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.
