69th Parallel

Somewhere dead ahead
There is a line of cold
That breaks the heart

Without maps or numbers
I have travelled the distance
Between equator and pole

Where there are no roads
For the living to follow
Neither north nor south

Beginning and ending
Like birth and death
Have no markers

And I have no sense of purpose
Other than my own obsessions
Walking away from the light

With entropy for my guide
Through the chilling winds
And the shortening days

Every degree of latitude recedes
Like the passing years I have
Squandered in my becoming

I have gone from sun into shadow
Where the balanced hours grow uneven
And the spinning seasons dance away

But I am still the poet crossing lines
To find where winter must begin
In all these inevitable tomorrows

There have been others in this wilderness
Stranded by the deepening night and its stars'
Bright reminders of what the sun had been

Like those before me I have no choice
But to choose and I lay down these words of mine
Word upon word line upon line

My trail of footprints

If there is one line I must eventually write
Having chronicled the elusive sands of time
One faltering line with no hint of rhyme

It is unutterable

Somewhere beyond my words
Beyond knowledge and the endless night
Lies another line of cold over which
Endless daylight must yet return to break
The mournful heart of darkness

© BH, 2017

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I blame David Bowie for this. 

I’d not been into his work that much. Of course, I appreciated his approach to performance. I mean, I’d done a little work with the actor/performer Graham Valentine back in the day. And the name Lindsay Kemp was familiar. But, no, I didn’t follow Bowie from anything but a respectful distance.

So, when Bowie died last year, I was struck by how he'd created and performed, despite everything, doing the work relentlessly to the end. I was very struck by his Blackstar.  

Last week, I watched the documentary ‘The Last Five Years’ and it confirmed my impression of an artist who was continuously working through his own process of reinvention.

This, if you like, is an oblique homage. I was thinking of his 69 years and looked up the 69th Parallel. I got a map of the world with a red line somewhere up by the Arctic Circle. As if that represented a journey’s end. 

Mind you, as it’s all cyclical, so there’s also promise of renewal. Well, you’ve got to hope…