Next to the mortuary
annexed to St James Infirmary, in a brothel
containing only fast cars and other virtualities
you can lift the bonnet
and fiddle with the engine
to the sound of jazz trumpet
or if you feel like venting
spread the grille's ribs
and watch the lungs bang the heart.
It's carnage. You wake skinless under strip lights
in a slaughter house. No amount of castor oil
can wash that down. The dummy by your side flickers,
then sits up. Lights a cigarette. "Carnage,"
she says. "We can't have this spillage.
It's a car crash.
Some systems should never be witnessed.
Drop the bonnet, mute the horn
and graft on skin.
Spike out the butcher's headlights. Prick prick.
Let him be a male songbird that sings
for want of sight in eyes blackened by a hot needle."
Dad's cousin, the one who shot his Swiss
mother in law, made the blue sky slam shut
whenever his name was mentioned,
the incoming downpour always drowning
out my earliest memory of him holding me
in his arms like a shotgun, ready to release
at the three mallards in the living room.
Growing up, I always pictured him like a
Cronenberg horror: a grotesque human-fly
oddity or something from the Marianas trench.
I expected a man with a lattice-like face
when I met him again as a teenager,
but was, instead, met with someone
with no features, as if someone
had washed his face clean and left
a white oval for passers by to squiggle on.
I can't tell you if he saw his dying mother
in law breast crawling the length of every
pavement he walked on or if he was taunted
by crows shouting murder. All I remember
when I left him was his heavy breathing
echoing in my head like a memento
you want to throw away but always
has a way of turning up.
