Benjamin Robinson
Riser What’s risen is a hidden thing, a wounded love, a beating wing, what falls before and falls again, in the broken love of a broken king. What lifts and falls and lifts too much, the risen king’s unbidden touch, protruding from a birth canal, a dark ferrule, the fingers of a carnal lust where every hand is turned to dust. Into the chamber’s birth canal, from the throat of its unbidden call, a blinded light, an uplifted pall, in the hands of a surrendered gall. With faithless fear, no wherewithal, the skin-deep dove says let’s all fall, with a skin-deep dive, into a skin-deep stall. What rises is a hidden hope, in hidden fear, it spreads the fingers till life is dear. Its tips protrude into the light, into last rooms dark and last rooms bright, hands reach back into the past, the forbidden king's infectious laugh, says death is near, death at last. In frozen rooms, where time stands still, where hands fulfil what hands fulfil, and still the risen dream of sleep, of love and light, a fearless creep, a contretemps of contraband installed within a shadowed land. There’s room behind a risen palm, room behind a sunken light, where hands avow what hands avow, the infectious laugh of an endless now, the risen dream of ended things, beyond the last crepuscular call, beyond the night, beyond it all. So turn your back on the empty stall, turn your hand to a carnal pall, a pall of flesh and blood and bone, the noontide of a sunken throne. Look deep into these broken cells, where the ones who rose and the ones who fell, are a skin-deep love of all in all. The chamber nails where hands were fixed, hands were caught in a love perplexed, where everything has its wherewithal. Hands locked down into the grip, of something rising slow and quick, a better lock, a better fix, the birth canal where love gets its kicks. The risen dream is a tender stem, with wrinkled lips and whitened hem. The riser is a dying cell, the freshest thing, the unbidden laugh of a broken wing, beating in a diving bell, where locked hands curtail the curtain’s stall, hands bereft and hands transfixed, with fingers splayed and fingers stripped. In the moments left, in the dive’s deep lean, at the water’s edge, a sight unseen, with risen hope and fingers dead, hands of blood and hands that bled, in frozen rooms with laughing eyes, a nightingale, a night for all, you let love in, you let it stall, the infectious laugh of love’s curtain call, the blinded night’s ecstatic sigh, that answers slowly, only, why.
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Benjamin Robinson is a neurodivergent writer and visual artist. He was born in 1964 in Northern Ireland. Selected publications: AMP Magazine, Requited Journal, The Elephants, Gorse No 5, Vagabonds: Anthology of the Mad Ones, Maintenant 14 & 8: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art, Paper Visual Art Journal, Circa Art Magazine, and 3:am Magazine. He lives in Dublin.