An early dusk on Halloween, the street
Picks up what the clouds screen, her bricks meet
Her, husk of a weekend spends on her book
-shelves, bricks on the box and the silver screen
Locks her up, look-in leaves out
On the slasher-flicks’ street, reeking of musk,
Knives-out for gores and leaves bored
Building brick-book-shelves, drinks, teas,
An early, sinking dusk on Halloween; and sees:
a shatterglass belt-buckle stretches it taut
blotches of entry on Fauvist skin
clinging to welt-dappled cherubim – thin
is the matted gantry to Fingerclutch Port.
Pitiful short little choristers, slinging
the needling pins, the glass taper tattered
Some churning assorted catastrophes fatted
on youth trundle in, tugging and bringing
in bodies for hanging, scumming up, turning
up ranks of scattered placard-truths,
Settlers singing on cloven-hoof
marches through plaited veins and burning
under the awning, poised to throttle,
Spirit of soothing hooks and nurtures
abuse with the yearning for such a departure,
impaling the proof of the suffering cattle.
Her frozen kettle, high as a noose,
screams like a torture bull wild and wailing
Coil-sprung metal, shot through and flailing
out heat like an archer grown blinder than use
in the broken truce: in gorging on spoil
Pity’s scaling walls of self-defeat
Aligns her loosely – with the Eaten.
Heroine’s failing her function as foil
On this malignly early sinking dusk on Halloween
The whole damned species likely flipped
A switch, some years ago now, brought to the
Boil and left, she surmises, by
A casual eye, surprised to come across a
Cupful of self-mutilation brewing in each
Sorry, sore, dilapidated, one of us,
To pity a man is to remove him from
The centre of his own story.
Unless the story is about pity,
many are, their inhabitants
creatures of incredulous cruelty.
But pity is a story without events,
written by committee: they need
her empathetic punchline to make sense
of themselves, to illegitimise with
a jurisprudential legerdemain,
their glossy buttonhole of suffering.
Pity is by necessity
A conference.
A congruence, sliding on skin
ploughs a plaintive razor imperative:
H A T E in
deliberate capitals. Give
it to me as a connection,
something associative,
Red on a pallid complexion.
We can do it together, say
after me and repeat to perfection:
H, A, T, E, H, A,
the sweeping grace of a T,
the baffling complexity of an as-of-yet unfinished E,
over the sweet plaintive confection,
multilayered, brittle, brulée:
Autovivisection.
And wilting on the roundabout, the eldest,
loquacious in their dotage, reminisce
of the deep and dark unhappy days when they
were young and carving autographs to hide
under their black sleeves and tight, black jeans now
sprawled over the circumference, this being
a year or two or three at most behind.
Spun slowly about the competitors
who sing the lowest parts of human song,
the themes: how wearying their audience
with their ignorance of all this deep life,
the themes, and who can claim the grandest share
of all those ghostly black-clad bodies
meek and half-assembled there.
Which here means the meanest portion:
She sees, the thought bent-double, the gleaner
Strands of monologue fold about her,
Shut down, the ports in a strangle-blockade,
A porous and permeable emotional wall
That cannot be made to persist without her
and therefore cannot be said to exist
At all. And beside
The deep introspective platelet tattoos,
Deep-seeking needling streaks of abuse,
Deep-seated doubt of a will to acclaim,
an appropriate and permissively sneering
King of deep inkwells and pity, a name
that’s a part and parcel of an early darkened dusk
on her sightly, slightly saddened side of Halloween.
*
An old professor, that, I do admit,
Has somewhat literally a hand in it,
The puffy crimson horny puppet-Devil,
From the tail-end of the bag and several
Joints out of place, with a thumb in one arm,
King of nothing more than sought-after harm.
So I accept, if I denounce, complicity.
Forgive, though, a professor’s interjection,
My friends: let’s introduce simplicity:
PUNCH on the roundabout brawling, bawling,
Bellowing, wallowing, crawling, brawling
and falling down laughing for rage
As he bellows and cackles high, rattles High
Laughter, and flails at ghosts calling
“Back to your cage! Back to your cage!”
and batters and shatters and tears out the cases
Boot to the Throat and Club in the Faces
“I’m a Fist-past-the-Post,” he knows and he crows it
“and t’only done thing in a ghost is The Die!
Die today, and I’ll have Jack sent tumbling after!”
As he reels in the blood and his laughter.
Punch on the razor blade, heckling, cackling,
Cheering, leering, cackling, chuckling,
Dancing a crackle-back stamp on the
Pressure, the skin-slipping finger-clutch
Scoring the flesh and “Too deep! Too deep–”
and the voice gets no further.
Punch is a hump-back snickering bridge
on the road between laughter and murder.
Punch in the needlepoint, spattering, sputtering,
Pissing contempt and a sick dirty
Gag on the skin where the prick
and the hurt he unleashes
Enter shuddering in. Hunched on the gangplank
Punch doubles over, cries out, releases
a shout of throaty glee at the prank:
“They wanted a slow and ling’ring slink
out of thinking,” the hunchback a giggling wink.
“None slower’n this, if they ever come to it!
That’s the way to do it!”
He dances back to the ballroom snickersnee
Stainless-steel razor-blade parquet-flooring
Slaps a bow-legged foot of infection
Into the too-deep-set inch of an E
that to finish, the razor was scoring.
Red and green-black, a clown’s own complexion,
The harlequin skin and a life-long laugh
that self-contempt cannot altogether diminish,
Punch’s initials: H A T F
He laughs from his belly, but words still come through it:
“That’s the way to do it!”
Punch beats the Devil with a short, thick club
Punch beats the Devil with a short, thick club
and this is routine, and she’s seen it on other
Days than Halloween. And yet,
Repeats have a shrinking-
away kind of character, disgust at the crunch,
Like the sound of rust cracking
Punch beats an object with a short, thick club,
A clown’s happy chortle dubbed over the backing
Punch beats at something with a short, thick club
and he’s still clubbing when she can no longer view it
and that’s the way that Punch
Hops on what’s left of the roundabout, sharpish
Jagged new shards on the synthetic ground, and old
Scratches ranking their scars at his feet, and cold
Winds beating a path down her street,
and broken things beating their wings in the cold
and lonely, dark and broken Sunday night.
The early dusk, and long-departed,
The spattered dancer never knew it:
and that’s the way to do it.
Yes, that’s the way to do it.
[Forward to All Saints]
