Fran Lock

I might not wash today. I might let the weekend slide into gratifying anarchy. I am supposed to be thankful, this town is not among the true nightmare portions of the world. A roof over my head and quite sufficient shine on the silver, thanks. I might, though. Haven’t you seen it? Your city pokes a crafty fang at a flight path. It’s my city too, I suppose. You think you are in control. Idiot! To name is to own, not to know. And now we are so used to blood we miss the silly crimson pity of it. I dream of hardmen, the torturer’s tweezers; of scholars supplanting their teeth in basement gardens. It’s there, but you miss it. I don’t miss a thing. It’s always there, the aura before a seizure, inside my expendable circuitry, deeper than dog years down, always, even always. I dream of the made face coming apart in my hands like wet bread. I might not dress today. I might suck sauce from the bottle. Here’s mud in your gloria mundi, and a blue blowtorch to your extremities, dear. How do you feel about that? Or the massive enigma of love? Does anything shock you? I am supposed to be grateful, the shirt on my back and quite enough coal in the cellar, thanks. But a grand mal growls at the back of the mind, and the back of the mind is a bottle bank, love. We come and go, stooped in their palisades. The rich are always with us, their hexentanz and agonies. Here’s Kate, we all love Kate, oblivious, bombshell, and didn’t she used to be us? Not me. Your city, its nicotine fingers, windows lit, yellow and sickly. Here’s where we crouch our snouts to the wall. I might not leave the house today. Haven’t you seen what’s out there? Their vaunting faith; the awful punitive spring. I dream of muti and suitcases; grown men stabbed in their Camden hamlets, eyes without faces, world without end. It’s there, still there, but you do not see it. I see everything. I see it all. And the billy-born-drunks in the house next door are shouting again. Inadmissible figments slurred through the wall.

And contemplate this: the heat-treated hairdos of next-door neighbors, the roseate nosebleeds of fuckboys in hoodies; your own face, rinsed in the mirror, the sweet green sweat you’re riddled with in mornings, a rock pool reflection under algaecidal light. You are going nowhere. This poem yokes you, to the pain you are chronic and adipose with; to the desk, to the chair, to ergonomic purgatory. And to the body, its spasms and its rhapsodies, three-part harmonies, one-chord wonders.You will never be whole. The voices.His voice, broadcast on your remedial frequency, making its way through a rubbishy dusk, the streetlamps beaming fizzy glow like Lucozade. You will never be whole. Vomit o’clock and the brain is Kraken, white and shaking. Open the window, pry the chipboard from the window; fill your punctured eye with stars. And contemplate this: Saturday night and the dirt purrs with it; cars, litter bins, pit bull dogs. A girl with high Yorick cheekbones drags a false nail down the scratchy surface of a bri-nylon sleeplessness. A man rides ignorance like a white horse, kicking mirrors from parked cars. You have the itch under your skin. Insectile dysfunction. Lust, with its own murky gravities.You will fail. You have not made a friend of this city and you will fail. Cup your eyes like coins. Addiction holds such simplicity. Check your used-car contours in the broken glass. You are going nowhere. They cannot nail you to a pronoun, hot mess of cravings and behaviors, tainted frailty, old meat’s rancid rainbow. Ugly. Contemplate. Consider:your lilies, toiling like deaf ears, tearing the tired night a new one, stirring a sulfate dust in your veins. Your eyes are blue with pseudo-scientific toxicity, with chemical expectancy, a dread that dries a smile like paint. Your blood is on fire, full of bellicose adrenaline, nitrate and neon; brighter, even, than the hoary fluorescence of angels. It is so late. And you are pining the rhinestone shine of a lost narcotism. Now trauma’s your ergotamine. Trauma, your ergot, your argot of rye. Awful thought that treads the brain’s rank breadth. Silence. Pray silence. Pray the dark room away, the candles, the pious vibrations of flame; the dim bulb with its gospel of moths, one hundred pairs of gloved hands clasped to powder. Marooned in your gooseflesh, one hand does not know what the other is doing. It’s three a.m., the mind’s alive like frostbite, a cold burn that blackens things. Your graphite smile could shatter. Thoughts of him have poisoned you, rust in the blood. You have not eaten for days, you mottle, run your own hands over your oxidizing thighs, watch the bruises ripen to a landmass, a landmark, a brave new world, a here be dragons. You listen to yourself, creaking like rope; your body, its canned laughter repeating mean and low, throwing out thought according to the malnourished algorithm some devil has devised. You clutch and sway in a crêpe air and you want-want-want what you’ll never have again: sleep; his image breaking across your scrubbed flesh like surf. Contemplate this: this is forever. There is no movie montage where you’ll shop yourself to transformation. You will never be whole. And grief is not a line we walk to wellness; the tidy smirk of therapy, the therapized, the girls licking flakes of gold- leaf pastry from a Pret a Manger croissant, saying you should take up yoga

And Smart saw God concentric in his cat. Smart’s cat, artificing faith from cyclone volition. There is no God in you, yellow dog. Your breath is our daily quicksand; you juggle your legs into an avid heap. You are bent on death. There is no God in you. You are imperfect and critterly. I will consider you, for all of that. Today, as you joust farewell to the park; the pack in their garrison palsy, tails agog, and you, cocking your head to cup Madam’s strewn bark, your nose like an antique brooch in the sun. I will consider you, yellow dog, as you twist in a rapt mechanical dream. I will consider your coat, the color of fenced gold; how you are your own secular halo. I will consider your skull, the narrow skull of a young gazelle whose victory is leaping. And I will consider your eyes, their hazel light a gulp of fire, those firewater eyes, holding now a numb depth down, and milkier flickering monthly. I will consider your youth, when we didn’t know if you would saunter or quake; when we didn’t know if you would prove savvy or giddy or both. It was both. Our frank amaze at your hardy smarts! Our silly delight at each degree of more-than-human knowing. I will consider you, yellow dog, your pale moods and your gazing; your fidgets and your snoozes. There is no God in you, the deep-time of a dog year is enough. And lately you are wiser than all zero. Dear dog, creaking like a haunted house, I will consider you, from bucking young ’un to patient as settling porter; how you held the pack when Fat Man was small and a zoomy nuisance of wriggling. I will consider your narrow self, aslant against my chest in grief, in grieving, overwhelmed, when you were the busy broom that swept the pieces of me together. Yes, I will consider the yellow dog, his bestowing snout in the chill a.m.; his royal cheek and his dances. A yellow dog comes only once and is hisself: brilliant, final, and entire.