Rocco
Rocco, aged four, telling his recurring dream:
running down the slopes of a spewing volcano
narrowly avoiding with desperate leaps
the myriad streams of lava.
Sometimes he does it driving a truck.
stray dogs song, Mostar
dogs reading in their magazines –
oh it’s just because they’re int-erested
- stray dogs
the muezzin calls us most periodically
to knees
dogs dip their hindlegs in their tea –
oh it’s because they’re mal-adjusted –
- dead dogs
the bell calls us almost eventfully
to peace
dogs licking empty margarines -
oh it’s because they’re no lon-ger prehensile
- free dogs
they seem to taste of all of our history
and ease
abuse
an upright man came to tell him
what he was eager to hear
that he could trace the footprints
that had led up to here
that life was like the database
the grateful policemen’s tryst
that memory was the couch
at the psychiatrist’s
that each line in the mirror
had been etched by this or that
that causality is simple
that the face is like a map
there was the click of typing
as melting responsibility
a depletion of funds went unnoted
and a bright day froze him chilly
an overflowing drawer was cleared
at home without a word
it was enough he knew
the report had been interred
in a sighed future declarative with conditional ellipsis
a polite warning of mess, a touching tacit warning of emotional incrementum
offered the threshold-crossing
fun suddenly became weighed as ultimata,
aborted the operation
scared of a change
and wondering if retro-fitting mouths were what was required
(it started with deliberately pissed jeans in our garden)
that might lead to the eyewandering day street
and confessing the pragmatic want to keep scumbag options open
and not be introduced as one of them
so let the fish flounder
tilt, jolt and slight shrink
and then a slow and silent shrink
whose awkwardness was not really awkward except much later when its moment crystallised.
sure, there was subsequent even fulfilment
even under a particular pale roman nose
but there was never another road not taken
Was this a real fork or memory’s highlighter –
Hollywood made its confident claim.
left wondering and ungrown since then.
More rats and denty
That rough boy was right about how they fuck you up
and now holds a sardonic professorship.
Think about it daily on the trudge
at the third lamppost, look down,
at the oversize shoes that drew blood:
resentment has conglomerated on these, their successors.
Your life is like this, memory meanders on itself
or oxbows off stagnant.
Ask: why is an eyesore’s prominence on a map of misery
such mitigating cold comfort?
