A Commemorative Tone Poem of Surprising Delicacy
When young men go out at night
their veins are a plump chord
binding a shimmering chest,
steely spider nets containing the kilogrammatic heads
that burst from their shirts.
They have trout eyes that glow in the dark
like saucers of boiling fat,
soaking up the night beetles and specking the walls
with flecks of steaming lard.
Outside the clubs warm bowls of sound are placed
to entice these preening great-headed Toms.
Lurching through the reeling doors
they check their minds with the cloak room girl
to pick them up when they leave
in stale paper bags
slightly damp from leaking brain.
They are the sex-magnet men
and naked in their suits they come
filings to the steel they shiver and howl
to the rattle of the loud wet music.
It’s a funny world when you’ve got your head on wrong-
the fruit and clatter of life recede
as you bounce off the walls of the rage-cage
your ears electric shells tuned to receive
some hint of lust that could lead
to a bruised and musty coupling
in some sticky fortress of love.
At the crest of their nights
they are snapping dogs at a children’s party
eager to snatch the minds of adolescent girls
and dash them from their bony cupboards
and quite prepared to catch half-bricks
in their quick mouths.
They wake pricked and pickled
on bleak and featherless mornings
wounded birds at the road
distended organs shovelling out
a brittle cylinder of cellophane skin.
All that remains is to order the starry spume
of their infinite celestial nights
reducing these memories
to a commemorative tone poem of surprising delicacy.
