Goodbye Boys
"the stain of absolute possession" - Eavan Boland
no more of you, shifting your weight
through pewter suburbs, dissembling
and emigrant, to wrest these woollen
words from mouths worn wide with
monologue. no more matter out of
place. unscrew the scuppered bulbs
in squats that cupped your ailing lily
forms through sunday's drab
mysterium. no more house of straw.
or else the hooky jests of dealers.
men like fawning ghosts. and you.
the smokey jeers of women. horny
blue abyss between the bridge,
the hill. the court, the morgue, or
anywhere. no more merchants
of scurvy, the geezer with his
bleachy eye turned toward your
pocket. on afternoons, emphatic
with landlords, gangers come to
whip your lackey genes to froth. no more of you, resplendent under
section, teasing your petulant griefs
through the eye of a needle. no
more doctor, oiling his oracle's
voice in a leatherette chair. no more
chairs. no more tables set for seance,
mothers who shake a failing finger
at your dreams. no more all powerful
oz. a moshpit's fickle cotillion. in
the dark, those ikons of collision,
kodacked into double-take, or knock-
on-wood, or i-was-there. oaths or debts,
or anything sworn to. the linen map
we'd fold around the dream of being
free. the volatilizing fog from off
the motorway. the faces of the dead
like rotten tablecloths, torn along
each blackened crease. eng-land
belongs to me. every nebbish, every
gamalog, and every mullered fool.
no more of you, how the orchard was
a door that opened onto fire. and every night an irony of kisses, shiners,
splintered teeth. oh gully teens, oh hoods,
oh skangers, renegade 'ead the balls,
i leave you to your boarder levitations.
i cannot carry you anymore.
Dr Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of seven poetry collections and of numerous chapbooks, most recently Contains Mild Peril (Out-Spoken Press, 2019). Fran has recently completed her Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London, titled, "Impossible Telling and the Epistolary Form: Contemporary Poetry, Mourning and Trauma". She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters.