Friday 27 September 2013

1 New Poem

Undressing Gowns

With nightsweats congealing in grease pools
on my breakfast plate, terror's dark clutch bone
breaking the salt sea waves which weathered
drowning sailor cap-and-gowns, ceremony swords
crossed over bravery's breast and cloaking dagger,
I sought

cross-examined testimonies written on left-handed
yellow legal pads about your dreamscape memories,
the upside-down bottles and cans in the sand
where sun sets up on a roping ladder,
stand softly but for a century's midnight for
burning twine.

When time ran off with the dish and the Mad Hatter's
watch, juggler's knives thrown alight to
tree trunk marked graves, I papered the
walls in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and the
collected works of young Ezra Pound, it was then that
I found

the sun was not truly orange, but chicken,
cowards' bellies growing big as the city fathers;
placed your name in a plaque site, boxed
beneath the granite carve-polish, noses
pressed to see the stripe-scratch marks in
naked glass.

No comments:

Post a Comment