trojans

Trojan thoughts captured the playground of my heart. Your fingers caressed the temples in my head, peeled away doubt and fear and God and left only your bloody charms. Me lying in your bed broken. The crucifix on the wall unstuck with our threshing. Jesus tilting forward. I heard the bedside table cry out your name—. Sharp stones outside whispering and plotting. Darkness fell into flickering light of the gas mantle on the lane. The twills and shrills of the wren, alighted like arrows in the air fighting for supremacy against the cacophony of the blackbird, robin and wren. Someone screamed. Alone—together. The smell of blood and burning. I made a pact with the devil as the light broke morning that as long as time calved time I would be yours forever. I left nothing of myself behind.

During daylight I hid among the catacombs of the Necropolis cutting myself with bottles, slashing myself with plant-holders to keep myself focussed, searching and sharp. Everyday people toppled and fell, the animal sound of mourning their veil, brown earth doctored and despoiled green and the long teeth of wooden batons stuck together for re-use. Daffodils gleamed gold. You left me the soft perfume of French syringa whose sepals sung of your love. I placed them as God in my mouth a token of our promise.

I wrote to you on the backs of the litter of lost prayer cards, souls with other people’s names black embossed on them and the spider-scrawl of those searchers. The smallest of scripts, holding hands from line to line, encrypted in a false figure- of- eight. You remained the key. People with hats and torches dotted- and- dashed the hill in a shadowy line. My feet hug the damp dew knowing which path to follow. They yawp out a name. I have lost my past. Safely buried in the shadows I’m touched by their confusion and want to reassure them. I opened my mouth. My tongue tripped and tricked into a foreigner’s mouth. You flung me to the floor and cover me drilling me hard into dust and nothingness, seeding me with your love. You burned. I witnessed no shame, but longing.

You sent a slinking one-eared mongrel. It looked at me with through the gap of mildew marble with the lamentations of your all-knowing eyes. I reached out my arm, my hand shaped in subtle friendship. It snapped its sharp teeth. I laughed and it echoed like cold betrayal. The flickering stars strayed from their elliptical planet path and spoke to me. They said be steady and sleep.

I dreamt of you and the one-eared cur. My hip blazed wherein your haste you’d dashed me against a whitened sepulchre, but my feet were toasted. When my eyes flickered into recognition the dog shape-shifted and took a few steps away from me. It turned to see if I would follow. My duty was to you. Only ecstasy would do.

Friendship grew between the one-eared and two, soft-stepped into the ways of shivering shadows, the undulating wind whipping the rain, the light and the night. The one-eared dog slipped into our life and brought the manna of dead things as offerings to your goodness. For two nights I keened for you, growing careless and searching you out, flirting for your touch among the newly dug graves and was chased from stone to stone by the whistle blowers like a robber. A blow caught me on the back of the head, drawing blood. A meaty fellow with a thick moustache holding a torch in one hand and a club in the other felled me near the spigot used for filling jugs. My wrist took the next blow. He shook so much the whistle fell from his thick lips. He flailed, missing my head and whacking the lopsided tombstone of the long dead Mrs Dixon. I’d have caught another blow, but our cur was his curse, hurtling from behind the old stone hut the gravediggers used and knocked him to the ground, snapping at his face and shoulders. He spidered backwards, his arms windmilling and dived headfirst into a cut grave, the dog snapping the wind out of him from above. Silently we slipped the leash and spirited away.

Nights grew long through the gap in the cracked stone flickering into a candle light memory of Canis Minor, the little dog, Canis Major, the big dog, and starlit eternity. My mouth could hold only a mouthful of cold water, teeth chattered, and body sulked into the dusty soil. You were pregnant with waiting and no longer visiting. Our one-eared dog grew a fat belly, eating for both of us, my lips sealed to food. He whined when I scratched up and under his ears, his snout falling onto my belly.

With no dog at me feet the long bones of my legs grey icily into the coldness of marble. I plotted death, as you plotted my life, uneven breath by breath. The ivy of decay wreathed my lower limbs, working its long tendrils up my legs. I raised my head. Through the fog of my snuffled wheezing, frost glimmered the light of the cold stone and the pristine day. The one-eared dog was panting and scraping its behind along the ground. It looked at me with those eyes that said help me. Our one-eared dog had a puppy half in and half out, but it slumped sideways. I heard it yelp. Then it keeled over.

The slumber in my limbs unsealed I crawled over stroking the matted fur on the cur’s face and mouth. I planted my hands inside a viscous living thing and struggled to bring forth the bright shiny buttons of new life. The cur licked them clean. We seemed like a good team. I had little human fears, but the one-eared dog tremor red and too much bled into the earth and years. With a blind twitching life was in my hands and I was running with six bites of life away from you, away from our park and into the city gates to find help.