Poem

Modo Wastum Est

I

Walk backwards through the room.
Charred, spoiled with salt. Unmentioned, the stink,
stink of burnt hair, sweet cloying
human fat and marrow. Walk backwards
through the cylinder of steel which pushes forward
gulping twenty thousand volts.
Spitting forward, draining south.

We'll alight before time. Momentarily stand
watching the rain angle into the ballast,
feeling it pummel the corrugate roofing.
Grim (human) as those who march north
to reorient the geography of power. With blunt instruments
as infants heads thumped against timbers,
fires set over the horizons.

Barely mentioned.
Perhaps its an embarrassment
to be swept beneath the carpet,
were the carpet
a weave of ash, salt, the animal screams of women.
As an artist reworks a canvass; the burden of a brief existence,
then the rendering invisible.


II

Worlds crawl to their end in these alleyways,

prone and shallow breathing beside refuse sacks, mean pellets of cat shit.
The gridwork of terrace and lozenges of lamplight in night time exhalations,
or greased and veinous with dark rain.

I've blundered through these streets, through all their weathered aspects,
gone away, come back, assaulted by hailstorms of memory,
or forensically exposed by scraping; flint, the odd domestic shard.

Retreat behind these walls in York where it began for us,
blond ghost, taller than I, who dogs now my steps through this city
of digs and blanched stone.

The way strata is laid down, period by period, bent upon by teams under arclight.
The way when you rub skin there is more skin.
The way a restoring art historian might scalpel away paint to locate

beneath dreary pastoral some sudden brilliance, rendered outlandish by time
and the clockwork of the imagination. And beneath that
scrawled upon the damaged canvass, bare text, which just says

“I am sorry”.


III

Garrisoned within the splintered walls at York,
they radiated outwards like a God's wave,
disturbed from the middle of the ocean.
Flattening crops and death to livestock
and each located male. Burning, salting in their wake.

North through Galtre, beneath the shadow of the hills
at Alverton the sky grew dim they could not discover
the direction they need press, each man could barely find his other.
Knowing St Cuthbert wont to shield his flock at Durham
and p'rhaps dimly cognisant that they had
hugely offended God in the ravishing slaughter,
they turned, fled back to York...

Dense forest spotted with corpses of farmsteads,
in semi darkness birds hopping across the wet charcoal.
Leaves nodding, laden with globes of rain.
A spider stop, start, sprinting across the stained tree bark.
All of these were dangerously impassive.

William met them in York, placed steel in their spines.
Return through Alverton was
marked by unnatural, blasphemous brutality;
at their heels, the postured dead unburied,
no living hands to keep the meagre honours.

The place was recorded by Doomsday
some seventeen years later as
“waste”.


IV

Out across the vale from this grass slope
lumps of rock making up the Dales. The car stereo
thumps its beat out like a panic attack.
Gib skins up, leg dangling out the open door,
Skanny jumps about, a costume of high nerves
like a fucking parrot, screeching
“If they find us, if they find us ?”
“Fucking shut the fuck up” he instructs.

This manchild is history. Through his eyes,
to the content of his stomach, churning like a Bosch,
with his sports gear and trainers and cap.
To what he sees when he chucks his mind into the future,
an inconvenient shaped stone rolling to a stop
at the end of a wet November alleyway
where cats and foxes have torn open the bins
for chicken carcass, and pigeons
perch the rotten doors, opening their cloacas.

In the summer dusk populations of rabbit graze
quietly across the same stretch of grass
between these dry stone walls, and in their warrens
the numberless generations honeycomb the hills.
“Right” he signals “lets get this
fucking show on the fucking road.” Gib opens
up the petrol tank, ties a sock to a stick,
pokes it in, lays it on the front seat.
Flicks a match.

They all move away to watch the show.
It starts slow. The red cobweb clouds
transform gently in the spectrum sky.
The moon has risen, gaunt and blanched,
the dark of its one socket, probably open
and watching. Slowly the flames eat the leather
and varnished wood of the interior,
'til the tank goes, showtime, obliterate
the twinkling lights of Northallerton. Against the roar
the stand drinking quietly. In a kind of rapture.

Perhaps they are toasting the future,
as the flames lick outward across the grass
and the flakes of charred matter spiralling rise
into the shimmering, draining sky.

Ben Gregory
Northallerton, UK

Northallerton, UK

Back to poetry map | Back to poems index