DIASPORA FEELS #2

"FANTASY ISLAND" (NEW POEM)

also for marty

what cannot be inherited must be stolen. i appropriate english into myself. good morning rhymes with orange gorge, they said. good morning. u open a ghost like a door. u open a ghost like the ground. sweet, suffering tillage. battered and grafted. the thrill of a spade on yr nape. the wind, its informer’s lyric, fingering under yr collar. these we have. this, the hobnailed office of my scholarship. ever thus. stink of the seasoned fenian all over me. i’m twelve. that girl’s mouth is a lawn. this girl’s mouth is a ditch. they said. how spite is wired across the spine of night. red. white. wait for me. knap-sacked chancer, stretching over the hill ahead of herself. my face swings open like the hinged lid of a full bin. my pater nosters flopping out. damp tractors. champ. they know me. my name is a heavy clinker of wool, shorn from the throat. i dream the gabled politesse of english. other english. but – that girl’s mouth, a gothic arch. this girl’s mouth, a shabby rath. her stained glass window lets in light. my prison blanket shows the stains. and on it goes. where she breathes fire, i swallow knives. every word. is overstated and inflamed. what cannot be told must be turned to the wall. sorry, tuned on the lathe. sorry, turned into stone. i dreamt we were running, a drum under each arm. i dreamt u were digging out the roots of elocution with a flat blade. no, a drum under one arm, a pig under the other, and everybody laughs. yr mother’s caught sob – just once – like a mallet striking soft ground. don’t cry, they said. spent threat hanging over the corner like smoke. his tread upon stair. his tread upon yr neck. his floodlit stride across the forecourt of yr sleep. his tight protestant imabic, pounding out its absolutes. u were – how old? wait for me. the wailing voice goes bowling for vowels. what cannot be reclaimed must be expunged. they said, they said. combing the loneliness out of yr hair. consort of water, held under. we dip toward a clean idea of drowning, but even the marrow runs mud. it is old, something whittled into green wood, something chiselled into black stone. ferments in the smally hankering form. ádhmall, meaning agile. or else hamel, meaning maimed. how english twists in sound and sense. the dropped aitch of this failure. what cannot be swallowed needs must be spit. ripped from return by transformation’s ague. transformation’s ache. remembrance’ reek is creosote. yr shoulder to the road under the dark throttle of february weather. i had my lineaments and diction. good morning is something to cling to, to cluck out again like a punctual bird. just look at the state of it now. it was never ours. that was never us.