Mark Burnhope

THE IDEAL BED

Double bed which shouldn't look
like this: so skewiff but no one on,
I can't even stand to smooth its sheet.
I try to circle round it, but my wheels
won't fit down the right side, the one
which, incidentally, I try to imagine hides
who we were five years ago: you standing
heaving the bed to and fro, trying to catch
our south-facing garden's light
(the bulbs were always blowing)
and me laughing; then afterwards
us, falling bed-long into this
self-same undividable iron maiden.
My nurse has just replaced our mattress
with a manmade, farcical memory-foam
thing: cures pressure sores faster.
You'd laugh if you could be here.
Remember shopping in IKEA,
wondering what kind of carpenter
constructed, folded, boxed and sold our bed?
Hardly an artist, probably couldn't
have given an actual fuck, you said.
When we got home the bed refused to stand
up in the room we'd meant for it. In its form,
we saw the ideal parts to shed:
a little off this surface, that corner.
We grew hungry, desperately so
pushed it against the larder door
so neither of us could hoard
when the waves crashed hard. Its back
was flimsy chipboard and would give
out in the year's most unnewsworthy
quake, if the front of the frame stayed.
So you sanded back for days, weeks,
months; pored over cookbooks,
catalogues and promotions; reclined
on the mattress like an ocean, faced
me and my canvas, and said, Draw!
(But the kitchen bulb was dying.)
Hardness the Lord made then tore:
the one you pushed aside to get past
the fact we never found
the perfect light to lie in.

* * *

TO MY FAMILIAR, QUEEQUEG*

I too am tattooed.
I too tap away
nightly at an idol.

Show me a sailor who
hasn't savaged himself
and I will anchor a cyclone.

Our ink speaks
in skin: spins tales
of speared fins;

sirens found by fingering
tracks of sultry song
and then defiled.

The world turns
over like a novel
sex act requires

of a woman. I often
trail the geography
of the tethered body.

Once, I woke to find
your tentacles tightly
wrapped around me.

I wished to be tangled
safe, like Ishmael
finding in you his wife.

I wanted to compare
tattoos, remove tops
and trousers, and trace;

laugh at lines
blown out from excess
force by the hand, and time,

designs that lighten, slowly,
like flints in the sea.
For a while, Quee, we'd find

a world where the whale
is not white or dreadful. It's
a pale vessel, drifting, singing.

* * *

THE HOUSE, THE CHURCH AND FISHERMAN'S WALK

The non-discriminatory town accepts me,
sees no difference between a house
and hospital but for size, number of beds,
cadaver-count.
                I dig my front casters
into the grass, of this derelict house
I wheel past daily.
Its windows, kaleidoscope-shattered,
twenty roof tiles missing, abused
by youth or age, bang on to me in Sign –
for sale – what it says and has
for seemingly years.    The house
is seated at a church's right.
A beech bows over its fence,
weeps against that Beloved Body;
one day bites a thumb at the sad façade,
strokes its neck the next:
Ah! Dialogue, change,
at least to the state
of the church roof, the fence, the tree itself.
All that's skint and sorrowful watches.

Every Sunday, all the coastal churches
intercede for me, quick to unlock
the cells of my securely-guarded body.
Their petitions vary: 1) Evangelicals
in rhetoric-plate drive
the ghosts of Adam and Eve and all
their children (no longer one but Legion)
far from me; preach a future without a past
tense of to suffer. 2) Roman
Catholic doorframes carry my cross for me,
blood still fresh, wounds sashimi-raw.
They ask no more than that He,
Lemon Sole once slain,
look out for me, which is lovely
even if (slightly) lame.
                The crux
of every prayer is much the same:
deliver me from the evil one,
whether he be damnation or just
a fortnight of light depression.

Pebbles, prayers, rosary beads
line the beds of Fisherman's Walk.
Flowers lay slain along the floor,
followers to the Toronto Blessing (1994).
Bins. Our foxes infiltrate to seek
and save and, let's be fair, to eat.

The lights on the street in the town on the coast
like me. Okay, some of their posts
are wonky but they shine on plaice
and pitta scraps thrown to swans
and us by prosperous families;
on them long-dead, gammy-legged
trembling out of the ground to dust
waders down, run to the ocean
where fishermen cast
without conditions or crutches.
All aboard the sprawling liquid ward
as Nurse Night flaps out a fitted sheet
they sleep on the tremulous sea; thusly
all their careful catches, care of a strain
of events too arcane to see, come to me.

*"To My Familiar, Queequeq" first appeared in Magma. All poems are from Burnhope's book, The Snowboy.

Mark Burnhope lives in Bournemouth, UK, and has Spina bifida and Hydrocephalus. His poems and reviews have appeared in Magma, Horizon Review, Nth Position and other journals, as well as a handful of anthologies. His chapbook, The Snowboy, was published in 2011 by Salt Publishing.