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Martin Stannard


LETTER TO THE SLIPPER KING

Dear The Slipper King,

These letters please you must stop please stop
sending them. This should not have started since
we knew already its inevitable ending. Once upon
a time and it was not a long
time ago I forget who I was but
lately I have often been talking to myself
reflecting upon my reflections as the morning rises
rising into its glory. What happened I wonder

and can I now be recognised? My hair
is falling across my eyes and a blindness
ensues even as of a sudden I see
more clearly than for many a deceiving day.
My mother called. At least she claims to
be my mother, a friend at least of
my father and I feel a fragility about
this my familiar identity I cry at my

own thinking now and your interruption is exactly
not necessary. Of families I have little of
import to say except to say that in
your own house as it crumbles into the
torpid tarn that's where our reflection can never
be. We should never have started in on
this, knowing that to swim is beyond us,
that to flounder is our only certainty. Poetry

kills me, and prose puts me deeper into
a coma. If the dreamer in you needs
so much to dream then go ahead and
dream. If the architect in you needs so
much to build then go ahead and build.
I am too busy looking at myself to
look elsewhere where the wild beasts invade my
heart and where our hurts are two pears

in a pot and the bed is a
meadow within which grim little goats gloat. We
have the fire's emotional turmoil, the fog's foresight
between us, and this casts a shadow upon
our future, the sun if sun it was
being in our past. I've fallen carelessly into
our habit and starlings gather off my balcony.
When I break out of your drear hands

the owl will be waiting for me. My
father's reflection is inside the mirror,
and many times I have been here before.
You only know imperfect is perfect when silence
descends and it doesn't sound like solitude. And
the words in this little note can be
erased with one swish of your tail. You
don't know the power you have over me.

Yours,
Bluebird





Copyright © Martin Stannard, 2009