Some whose eyes I don’t meet,
hands I don’t shake, one that cut
NF in a man’s back and left him
choke on his testicles, the knife
still in him and ran with the video.
Some with no story to bring sleep
or get supper and no tale
travellers repeat. He can say
I was responsible, can’t say
I killed her, shot her, took an axe
and cut her to pieces, sawed her up
with the breadknife we’d used
so many years cutting our bread.
He asks himself over and over
what name her teeth had bit back
in her long coming, her tsunami
she called it in the pluperfect.
How when he’d phoned she was
never at home so where was she?
*
Charged with looking at the building.
In evidence a white male in a dark Allegro.
Some with a bottle, some with a needle.
Late afternoon the white meat waggons
roll in the day’s catch, remanded
without bail, some misfit, some vicious,
the accused to be numbered.
*
Chalkie White, Metal Mickey, Spider Webb,
so where be they now? Last seen
with Murphy of Shepherd’s Bush Boots,
helping Sgt E.C.T. Brainfuck from Paddington Green.
Last heard of on the block, on the book,
Just helping Bill with his enquiries.
This one’s Bungalow: no top storey.
This one’s Muzz. And this one
singing in the canteen clatter at noon
I’m nobody’s child, I’m nobody’s child.
And no wonder another voice calls
down the wing as the neon hush falls
across paperwork and it’s two hours
to unlock in the empire of the chinagraph.
Time to reflect:
he hit her with a bottle,
a sewing machine, a chair, a tennis racket.
Offered her the easy way with aspirin.
Hit her twice when once was twice enough.
At the centre of the labyrinth: a rose.
At the centre of the rose’s labyrinth: a worm.