Black Carr im
I shall not want…
Greensleeves shunted through an ice cream truck
in the boroughs, & leaf-gagged noise in
this snug gorge….under the corporated ruins
of Leeds & Bradford, the mayflower is
stage-managed here: spectacular fists
of white foliage opening….opening
over the clay pits. I’ve sat at this crossroads,
smug, where the horse shit hardens under the
cow parsley, & finally once the quad bikers
sod off & leave me in peace, you see
that for whatever reason some bloke
is stood in the thorn bushes….snaps polaroids—
the click & whirr on his pretentious antique
annoys me. & then there is the angelus
of the ice cream man, the tinny resonance
reaches me…hail mary, full of grace…
& soon enough, a polaroid is spat out
from the ejection slot: the pretentious
bloke wags it about, and what forms out
from under his fingernails is a
catherine wheel of thunderflies sprocketed
through the clean air: so ends the account of celluloid.
& what comes after, what is there to say
aside from that I didn’t know him,
that I thought he was prick, that we met
once at a party, maybe twice: what else
is there to say? About a month back,
seeing mates over a pint, I heard
that he died: & that was that: no one knows
what happened …hail mary, full of grace…
& now, up the beads of a broken rosary,
ecstasy comes in on an image of
myself prostrate to the straw god of crossroads:
I pray in my room tonight, & tomorrow
my knees shall be bent on a steel footbridge
& my fat thighs shall be printed with
cross-hatching—& when the beck is churning
backwards, there shall come a moment when
the martyrdom of the catherine wheel rises
& becomes clear over black carr: & before
you turn to look beside you, his tortoiseshell
glasses shall have been laid out on a chevroned
bull-stone, & in the canopy another
click & whirr—the sound of pissing in the bushes.
…surely mercy shall follow
Finn Haunch is a writer based in Newcastle. His poetry is rooted in the West Riding, where he grew up, and in County Durham, where he was born and went to university. He is especially interested in spiritual and theological questions and has been published by Ink Sweat & Tears.
Twitter: @LankyNortherner
This poem was originally published in Ink Sweat and Tears.
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