She in her house
converses a lot:
asks questions, answers them;
debates, argues;
always wins
the argument.
Her decor spare;
a tidy mind,
all planed to her liking,
stores pat;
a trim house.
Coming, going from her door
with the working hours;
has friends,
keeps them separate;
eventually they disappear.
She might be seen
passing a window,
then another;
always seems she’s looking
for something.
Early morning sun
in the front,
late evening round the back;
she in her house:
a stone in a box.
No one knows
what wars were waged in your head.
That you were bruising on the inside was clear,
but locked up in silence ‒ a human safe ‒
only your eyes spoke and they of pain.
And hands shaking, cigar burning
precariously close to your fingers; a storm warning.
You, sat in our company; in your own private weather,
your own private sea.
Let’s pare away what’s not needed;
carve it back
to the vein
running rich through the stone.
Not the media noise:
lazy visuals,
pulp pop.
Let’s remove, cut and cut
till we have it massive:
the elation we feel
lying side by side.
The mangled corpse: bludgeoned; skull gaping,
gore-spattered, blood-soaked. That intimacy with
slaughter, we call it savagery; their basic weaponry,
rock and branch; that engagement with violence.
And later, with the wielding of swords, the blood-bath
battles; that crush of thrashing bodies, flailing armies,
harvesting death; we call it barbarism, that intimacy
with carnage: the hacking, slitting, piercing of bodies.
To the release of rockets that kill, maim and demolish from
distance; no blood-stained tunics nor eyeballing death;
we call it civilisation: that delivery of devastation and death
with corporate efficiency, distribution worthy of the 21st century.
