By: Angus Rogers
A circle sits in a square on a high wall and
looks down at the stagnant river.
What have I done to deserve this? He wonders.
It’s not so hard to keep a fucking plant alive.
You pour water on it and open the curtain.
Why is there foliage inside the house, child?
She cries into the dead leaves of her spider-plant,
fainted dry on the bureau, and wonders how
on Earth she came to be where she was.
Home wasn’t so far away; a thousand miles
of bluebell wood; seven bolts of shimmering
silk across the open door; a kettle screaming
a lullaby somewhere deep inside. The hot pipes.
Home won’t be so far away, the next time,
when the time comes round again,
too-rah,
Hokey Cokey,
bread and butter,
raw sewage down Argyll Street.
Are you hearing the distant muezzin, child?
Are you still locating these sounds like you used to
when you were an un-budded thistle?
How are you finding the one-horse town of Earth?
Climb the hill. The sacred heart. Primroses.
‘Hallelujah’ on accordion. Leonard is dead.
Everything should have been in place.
Perhaps, in your absence, the hallways had
swapped places and the compass upended itself.
Too far in to think about that now, though.
You, a triangle of love and hate and
whatever this new one is, sitting as reviled as a rat
at a dinner table in the octagonal hole
in the circular hole in the middle of the night
in the shadow of the valley in the manhole cover
you have slipped halfway into. Enough!
Cease thought!
For, really, who am I to question the order of things?
For, really, who am I…?
For, really, who…?
Four rolling hills at each corner of the map.
I tie my grandfather’s handkerchief tightly
around my throat and scramble up,
only to slide back down.
Where?
Here!
Here I am, the circle in the square.
It should never be so difficult
to remember to water the plants.
I can hear the deep-sea leviathans,
laughing from their boardroom meetings,
actually laughing, laughter like crying –
Ancestors, fetch my watering can;
My spider-plant, Lazarus; my wet shoes; my eye;
A light in the village hall come on COME ON
COME ON EILEEN geography homework dignity
beauty come on scream hark hark hark hark hark –
One foot in the seagull’s song and one foot in the dark.
Wells Street Journal 