Meat On The Table

what can I say?
I needed the brass
we can argue the ethics
it won’t put meat on the table
I’d steal for my own
I’d probably kill
too raw for you?
so what would you do
there in my shoes?
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Ghosts In The Blood

you got ghosts in your blood   you best get you some stony   I got the fear on  roll me one too    I’m bound to get lucky   I’m prepared to die trying   you can fetch me solace   from another man’s gutter   because I’m headed home   where there will be a welcome   or a maybe just a lynching   they might have forgotten   I hope they’ve forgiven   what’s done is done   and I paid my dues 

I don’t believe in resurrections    or in tearful reconciliations    the past is gone forever    ghosts take shape in its shade    and my head is haunted    with that fearful geometry    and the friends undone    by time and tide   you take your best shot   and maybe another   you might win some    but you’ll likely lose more   no-one passes this way     unless they pay the toll

The Final Straw

I lost my spit and shine

And the all weather finish

That had served me so well

Against the inclement

I had been less than diligent

With my applications

You might call me lazy

But I was tired of the front

And dropped my guard

The signature of a chump

I took the blows due me

And maybe more besides

But there’s always a final straw

An injury that cannot be borne

Often it’s a concealed blade

Nestled in the hand of a friend

I’d be a hypocrite to complain

My dabs were all over that instrument

The blood on my hands was not my own

My complicity was beyond all reasonable doubt

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The Boy Who Wept

His name was Calum Fraser and he was seventeen, though none of us knew this at the time. The folk on the ward just referred to him as the boy who cries. Calum cried a lot – no, Calum wept a lot. You might say he was inconsolable, but I don’t remember anyone actually trying to console him. It was heart rending and it was embarrassing. So we did our best to ignore him. I thought about going to him once or twice. To put my arm around him and ask him what was wrong, but I never did. I always figured he had lost someone. You only grieve like that when you have lost someone.

Poor Calum. He wept both night and day. I know because he slept in my dorm and kept me awake with his sobbing. One night I lost the rag and told him that if he did not shut up I’d give him something to cry about. I felt instant shame. Those words shame me still. He stopped crying a few days later when he fashioned a noose from a bed sheet and hung himself in a toilet cubicle.

It must have taken a determined effort to hang himself on his knees like that. He was still kneeling in the doorway of the cubicle when I found him; the improvised noose held him upright in cruel mockery of prayer. His had been a gruesome death, a violent death, the bulging eyes and bloated tongue attested to that. I hoped to God that he’d found some peace and that death had finally dried his tears.

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personal power

Most people are lost

In power games

Of their own devising

Ensnared in the he said/she said

They endorse misery and conflict

For all of their lives

But it’s hard to hold your head high

When you’re swimming in shit

And that’s the greatest threat

To your personal freedom

Not that some unseen hand

Takes away your power through force

But that you give it away freely

As a matter of course

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