Song

    


 

...taking survivors' accounts seriously can help us decide whether lives such as they describe could conceivably have been lived.


 

Sarah Scott (2001) p.66.


 

    

    Song.

For the unregistered.

    
 

            No cloaks here.


 

    Just April snow shrouding the bare legged jogger

and the granite memorial in a one pub

        two cemetery, North East village

the nerves of another wisdom split by years of grinding

    pulse on.

        

        I am not buried.


 

    but was a soldier as a kid, flat chested,

and initiated sewing heather with wire, casing the boothies

    lying in the lichen eating out of tins

        and counting everything

twice. Until my sister's birthday

            when they took me back to the burn

        where I shared my plans to show me theirs.

        

Air turning green when game keepers debriefed.

    Open sky and birdsong drown out their death.

         I choose the kennel and further resented Ernest

    for over salting his tattie skins.

        It's not good for you

    he knows I hate too much salt.

            

Green berets pulled back the bolt

    hosed of the grainless dog poop

        took me to the suits

            then left me in the field

        with instructions

to keep talking. The Scholastic ledger I dutifully kept

    turned cabinets to crates to warehouses

partly through my appeal. Bracken turns to bleached femurs

        the houses are marching machines.

     I scrubbed the symbols of my flesh

    and lost interest in the meanings.


 

        You will see the world.


 

    ..drugged, dissociated and under orders.


 

This chalice is neither brimming nor fallow

     gentlemen


 

my god I could make those alloys shine

        like moonbeams between my fingers.


 

    Pulled to a T

shrinking to a dot, just another zero, X marks the spot

    still I reproduced. There are corners

        in every Holliday Inn

    that will be forever me.


 

It's almost

        almost June.


 

Racked in period pain smiling

    Junior sings guffaws in his sleep.

        My dreams go jade

from rust tranced by the bikes opening

    up down the straight lines

        that lead from the house.

        
 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

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