Guttural

 

Guttural

 

With sound like gulls eviscerated to shreds,

shrieking over a single cast-off slice of bread,

the Walrus lumbers his hangdog head,

opens the back of his throat and screams

choked off strings of senseless phonemes,

stitched together with shards of barbed wire,

and in piss-hole eyes, rot extinguished fires.

It goes on all day, from the morning grey

of his first wet whistle to the end of play -

as if they’ve lashed up whips to flay

at sluggish, slack and stagnant rubber,

pierce thick hide; mine for congealed blubber,

impound metal sticks where legs should be.

While somewhere in scud, his flea-bitten fleas

suck deep at pallor to feast, rut and multiply -

tattooist that punched at back of his neck,

severed the spine from the cerebral cortex.

Hocked up from black cast oil-slick lungs,

his dissonant cacophony of malcontent is flung

like flame grilled whoppers, hooded like claws,

twisted by spanners, slung through doors,

flapping on floors like a harpooned pollock,

a stuck hog floundering with a twisted bollock,

open mouthed in instinct, swearing hunger,

squatting in piss on his concrete tundra

and the acolyte that orbits him like flies,

whose doped eyes widen in draggled surprise

as he screams - fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,

with crotch blight patchwork on damp cloth.

They carved pie into the thinnest of slices

and in a flick of blade, a twist of knife,

environments have evolved to suit this life –

Poundstretcher, Newpoundland - offering clutter,

spewing putrid gash into high-street gutters,

and the sky is full of wheeling gulls who never tire

of circling this guttural with feral eyes afire.