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first
published in Fin;
in
collection Unpredictable
Geometry, Templar,
Oct 08
Ghost
I read once of
a shadow burned into the ground,
like
an autumn leaf, a black imprint on a shiny street.
And
there were patterns the silk kimonos left, wounds.
A
girl and her mother had weeping flowers for scars.
Here,
there are blokes in offices who control the locks.
There
are panic buttons. Don’t tell me the man in the cell
has
seen it all before and isn’t scared. Don’t tell me he’s hard.
It’s
not the dark he fears, who’s died before. It’s the years,
the
interminable mopping, the young men shuffling
in
slippers with plastic spoons in the dinner queues.
It’s
the absence of anything that’s green or growing.
A
single blade of grass might save you from madness.
How
did it sound, that shoe lace, when the knot pulled tight?
Did
the bars that took the strain creak before they settled down?
To
find him like that, blood stopped up, lying in shit.
To
cut him down like Christ and pick up the phone.
Each
time you pass you see him standing there. You remember
how
he’d turn and grin. Sometimes you imagine him being born.
Pat Winslow
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last
update:
e-mail
Pat
poetry
favourites:
Magma
Rain Dog
Iota
Poetry London
The Poetry Society
Templar
Poetry
The Rialto
and in
the
shop
...
collections:
"Unpredictable Geometry",
Templar Poetry
"Dreaming of Walls Repeating Themselves",
Templar
Poetry;
"Skin & Dust"
Blinking Eye;
"The Girl in the Iron Lung"
Crocus
Books;
"The Fact of an Eye"
Amazing Colossal
in
anthology:
"The Poetry Cure"
Bloodaxe Books
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