A Map of the Island

 

A Map of the Island

 

 

When you was little, did you snatch crayons and draw?

Fight children over the least-best-used colours,

nicked from classroom art box under teacher’s nose,

clunky passions there, within your child heart grows

 

like thick nailed rainbow wax ricked by chubby digits,

ballooning like stuffed nobbled turkeys, fat on rickets,

lost within blonde foolscap, blank lives are forming:

risen buns upon hot cross islands sees ideas dawning.

 

Harsh would she patient remind you share, play fair.

Yet she set square smiles, framed in locks of protractor hair

would you bring autumn apples, to lay upon her desk;

she was pleased to rub upon full bosom and caress?

 

You knew it then, could not lay your thumbs on breasts:

so it twitching grinned, from within to fruit without

from paper’s east, all blessed peace, wide open armed

Messiah; his robed limbs drawn thin-stapled to his chest

 

floats above, with cross-eyed glance perhaps to fall;

surveys your scribbled imperfect lost paradise scrawled,

all bits of flat roofs, palm trees, gawping faces in awe,

each sloppy circle on circle on circle in pencil scored,

 

carved deep from lost woods and broken lead,

genesis to revelation from soft blistered bubble head.

While from paper’s west, wild tempest boils and blows,

when there will come rains, there will come snows,

 

shuffles Caliban rude, but you do not will him yet,

suffering to learn soiled language and not forget.

Hug him, child. Impulses, like sour strawberry whips,

and sherbet lemons so sharp they kill with cherry lips

 

rattled out, all quarters into tricornered paper bags,

tooth sucked yellow triple chinned cheeks of hags,

and though, as yet, your masterstrokes are poor,

take up those cast iron-chartered dividers and draw.

 

Draw. This map of the island from within inked in

such dreams as stuff is nonsense, frowning begin

deep in call and response, walk on, walk on with hope,

to hang up on their hearts with just enough rope

 

and vote. Oh, for such parties will there be, teacher,

in castles, castles on drifting clouds, and great creatures,

great like hedgehogs or even water voles, all breathing fire

submerged, trodden or not, I forgot, for heavenly choirs

 

will greet you, as down the catwalk will you strut,

and even as you trip, cushion you with pillows of apple

fool fantastic. She indulgent ruffles raspberry thoughts,

to deal her hands to all those nurtured monsters taught

 

how to draw maps, maps of islands. Oh, see Ariel fled,

but within his hands, you might be better dead,

circle on circle on circle, a whole stadium indistinct

must be forever circumscribed in such clumsy ink.