Telling Tales by Patience Agbabi

Author:Patience Agbabi [Patience Agbabi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2014-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

With this ring

I opened your mind a book and read

in fine gold letters

Don’t touch my metal

déjà vu but the urge was too strong

I put my tongue to your lobe

and you bolted

leaving me singed the wild bird

who

flew

too

close to your fire and scorched her wings

Betrothed to a future perfect you

I read the minds of gold-studded unicorns

with fake horns who

see their fate framed in the fading blue-

black of my back

when I turn my back

on them

for not being you

Makar

Frankie Lynn

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

– Henry David Thoreau

To Denmark’s Freetown Christiania

my mind transports me when it’s overcast,

when there’s a thunderstorm or night draws near

I close my eyes: the heady hit of grass

from hash stalls; houses honed from wood and glass,

one flaking door, its mirrored hall, the spiral

staircase: on that battered sofa – Arild,

his purple dreads engrossed in his own story,

Arild, who flew too close to gold, dropped out

and landed here, the tumble-down, three-storey

Sesame House, home of the down, the out,

who come to learn how to survive without:

to make do, make things, make things up, to dare

to fabricate a castle out of air

under a master, aka The Artist,

whose learned thoughts flow deeper than a fjord

and made of Arild’s mind a palimpsest

on which he wrote three notes that formed a chord

till Arild knew the world within a word

and one long night, through spelling out a spell,

cobbled a cabin made of cockle shells

with seven caves, each cave singing the sea

and when the sun came up his cabin shone,

everyone marvelled at his sorcery;

but Freetown states you can’t create a home

without consent: a clash, and Arild’s gone,

squeezed out, forced out, pushed out down Pusher Street …

now here we meet him, crossing Princes Street,

Edinburgh: now an actor, single, shaved,

who slept on someone’s floor two years ago

till luck ran out; homeless: then one night caved

a home inside the Mound, its walls aglow

with books, books, books, except for one framed photo

where you’d expect a mirror: Hogmanay,

Deirdre and Angus on their wedding day,

his dearest friends: Angus, bleached blond, well-built;

Deirdre, brunette, petite; she made his outfit –

bubblewrap jacket, seersucker kilt

to match her jeans bejewelled with pomegranate

seeds, her bubble shoes the perfect fit:

made for each other – Deirdre wears the trousers,

Angus, the kilt – they’re solid, safe as houses

till late midsummer’s eve, Angus away

in England for a month, everyone high

on homebrew except Arild who today

must spell it out, confess to Deirdre why

it’s agony to look her in the eye

for every time he looks at her, he’s cursed,

must say those words a thousand times rehearsed:

I must make love to you. Two years he’s made

light of it, nothing of it, forged, invented

a virtue of necessity, betrayed

nothing, but love, drunk on itself, unwanted,

made a pass, yet Deirdre’s strong, undaunted:

I will, she laughs, if, for three weeks, my Danish

bookworm, you can make the Castle vanish;

not knowing at that instant Arild texts

The Artist in his hammock out in Freetown

who knows, this master artist-architect,

both how to build things up and pull

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