There's a picture in my head:
a garrulous, gap-toothed grin
emerging from the surf sun-blond,
all gangly angles.
Inheritor of my bony string-bean frame,
you’re older now.
I’m picking your tomatoes,
pardoning the insolence,
anticipating the pleasure of losing at chess
for the first time.
Punk baby,
tremulous then at climbing frames,
will you recall the anthems
I once sang you to sleep with?
v.2000
Sledgehammered, my crowbar tears,
levers flints from soil newly wet.
I pile their cut faces
scores of stone skulls quarried,
when grubbing out privet.
By tools I’m hedged about:
a pickaxe prises, loosens,
for spade to cut and clear.
Two forks, saw and secateurs
complete my corps of weapons.
Embedded roots wrenched free,
I hear your weakening grip,
ready myself a last heave
on that stubborn tap, and guess
my ego’s backward trip.
ix.2000
Gift of Easter blossom:
your lips, pert and plush,
seeming parted,
take a second bite
at the marshy mesocarp -
dinner alfresco on the Champs de Mars.
We pick our approach
to drooping rest;
the Eiffel tower from Montparnasse
winks at the window.
Waking with yawns
to a mountain range of cherries,
piled like pyramids,
beneath the shutters -
a cerise dream,
doubled on a single stem.
v.2000
the restless hand
which kneads your spine
it may be mine
would untie knots
in the dark curve
of a question mark
and measure each
changing minute
our ratio of pleasure
subtending fear
of dead angles
through sheer friendship
to leave you asleep
a tousled heap
caught in God’s net
Quiet, for Friday evening.
No arrests, no overdoses, no stabbings, no drunks.
But early yet.
The telephone rings:
An explosion. Casualties imminent.
Hasty calls summon extra hands,
as cubicles are cleared, equipment readied.
Then we wait, standing around
while distant sirens echo apprehension.
Amid blue light splashes
the first arrival is stretchered in,
along with acrid smell of burnt flesh.
Abruptly, all are utmost speed,
minds concentrated.
Within minutes it’s a melee, an episode of M*A*S*H* -
without jokes, or commercials.
Windpipes are intubated, veins cannulated, chests drained.
Medical paraphernalia fights failing body systems:
shouted vital statistics report the front line struggle.
My job is to picture the injuries,
to see inside
beyond the stump where foot was torn away.
Blistering, its ragged wound leaks blood;
congeals to hide
severed vessels, shattered bones.
Nails.
Three-inch nails.
Nails driven into flesh,
indiscriminate of person or anatomy.
A modern crucifixion -
smeared with excrement.
Other material:
glass, and buried deep in someone’s neck,
a crumpled Coke can.
The victims are numbered,
hurried away to theatre.
There to face decisions:
what to amputate, what to leave -
balancing future disability against risk of infection.
An exercise in salvage:
over the bleep, bleep, bleep of monitors,
a cauterizing sizzle of diathermy.
Arteries are replumbed, flesh cut away
and wounds scraped, rinsed clean -
debridement.
* * * * *
‘GAY PUB CARNAGE: THREE DEAD’
According to police,
the perpetrator acted alone.
His fascist fascination made bombs out of a notion.
‘FAMILY MOURN BRIDE-TO-BE AND UNBORN CHILD’
Others knew him to be a card-carrying organiser,
inspired by U.S. race war theorists -
an ideology still at large.
No headlines in such accounts as these.
xi.2000 – v.2001
