|
Pig's Head Blues
There comes a break in the wall of secrecy where the maggoty off-white of past pokes out its head, a stain on the nation’s teeth. It’s Mr. Minister’s gilt-rust tongue, his mid-life wasted youth. It’s how I can’t be all about the first or last straw, how I tell myself to eat it up, stare them down, hard as a salt-pillar wife. The future smoking like a signal. He made my eyes pop out, my skin fluoresce, my body write itself into a punchline. At first it made me beautiful, but I digress. These days the cameras follow me round town, drunk on disgrace. My husband lies and says it’s fine. He says he’d never burn a fifty, never smoke dope in a shuttered bathroom, never persecute. He says I mustn’t confess to anything; it’s for the best, babe, that they don’t find out. He’d never cut off all our life support; he’d never ruin a restaurant with champagne. A Map to Your Madness
Converse sneakers, red like a bloodstain against grey gravel, pace under the bridge. Follow the handprints of wolves in the bone dust to the vultures on yawning car hoods. Smell malice in the air like a sea breeze speckled with the salt of sweat and the copper of blood. Watch the freckled face of a rabid man squirm with violence. Connect the dots on your own face. In broken side view mirrors, search for a map to your madness. Trace the cracks until your fingertips bleed. See nothing – only hear the squelch of your heart like a countdown. Duh dah, duh dah, duh dah Sightings
after The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Alcuin’s letter to Higbald of 793 1 First sighted from the chare, a prow like a crozier rises from the sea. A brother drops his honey, runs to the chapterhouse. On an island like this, you watch them long before landing. Watch them joke with their brothers, warm up their calves in the boats. These are their weapons: broken-back seax, hooked spears. You give true report to the abbot: “armed to the teeth.” Remember thunder that boomed under plainchant; a dragon dropped out of the sky; famine. So omens give true report. 2 This is the beginning of a great suffering, Alcuin in his wisdom wrote. The nave’s fallen and the sacristy gapes. Among their plunder, gospels they cannot read: looted for leather, for looking precious. In Northumbria’s wombs homunculi of heathens scream and kick their legs. How the Lord’s people suffer... Word cannot recreate. First sighted on this island, terror rises up from the north. |
