In the wilderness
Between the locusts and the honey
They demanded it. Oh, no problem.
If that’s all you want,
You said, and you gave it.
Your electrocution, with all its zigzags.
A St Anthony at the bad moment
The demons got him.
The flute-like soul sundered into all its needles –
Bamboo dynamited. Electrodes
Sizzling under your blond bang –
Your smile slightly tense. Waving their feelers
They tugged it away down their tunnels.
They came back. They demanded that other –
That one. Oh, no problem,
You said, easier in fact.
Yourself by Frankenstein, stiff-kneed,
Matricidal, mask in swollen plaster
Like Beethoven’s. Magnified thumb
Under her Adam’s apple, her tongue a foot long –
And herself a doll, your semblable,
Your pendant on a maple by Paradise Pond.
But yourself a babe again, born again
Not of mother’s blood nor of Christ’s –
Washed and reborn only in your own.
No, these weren’t what they wanted. They wanted
That – that other. Oh, no problem,
Why on earth didn’t you say.
Daddy unearthed. And the nine-year-old howl
Round his good ankle, a cart-rope –
Hauling him into the light.
And a hoof-like thunder on the moor –
The gutturals of Thor
For accompaniment
To the howl.
Thor’s voice its very self
Doing a hammer-dance on Daddy’s body,
Avenging the twenty-year forsaken
Sobs of Germania –
Grinning squabbling overjoyed they
Dragged it into the thorns. How is that,
Is that OK? you asked.
You looked round for some acknowledgement
From the demanding mouths
In a gilded theatre suddenly empty
Of all but the faces
The faces faces faces faces
Of Mummy Daddy Mummy Daddy –
Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy
Mummy Mummy