Black Carr im
I shall not want…
Greensleeves shunted through an ice cream truck
in the boroughs, & leaf-gagged noise in
this snug gorge….under the corporated ruins
of Leeds & Bradford, the mayflower is
stage-managed here: spectacular fists
of white foliage opening….opening
over the clay pits. I’ve sat at this crossroads,
smug, where the horse shit hardens under the
cow parsley, & finally once the quad bikers
sod off & leave me in peace, you see
that for whatever reason some bloke
is stood in the thorn bushes….snaps polaroids—
the click & whirr on his pretentious antique
annoys me. & then there is the angelus
of the ice cream man, the tinny resonance
reaches me…hail mary, full of grace…
& soon enough, a polaroid is spat out
from the ejection slot: the pretentious
bloke wags it about, and what forms out
from under his fingernails is a
catherine wheel of thunderflies sprocketed
through the clean air: so ends the account of celluloid.
& what comes after, what is there to say
aside from that I didn’t know him,
that I thought he was prick, that we met
once at a party, maybe twice: what else
is there to say? About a month back,
seeing mates over a pint, I heard
that he died: & that was that: no one knows
what happened…hail mary, full of grace…
& now, up the beads of a broken rosary,
ecstasy comes in on an image of
myself prostrate to the straw god of crossroads:
I pray in my room tonight, & tomorrow
my knees shall be bent on a steel footbridge
& my fat thighs shall be printed with
cross-hatching—& when the beck is churning
backwards, there shall come a moment when
the martyrdom of the catherine wheel rises
& becomes clear over black carr: & before
you turn to look beside you, his tortoiseshell
glasses shall have been laid out on a chevroned
bull-stone, & in the canopy another
click & whirr—the sound of pissing in the bushes.
…surely mercy shall follow
Finn Haunch is a bloke from Leeds. He mostly writes about where he grew up and people have said that his poetry is alright. He has been published by Eggbox.