beneath an avalanche
of pills and booze, his heart still cracked
from Infidelity’s punch
cracking once more, there were those
who gathered for the lynch.
When men of Freud and men of Jung
locked you in a room
devoid of joy, devoid of youth,
and strapped things to your arm
while Jason syphoned bottles of gin,
then smashed them, there were some
who wailed first of the broken glass,
and second of you, Miss Black.
They wailed, “You idiot, Jason, can’t
you see this girl’s a trick?
That maze of cuts across her flesh
will trap you. Get out quick!”
But that sweet face of yours was wet,
each day, with waves of guilt.
Your love was real, revealed on walls
in ballpoint and misspelt,
in brassy northern tones that showed me
how you truly felt.
“I’ve tret that boy sur fookin’ bad,
how can I make amends?”
you wept to me, and I replied,
“Bobbie, my darling friend,
just keep on showing him your love,
and he will comprehend.”
That Christmas you prepared a gift
for Jason and the world
that was to be a beauty and
a wonder to behold,
half-artist, half-musician, face
of olive, heart of gold.
The gift was intercepted and
then flushed into the ether
by drugs designed to block the pull
of the psychotic lever.
Stomach-cramped and vomiting,
your paleness digging deeper,
anaemic, cramped and vomiting,
you traipsed halfway round London
to hear me read my poetry
beneath a swinging lantern
to six people in furry hats,
traipsed with bold abandon.
Your pain threshold was high as Felix
Baumgartner on acid.
Or maybe you enjoyed the pain
that made your life less flaccid.
Perhaps pain helped you feel alive
and kept your vision lucid.
Perhaps that’s why you sat all day
and night beside the river
on a bench and in the name
of Art, and didn’t waiver
from leaping down a line of plinths
in a symbolic endeavour.
Five feet apart and high and stood
on concrete was each plinth
and you were going to make it from
the first one to the tenth,
re-starting if you fell down, even
if it took a month.
Perhaps the pain was over-ridden,
simply, by your love,
by all of the devotion that
you never ceased to give,
just like the crazy little sister
I would love to have.
My darling friend, you never reached
that tenth and final plinth.
You reached the third or second one,
then, offering no hints,
on a whim and suddenly,
you gathered for the lynch.
That day a plectrummed gin-soaked man
had pulled a desperate tune
from his archipelago of a heart,
“so, can we let our wounds
heal together?” his words that would never
fall in your ears and bloom.
When Jason found you by the ceiling
above a mountain of sorrow,
he wept like Europe was an ice-cap
and there was no tomorrow.
He whipped himself as though he’d failed
to see a neon arrow.
He whipped himself as though the scarf
was tied with his own fingers,
as though he’d had no love to give
but only aging angers,
as though he somehow could have fed
those wild unfeedable hungers.
He tore you down and howled his life
into your purpling mouth.
It sighed back through your vocal chords
in songs of living breath
that made him think, with cornered hope,
you hadn’t left this earth.
The funeral directors wept
at such a waste of beauty.
Hundreds wept at such a brutal
breakup of a party
with so much colour, noise and life
that pulsed through us so sweetly.
I knew you for a year, my love,
a year I’ll always cherish.
A year unlike all others, that
I’ll talk about with relish
until the day I join you, with
no need for gloss or polish.
