David Susswein - Poems

I’ve been dreaming about poetry my whole life- the first girl’s kiss I ever stole was the responsibility of Ted Hughes! – ‘Song’. From his first collection. She loved the poem, and me speaking it. Sadly that childhood romance didn't blossom to anything, but my love of poetry has never left me. Nor will it, ever, like either a loved one, or a cancer you just can’t shift.
I live in Eastbourne, right at the bottom of England. Next to the ocean.
This is my first publication. 

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                  An Alien Spring
 
To be born anew
we want to be born anew
shake off this coil,
remake our destiny far from...
all space laid out, stars too far
to tan skin, too far to care
which dream is taken,
which philosopher's school made fashion.
 
I dream to be, yes! far away
from the dozing masses, a rocket can take me
into the dream the christian’s seek
their god an alien who blessed some wine;
an interstellar joke on our perpetual dependencies
and made for himself a religion
the exact inverse of what he meant,
 
is so very easy to see, if you have eyes
we travel worn roads of unforgiving,
a merciless track where no friend traverse
a deceit to mask a truth But…
 
walk to the plains of Mars and find
a face their gods shorn from rock,
 
to Europa where beneath a crust of ice
dolphins swim in perpetual circles,
 
to Bernard's star where don't you know,
Bradbury, Asimov and all the greats
took their first baby steps,
 
To Foundation… and brains that think in tanks of liquid,
where a conscious robot dreams of being human,
ruled by laws encoded in circuits by his gods,
where ambassadors of shadows crawl among the stars
to turn the epochs of the galaxy to their liking,
 
where i have spent all my childhood days
locked, and tumbling in weightless worlds
freed from absurdities of earth's cooling heart,
where lovers played with insectoid creations
of minds like mine; trapped to be released
from the tyranny of a society impenetrable,
 a literature failing
in modern times, to make sense of any of us,
 
how wondrous to face an alien spring,
to touch and reach out,
without shame or its corollary hate,
and break the spell --
the rolling green hills of earth
seen not as fat feed for the masses
but a magicians’ beautiful playground --
 
Lift up your heads!
you poor race of men,
to the beckoning stars
the eternal empty vacuum,
so swelling with all kinds of life,
reach out and dare, to touch
those whom walked amongst the stars
when we were all young,
and by doing find
some measure, any measure
of what it is to be human after all.


 
                attempt at a narrative #10             
 
Break this spell upon the ocean
let it drift into the day
break this spell upon the ocean
let it drift unto this one day.
 
Break gravity's spell
or photons slow quantum wave
speak: brown dwarfs' baying
in full light's sheerest wake.
 
Don't speak to me of madness
not whisper in my ear,
nor smooth my brow, nor kiss my lip,
not hold my cheek from running tear.
 
Or tell me there is any hoping left,
for minding mercy kindness,
from a world spun and bound to darkness
to your opaqued one God’s holiest, divine.
 
[i've read your papers
skimmed a twitter feed
watched the youtube videos
captured all your sickness]
 
i need no further evidence
to pass a full sentence on your world:
you are limited to a violent, violent chattel,
that no one would ever... ever
      bother reaping.
 
Any imperial alien species,
haughty in their perspective,
would leave you to wither
wither, as thine will always do.
 


 
                      A. Looking from the Hill
 
Childhood fortress of dreams
playing drivers with wireframe cars
pulling on string and rubberwheels
underneath the hot African sun.
 
Planting dreams and winking at the camera,
as the mother snapped shutter
looking over the rainbow t-shirts of friends
finished with their pitch black faces,
returning home to the grey finite sky,
rain all thru every season,
roundfat face staring over neighbour fences,
into muddy ground, foreigners' lives.
 
To divine how the english live,
so far from the roots that burrow
the fat unformed of adult lives
swirling down the toiletbowl with drunken fever,
standing outside and looking in,
where is the centre of a bastard race,
fading photographs of a garden tendered
by black-servant-gardeners who stole whiskey
and frightened siblings to distraction,
trying so hard to recall a life that's lost
surrendered, to the dull leaden daze
of an adulthood spinning, the focus gone
the roots brittle in their amnesia,
antinomian life, a consciousness
at war with itself, its social peers.
 
Do the cells of water know the course of the sea
to divine the tides the moon's sway
with the consciousness of a bubble rising
to the surface, how does a child understand,
what it means to be, a member of this or that race,
to follow unwritable laws, and failing so offend
the righteous to be struck dumb and blind,
an outcast, befriended by nothing other than the moon,
and spend one's whole life,
repeating errors unmentionable, patterns unintelligible
to reach the final understanding that never comes,
of why, the unseen mark must so be painted
on the forehead of hated alien,
the interloper from foreign shore.
 
And no matter how I hide with perfume,
or pant airs of religious incense,
the broods of righteous have the smell
—the hair on the neck's back pricking--
the true smell will out,
and no matter how my eyes dip to authority,
or feign insouciant manner to buy support;
I am lost before I am born.
 
And the wake of magic rites stir no longer
the fields and suns once prayed over,
now reaped by imagination’s mechanism,
tilled by steel hands and the coldest science;
the maypole, the all-souls-night turned
to quaint spectacle; no matter how far
the fathers of mankind have travelled
from hunter's spearing oxen
washing their blood-hands in sanctified pools
to the leering citadels of progress
and science warring with itself in paradox --
 
The children of our time still turn,
to the bitter consequence
of the unnameable soul,
troughing animal or mother of three,
pale faced boy or liquid saint,
pouring thru our callused hand,
 
we all still tied
to the tropic urge
that i can not name
that governs our breeding,
as surly as the sun we worshipped, brings its night.