The End of the Pier Show

The End of the Pier Show

*
Roll up roll up ladies and gentlemen
for this once in a lifetime, once in a deathtime experience
coming to your town for one night only
this five-ring circus of mythic proportions!
 
Take off your shoes, peel back your eyes,
remove your epidermis ladies and gentlemen –
open yourselves up to the whole grand menagerie – 
let snaggletoothed twilight rummage your ole bag o’ bones!
 
*
 
This is the dream 
where you are a tightrope walker
 
suspended over a crucible
of molten glass.
 
You know in your heart
you shouldn’t look down.
 
When your mother calls 
from the basement
 
you let your glance fall
 and it’s done.
 
*
 
Everyone leans in
to see the educated fleas
harnessed by gold thread
to carriages and ferris wheels.
 
A two-bit accordionist
tries a creaky accompaniment – 
the music of the spheres
between smoke breaks.
 
*

Test your skill and your chutzpa
on the eye-popping hoopla game!
Hear the circles of hell
whistle about your ears!
Stare slap-bang into the abyss, 
ladies and gentlemen!
 
Mind your step on your way in – 
leave your pusillanimity at the gate!
 
*
 
The sea bridles beneath the splintered boards
but everyone is wrapped in their own heedlessness – 
clothing thick with the scent of burnt sugar
candyfloss cleaved to the crags of their teeth.
 
The speedball rush of sweetness to the brain 
and the hall of mirrors transcribes you
as a side-splitting freakshow mask
delirium bridling in your shell-likes.
 
*
 
It’s hard to look away
when a spectacle dances itself free
from the dark crescent
of the hippocampus.
 
A contortionist, tattooed 
with all seven continents
is suspended over a circle of lions
by the rope of her hair.
 
And you feel a tightening
in the collar of sinews at your neck
and the slow creep of centuries
up the ladder of your spine.
 
You console yourself
with the fact 
that you are a meal for no beast,
and somehow, fall asleep.

*

This is no ordinary act
of two-bit trickery – 
this is Mephistopheles
The Great Magician!
 
Witness him speak
with the voice
of a hundred spirits - 
see beyond the veil!
 
Call forth 
your drowned daughters
your stillborns
and all your dark fathers!
 
And when the secrets
of the universe
have been revealed to you entire
and your skin a ghastly sheen
 
take your dead 
back home with you again – 
let them wild your dim parlour
with their graveside flowers.
 
*
 
These nights the voices
test you with seductions
from the otherworld
as lightning rips through the sky
 to unearth you.
 
And it’s clearer than day when it does -
that look on your face -
as if you have been expecting
to be found so incontrovertibly 
 lacking.
 
You hold your soul, that threadbare shroud   
to the light
 and utter the beats 
 between thunder and lightning
as if this tallying might lead to deliverance.
 
*
 
The magpies are gathering apace this morning, 
and the tempest that cartwheeled the sea
has now smoothed down its skirts
and put on its blithe morning face.
 
The pier is dog tired.  Its baptism
has washed away the human debris
but its legs appear to lurch
as it tries to maintain its own bulk.
 
One by one the birds are called away
and the clairvoyant, the palmist,
the dog-headed man and the princess of the sea
open up their shutters for another day’s grind.

Helen Ivory

Helen Ivory’s new Bloodaxe Books collection, ‘The Anatomical Venus’ examines how women have been portrayed as ‘other’; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets. A hanged woman addresses the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, a woman diagnosed with ‘Housewife Psychosis’ recounts her dreams to Freud, and a sex robot has the ear of her keeper. The Anatomical Venus imagines the lives of women sketched in asylum notes and pictures others shut inside cabinets of curiosity.

The Anatomical Venus is published in May 2019 is available here:

https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-anatomical-venus-1210

Website: http://www.helenivory.co.uk/
Webzine: http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/