On the Presence of Being Everywhere is a platform for Richard Mather’s poetry, prose and non-fiction writing.

The Darkness of This House

Making his advances in tall steps,

Davie marks Suzie standing small

at the kitchen sink.

She drops something, holds still her breath.

‘No-one’s gonna listen to you, Suzie,

and that’s a fact’.

The ugly brown voice of a drunk

scrapping for a fight.

From him bad odours rise, smells

of fish and river foam, tobacco and beer.

He picks up a carver, puts it down.

‘So don’t even think about it’.

It is evening, it is hot, and a dead carp’s eye

looks up at Suzie from the dish drainer.

An attack is imminent.

Davie patrols the kitchen, his heart

a drum beating a tattoo.

From his hands an anniversary gift

of bella perle plates goes to the wall.

Underfoot a confetti of glass,

the untold fragments of a broken marriage.

‘God damn you, Davie. Get out’.

Suzie’s on her knees, again.

Her patience is stretched thin,

like skin over a hollow frame.

Davie marches over, his steel toe cap

colliding with Suzie’s most tender spot:

yesterday’s bruise.

A deadly quiet occupies the space

vacated by comprehension.

Nothing he says can change anything now.

Davie skulks, his insides

glowing dark; black lava, hot

and inviscid, breaks the crust and surges.

House lights flicker and dusk

marks the end of twilight.

They came with sirens, these strangers

with their notebooks and equipment.

Intermittent chatter, concerned eyes.

Radio static crackles like fat in the oven.

Suzie’s tearful mother is talking.

Who is the injured party here?

Am I alive? Is he alive? Now look,

when I move my hands the air moves

and cools under the fanning air.

Suzie? You are Suzie, aren’t you?

I confess, I’m Suzie Wilde, woman, wife

and daughter, twenty-nine years old.

III

A knife came to me from the cutting board.

It entered my grasp as objects often do.

I held it like a key to a prison.

Its blade penetrated as deep as I dared.

Behind his back, the knife commits murder.

It fell from my hand onto the kitchen floor.

A wild man of blood, Davie is wild no more.

I sit a while. His hands and face I stroke.

I come to this room; the light doesn’t work.

The room is empty. I straighten the bed,

turn back the covers, and I do all this

with a feeling I cannot name. Not real,

I lie on my back, these red fingers

clasped over my stomach, coffin-like.

Hard I stare at the light that doesn’t work.

From the beam the bulb hangs limp, suspended.

I wonder if the time I’ve served on earth

is a prelude to life, a prelude to death.

And in the darkness of this, our house,

I dream I am dead already and Davie

is the one who is lying in my place.

Poetry from On the Presence of Being Everywhere

Blog By Richard Mather

Aimed at those who appreciate poetry and philosophy, my website acts as a platform for showcasing both passions, with poems, essays, and reflective pieces on language, phenomenology, religion, and ontology. An ongoing focus is on how language not only ‘speaks’ writing into being (often beyond the writer’s conscious control), but how it speaks people into being, leaving us with the unsettling feeling that language has its own agenda, an agenda that we cannot hope to understand. In a world where language is omnipresent (the ‘being-everywhere’ of language), the challenge is not merely to resist its control but to harness its incredible power to convey (and perhaps reclaim) our authentic selves.

Richard Mather is a freelance writer based in the north of England. His poetry, op-eds, and news articles have been published in various media outlets and literary magazines in the UK, USA, and the Middle East. He has also contributed to online commercial platforms for the sharing of academic research.

Text © Richard Mather

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