storytelling

The stories that crowd
the walls of my room

jostle and elbow each other
in a last ditch to be heard
before they’re packed away
in brown cardboard boxes.
I lay back on my bed
and snap at them,
‘Hush now all of you.
i’ve had your stories
now you’ll have mine.’


*


It is the best of times,
It is the worst of times.
Under elephant-grey skies
the Blue God sings his song.
The horses slip in the mud,
the archers squint in the rain
while they wait for
the hour irrevocable.


Nikolai Rostov pays
the Seamstress a visit.
He has news for her;
the kings of Macedonia
are fast approaching in
their yellow mackintoshes.
She rushes out distressed
to the apothecary.


Buck Mulligan looks out
of the misty café window
and watches her wring her 
thin hands and furrow her brows.
‘There’s death coming,’
he mutters to himself
and goes back to his paper.


Across the table Kurtz looks
sharply about for the waitress.
He’s been here ten minutes
and he still has no tea.
He leaves but not before shouting
‘A plague upon this house!’


A startled Becky Sharp spills
her coffee, burning her arm.
She’s just returned from Soweto
where the streets are running red
and there’s revolution in the air.
She’s in search of a certain


Dorian Gray, keeper of
secrets, master of the
wind up bird chronicle,
but she hears that he’s locked
himself in the old brownstone
refusing to emerge until
he turns nineteen again.


The ships are neigh and the
masts flutter in the distance.


‘Will we lose our kingdom
to yellow mackintoshes?’
wonders Richard the Third,
his head already feeling
unsteady under that crown.


A fog envelops the hour
as Faustus pulls out his torch.
His hound pulls him
through the stifling moors.
He’s to tame the monster
created at Ingolstadt
and he knows not how.
Only Casandra, he’s heard,
can help and he’d better hurry
for she’s not one to wait.


The ships crunch to a halt
on the rocky shore and a
hush descends upon them all.


The Blue God finishes his song,
Arjun steadies his horse
and signals his prized archer,
Holden Caulfield, to strike.


A rain-soaked arrow slices
through the air and strikes
Alexander dead in his spot.


‘Murder most foul!’
wail Abigail Williams,
Betty and Tituba of Salem
and ring the alarm.


Emma Bovary hears their
cries, drinks deep from her
glass of sherry and whispers
behind her chintzy fan
to the Duchess of Malfi,
‘They’ve had it coming
And you know that best.’


There’s a trample of
mackintoshes over the land
as inch by inch, the lot of them
fall to the Macedonian army.




Nikolai Rostov writes home
of the woes of war and peace.
The Seamstress loses her nerve
and pulls out the vial she
bought from the apothecary.
Buck Mulligan takes the
last train home to Dublin.
Kurtz does a jig over the
street littered with corpses.
Becky Sharpe bandages her
burnt arm and decides to leave
the burning city and head East.
While Faustus loses his way
somewhere in the bleak fog,
Richard the Third takes flight
leaving Holden Claufied and
the brothers in charge.
Abigail Williams, Betty 
and Tituba of Salem
are hauled into court for
ringing the alarm.
Emma Bovary and 
the Duchess of Malfi 
lie in drunken stupor
amid their rustling taffetas.


*


The stories are quiet now;
their pages do not stir.
I pile them up carelessly;
the Russians over the
Americans, the poets
between the Greeks.
They’ve had my life
in the clasp of their
fickle words so far
while I played along.
Today, I’m taking it back.