Flowers from a Book

Opening slowly as a forgotten murmuring dream
Undressed, naked in its sepia hidden secret years

Of once bright orange stamen, now stained, ingrained
As an old nicotined finger of petal thin skin
Pointing it’s impress to words of once love of a lost memory
Sacrificed in a last act of submission
Inscribed by copperplate indigo ink that has paled
As lost old eyes that no longer see, now to be found

By other fingers that have touched the soul of sorrow
Kissed by lips that have tasted hopelessness

English Bakery Boracay Philippines15th February 2012

© Harry Mills
All rights reserved

Midnight Rainbow

Is this your name, Peace?

Then show me your night sky

Let me ride the bright star

Let me kiss your black lips

Then arc me tenderly with your midnight rainbow

3c English Bakery Boracay Philippines 10^th February 2012

© Harry Mills

All rights reserved

The Old Lady’s Hat

Waiting for the storm

Animals in the compound, befuddled

And confused, take shelter under rusting cars and leaning corrugated-iron 

     sheeting

Leaving two young fawn dogs, torn

Between taking cover, or chasing each other’s elusive circling, gyrating curled 

     tails

Stopping suddenly, to sniff the changing shifting air

Above the coconut’s swaying leaves, tossing and weaving, anchored with no 

     escape

From the inevitable fingering of the dark blanket

Of storm- grey mountain cloud, laughing at the pea- green screaming high trees

Flustering, like an old lady’s Sunday-Best hat

Of peacock feathers, bobbling above the odours of moth-balls and cheap face 

     rouge

Sucking down the mountain’s menace

From an invisible mouth that targets the dogs, with a sniper’s kiss of white 

     lightning

© Harry Mills 7th December 2011 Philippines
All rights reserved

Silent City

The white granite City of arched, parched quiet domes

Homes, to the Glorious Dead, mile after mile

Pile after pile, side by side

All, precisely one yard wide

In the Silent City

The roads with familiar names, Robertson, Emerson

All gone

Or cul-de-sacs called Unknown, Anon

Numbered white dome- doors that nobody answers

Cemetery road maps, creased with crosses, showered with shrapnel

Row after row of low pink moles, untold heroes

Who live eternally, in the City of fighting ghosts and deafening  lost souls

Come judgement day, who will stand and say

For the soundless, hushed, crushed

Cross or Crescent, Hindu, Jew, Voodoo or a few He knew

The multicultural slain in their final pain, that cries out their own God’s name

Laid out neat, in  sheets of detached graves of Devil’s slaves

Facing the same way, all holding their breath ‘til atonement pities

The old lags and Battalions of bold, unfolding, fluttering flags

Away from the Silent City

Concept of ‘Silent City’ by Tony Addison

© Harry Mills Boracay Philippines 20th November 2011

All rights reserved

It’s Quiet, Now

It’s quiet, now

Just the sound of distant traffic on it’s daily way

Skirting the early dancing sun that chases mobile shadows

Commencing the ritual of baking the rooftops corrugated iron

Noise, interrupts

I see the street and fleeting feet

Of torsos that come and go, some fast, some slow

Glowing as the blowing sand that swirls around the two girls

He shouts

Everybody hears the Korean hailing a trike

Half decorated motorbike, half tattooed man, who like

Nothing better than to skin the fat cat on the scorched earth’s mat

It’s noisy now

  

© Harry Mills (7am Saturday 3^rd December 2011 Boracay Philippines)

All rights reserved

Dear Wendy & Rodney

Many thanks for your Wedding Invitation, 

received this morning on Facebook.
Rodders, old man, I was Best Man at your first two attempts,
(and thought you had made up with Charlie..)
Wendy, I still have your Versace black thongs,
and your pouting porn DVD

I think, under the circumstances, you should retract the Invitation,
and just send me some Wedding Cake

Freddie

© Harry Mills
All rights reserved

September

You told me so
It was in September, when first my love did die

When your fruit was hardening with softness
Like the skin of pears waited their turn
To deliver the year’s promised labour

Before his winkly, crinkly, crystal-blue eyes
Danced with the Autumn night stars
That haloed his Celtic want

That was a full twelve months of waiting
And still he stays in the hills, dancing a swirl
To leave both dog and fire to father his brogue

You told me so
It was in September, when I and swallows left

© Harry Mills 22 October 2011: Philippines
All rights reserved

Bangkal

Call me by the name of Bangkal Tree
Rheumatoid knuckles, curled, outstretched
Branches for begging arms, swaying, nodding to passing birds
Telling ancient secrets in the night’s relentless rain
A wet silhouette, a gnarled face forgetful of it’s name
Leaves of artificial green, that sheen, reminiscent of kid’s plasticine

© Harry Mills Philippines 16th November 2011
All rights reserved

Run of the Mill

NOTICE TO ALL STAFF and WORKERS

EMPIRE COTTON MILL : OLDHAM

ANNUAL FIVE MILE RUN 1952

The EMPIRE Challenge Cup & THREE Guineas

Registration and Entrance Payment of Half Crown
To Mr G F Rowbottom Social Club Secretary

Werneth Park : Saturday 10 May : 9am Sharp

Presentations : Works Canteen

Signed

Mr Arkwright

Personnel Department 

© Harry Mills

All rights reserved

Without Compassion

136954 Auschwitz-Birkenau

A numbered arm that pays the price

Of men’s frenzied greed of gluttony

A fighter denied by evil desire

To murder self-preservation in a death ring

‘Without compassion.

If I didn’t win, I didn’t survive’

(Salamo Arouch)

© Harry Mills

All rights reserved

The Compound

It’s a strange self indulgent feeling.  A cross between a prayer-less Sunday morning - waiting for the newspaper boy to creak the cottage gate before raising the old brass letterbox that gives birth to the elastic banded roll of doom and disaster - and the other guilt feeling: the stillness of a grave-side where the names of relatives’ children evaporate from the grey matter.

The relentless typhoon that had squalled it’s vengeance throughout the Philippine night had, at last, ceased. The mundane activities of another day stirred life into the Island, bringing to the rain-pool surfaces a trillion more mosquitoes: crackling in the stagnation of liquid typhoid, popping in the morning heat like Sugar Puffs in a swirling dirty brown bowl.  Each one an airborne miniature vampire waiting for dusk - and the unprotected - to fill their empty blood sacs with crimson O, B or rhesus-negative; they’re not fussy, skipping over the anti-mosquito creams with the ease of the Dam Busters’ bouncing bombs.

 I sit quietly watching her.

The Sunday morning toast is buttered and drips tantalisingly. She sits cross-legged on her wicker chair, looking like a long black-haired sultry Buddha, occasionally leaning across the small breakfast table to squirt more camouflage HP Sauce into her bacon butties.

Finished, her red nail-polished arched index finger squeakily slides through the sauce remnants on the plate that gets deposited on her outstretched pink tongue.

Then, knowingly, she smiles   

 

She wipes clean her finger on a tissue that defies gravity, wedged between the discarded mango skins of vibrant orangey-yellow - the remembered colour of the toucan’s bill on the early Guinness railway posters.

She had long left the poverty of her mother’s Negros Island and the daily diet of dried fish, fried ‘til the disgusting odour permeated the small shack that had been home to her seven siblings.  Her table manners had not improved from those Negros years of scooped grey rice and fish heads, but now she had acquired a new culinary habit that both fascinated and disgusted me.

Looking firmly into my eyes to gauge reaction, she tears open the corner of her bag of Maltesers with her white Filipino teeth, then smiling, she lets half a dozen chocolate covered malt balls float on the surface of her morning coffee.

She does this without taking her eyes off mine looking for my approval.

Her spoon swirls between her long fingers, prodding the brown balls bobbing on the coffee’s surface, looking like spiked, wartime floating marine bombs lapping outside a harbour wall awaiting enemy vessels.

After a few tantalising minutes, the chocolate starts to melt, the malt sends bubbles to the surface, she scoops up the reward into her open mouth; the descending escapees gather into a chocolate goo waiting for a deft swirl of her wrist holding the coffee cup to conclude her performance.

She bores of trying to disgust me and leaves me at the breakfast table on the balcony that overlooks a sparse but strangely interesting compound owned by one of the wealthy resort hotel groups.

Here, in this compound, is home to a variety of yard animals and paraphernalia that comes and goes on a three wheeled bogey pushed by two hotel porters.

This is now my time.

My morning of new sounds; new smells - like the acrid accent of smouldering vegetation waste - brings a sharp pungency to the nostrils.

The balcony is now quiet.  I watch, below, the new banana tree leaves unfold.     Their pea-green conical ribbed beauty graces space on a heavenly journey, only to be mercilessly scythed by the looping overhead black electric cable.

These young intrusive banana plants are overshadowed by the hundred year old Bangkal trees which dwarf all other barked pretenders in the compound.

I watch the tree lizards, with their tiny suckered toes, jerk in bewildered movements, changing colour from leaf green to dark bark- brown, as their tongues stab the resting damsel flies whose gossamer wings protrude the lizards’ slitted mouth.

These trees have a presence of purpose.  Their lower branches that encroach over the makeshift basketball pitch are lopped off with machetes for firewood.

Branches culled over many years leave gnarled knuckles on the trunk, reminding me of a poem I read somewhere - may have been from the pen of Ted Hughes - about a lone weathered blackthorn tree on a Devon moor, hunchbacked against a hundred relentless winter storms, it’s one leafless branch held out like a drawn wooden sword, in ferocious defiance against the elements

The compound’s entrance is graced, by a fairly new wrought-iron gate, maybe twelve feet wide. Above its central opening is a curved double arched section that - if it carried wordage - would not look dissimilar to the nightmare of Belson. The rest of the compound’s exterior fencing is comprised of stained, dilapidated corrugated iron, held vertically by stakes of bamboo twined together.

On hearing the whistle of the approaching porters with the loaded bogey, the young guard swings open the entrance gates that answer the incoming whistle with a returning oil-less squeak, one octave above the porters.

They enter the compound, go pass the grey geese - pleasuring themselves in the overnight puddles before the intensity of the morning sun shortens shadows and evaporates the water, leaving cracks, once more, in the iron-hard ground.

The geese toss their majestic wet necks, almost like dipping a hand into Holy Water. 

I often observe men entering the breaking sea waves, dipping their hands before making the Sign of the Cross.  Footballers, too, touch the turf as they run onto the pitch.  I wonder if these mystical actions actually stop drowning or broken legs.

As a kid, I remember seeing my father bless himself with the river’s water before fishing, and how, in his aluminium box of salmon flies, there would always be a small crucifix and - how strange I used to think it - that a tin box of lethal feathered barbs could sit comfortably with another medieval form of death.

As the geese waddle down in their disappearing pool the compound’s hens strut under the trees fallen foliage.  Their trident spurs turn the vegetation - head to one side - looking for lunch.  Above the hen’s activities, nailed to the tree, is an empty roosting pole (for the guard’s prized fighting cock) which has been left empty since the demise of the rooster at last Sunday’s pit fight. 

Other domestic - and some feral animals - prowl around the corrugated jungle.  From my high vantage point, I observe a scrawny, long-backed black cat, snaking between the bamboo poles, prowling for recently hatched chicks and rodents.

Mid-morning sees the arrival of two men.  One younger than the obvious boss man (both carpenters), who have come to inspect and select cut lengths of bamboo, which will be fashioned into outriggers for a catamaran they are building.  The younger lifts a length, maybe twenty-five feet long, one end resting on his shoulder, whilst the older carpenter squints his knowledgeable eye along the length, gliding his machete over the growth rings every few feet, chipping away any imperfections.

The maid arrives.  A Filipino with a mouthful of white teeth that appear as she says ‘Good morning’ in stuttered broken English; her native indigenous name is unpronounceable. 

We call her Mary.  I watch her as she collects the washing, assembles it on plastic coat hangers and leaves it to dry in the sun, which is now creeping steadily onto the balcony.  She knows I watch her.

Mary stoops down to retrieve more garments from the plastic bowl allowing me a tantalising glimpse of her braless boobs; she knows exactly what she is doing, but never smiles at me, once - we have exchanged the pleasantries of the day.  I read her latest tee shirt, proclaiming ‘1+1=3...Jesus is with us’ and my rising sap is slapped in the face.

Down in the compound pups play silently, cuffing each other, baring immature milk teeth. Their heavily laden bitch-mother distracts the pups from her teats as they follow her in the direction of their owner, banging their tin feed bowls with what sounds like a big spoon.

Their owner will fatten-up the pups over the next twelve weeks, this being the optimum period for producing tender dog meat. After this time they are taken north - muzzled with cut-down plastic bottles or tin cans held firmly over their snouts with lengths of wire that dampen down the whelps on their long overnight journey to Bagiao.

Everywhere there are stark posters reminding Filipinas of the likely diseases of consuming dog meat that is not only illegal, but in some cases fatal.

Mary sweeps the tiled balcony, bending to retrieve an escaped Malteser that had abseiled down the breakfast table, giving me a bonus glimpse beneath the holy tee shirt.

I watch as the compound’s guard removes his Rod Steiger sun glasses, and starts to dig a hole below a Bangkal tree, close to the perimeter.  He labours with a spade and an iron bar prising the stones from the baked earth. Now shirtless, he scoops out the rubble from the hole with a discarded paint tin, before returning from behind his tin-topped guard hut - holding by the rear legs a two-tone dead pup that he holds up for me to see, reminding me of my father holding aloft a salmon to be photographed.

The pup is, without ceremony, dropped into its stony grave, where the iron rod curls the dead fur into a crescent, foetal shape.

I watch her, now - her tall, lean, almost boyish, figure leaning on the balcony safety bars overlooking the freshly dug grave.  The guard shouts out something in Tagalog.  She loosely translates, without any emotion: that the pup had been run-over by one of the hotel’s courtesy vehicles entering the compound.

Her long brown fingers mould themselves around the last remaining Malteser that protrudes from the inside of her cheek before joining the other brown delights that have already travelled down her long neck.  Her manicured fingers fold the now empty Maltesers bag into a childlike aeroplane that she launches towards the compound.  The plasticized paper bag disobeys its folded instructions, returning, in flight, to its original shape, before fluttering down to the pup’s grave like a bright red butterfly.

She turns, licks the chocolate off her fingers, retreats to the bedroom, giving me a bored smile; and asking Mary to find, and bring to her, her red nail polish and her Louis Vuitton manicure bag.

© Harry Mills 24th August 2011 
All rights reserved

Iron Coffin

I’ve seen them waiting in docks, nervous of eyes, like

Mothers waiting for their children at the school gate.

Gaunt, an iron fist, a gauntlet, rocking to sleep the children

In their bellies, meandering across vast oceans, laden and creaking

With secrets contained inside a iron coffin, sealed with sealing wax

Of wire and embossed like a Lord Mayor’s ceremonial chain of office

Weighted down, bow-legged on a legless sea-camel,

Interlocked like rusting Lego, numbered by once white sprayed stencil

Now, scratched like a whore's back, logo over-painted to lie or confuse

Disfigured, laying naked on top of each other, like spent lovers

Abandoned, metallic mouths now wide open waiting for rented food

Below a red and yellow Self Storage sign, signed off with an afterthought,

‘24/7 Access’ in a brazen new-speak of lazy shorthand communication

That promises the prospect renter a new key and little else.

Beside one of these iron, echo-cavern monsters I sit in my car awaiting

All my worldly goods to arrive in a rented van loaded by a dubious

Russian and two mid-European banal muscles who don’t even try to hide

The new scar, jagged on the dining table, crafted like a jealous idiot running

A screwdriver along a new car’s paintwork.

I trace my rain wet finger along the defaced table, remembering when once

This dining table was our pride, running your newly ringed finger along the veneer

Marquetry, inter-spliced with apple and rose-wood that perfumed the showroom with

Lavender polish that masked the salesman’s overpowering breath.

© Harry Mills

All rights reserved

D'Talipapa.

As with this old seeping, creeping age

Reality? Or perception of a cold, sleeping dream

Blurring the fading pictures of a wandering life

Slurring the mouthless words, adrift each night.

Her long, long hooped stocking legs walking

Mumbling her mother-tongue, unknown language

Paraded through an aquatic zoo of the dead

Faded, once staring, bright unblinkable eyes

All lifeless, beautifully naked and spotted

Captured in the ocean's death nets, garrotted

Marked with the freckles of the sea's trillion

A touch of slime, then time back to oblivion

 (D'Talipapa: fish market, Boracay)

© Harry Mills

All rights reserved

Death in the Shower Room

The battlefield wall is divided into 6''x6''
White ceramic tiles
Each square a mildew grouted war zone
Smeared with the remains of the dead enemy
Mozzies!
Arced like red commas on the glazed graveyard
Killed in action by a deft thumb, disembowelled.
Like little tubes of red paint
Alizarin, cadmium and vivid vermilion
Squeezed, swirled onto their cold white canvas
Each a miniature Jackson Pollack

© Harry Mills July 2011
All rights reserved

Dad:

No more pulse or snatching gasps, clutching the air of life

No last words from a cotton-wool coma, or coming home

No more Stretford End, Best glory goals or half-time Bovril

Or Likely Lads, no snooker or secret hooker

Three score years and ten, on the button, no extra time

Dad:

No more

(on his anniversary : 11th July)

© Harry Mills

All rights reserved

White Beach: 6am

Early, very early

Dreams still elusive, uploading awareness

The beach, yet to unfold its white sheet to the heat of the Cyclops sun

Watching, silent small men raking hairy husks that stain the sand

Piling high the beach-bleached coconuts

Fashioned in a Pol Pot pyramid of eyeless skulls

Smouldering, a tropical fragrance of spiralling sweet blue smoke

Enticing sand flies that crackle in the crematorium's triangle of death

© Harry Mills

All rights reserved

Mosquito

Silent,deadly dengue, like a night of black fear

Closing in, homing in, getting near

On her flight path, past exhaled breath of our union

Of my body & blood, her communion

Resting on the unconscious sweated flesh

Sucking brandy-blood, to fly intoxicated with fresh

Supply to nourish her off-springs

Licking my blood, pruning her sticky wings

© Harry Mills

All rights reserved

Ferrang

Boracay Sunset

Love in a Supermarket

Dear Diary (Monday)
We touched hands, briefly
She asked, did I need help with my packing?
Her Name Badge said 'Norma'

Dear Diary (Tuesday)
Love is cruel
Norma has a love bite and an engagement ring
We stopped touching

Dear Diary (Wednesday)
'Every Little Helps'
Back to self service
Bye, Norma.

© Harry Mills
all rights reserved