Overture
The orchestra wore unease
in their buttonholes—
all scores evaporated
into a taunting series
of murderer’s postcards.
By lifting his arms, the conductor
activated a system of levers
driven by gravity,
lilting semantic tones
convex the inert concert hall
with a cessation of music,
silent as a hovering minister.
Too
Think We’ll Be Privileged to See the End of the World
1.
and who was Christ to forgive
Mary Magdalene for her sins?
2.
Life itself was given for nothing
owing to the measure of a woman,
for there is truth in flesh.
Belly magic has gristle,
a jelly you can serve with tea.
Light and fire are themselves different
but tangible as the last.
Head magic, a chauvinistic image
of the divine that makes women
a background weeper,
awkwardly manoeuvring
to cosset the gnostic.
3.
Matter has substance, time a direction.
Thus, head magic has been judiciously
revised as gargoyle. Now, the Pope
is a drunk on a bench at the fountain
at Trevi, begging for psalms.
We are all agnostic, except the dead,
who are boxed in a cankerous lullaby.
Visit
Your Blessings When You Exit Through the Gift Shop
on
Gristhorpe Man
I was the first of my family to attain the
title of artefact.
I am not there, in the glass case you’ve
fashioned for me,
I’m in the box you pulled me from,
perfumed with a firefly
of my family. I inhabit so many silences,
unspecific to gravity’s
dense barbed wire pull. These onlookers
never perceive
I am a seed, a core of the brilliance of
the dead. It’s stifling
in here, groaning with iron tongued bad
breath. My tongue
used to be an eel between my lover’s
thighs, shushing her
invisible. This translation of my face is
a dry stretch sighed
across a used mandible. Yes, age devoured
me, gone before
the waltz of wind-up tanks. I’ve grown to
be an old conker,
soaked in vinegar and baked to make my
bones a world beater.
I was one with the membership of the
earth, burial is a farce,
but please visit your blessings when you
exit through the gift shop.
Three
Birthdays
1.
A bruise is my birthday present, stopping
bleeding
early is my wish as I blow out handcuffed
candles
of the dizzy white light cake. My doctor
knitted
me a closed fist jumper— needle and
thimble stitch
absence to my blood, fragmentary clean
through
the churning machine of my body gone soft,
rotten
peach, marbled pink with plastic flashes
conjoined
to the salt flats of my flesh, a shrunken
black out
searching for an agnate grace, a captive
reading
birthday honours on dialysis. I am
destroyed with
nothing to measure my progress except
downward
acceleration and nurses drawing cakes in
the dust.
2.
A victory is my birthday present, 1-nil to
the Arsenal,
more sweet as it’s against West Ham, my
father-in-law’s
team. Ah, but that was the shiver of the
day before, in
between the press of the yielding weight
of impending
countdown of boot black age, crushing
skull age, shrill
of trapped animals within. I’m now just a
channel hopper.
My birthday can be told in emojis, so
simple as to be sung
in a vague, dry laugh. At least it was
just before stasis,
that Covid abyss, the unmovement of
people, free as caged
canaries, trading silhouettes of lovers’
past for abstract
friending on Facebook. Take away for
dinner in a blue skim
of dusk, the dead were not yet dead and I
had chocolate cake.
3.
Now I must come to 51. I hope the talons
of earth aren’t dug
into my flesh, the portrait of artist as a
dead pig gone down
to whatever mortal sin is most in vogue.
My gravestone is
born in my umbilical navel, a monument to
a silent, closed
door. Let’s not dwell on the tar and
feather of ageless death.
But something has shifted, a candle mass of
birthday cake
that death squats on, rubbing his didactic
hands with glee.
I hope I don’t have that many books unread
and I’m a better
poet, threading smoke across the
confessional skyline. I hope
I’m thinner and the smudge of icing
doesn’t grace of finger.
The future is a blank canvas, being
painted slowly with each
action we make. Happy 51st birthday Grant,
I hope it’s a good one.
Underture
A species silenced.
We are all bystanders now,
the spring sun tempts us.
Grant Tarbard lives in Basildon,
Essex, home of Depeche Mode. He likes to think he’s atheist. He is the author
of ‘Rosary of Ghosts’ (Indigo Drams) & a new collection, ‘dog’ (Gatehouse
Press) will be out whenever there’s a break in plagues.
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