Heart

Heart

The leavers left and, after they had gone;

exited through red atriums in blue ventricled

clip-boarded, front loaded data-trains,

those who hung back in the fading

light, too dim to see, clinging like fleas

to cooling fleece of slaughtered beast,

unwilling or unable yet to release

their piercing sucking mouthparts,

the red giant cooled; rumours spread

of the unliving and the not quite dead

looking down over the congregating mass.

Upon not just any ordinary crossroads,

for street sliced street into quarters,

then, hanging hobbled, drew

child-bearing wrong angled triangles,

ink bled wet etch-a-sketched

spirographing scatterbrained shapes,

forgetting hills that over-forge

like phantom pregnancies; swell

near distant bellies of neglect

where gatherers puff on e-cigarettes

mutter archly from foot-hilled base camps,

hold fast onto our children, bar their way,

you’ll not be climbing that mountain today,

because there was life up there once,

ramp it up, Bovril boil the rumours

that camp 4 was in the Death Zone.

At the summit they blunt eviscerated,

cauterised, hacked, cut the bleeding heart,

the dykes' breached scarlet floods, thumb plug

clutch it, oh, but it comes out and out,

in crimson spooned semolina pools

which you would know – ah,

but if only you could read, child,

besuited calls for a perfect execution,

could shed a salt lake city of tears

but were not enough bothered to try,

where nothing in life becomes you

as the leaving of those behind it all,

the bigger the heart, the harder the fall.

So, here’s one, grey hair washed feet,

teeth and eyebrows, kissed girls,

beached, grit sticky between tangled toes

spent sand dancing, waltzing waves,

fox trotting head of hunt and hounds

ghosting machinery, cutting teeth

on clogging the clockwork cogs

so, cry havoc, release the dogs.

Hush. Look back no more.

Freeze heart, close door,

our children don’t need that anymore.