Absence and Longing

The wind blew the dust of the orchids
Till they fell in tiny rain
Pocketed by the silvered banks
In vegetal greensleep

Ghost, Lady’s Slipper, Pyramidal
Helleborine, Creeping Lady’s-Tresses
Hear lost songs and murmurings
Their seed mouths pursed

For ten years, small fingers tap
The diurnal coils, feathery roots
Two tiny leaves, then four
What falls and rises in that time?

Waxen palest starlight, cold moons
Summon the princesses
Their slippers are violet, pink
dappled, toad striped satin

Dancers, if you part the grass
Stare deep into their eyes
A hidden lover’s shivering fancy
Such things pass and are purblind.

 

Veronica Aldous all rights reserved 2019

 

 

 

 

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Rufus

His heart a moonscape
Cinema of black chickens and rats
Under hedges and through ginnels
Up the wiry hill, his way is freezepaws
Carking and yelping at cats
Eyes chips of magma, ghost blood
Runs in his veins, heating
The live furnace of his one track brain.

Veronica Aldous all rights reserved 2022

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The Duc D’O

The Duc D’O on finding his horses were escaped and gone.
For Richard E. Grant because I dreamed he wrote this.

In Summer the little hatch is left wide
So the groom can hear if they need him
Lately, the Grey has been skittish
She is a mare and her belly is calling

I slept as a dark wine sleeps in a barrel
Nearly rotting with drunken fancies

In the morning the lisere shocked me
With its vivid scarlet and bronze irises

My eyes wept without my consent
Even before I knew they were missing

As if they had never breathed steam on cold mornings
As if my dead lady had never kissed their soft brows
As if there were nothing beyond doors
Creaking and slamming in a high wind…

Of course we beat the groom.

Veronica Aldous all rights reserved published 2022

Chap BookBy Veronica Aldous

All rights reserved 2022

Even the government
Hates its own
Snaky green wallpaper
The clanking doors
Heave huge repentant sighs

Puginesque beasts
Squat on mahogany tables
Scratching errata
Into the margins
Of soft crumbling scrolls

The Police are hunting themselves
With their own dogs
For their televisible crimes
Across several co existent realities

We are all deported at last
To serve in the war of the New Continent
Big Ben sighs as
A robotic waif is
Reprostituted on the Diana Bridge

A new Victorian tradition is promised
On several major service providers
The cabriole legs of Queen Priti
Are obscured in heavy marocain
By Black Rod
Chimneys are again crawled
By Poor Toms
But we are saved from the Unions
Or uprisings, or love.

70s Mess

I was staring at the hard cracked up mud that lay in octagonal biscuits
Mum said there was a war somewhere nearby
In those days there was chalk in dog food
But no one yet understood the white fossilised deposits of dogs
The sun was very bright but not yet Empyrean
There were a zillion insects of every jewel shade
Birds inhabited every square foot of air
The river was as clear as swimming in a mirror
We had a pet mussel in a biscuit tin under a tree
It was classy to go to a supermarket
And buy frozen chocolate mousse, or Kunzel cakes
Classy was still ok to say, it meant you were
Aspiring and had an account with Harrods
Classic was a small wrapover camel coat 
That made me look yellowing and peaky
Love Story was a melody and she looked so good
With that shining whippy mahogany hair 
Even though she seemed very sharp tongued
I once got a clip round the back of the leg for being Ali McGraw
Con trails were exquisite and were called vapour
London was a dream on an ashtray
Dad brought us, Mum said why have you bought
The children ashtrays, you forgot didn't you
I thought to start smoking as soon as possible 
Burned paper in the car using the lighter
We went out there to listen to Radio Caroline
Although we could have listened indoors
But we wanted to be on a fantasy freeway
Mum was a go go dancer and had hot pants
My father said you are not going out
In thigh boots, but she did and it was only the Odeon
To see something she shouldn't have 
That made her have nightmares
She also had a maxi coat and big felt fedora
From Way in, or Bernie's in Harlow
I sat on a pouffe and saw nakedness and breasts
I had a bell like a hippy and sounded like a cat
I was taken to Biba and bought a turquoise feather 
When we walked through Regent's Park, Mum said don't look
As everyone was lying on top of each other on the grass
A man made a horrible licking face at me in the library window
Another man kept touching my leg
I felt like screaming I'm only a child
You have mistaken me for a woman 
That was after I had a whole pvc outfit
And looked like Hendrix but small and confused
It was wet look too, Mum said I was adorable
And do that song at school, but nobody agreed
And I just got called PVC, which was ironic
As my father probably invented it. 


Veronica Aldous all rights reserved 2022 not to be copied reproduced
or quoted.

Aldermaston Highwayman

V.

http://www.veronicaspaintbox.com

On the Male Appropriation of Female Beauty

Is not flowers, but a suffocation
Of possibility, a simulacrum
Of the inner entity
Her eyes are luminous
Burning her books.

She stayed still for the image
Thinking it art or hypnotism
Inside her brain made
Novel synapses and spirals
Intricate new colours

Her breast lilies were quite violent
So he stumbled into her
A drunk demanding it, what, it, what?
Her starshell burned the black
Radiant, shortly before his paralysis.

I own myself
He made her say.

Veronica Aldous all rights reserved 2020

Painting Myself a New, Face by Veronica Aldous all rights reserved 2020

Sashiko

November plucks
At the beggar’s torn shawl
Blue beneath the folds

Veronica Aldous all right reserved 2020

Indigo. by Veronica Aldous 2020

Ancient

Ancient

If I were a tree
Ungovernable, with roots
Extending into the mouth of fire
I would crack open
A swarm of bees enter my heart
I would bow only to the empyrean wind
The white rain, the blue rain, the green waters

You would not notice me there in the forest
Amongst the others, I am not singular
To the eye, yet I scour the sky
With my dizzying bifurcation

I am an old elephantine beast
A scarred warrior in the darkness
As Orion blinks above me
And a thousand thousand diamonds
Fall straight into my yaw.

Veronica Aldous All rights reserved 2020

Textile stitched over leaf prints- Veronica Aldous

Wildflower

Veronica Aldous Instagram Art

Wildflower

In my weedhood, I scampered up the sidings
Lockdown meant the people stared at me
Naked as a shorn lamb in the undergrowth

They baptised me with urine and sometimes beer
Staggering up the road with wailing lovesongs

Beautiful as an astonished baby, I emerged
Brazen in the cold sun, my clockwork heart
An orison to repetition
I am nothing but expectation
My ovules full of fruiting bodies, seed
Is my apotheosis, my ecstasy
Let bees crawl upon my breasts
My upturned hooped skirts
Whilst you stare transfixed
At my delicious flowers, my green heartleaves
Expose my  inner labyrinths with one finger,
I am already dying

I pray my babies are birthed
In deepest richesse of stinking  manure.

 

All Rights Reserved Veronica Aldous 2020