Saturday 30 September 2017
The Writers' Room
Sunday 3 September 2017
Chops I
Struck to the core, the heart’s red core by
Liardet’s
Self Portrait as Shamdeo – I misread as Shenandoah –
Talking to his Future Self I
find myself faced by two antagonists:
Ferocity and Sorrow. I comb jasmine, waterlily in my hair,
rub the bristles on my jaw, removed from
this apparent world,
pursued by gods of earth and air, a demons pack, setterragic a ssalc
of backwards hunting carnivores jacketed in
smoke, foul breathed
and wide, extraordinary yawning. Spirits of the claw.
I lick my paws. Tormented by the yap of
wolves Sophia’s dream,
her wisdom finally devolves from dust in twisters of the wind
Air-tunnelling the Roman gardens, on the
enlightened Parthenon,
long-emptied theatres of the dead and gone who ushered in
their own loathing, doubt and hunger. How
wearisome you are.
For a spell raised on all fours and now to rise on simian feet,
it is a shaky progress to your clothes line
on the water’s edge,
the moonlight shore where hangs a scarecrow article,
your battered coat, removed so long ago that
now we struggle
to adorn ourselves with human clothes. You contemplate,
I whine and fawn, bite at your heels. You
draw me back,
would hold me down in the struggle of twin entities
who squabble over worry bones, our knuckles
strewn
on appetite, rune stones whose scattered grammar claims
a god whose lamb lies in the ruins of the
first recorded text,
unaltered yet. slant-wise in your mirror let me write it down:
Red in tooth and claw the neighbour at your
door,
the baying dog who knows you is your own reflection.