Jane Austen smiles

Part of the seduction of fiction is in identification.


Who wouldn't need to feel pretty downtrodden
to identify with the threatening surroundings
of dark Gothic passages, the screams of a virgin,
separated from her family, at the mercy of society,
running through the drafty corridors of the 18th century,
and everything bleak, bleak, bleak?

She gave us the modern heroine, each good one
since Elizabeth, with all her wizened wit.
Elizabeth, with her good-girl strength and spirit
the inspiration for Bronte's Jane Eyre, a governess,
her passionate independence; educated, autonomous,
in revolt against the lot; id, locked in the attic.

Classic heroines, their lines censored, metaphor straitjacketed,
topsy-turvy corsets tight as Scarlet O'Hara's, but sadly, not so loose.

Later, on the streets of romantic fiction,
fantasy is real women at the centre of story,
still painting satire on the back of deep feeling.

Horse-drawn-slow, or slow, slow -  - quick-quick-slow,
down a winding road of flowers and hedgerow; hay,
soft lace, muslin, frills...watch the pace of rugged landscape,
there's a willful spirit emerge through the ages,
our indomitable, incorrigible, formidable woman
until she's full mettle throttle and a real warm heart.

See her fierce liberation on the pages of every day,
in the leaping of her zeitgeist on the squares,
on the curled lip canvas of walls, her words
are the cinematic graffiti of women's culture,
of fiery clouds calligraphic across blue skies.

(Jane Austen smiles. Another modern heroine writes the next page,
dipping the oceans, sitting in circles, weaving the texture of lives.)


07/08

It's about it,

It’s about the things we cannot write down
until all those people die - or we do,
whispering to stars making libraries in the sky,

all about the things that make us so elusive,
when elusiveness could be elu-civity, or lucidity,
for when we wanted to be as clear as day.

It’s about the glass stanza, somewhere in the middle
which breaks, and turns to such, and such; re loyalty,
stupidity, the inevitability of lines, sides,
Tribes, and many other rhymes.

It’s about illusions, delusions, fantasies, the ramblings
of drunken libraries, open books, doors ajar to moments of moonlight -
stars, stripes, scandals, newspaper articles, and silence.

it’s about peace in the middle of warring factions,
fractions, multiplications, and subtractions;
when a pie is not a pie, and there’s no point at all -

- measuring an expanding radius, or running
around on edge - it’s always about returning to the centre,
putting pen to paper, or tapping on the keyboard to begin.