…The behemoth towers/ A fractured edge of the city/ Forged in its rows of sightless eyes/ And as darkness smears the day/ An elevator grinds and rumbles/Fills its belly with humanity/Radios and televisions fuse/In a babbled soundtrack/
From a selection of poems titled The Citadel
‘Whilst the night deepens/ The mortals within/ Fortify against the incubus of the dark’
THE TOWER
The behemoth towers
A fractured edge of the city
Forged in its rows of sightless eyes
And as darkness smears the day
An elevator grinds and rumbles
Fills its belly with humanity
Radios and televisions fuse
In a babbled soundtrack
With the crackle and spit of pans
That dance and leap in ritual
Above the fetor and clabber
Of yellowing stoves
Somewhere a baby cries
Dogs bark
A plane whines overhead
Whilst the night deepens
The mortals within
Fortify against the incubus of the dark
And when heavy muses surface
The dreamless and the empty
Fill in a chimera of icons.
UNIT 3
There is one within who sits
A reluctant companion to the night
Circled by cobras of smoke and regret
She rolls another cigarette
Dwells on her creaseless face
Her adamant and tight body
Plundered by the years
The hands of time dragging
Straining and stretching her
Into another shape
She no longer reads time
In the faces of people or of clocks
For time is no longer on her side
She waits for him
He who is plunging his memory
Into a bracing splash of the past
Whetting dry frustration
With the potent promises of youth.
UNIT 8
He lies
Bible pyjama’d close
Dreaming of knock-knocking
Peddling his brand of religion
On glossy pamphlets printed in China
Converting his way to paradise
While Armageddon looms
She summons him now
Through the screened door
And the deep bee-drone
Of a distant lawnmower
Provides background harmony
As her weeping hair
Sullies his body
With wanting and pain
His sin sputters and spills
Into the yielding mattress
That holds him tenderly
Under a heavy crucifix
Rigid against the peeling wall
While in the kitchen
The obscene dishes nag to be washed.
UNIT 4
She drifts
Creamy and bubbled
In his party-hatted
Hip hip hooray love
He suspends her
Dulls her senses in fairy-floss solace
Pads the enormity of hundreds and thousands
In soft white bread
Still she yearns for the cut and slice of life
The ache that scratches pen to paper
As words come serrated and sharp
Stained with reality
In the slumber before dawn
She dreams him away
Before sweet-toothed and longing
She calls for him
To float once again
A lounging marshmallow
On the hot chocolate of his love.
UNIT 13
A shrine of burnished trophies
And effigies suspended in frames and time
Conjure a haunting apparition of her daughter
One year in the ground
Her dreaming moves with a moaning wind
Through the graveyard until she watches herself
Dusting the plastic flowers that hold their shape
Against the hard glint of black marble
The polished surface interns her
In a back to front present
Where time twists and contorts
Uncanny and out of order
Crumpled and invalid her will lies
In the bottom drawer of her being
While her empty womb
Frets for the forsaken babies
This grave calls and claims her
Yet she must linger until her name
Lies in the hollows of a headstone
To be uttered in silence by a passing stranger
Enshrouding her is a vision
Of the ground taking her under
As her daughter holds wilting flowers above
In the melting colours of a sinking sun
She grieves for the earthbound birds
Whose feathers send the dust skyward
Summoning mirages of ghosts
In the clear morning light.
UNIT 12
Through the back door of his mind
He seeks to read the shifting signs
Of her artistry that lies in covert stains
Or inscribed in the soft sands that surround him
She is the black ink of his secret imagery
Indelible marks smudged in his unknown
Surging now as dancing signifiers
In the bewitching hour of his dreaming
When the day slides through shallow curtains
His thinking slowly rises
While wheelie bins
Sprawled open-mouthed
Like fat ancient Greeks
Purged of night-time ritual
Lie dew splashed and winking
In the sane morning sun.
Download a pdf of ‘The Citadel’
Melissa Farrell
With a background in performing arts, Melissa Farrell has written a number of short plays for theatre, as well as performed her poetry at various venues and festivals. Her postgraduate study at Macquarie University is allowing her to indulge in her enthusiasm for writing as she hones her skills and continues to explore the craft through its many manifestations.
