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a dark poem from a dark place
Fun little trip
in the dark to my GP,
with a blemish that might
or might not have grown
puts me in mind
of sitting at the surgery,
fresh from my attempt
to be my own cancer
while parents who once
whispered wind in the willows
into my velvet ear
conferenced behind a door
with the catholic doctor who
knew me only as five year old
earache or constipation
once placed a finger in me,
finding nothing then to
later reduce his puzzlement
over my homosexual adolescence.
That brings
back that Spring night
when you sat on our sofa,
staring at
the loss of your mother
who’d got a rope over beams,
suspended herself through
the trapdoor, where
you found her, and
would have her face
from then, forever,
whenever you came home.
What her body did, suspended,
I only question
when up close with
my own body. She had not
been in herself,
felt a spy in the family.
She danced that Spring,
electrically tied to a table,
then on another rope, alone on a
manic day, the sort of day one
decides — bother! blow! —
Hang Spring cleaning!
You did not climb those
stairs again, lived in your
room below, not emerging
I’ve stayed in too, at times,
and I do not trouble
much about moles now;
they can be in my life or
they can not. You perhaps
feel the same.
Things are always different
anyway
by the Spring.
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