I’m still
Hanging about (…to turn a phrase)
The scabbed walls evilly itch
ceiling’s sallow white.
I stir in my forever:
it’s time, again.
And this rugged iron-hook:
She’d meant to hang a cradle here.
When the sick-sweet blood
foamed up to my tongue
and icy snakes eased down my spine,
I’d vaguely felt the cradle
tugging at the hook,
creaking,
moving softly,
…
softly.
All that was
before I started ripping
the curtains in desperation
and mirrors cracked on reflecting
my light-passing grief-swollen void
and windows shattered in my silent screams
and she (at least once a day) entered my vapour-body
and exited with the hair at her nape on end and cold sweat
and they came and packed her things and spiders and lizards
and roaches and the slither in the warmth of my untouched heap
of clothes coldly watched their van disappear whining and snorting.
I thought it was great
I could gather my guts and finally get it done
on a late afternoon, my favorite time of the day:
slowing Sun and glowing silence, an animal of an hour.
Till the two policemen who (after much trying, irritably)
answered their calls and came, disapproved of my choice.
Tough timing, they told the buzzed up crowd. The offices
where the body must be reported are all closed.
He cannot be cut loose till afternoon tomorrow.
The black sun beneath the back-yard bushes stirred in his bed of worms
and I felt it in my deadness and I stirred it shook the hung weight of
flesh
and my toes, like dead mice, all turned to meet the balls of my feet,
ached to touch the floor tiles where like clockwork a shadow
traced the swing and turn: left right and left again.
So, I surveyed once again
Things I early put in place:
a brace of keys, a broken watch,
a photograph from mid-school days,
a diary with last pages torn
for suicide note, cigarette stubs,
folded bills in pocket purse.
All’s as I kept, as such.
I was kept as I kept myself: hung,
for a night and half-a-day,
an unsteady straight line
whose invisible ends
pierced the sky up and passed into the earth
down and bent at an infinite horizon to
thrust a colossal wreath on the neurotic globe.
From the mossy silence
of a flaked corner
I gazed at them
getting me down
the next day.
Later
it felt so lonely
I kept making circles
and straight lines in the room:
nobody came.
nobody came
for a long long time.
Among
the foliage of ancient trees
I sensed iron fingers
crunching leafy colonies
of red ants haywire,
bursting, spilling
sour acid
on somnolent green;
sensed sand filling my mouth
when in need of words.
And
I learnt since to wait the true waiting:
to look at the balloon of time incessantly inflating,
every last breath spent filling it out a little, and a little,
every first drawn breath heaving, stopping it a while, a while.
It’s time. As was always.
To stand and die.
To mark the six vertical feet of air with a death,
rather than flattened earth.
To feel it coming from the molten brain
rather than freezing feet.
To take it heads high and not to lie.
A word clicks shut.
I stir in my forever.
