What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?
Cut it into my heart, where there unseen
A pictured heart, dagger-blooded resides.
A little more to the right takes the life,
Rather than declaring it worthless now
Of the too brief abode he took of it.
On my skin, tattoos like dragons hurled
Into a land that fears them, that as they
Fight to be released, create dangerous
Fire in the surface scarred by their hot fear
Of being misunderstood.
For tattoos
Speak defiance of invited pain, skin
Deep. Cut deeper for that endorphin-led
Release of joy in pain, continuance
In tissue less fragile than wounded trust.
Let’s face it: life cuts insignia on
And in us in its onward course and flow
Carries sharper stuff than keen cutting edges.
Sometimes, vicious pride in that tougher youth
Still outlives the softening of spirit
In the fat flesh. Relish now what Mister
Venus’ skills in taxidermy fakes of life:
For had Venus had ‘the making of you’,
As he once said, “You’d come out pretty small”.
______________
Sometimes the feeling is all there is in stuff I write for release of I know not what. The words above, in some kind of blank verse, are rooted in the memory of a dear friend, now dead, Tim Jordan. He used to teach our joint students in a course on The Novel, the deeper meaning of the dialogue between Mister Venus in Our Mutual Friend, the taxidermist, with a curious shop full of stuffed dead-but-once-living things, and Silas Wegg. Venus reprimands Wegg, a man in his sixties with a wooden leg, for the ‘wicious (sic.) Pride’ of his youth and takes it further; his eyes glinting in the light of the tools of his trade: “If I had the making of you, you’d come out pretty small’. Tim would read this as if he were the very soul of Dickens laughing at his own extraordinary skill in making life in any form he wanted it to be, carved out of words that cut deep.
With love
Steven
PS. In fact, what Mr Venus says is;”If I had the articulating of you, you’d …”. But the word ‘ariculating’ whether of bone frameworks or characters only drops us deeper into Dickens’ craft. Xxxx
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