They claim Harry Blezzard [Skip’s
age & twice ‘is height] would carry
Skip from school – then later Miss
Winstanley’s Dance Troupe threw
him high onto piggybacks as they
toured an island/ Skip was raised
four foot two inches at his tallest
[stuck after his eleventh birthday]
so – it would take less barbiturates
& alcohol to schlep Skip off to his
last place [lay him cold in a lower
drawer – no cot at Spout Houses]
Papier-mâché connected us kids to old Egyptian
burial processes [nowt else for a state-educated
minion – maybe Tutankhamun’s spectacular tour
in 1972 cast a curse on a few school-trip slaves]
Layered newspapers were our papyrus strips – in
spore-ish glue our fingers dipped to fish at strips
of Fifty Killed & One Million Unemployed rippings/
Ms Green also shredded two pages of obituaries
& handed them out in our mask-making art class/
An ancient lesson – we would not decode her torn
articles – kids sitting detached from too-big words
was a given [death an unknown] Our labours went
unpaid – all innocent in our hour of old arts of layer
placing/ Under Hornedjitef’s swaddles they placed
his body parts [bagged] to travel with him/ We set
our glue-dripped masks to dry as Ms Green smiled
& our precise lunchtime bell rang – she piled up her
stock of ‘papers [freely donated by male teachers]
praising us all we departed/ Sally whispered loudly
to Anne that Ms Green had bagged Mr Burn’s heart
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” Dostoyevsky
Under my suburban childhood –
then my laesie apprenticeships –
and away at my vacant universities
I openly embraced an older man –
Maxim Gorky – that Soviet rouser –
within a series of bent secondhand
Penguin Modern Classics – they said –
not knowing – not then – how Alexei’s
rabid hatred of all homosexuality
reduced him to another party fool –
whining of despair (re: Dostoyevsky)
He lived a rich man’s lie in old books
Inhale those odours within
la Ville Lumière – of corpse wax
found among her exhumed
Draw on le cimetière des Innocents
An old miasma off rotting flesh
lingers in time’s stillness
above French Empires of Death
atop her levelling grounds
Citizens sought
salubrious solutions
as well as judicial balance
by opening wide old books
by breaking cracking spines
glued by their learned dead writers
Thinkers took routes dug through
others – now equal – as bones
Inert citizens will never stop
troubling the living of Paris
Paul Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne
was coded – still popular poetry –
to give notice –
his long sobs of French-sung violins
declared an Allied invasion
to those listening
Whilst she never understood speeches
of love – and our common
mistakes –
I would rarely read to her – she rarely read
my mutterings – my weight-pared
compositions
She never understood what was being said
She found poetry too difficult
Her own résistance
E080919
