Gravy and the Grave
Listen Here
You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol
The watcher. The watched.
The endless night squeezing into the strangle of a shrill. Guts rolling with a wave of punches. The gravy wants out. The grave wants in. This skin soft and thin, yet thick and wrinkled. The silence spooning reflection as the wild urges of reaction rattle the chains of their addiction. The moaning ghosts ensuring that they are heard, seen and felt.
The watcher. The watched.
Duelling banjos playing loud from the south like a scene from Deliverance. Theatre now reality in the games of throne. The cosmos smiling love and light in the north. The stars rippling in widening circles. Wisdom sings into Being from the east. My brown eyed roots dancing in the shadow of the tree of meaning. The mystery of the west beckons to me with the sweetness of what is yet to come. She knew me before I existed. The world wants in. The world wants out.
The watcher. The watched.
Will it be three ghosts tonight? Will there be just one?
I sleep with one eye open and welcome in the storm.
Gravy and the Grave
From the gravy and the grave
the ghosts arrive in chains.
Collywobbles
going bat shit crazy
in the saddle of a blind mans bluff.
Looking for a lost head
wearing a pumpkin
hollowed out with a dull spoon
after midnight.
A rowdy mob of rot and churn grope
at the gripping guts of a half finished loaf
that burns by belly. The moaning
in my stomach slurps me through a plastic straw.
A revelry of duelling organs tangle
in a tune of deliverance. Screaming
into the strangle - of the night.
Echoing through the bones
where the dead walk the world.
© Jamie MillardThank you for Being - Here!
May the rumbles in your guts bear birth to the fruit of authenticity.
May you lean into the soul of love.
Blessings.
Have the best of days.
Lots of Love,
Jamie
Jamie
What the Dickens indeed.😊 Christmas cold and a joke cracked in London before the advent of psychology; the temper of an injudicious late roast... a cooking of his goose, his ghost with a shimmer still of the oven. Tales of Dark London where many narrow streets lurked in the time of the year; 'the river sweats oil and tar...', a later poet observed of the sullen tides. Old London dreams even now.
Why this morning reading your tidal gut poem did a memory, it could have been from you (?), float in; ice and time on the shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence where life and humans persist in unnamed abundance with the tides along the flats? What 's in the name; patron of the poor and children, I learn. And scholars think it likely by a typographical error, a grim joke in the spirit of the time, the patron of good cooks?
May your blessed cardinal directions preserve us under the balance of a joyous moon!
v best
Phil
Woah, what a feast of words and emotions, Jamie! Thank you. Your 'gravy' and 'grave' are ab-soul-utely mesmerising! I will have to come back and reflect on them again and again. As I listened and read this first time, I couldn’t help but imagine Alastair Sim as Scrooge meeting the three ghosts. I love the way you’ve skilfully woven humour, reflection and deep mystery into this post. It feels like you have one foot in each 'word' and 'world'. Just glorious! Thanks again.