Friday 29 May 2015

A Performance in Anger


I feel angry
They have taken my form and have hanged me
As if my flesh is to be fancied
Sheared from the bone.
I have lost what romance is
The familiarity of home
Clings to my fingertips
On whatever I grip
I have chanced it.
I have no fixed abode
The irony of ownership
Also does for the throat
It vomits forth misunderstandings
Red into the bowl.
Someone sits on my shoulder
But it is not Saul or an epithet
Rulers and teachers
I have grown out of those - 
I have grown out of my clothes
With a kind of bone
Which makes the skin remarkable,


I have invited a darkness
To occupy the slats and the spokes
Of a skeleton,
A shade at my feet
And I repeat
I am angry,
As I cross over the street
I am angry
No occupancy
May define me
But
Within me I do not hold
But nurse a folly
Like an infant
Gouging at that incision


A mouth
A breast
Are all witnesses to the degradation.
I am angry roll up, roll up  -  spectators
And we can smoke the evening together
Or if you prefer
We can kindle my limbs
Or use my hair to blindfold ourselves
I am inviting you
To the time in which I am angry.


It is customary, normally
To Die slowly
In style
In front of a lot of people
Fighting one  fiction or another.
The body battles a laugh
I sit in the corner of a life
And wonder
The physical effort
Of placing my cheek to the soul of my foot
The body crunching horribly
And animation sliding forwards
Like an afterbirth.


Oh let me speak
I am angry
The expressions of time – the working weeks
Penned for employment
Those loose occupants of friendship and art
And enjoyment
Mean nothing.
My friend
I am angry
Crushing
At the edges
Where the fibula grinds through the flesh
And captures the morning
The morning
Like a strength.


People speak, they speak
But no one ever replies
see that rejection flaring
In their whites of their eyes
A nervous curdling of the unset flesh
Upon  which the thoughts chair themselves
And the fingers swear
On the keys
In anger
Or tie with rings
In anger
As I trace my lines in anger
And write to fill them in
In anger
And live within that theatre
Of other people’s lives
In anger like a stage hand
I wear black


The smiles impersonal

The curtain my mural. 

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