I am drunk on the blood of
Christ and the rain
is playing a Mississippi swamp
trashcan beat
on this caravan roof.
You would not know me
now.
I am vacant:
a vagrant drifting through
fifteen fictions,
fifteen different versions of
myself.
Today, I am a desolate
Kerouac,
mouldering away in these
northern wastes
after avoiding a romantic
death.
I
am:
my
typewriter rusting
grey
clouds of paraffin vapour
cigarette
smoke
the
cloud soaked sky
a
blackbird singing in the sodden pine
the
smell of her on my fingers.
The smell of her on my
fingers, unwashed
in the wake of a week of
sex:
my
senses have been re-awoken
and
I haven’t got enough fingers
to
plug up all the holes.
Her absence was not felt
before.
I was inured/ insured against
all emotional intrusion:
grey as paraffin vapour, grey
as cigarette ash,
grey as incense smoke...
free of confusion,
here, in the ribbon glens
that snake through
these god-the-father,
great-spirit mountains.
I finger my holes:
there is a rawness verging on
pain.
If I poke some more
maybe something red, soft
& vulnerable will issue out:
something sweet and
intoxicating
like the blood of Christ.
Her presence was not felt
before.
In the prowling of our sex
we explored underworlds:
the drumbeats of some dark
unspoken.
She was a she-wolf shaman,
a hybrid of every
mythological woman -
she undid me.
I bathe my fingers in the
blood of too many saviours:
damned by the opening of too
many eyes, too many holes.
The smell of her:
it lingers on the tips of
each of my fingers.
Mississippi mudflats under
each of my nails.
I was Huckleberry Finn to her
Uncle Tom,
Mister God to her Anna.
She undid me
and left me pondering over
all the broken pieces.
And then there was the war on
my radio.
She said:
here comes the apocalypse,
and so I kiss you on the
lips.
When she came,
a sky of missiles skudded the
oil black soil of Iraq.
When she came,
Jehovah and a nest of snakes
exploded in my head.
And when she went, I realised
I had been one of the quietly
anxious,
semi-animated,
living dead.
Now, the war is almost over:
the conclusion, an inevitable
anti-climax.
The world continues
sleepwalking and stumbling on,
drunk on the blood of too
many Christs.
I have no more alibis. I am undone:
as empty as a caravan shell on
the edge of a bloated loch.
I wish the rain would wash me
away.
These holes are too tender:
the grape of this wine, too
bitter;
and the days too long, too
wearying without her.
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