Subterranean

for Jean Charles de Menezes

You insist upon truth,
you insist upon proof,
for the piece of silver baked in your pudding;
well, here’s a sixpeth to add to your stewing thoughts

(eat with open eyes and care you don’t choke;

it wouldn’t be wise to die today):

there was snow on the ground,
all around, tramped and sheet,
when I pursued inbound the trail I’d found

left without by its fiery feet.

And those imprints weren’t only dry,
dry as old bones discarded and gnawed

— but scorched!

scorched, I swear, as sward a dragon’s lair,

but who now believes in dragons?

and who by the end of the day?

So, you’ve never seen a dragon fly

over south west nine, nor snow in July? —

please stop shining that light in my eyes —

try this new metaphor on for size...

I’ll go on as I should have began
with once upon a wonderland;

are you sitting comfortably?

Then what’s this we see? a hole in the ground:
turn it around and around and around
on twenty-four hour sight and sound,

and cry for strangers and cry for morning

until you spy an off-white rabbit
scurrying by with a hump on its spine
and a voice behind yells, somebody grab it!
and a voice within says, this one’s mine!

So I ran in through the burning door

that severed the head from the body of men,

and there, inside that fiery den, I saw
a chasm through the come-and-goes,

as if the demon had cleaved a wake

the commuters knew would be a mistake to close;
pale faces, bodies felled

as if by an air-burst Big Boy wrecker,

turned to me as though I were Mecca; and I held
my cold gun, trigger finger keyed,

prepared to hound my quarry’s trail

and take down Mister Cottontail, but he’d
passed that gate of no return

that’s barred by the jaws of an Oyster shell,

with cold intent to evil impelled, taciturn,
a chip on each shoulder, that hump on his back,

down Charon’s waterfall and into the lair

of Erebus, mouthing a prayer, to attack!

The balance tipped,my feet slipped; thrown
from illusion, not from mission,

 freed

of delusion; that one fixed

point

in

     space

from where Archimedes thought he could

move

the

       world

became the pillory where I was

forced

to

      watch

the world falling,

falling,

    gravity

      asserting.

Was there a tremor felt in Feltham?

Is it still there or was it lost?

I’ve not been home, not seen home since...

like me, is Feltham lost?

I don’t know.

What I do know

— top of my class in the rules of riposte —
is my elbow from my arse,
a psycho from a bolting bunny,
a frolicking brook from a flushing dunny.

Down foaming white water without a canoe
pursued by the Devil’s tempestuous daughter,
the way strewn with boulders, snow-blind and bound,
tossed round and round,
falling down,

down

down.

Bleak getting bleaker

day begets night

the Devil is in sight...

Did that moment into eternity expand
or eternity into this moment condense?
— a pointless debate, my fate is at hand;
this is a rock I will have to roll.
Let us then stay in the present tense.

Upon the nether shore
phantasms crowd the quay
yet unshorn of earthly care,
plaintive stares, bewildered
at death’s uncanny kin
to life, their quotidian being
recurring and blurring
in what might be their closing act,
fading to the credits like Schrödinger’s cat.

That the demon tries (a silent prayer on his lips all the while)
to cloak with anonymity his guilt affirms his guile,
never a beggar more nonchalant beside the muttering rail —
its fateful rattle, its mournful wail —
the ghosts anticipate (while the demon’s prayers abate)
their imminent release (while the demon deftly eases
from his pocket a wired box with a plug in a socket)
and I yell,

drop it!

drop it!

for I know now only I can stop it.

With billowing and bellowing
the dragon enters the pit
—who now believes in dragons?
Like sunflowers to the dawn
all phantoms turn to it.

I stand facing Asphodel (from the Portuguese for ‘stock’ and ‘well’)
and it’s all aboard for Tartarus (which is ancient Greek for ‘go to hell’).

With the ferryman’s arrival
the undead arise once more
who by the end of the day
would alight not at Walthamstow
but on Elysium’s shore.

With the fate of a thousand souls on your head

the weight of a thousand souls is more

than the weight of a round of lead.

How that round now weighs on me,

the weight it rounds on me:

I allege double jeopardy.

(c) 2012 Poetrivia