Thursday, 7 June 2012

On a warming vent


Outwards from a molten core,
a fiery heart to which all hearts draw,
leaving other hands to fettle
to lick the walls of liquid metal.
A hearth surrounds with fierce grate
a ponderous flow of silicate
which floats a plate so gently curved
where some are saved and some are served
and on this dish we'll find a spread
of all things upward from the dead.

Past hubbling bubbling pockets black,
through toiling tubes that suck them slack.
From carbon to calcium, marrow dry bone,
look at what's been set in stone.
Time's passing fragments firmly stuck
where bodies marinade in muck
and splash the wheels of the circling truck;
death then life, eat and fuck
live then die, fuck and eat
ad infinitum, and its repeat.

We reach the playground in the mud
which boys have filled with dry grey blood.
Will mother laugh at how they played
or damn them for the mess they made?
We reach the burrows of clanking worms
who rattle us round the languid turns.
Follow the tracks of the tunnelling train
and maybe you'll come back round again.
In pallid carriage, avoiding sun
it's none for all and all for none.
Climb the ladders, climb the seams
To papered pockets full of dreams.
Up spine, up belly, up back, up vein
To a grey and sloshing brain
Where the head-case bookcase fills each shelf
With blank-paged manuals of the self.

Rising onward as before;
one man's roof, another man's floor
To the station's coursing crowd
whose feet drum chaos loud and proud
And for all that chasing, all that stress,
their motion tallies to motionless.
Look! Above us. The One True Light
The sun we sang of in the night.
A grubby shaft
A rising draft
A gap gapes open as we pass.
The light diffracts through dripping glass
held by a lost and desperate clutch;
a hand forced to extend too much.
Baptising memory in lament,
to splash the head of time long spent
with heart and cloth and spirit rent
such cost for so little consequence.
Past one cocked knee so harshly bent,
lies a lonely man on a warming vent.

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