. I am loneliness. I am both alone and lonely in this world of ours. With one light on, I know you are home mother. With one foot upon the stair, wind in your hair, you’re simply put an angelic flame. You, like my grandfather are a saint. You’re the axis, the planets, the stars, the sunlight. You’re the riot of the phantom thread, the golden thread of this planet, the rollercoaster machinery of Monkey Island, the theme park of Africa, the aloof poetess of Bulgaria. I am mulatto (of mixed-race descent). You, Petya, as pale as milk. Hair as thick as molasses. The colour of honey. In photographs I did not smile either when I was your age. Even in death, frozen in time you bloom at specific will. With the focus, growth-process, the speed of a flower. Like a wildflower. Like all wildflowers.