Five Poems by Lawrence Freiesleben

Mr Robber’s House

Struck by images of a different time
Early from the rain we retire
All these friends and children I knew –
In vanished clothes and whispered lines
Even myself
Exist somewhere else
Early in life or half-way through
Were they ever us?

The photos children take are uncentred
Randomly focused – the reason for choice almost lost
What survives has no natural priority
In home-made jumpers or lighter hair – a reluctant smile perhaps . . .
The chronology of objects oversees them
Yet brings them back
To make their untold afternoons live again –
The resurrected railway stations with ornamental churns
Our old kitchen at the millennium’s end
A tyre swing by a stream . . .

Such alternative frames tell stranger stories
Of moments, of other untaken pathways
They are not the accepted myth
They are the rejects.
Yet some are better than anything we plan or strive for
Greater than any worshipped art –
Their meaning is beyond perfection
Their memory an anti-time.
How do they not reach the prominence they deserve?
Never grab or influence their future?

This boy-haunted blur
On dark red sand under a tilted sea
Crouching to realize the onslaught of waves
Under the weight
Of overcast headlands
Threatened by Mr Robber’s House –
Will always be there
Will always be free.

A Rush of Green

Crossing the line into negative space                                 flicker
to realise the stress of being out of reach                          drag
to exchange it for infinity . . .
At last, the bones are beginning to show                           crack
survival here always required a disguise                           token, filler
a white self-deception of kindness and calm                   filter, flow
a feather to hide behind hardly
to restrain or conceal the inevitable impatience             not well
– even to cast distracting trails                                               maybe
a riddle or mesh                                                                             yes
or better still . . .

Like the poor and exploited,                                                                sturm and drang
the bourgeois, repressed or falsely free are always with us . . .
ever more expert at fooling themselves                                        balanced, rational
yet desiring, in rebellious dreams                                                    the arch, the light
things they’ll never reach . . .
Others meanwhile                                                                                   breathe deep
cannot be driven onto the rocks most strive to avoid
evade
for that is where they live.

So is there an answer to these extremes                                      iron struck
if no-one is sure where they stand? . . .
The mixture of trees from the graveyard is sublime –
and no one passes                                                                                  breathe again
only the sound of a distant tractor
from negative space
Under the white and blue towers of the sky.

Don’t waste time or space thinking this can’t last                     no!
Old stone or tired wooden fence,
by the ancient bridge a modern streetlight to remind us . . .
the edge of a garden, there is no going back.
These random thoughts can never be lost,
greyed
blurred by touch.
Listen closer all around:
three pigeons now are calling together
and around them, all the birds and lanes of Lancashire
have lost their county
no questions asked
awarded a rush of more intense green.

Crazed pavement tarmac with a brief atmosphere of Saltash

Afterthought Eagle garden           March crocus           north bitter
chapel symmetry           bishop yews           curtain guards
Sweeping road           broadly east           dip and rise –
the distant ring of fells, snow crowned
Small black flowers bloom in the sky
Another Spring, closer than before
rockin’ across the world
          speeding

I ask and turn, invisible, fading,
while the ground opens
a warm welcome
But there isn’t time for this
It would be irresponsible
No foolin from the general chatter . . .
“He’s been done!”           “What for?”           (a whispered answer,
eyes down, smirk right, shade left)
the pump handles gleam in the smokeless air
and laughter

A haze of purple sprinkled with white
Holy snowdrops cast back that
wandering mind           under the bare trees
turning west           a thankful village
for what?
rise and dips reversed
snow flurries           bleak crossroads           a distant dell of static caravans
and glancing across, a bungalow’s circular mirror like a hole in space
was lighter by far than anything out here
like a hole through space           you said that before
not quite
and the waving path through the silver birches was beautiful
ungreys the sky
towards the bay and shifting sands
          homeward

My Heart is a Crab

This time, seven bells within the long dark
it was a scrape which jagged through our heads,
though the noise, its location in blotched darkness
was impossible to plot amidst the ozone of crisscrossing tides.
Funneled by ruined terraces, the waves approach in formation, merging grids
as your hands experiment with keys
and the doorbell rings.

I don’t want regrets, but life is a trail of them
my influences are impossible to nail down,
they flit across the mind in droves
throughout glorious day and Stygian night
‘You shouldn’t go around taking chances with that lovely fuselage’ⁱ

i The scent of lilac, the smell of creosote
we are not here.
The swash of retreat sinks
your skirts float up in a whirlpool of grace
while I waste attention on a sock which seems inside out whichever way you question it.

Don’t ask for credit my love
in orchards or phases of the moon
for I cannot give, not even to thee
my heart is a crab
caught in the swash of retreat
I cannot reach
Can anyone help anyone?

Forewarnings and Portents

Between midnight and one, disquiet became present
a clang or rasping vibration into the foundation
– volume on two different wavelengths?
Grinding train with excess load, out of gauge,
smashing trees and dragging bridges?
Or ship prow mounting the land, supernaturally determined
thrusting, scraping, sheet anchors abandoned . . .
What we dream or imagine, will always exceed what can be lived or known
in this case negative.
The ides have come, but are not gone.
A dream about nothing
in the sense of the void beyond
A dream about if not today then very soon.

And now, in this wave, a warning from our mountain valley
Are we there or is it only some past tense of mine alone?
its fastness invaded by marching children looking for barns
robots in uniform passing.
Still the sky is too wide
it reminds me of your smile that hollowed . . .

A sense of the broken-hearted.
A memory of dawn.
Laughter and anger on separate tables
tearing up different menus.
Forget careful friendship and queasy alliances.
Transcendence yes! but this way was not it.

So many warnings:
excavators clanked against the rising tides
a shatter of pencil leads snapped in two
a caustic joke with no silver lining
more skips than vehicles below
the arrival of roadblocks and the encroachment of scaffolding
traffic lights out of sequence
curtains that won’t quite join.

The flash was ahead, dazzled on the wet soil and the leaves fresh from a shower.
Dazzled away all darkness in bushes and trees, any shadows on the surface,
cleansed every organic accretion to make things new
for the few who believe they can have things to themselves . . .

I was in bed when it happened
or the bath, the cellar, the broken greenhouse
so many things and places and faces
we will never see again
including our own.
We did this – don’t ever forget!
We followed the rules
let psychos, ideologues and billionaires hijack the world
with their corporation friends and pocket governments
all those who never cared: dotards, fools, megalomaniac nerds
darkness comes now and will never end
only the elemental map will endure
to fashion a consciousness over again, eventually
or not bother –
that project was always futile
the wrong and the worst always win
while the meek inherit the kerbs and graves
the flooded quays and suffocated oceans
Sounds religious I know – but I am past that
we are all past that.

Leaded air, I feel the crouching, I see flaking faces appearing burns like stigmata.
We fell into the shack with splintered hands
as another train thundered past. But neither the thudding of wagons
and not the rising of the sea on black rocks shrivelling at our feet
creates the tension murmuring upon the air
cupboards and screens chattering despair.

I was lucky, society was my only allergy
I tend to feel transcendent rather than lonely,
my arms and legs do not really belong
except in winter, prior to bearing the temperature . . .
the despair apparent.
We were lying on the tourist beach flattened by heat, sharin’ our last fag . . .
the vapour trails of cheap flights.
We were singing in the mission chapel,
hymns of blind hope.
I was feeding the cat –
that whiskered smile against loneliness.
I was scraping ice from the windscreen:
fuck! me fingers was frostbit!
I was watching two ladybugs cross a green leaf in the hedge by the school:
meeting, in love or about to fight?
lit up in a March sun that was like autumn
glowing, magnified, on rust leaves, Spring at last
you said green
rust leaves left over?
you did say green but never mind
the ides of March
the tides of supermoons . . .
Memory – who can trust it?

The flash was directly ahead – I could not close my eyes fast enough –
the instinct of shutting follows only the inertia of wanting to know.
Tripping on a sleeper, blasted down the embankment into momentarily cool weeds,
cool soil, cool earth grasp hold, now everything can only ever be texture . . .

Brussel sprouts and mushroom clouds – (worth a laugh)
flower patterns scattered across meadows and marsh
twilight’s last gleaming in the rushes
a river going nowhere – its flow reversed
flowing back through trees and branches
overtopping the platforms . . .

Miraculously, all my children are here in the mountains
but the curtains are too thin
and the tinned food won’t last
we have no guns or bows and nothing to shoot
no fields or land to plant
no water that is not brackish or poisoned
no past or future
no lips or hair
nor easy lives
no roads to cycle or spokes for repair
no world in which to despise easy rhymes,
their complacent withdrawal, their incipient irony
wind rush fills the night’s swelling fear,
the headache buzz, the speckled hazarding pressure
the prayer for normality
for relieving slumber
withdraw into green
the otherworld or screens
to favour a hero (female, male or in-between)
who you can avoid finally caring about . . .
I loved the cool soil
and the warm sand, the trees and the birds:
What we dream or imagine, perhaps will always exceed what we could have lived,
even the positive?
Transcendence yes! but this was not the way.
Can we get through this watch?
Can we pass this broken repeated banging
– as of a rubbish truck with square wheels determined to carry on.


ⁱ from the b movie Three Bad Sisters, 1956, dir. Gilbert Kay with Marla English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Bad_Sisters



Lawrence Freiesleben grew up on a council estate at Aylesbury – one of the “London overspill” granted freedom beyond the green belt. Leaving home at sixteen, a Devon caravan was his next home in a peripatetic life of writing and painting. Described by poet Brian Louis Pearce as 'A liquid, lyric prose achievement of a high order.' The Bow, was reprinted by independent press, Stride, in 2000. In 2013, he completed the novel Maze End. After seven years in Northumberland’s North Pennines, Lawrence, recently appointed Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, now scrapes by in the dilapidated seaside town of Morecambe with his 16-year-old daughter.