On a rare cool.  Calm spikes impending.  When I lie quietly sleeping upon my couch I hear you speak to me.  Within my heart and eye lies a picture that shines forth our violet-pale faces - the colour of lovers.

My portrait shows the world my hurt - rising till it bursts a third eye in my furrowed brow.  Always dreading the secret riffs of those brilliants abroad beneath my wall slats probing my spaces in this dark this silly mid-off land.  We are caught between the plague on both our castle keeps and khazis.  Yes my pet even my most privy moments are spooked with ears and eyes.   And so are yours. 

I will not accuse any person since I know your heart touches my blood.  Enemies will slake their black disconsolate thirst on my white plasma.  As I suffer this country I suffer you to remove my corpse to holy ground with a sacred geography and liberty to dwell in peace in my afterlife and France. 
 

In respect to our consanguinity,

Queenie M
 
 
 

***
 
 

El on High

Water.  Sea anemones.  Creature-me emotional in deep worry-dives.  Sea scythes. Scissors to my land-tongue.  I am sub rosa.  My world is in a state of hush.  And yet my body skrieks.  Blue blud is no fortress against purple urine.  Porphyria.  Canterbury bells.  Palma violets.  At what point exactly does blue bleed into purple?  Mauve to lilac?  Rose to red?  What is the point?   All day and every I paint with needle -  the diversity of colours makes time seed less tediously.  I continue till the pain bleeds green to auquamarine to cobalt twiligh...t...sky.

Oh my pure English rose. 

My crew is diminished.  I know not what line to sail nor how to lift my anchor.  Me - so at home on the sea.  Now so landlocked.  A gormless lubber without a gull... 

Codes lumpen inert.  Stump me up Scottish tweed twin-set wi fresh-water pearls.  Family pact my pet.  I need a perk.  So what if the younger gives with two hands what the elder gives with one finger.  Since when has gifting been a digit count? 

My heart hopes to die cleanly but my ever diminishing octaves condense into a low-throated curse.  And here comes the inconsolable scratch of quill at the final loop of my signature.

Tu Te Marieras
 
 
 

***
 
 
 

Yer Maj,

If I could seethe till tender as Neats Tongues turned to Hash my days would not stick in my throat.  I'm brittle as a Prince Bisket imbued with Butter as thin as you can then battered into bakers coffins.  It streatches my choler.  I begin to think in food and dwell on past feasts.  It turns my pallor to a marble of Pomme-Cittron As They Do Beyond The Seas. 

Send me confected Snow beaten with a birchen rod topped with a Sprig set in the midst a Sallet of Rosebuds and Gillyflowers in a pipkin with Roasted Carp Caper-rowlers of Radish Cods Cowslip Tart Larks Sparrows and Arrowroot to soothe the Pottage of Teals and Woodquests with Hypocrast to move my bowels. 

Right now I need a Cawdle For A Sick Body Egg-Egg-Limon-Egg and the weak Honey drink made with taking warm fountain water scummed with a silver spoon and a feather. 

Lard me with Lemon and cook me alive as they did-do with a goose -  sponging his head and heart as his inner parts roasted till he run mad up and down and stumbled with his cooking juice roiling to the verge of language.  My gnawing hunger for anywhere but here takes me in strange way - 

Caraway Caraway, 

Affectionate Jumballs,
Mary Maw.
 
 
 

***
 
 
 

Mighty,  Hi Coz,

My five unequal branches are unequalled but substrata-spirits knarl as I write sore amazed.  These branches that received a swell ring from you so true did usher an assurance of  safekeeping.  Third finger left hand-ha!  So many obscure words and dark sentences come from England.  Would I baffle with a long casket letter?  Would I?  Even though the casket be of silver and the parchment rare.  Nay.  No one can compel me to accuse myself.  I show little sign of grief yet it nips me near.  Nips me near.  Rare near...

Do not as the serpent that stoppeth his hearing for I am no enchanter but your sister and natural cousin.  I am not of the nature of the Basilisk and less of the chameleon to turn you to my likeness.  I continue to stitch pictures till very pain makes me give over.  This is my life.  They have not yet built Ikea over the road.  Rumour has it they never will.   So I wave bye-bye to my dreaming flat-pack Trojan Horse.   And stitich on. 

Veritas Armata 
 
 
 

Note:
The Marian Letters are part of a sequence from Escafel Hangings which centres around the city of Sheffield, England, where the poet now lives.  ‘Marian’ refers to Mary Queen of Scots who was imprisoned in Sheffield for 14 years.  These letters draw on Mary’s original letters to Elizabeth 1st of England with liberal updates and outrageous additions by Monk. Escafel Hangings will be published by West House Books in the late Northern spring of 2005.