No More The Clopping Hooves Of Death’s Horses In Your Legs
An Elegy for Graham Parkinson
PRELUDE—A NIGHT IN THE HOSPICE
The greatest love we can have is for the suffering youth.
I watch you sleeping in your bed,
the age of arbitrary manhood
& see you as a little blonde boy who slept beside me in the past,
now your poor body twists in unknowable pain.
I ask that the dead at your bed-side and the angel at your head
deliver you, bless you with mercy now.
Purple veins in your side, lump in your chest like some awful hill,
but your handsome face has peace in it at this hour,
now that nurse’s drugs have calmed the screaming pain.
My tears are sins, my words cannot explain the weight
of this experience
and so I call on love and it speaks to me,
touches my crown and says
I am here, I am waiting, I am his guard,
and yours, he shall not want, he shall not need,
he will walk into my embrace.
I
Shall I slice off both ears,
so as not to hear the death rattle’s melody?
How beautiful you look, my Patroclus,
fingers so thin, painless face, now mercy has kissed
you on the purple lips.
Shall I stab my eyes,
so as not to see the body?
Shall I tear at my hair and beard, rage like Achilles?
Cut out my tongue,
so as to never speak again to the world?
Plunge my hands in to a vat of acid,
so as to never write another poem?
Dive head long from the top balcony
of the blocks to the street below,
let them bury our bones as one body?
NO! NO! NO!
I will live this life in your honour.
I will speak your name into a monument of praise.
I will sing my greatest lyric yet.
I will love my sacred flesh until I break its bounds.
I will not rest my pen until my work is done.
Sing on muse, sing over deaths voice, sing the elegy through me.
II
It’s three weeks since
and your face is everywhere,
your smell is on the clothes I wear
that you once wore, the funeral songs come on
and make me smile and weep together,
you on that hospice bed my friend, red t-shirt, pale face,
you in the papers, football memorials, goal dedications
and minute silences,
you in the window of the tattoo shop,
remembrance tattoos, donations for hospice,
you my friend, with blue eyes oceaning around me.
The music always pulls me through.
And now I watch football alone, when once we watched together,
or at the least would call or text
and now football seems a dumb game full of dull folk songs
and divisions of the heart among the poor and broken.
III
Help me Karl, I need fresh, I need fresh!
The last words you spoke to me, waking for a moment
from the final sleep,
trying to get out of the bed, you saw me and said
Help me Karl, I need fresh, I need fresh!
How help? What action?
Open the window let in the air, fresh air.
Help me Karl.
My hand always there for you,
my heart always open, my voice to soothe.
Now my hand a fist, my heart savage,
my voice a wail. How help now?
You called for your Ma,
my Sister and then
you lay back down and went to sleep.
Sometimes I feel like a Motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost done,
A long, long way from home.
Come tears,
run like the water of a dark river,
cleanse like rain through the streets,
tears be like seraphs at my cheeks.
IV
He is dead,
lay his head on the pillow of gold.
Wrap his hands in rosary beads,
wash his skin with rose water,
dress him in expensive clothes,
lay him down on bier of lilies
and pink lotuses
play him his favourite songs, play Biggie Smalls loud,
drink for him in every pub in the town,
kiss his hands, kiss his cheek, kiss his forehead,
stroke with tender his hair,
take him to the church and speak on his name,
bury his body under dirt and flowers.
That is not him. No, he is risen and he calls my name,
comes to my home, speaking of the other
and lays his fleshless hand
upon my bone shoulder and says
Tell them I’m ok, tell them I love them,
He is dead, as dead as we are dead.
I am here, I am waiting, I am his guard,
and yours, he shall not want, he shall not need,
he will walk into my embrace.
We all wore black and cancer lilac at your funeral.
Made me think of Whitman’s lilacs in the dooryard,
and all the war-dying young men's hands he held.
I wished that I could have turned black all over,
took the clay from your grave
smeared it on my face, rubbed it in my hair, on my scalp.
I scream at the world and all of nature
that you have taken one to good to me,
one who I loved like the earth.
Who takes the lamb, takes the Shepard too.
Who strikes the lamb, strikes all.
Strike on then death, strike on all,
but know that he who strikes all,
strikes himself out too.
V
April unleashed cruel ravens on my head.
The murder spits bits of worms at my feet.
The sky bursts with flesh, dead meat on my back.
Clouds of filthy sorrow lash the earth and grave with rain.
The blocks fill with ash and smoke, the night burns with sickness.
Vomit rivers through the city, urine and faeces swamp,
drowning, all is drowning.
April I stand to your bleak days,
and cut my own flesh to reach the spirit,
I eat your bitter bark and choke till I puke black fingers,
black toes, black teeth, black eyes, black rats, black death babes
screaming in the woods of my chest.
Come the wreaths of condolence that will wither on the grass.
Come the nightmares full of rabid dogs and jackal faced men.
Come the moon a sphere of rot in the sky.
Come the piano cords playing sad notes like a whiskey buzz in the brain.
Come the voice in the dream like the first snow flake
on the face as you look towards heaven, which you think is above you.
No, none above you, nor none below you, only you in all, the one, the same.
Music pull me through. Art devour me.
Lord pour oil on my forehead that I may speak in your one tongue.
VI
Through you. For you.
I must lay down all foolishness and become a better man,
I must renounce distractions and go and sit on the grass,
surrounded by trees and birds, listen to what the water says,
be humble before the wind,
still the cogs and wheels of the machine mind,
pray in the silent temple of the heart.
I must grow a lion’s mane and growl for God, cut the serpent’s tongue,
sing from my belly and lull the world to sleep with me, through you
my Nephew/brother/friend/son/saint I must be a drowning wave,
a heretics hymn, a rebel of love.
VII
It’s your birthday today
and you haven’t gotten older.
You are like Keats now, the ever beautiful faun in a portrait that beams.
You are the poems of Rimbaud. You are the movies of James Dean.
the kicks of Bruce Lee, the goals of the Busby Babes,
You are an eternal spring morning.
You are a butterfly of a bad summer.
No more battling pills warring in the sea of your blood.
No more of the tidal scream in the small of your back.
No more the clopping hooves of death’s horses in your legs.
No more the Chemo, no more cutting out tumours, vegansim, hash oil, reiki,
back and forth flights to Germany. Crutches, wheelchairs, hospital beds and hospice rooms.
No more needles to stab your skin and puncture your veins,
No more bed sores and clots.
No more morphine to keep you calm
and make you sleep without dreams.
No, cause now you’re free of that nightmare and are dancing and running,
scoring overhead kicks at Old Trafford in my dreams.
VIII
Today our sofa got taken away,
that sofa where we played so many matches on FIFA.
Where we watched our favourite movies,
and late night UFC fights,
where you had to be helped in and out of your wheelchair,
when your legs gave up on you, but not you on them,
where you fell asleep so many times as the drugs took you down
into silence.
When they took that sofa out another bit of you was removed,
but when I sat on the new one and closed my eyes, that which is within,
reminded me that you are not in things, that you are in me,
that you are in us, that you are in that which is within,
where you do not want, you do not need,
where you sit in the bounty of love’s embrace
unwounded and free.
Lovely stuff Karl. I remember hearing you read that on the radio years back.