“Honestly, we are all children of God”
Day before Christmas Eve fell on Jehovah’s rest day,
I visit Pawprint. He is substantially medicated.
Since my last visit he’s invested in an exotic aquarium.
He still protects his shooter bong like an endangered species,
and ingests his thrice daily dose of Kratom.
As empty in hunger as him full stop, I conjure a blurb about food.
He offers me a bowl of lentils with wheaten bread.
Christianity’s cud is chewed over smoked soap, a pot of Kratom tea.
Pawprint decides dinosaur deniers are certifiable, but will be saved.
There are evangelical magazines open on the table, certain pages marked.
Vomit rises subsides in my oesophagus. “Christmas shopping?”
Pawprint postulates. I dart impetuously to bathroom
to flummox my gullet in gastronomical gushes,
that lash squeamish splashes against a shudderless U-bend…
Open-eyed. Regurgitated amber colourstains this porcelain bowl I flush.
“Are you alright in there Robert?”
“Auch aye, Christmas Shopping?”
I freewheel Da’s 4×4 down Ballymoney Hill to town.
“Either my leg or foot or these brakes aren’t working.”
Pawprint perpetually sneezes his body weight. We park at Tesco. I some-ways take to feet.
Vomit rises subsides in my oesophagus.
I purchase a banana to gutcomfort.
Pawprint cries, can’t say “banana”
for sake of some personal trauma,
I’d soon learn concerned his brother,
before heaven’s gate, his body’s last expulsion.
My pores humlikechant humdrum airs, Pawprint befriends equestrians.
Everyone collects a frozen turkey, my body is a turncoat to my mind.
Pawprint buys his gifts in Poundland where I’m priced out,
and spoilt for choice, on edge I’ll cause a public scene, another innard purge.
Before passing Peeler station, traffic caught stationary, I eject,
puke banana-ized bile at ironrust gates of Bannside Presbyterian Church.
Holiday traffic gawks, no-one dares doot, all I taste is acidic.
I collect a filamentflicker kinetic enough to drive Pawprint Home.
Then my wobbly self. Riot boots splattered in experiment.
My bed belches like an insidious black hole in my slumberchamber.
My opiated brain is the event horizon. I, abreast my sunken hippocampal blues,
as Pawprint prepares for Drogheda, for his first and last stint, in Pentecostal rehab.
Robert Herbert‘s debut collection, a sequence of poems entitled, Thon Pangs! Thon Pangs! is forthcoming from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He solicits poems for the e-zine, Digital Behemoth