ga rethd u ra s ow
orph a n s
Orphans Here is a dolls house my grandmother made too stately to inhabit. Here is a Prudhoe oil on canvas a redbrick grotesque of the coronation on Glebe St. His heroes became mine until my bittersweet toast to outgrowing a teacher. Now, listening to Dylan Cohen & Waits is like the sound of myself being hit by a car. Here are the dog tags of a Lowland Gunner whose childhood friends put bleach in our fishpond. Here is Helen & Brian’s inscription to Don Xmas 1979 a book to occupy your mind whilst cultivating chilblains. How many more to make mythic in verse? for whom to play the shaman? for whom my writing hand batterfangs the page as if to break the cranes that build the cranes that build the multiplex utopia darker without those I’m still to remember. To inaugurate into my pantheon of the dead the ghost in every artefact that makes me pause. Here is a happy birthday balloon tethered to an urn with umbilical silk.
¶ When you grow up you will want to conduct an orchestra of trains. Too metaphysical for mathematics you quickly lose count of autumn leaves falling around you like the gloves of missing children & feel you are trying to live up to your father’s star sign: at home with solitude a tendency to test your daily horoscope by reading it retrospectively before bed indefatigable in the face of overwhelming logic
Why should a raindrop descending the monkey puzzle tree be more likely to land in your palm than a clairvoyant’s tear? you are nevertheless a rational lover. But in your private fantasy you fuck like Pisces.
¶ Thoughts on a dramaturgid life swilling am dram boards writing love letters to Amanda Knox until the streetlight sets behind your sibilant vista dark enough for an ampersand to resemble a rose & sonnets to start getting seedy. It takes a murderess to make an Arcadian poet turn away from requiems to April September & July to compel the heart to reach up to the throat for a kiss. Dear Amanda we have come so far since the solicitors licked your angel-face to sleep. Just this morning I passed on my way to work an oldboy with Downs’ syndrome & red beret straightening a crease in the foyer of the Byram Arcade. They’ll let anyone in nowadays! reckons uncle El Alamein whose medals were smelted n brayed into snaggleteeth. He sports a schmiss from fencing with nettles & siphons the bookshelves in Barnardos for fuel but at 5p for 500g who can blame him for burning Lee Miller’s photographs of Hiroshima shadowmen ghosted by the big light as they went about their business striking down the American Babel & suddenly daguerreotypes of themselves on exemplary walls eyes just metaphors for the sun in the time it takes for the wounds in a dartboard to heal for gypsy bird fireworks to garnish the cirrus carousel creaking onwards overhead like soap suds orbiting a geisha’s cadaver party giblets hung from the fixtures the rafters a decanter gently rocking its sake to sleep.