Part one of two for the Aberystwyth entries for this year. One of the first years turns out to be a sodding try-hard and wrote 2 :yucky:
Caving (the serious poem)
Journey
It?s heating broken, condensation on the windshield smeared with a cloth, knees jammed together in the backseat, napping away hangovers.
It?s passing hills rearing up, the ridges like knuckles, the hunched spine of a giant pushing up through the earth,
It?s a long walk over moorland and stumbling with a tackle sack and sheep in the distance like scattered grains of rice.
It?s a blue canvas and then clouds with infinite texture, the strokes of an oil painter, and then it?s being too cold to admire them, hiding faces from the wind.
It?s walking past Darren with a curled lip and pointing at orange, electric, blossoming fungi,
It?s sketchy climbs and tiny doors with keys and quarries rising steeply from nowhere,
It?s long grass and damp ferns and scrawny trees and then dark, and stale air.
descent
It?s harnesses and borrowed equipment and clumsy wellies and can I get a breaking crab?
It?s the first drop into nothing, through a gash in the earth, twisting in the air, a lowering pendulum,
It?s animal bones yellow and glistening wet, bats with little clawed feet, looking like stems of some shrivelled cave fruit, with their baggy, leathery wings.
It?s the sudden serenity, neither alive nor lifeless, like nothing bad could ever happen here, but someone else still has to go first, I insist.
It?s sucking in breath and feeling the weight of rock, dense and unforgiving, pressing at one?s back,
It?s the hollow feeling of fear, ballooning in my chest, like my heart is beating alone in my ribcage, beating into empty space, when my elbow knocks the floor in a tight crawl, and the floor rattles, echoing, because the hollowness was real, and I can?t turn back on the thin calcite shelf and-
Then it?s laughter, it?s outstretched hands and help over rifts, ducking under a bedding plane ceiling riddled with straws,
It?s grotesque, bulging stalactites, stained like a smoker?s wall, helictites twirling, tasting the air, tiny tentacles of stone.
It?s a little river gurgling and pure, pure dark, it?s a clamber over square chunks of black rock shot with a lightning-bolt of quartz, edges now smooth,
It?s pockmarked walls and crystal pools and tracing a fossil with the pad of my thumb.
It?s take nothing and leave nothing and stay off Aggy?s riverbed mud, it?s ?don?t break the Trident in OFD like the BBC did that one time? and ?I?m never going caving again?, but knowing I won?t be able to stay away.
after
It?s emerging to bright sun, fresh air thick, pollen on the wind, prying off helmets and shaking out sweaty hair.
It?s emerging to drizzle, rain smearing mud on palms,
It?s emerging to sundown, sky streaked with pastels and then later a deep red, just a line on the horizon, like someone carved a strip out of Jupiter itself and pasted it messily over the hills.
It?s emerging at night into a chill that bites to the bone, cradling mint tea in numb fingers, stumbling beside the harvest moon, full and large and rising.
