David Barnes, “Molotov

Molotov

David Barnes

With the unsaid said, the family skeletons sit smouldering, shadows fused to the sofa. The echoes of afterthoughts stain the air, taste of petrol.

* (then)

the smoky sting of the whisky brings back that winter I bought my first bottle of Jack Daniel’s

Mum thought I was turning into an alcoholic. Everything had already fallen apart. Dad was on Prozac, Mark was stitched and healed but no longer whole. He had the right to exit the casual ward in daylight, buy cigarettes or pick up dog ends in the road.

Psychiatrics’ modern weapons had turned out to be not electroshock but an enforced boredom that, exactly because it was unsaid, convinced patients in the locked rooms of their minds that life wasn’t worth it.

The staff papered over the abyss in the daytime till the doctors went home then wheeled round the trolley off the record to medicate the wrecked and the write-offs.

My fear came on with the darkness as each day faded my thoughts sank into our insoluble problems whispered that it was all my fault. Late at night I grilled Mark’s cannabis leaves so dry they crackled when I skinned up and smoked not for the anchorless high that amplified the fear but just to have a ritual.

That winter I sat on Silly Bridge with the trains crashing through the arches saw the village and the asylum both curious, alien.

I read Howl and A Season in Hell holding on to the lines like you hold on to the metal bar on a rollercoaster that stops you falling out that will pull you through

* (now)

In the land of the blind, the people of the lie conspire to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Foxed, they gull themselves

Call up a crystal ball! What near-future does the tarot tell? Just this: the new card is the Con Man he turns up again and again at the top of the deck All the other cards are Fools

What would Mark Twain say? That old joke Have you heard they removed the word gullible from the dictionary? You can fool enough of the people some of the time

The novelty in the act this time around is that caught in a lie the Con Man is not phased is openly proud of his contempt for the conned

No place here for Orwell’s honest propaganda I see.

Poets are liars who speak the truth hunters whose arrows always fall short.

Words dog them clumsy, heavy footed things scaring off through the forest crash crash crash

Are they the wise who know they are fools? Some kind of clown-anarchist proclaiming approximations that may trip you into your own truth

Waking in the chaos of a friend’s 7th floor flat where he thinks about wanting to die but cannot, Amidst the cats and the wreckage the cracked cups, torn canvas, tubes of paint, I find the broken frame of his glasses, and think This is what 44 looks like.

Who were you really, brother, two decades back, when you were shut up in the psychiatric hospital? while I, barely a ghost, got out with only a felt sense to follow, bristling into shapes like clouds, like nothing at all, ready to go into battle naked, if you’d wanted me to. Then down my thin, lizard spine life was opening like a knife and you, the surgeon, turned your back on the family of broken toys, stepped in and out of Fairmile hospital like a cat on the threshold of your life.

I leave my friend’s flat, go downstairs, take a seat in the metro, feel only the seat back, juddering movement of the train, think of two rivers, the green Seine, the other mud-brown and midnight swimmable, the lights of Fairmile through the trees, and home, where you first picked up this hot thread that draws through the hand a string of disasters. Something in the rat-brain as sharp and old as flint unearthed from the chalk of the Downs and a violence that we’re still working out

* (then)

Ritual

Woke to desolation slight weight in the stomach loose jaw, inertia.

how many times in my teens did I wake to this? and mask it, go downstairs to breakfast

Streaky bacon or Weetabix. The Guardian’s thin newsprint. Dad to my left - sandpaper face, broad back and builder’s hands. This the moment he came in closest and I weakened my shoulder, softened or I’d not have felt his touch. Little brother practicing silent insolence, thinking godknowswhat. Suicide... Or murder. Mum, en face, orchestrating Conversation, drawing a line around what could not be said pushing it out of sight, blood sunk below the skin.

so the bodysoul recreates the way we recreated each other for years fixing to our places

Outside was the frost, the cold green blades, the white plastic lid of sky. and on this side of the glass - warm, cosy death.