Fran Lock Poems

I might not wash today. I might
let the weekend slide into gratifying
anarchy. I am supposed to be thankful,
this town is not among the true nightmare
portions of the world. A roof over my head
and quite sufficient shine on the silver,
thanks. I might, though. Haven't you seen it?
Your city pokes a crafty fang at a flight path.
It's my city too, I suppose. You think you
are in control. Idiot! To name is to own, not
to know. And now we are so used to blood we
miss the silly crimson pity of it. I dream of
hardmen, the torturer's tweezers; of scholars
supplanting their teeth in basement gardens.
It's there, but you miss it. I don't miss
a thing. It's always there, the aura before
a seizure, inside my expendable circuitry,
deeper than dog years down, always, even
always. I dream of the made face coming
apart in my hands like wet bread. I might not
dress today. I might suck sauce from the bottle.
Here's mud in your gloria mundi, and a blue
blowtorch to your extremities, dear. How do
you feel about that? Or the massive enigma
of love? Does anything shock you? I
am supposed to be grateful, the shirt on
my back and quite enough coal in the cellar,
thanks. But a grand mal growls at the back
of the mind, and the back of the mind is
a bottle bank, love. We come and go, stooped
in their palisades. The rich are always with us,
their hexentanz and agonies. Here's Kate, we all
love Kate, oblivious, bombshell, and didn't
she used to be us? Not me. Your city, its nicotine
fingers, windows lit, yellow and sickly. Here's
where we crouch our snouts to the wall. I might
not leave the house today. Haven't you seen
what's out there? Their vaunting faith; the awful
punitive spring. I dream of muti and suitcases;
grown men stabbed in their Camden hamlets, eyes
without faces, world without end. It's there, still
there, but you do not see it. I see everything. I see
it all. And the billy-born-drunks in the house next
door are shouting again. Inadmissible figments
slurred through the wall.
...

And Smart saw God concentric in his cat.
Smart's cat, artificing faith from cyclone
volition. There is no God in you, yellow
dog. Your breath is our daily quicksand;
you juggle your legs into an avid heap.
You are bent on death. There is no God
in you. You are imperfect and critterly.
I will consider you, for all of that. Today,
as you joust farewell to the park; the pack
in their garrison palsy, tails agog, and you,
cocking your head to cup Madam's strewn
bark, your nose like an antique brooch
in the sun. I will consider you, yellow dog,
as you twist in a rapt mechanical dream.
I will consider your coat, the color
of fenced gold; how you are your own
secular halo. I will consider your skull,
the narrow skull of a young gazelle
whose victory is leaping. And I will
consider your eyes, their hazel light
a gulp of fire, those firewater eyes,
holding now a numb depth down,
and milkier flickering monthly. I will
consider your youth, when we didn't
know if you would saunter or quake;
when we didn't know if you
would prove savvy or giddy or both.
It was both. Our frank amaze at your hardy
smarts! Our silly delight at each degree
of more-than-human knowing. I will
consider you, yellow dog, your pale
moods and your gazing; your fidgets
and your snoozes. There is no God in you,
the deep-time of a dog year is enough.
And lately you are wiser than all zero.
Dear dog, creaking like a haunted house,
I will consider you, from bucking young
'un to patient as settling porter; how you
held the pack when Fat Man was small
and a zoomy nuisance of wriggling. I will
consider your narrow self, aslant against
my chest in grief, in grieving, overwhelmed,
when you were the busy broom that swept
the pieces of me together. Yes, I will
consider the yellow dog, his bestowing
snout in the chill a.m.; his royal cheek
and his dances. A yellow dog comes only
once and is hisself: brilliant, final, and entire.
...

And contemplate this: the heat-treated hairdos of next-door
neighbors, the roseate nosebleeds of fuckboys in hoodies;
your own face, rinsed in the mirror, the sweet green sweat
you're riddled with in mornings, a rock pool reflection under
algaecidal light. You are going nowhere. This poem yokes
you, to the pain you are chronic and adipose with; to the desk,
to the chair, to ergonomic purgatory. And to the body, its
spasms and its rhapsodies, three-part harmonies, one-chord
wonders. You will never be whole. The voices. His voice,
broadcast on your remedial frequency, making its way
through a rubbishy dusk, the streetlamps beaming fizzy glow
like Lucozade. You will never be whole. Vomit o'clock
and the brain is Kraken, white and shaking. Open the window,
pry the chipboard from the window; fill your punctured eye
with stars. And contemplate this: Saturday night and the dirt
purrs with it; cars, litter bins, pit bull dogs. A girl with high
Yorick cheekbones drags a false nail down the scratchy
surface of a bri-nylon sleeplessness. A man rides ignorance
like a white horse, kicking mirrors from parked cars. You
have the itch under your skin. Insectile dysfunction. Lust,
with its own murky gravities. You will fail. You have not
made a friend of this city and you will fail. Cup your eyes
like coins. Addiction holds such simplicity. Check your
used-car contours in the broken glass. You are going
nowhere. They cannot nail you to a pronoun, hot mess
of cravings and behaviors, tainted frailty, old meat's
rancid rainbow. Ugly. Contemplate. Consider: your
lilies, toiling like deaf ears, tearing the tired night a new
one, stirring a sulfate dust in your veins. Your eyes
are blue with pseudo-scientific toxicity, with chemical
expectancy, a dread that dries a smile like paint. Your
blood is on fire, full of bellicose adrenaline, nitrate
and neon; brighter, even, than the hoary fluorescence
of angels. It is so late. And you are pining the rhinestone
shine of a lost narcotism. Now trauma's your ergotamine.
Trauma, your ergot, your argot of rye. Awful thought
that treads the brain's rank breadth. Silence. Pray silence.
Pray the dark room away, the candles, the pious vibrations
of flame; the dim bulb with its gospel of moths, one
hundred pairs of gloved hands clasped to powder.
Marooned in your gooseflesh, one hand does not know
what the other is doing. It's three a.m., the mind's alive
like frostbite, a cold burn that blackens things. Your
graphite smile could shatter. Thoughts of him have
poisoned you, rust in the blood. You have not eaten
for days, you mottle, run your own hands over your
oxidizing thighs, watch the bruises ripen to a landmass,
a landmark, a brave new world, a here be dragons.
You listen to yourself, creaking like rope; your body, its
canned laughter repeating mean and low, throwing
out thought according to the malnourished algorithm
some devil has devised. You clutch and sway in a crêpe
air and you want-want-want what you'll never have
again: sleep; his image breaking across your scrubbed
flesh like surf. Contemplate this: this is forever.
There is no movie montage where you'll shop yourself
to transformation. You will never be whole. And grief
is not a line we walk to wellness; the tidy smirk
of therapy, the therapized, the girls licking flakes of gold-
leaf pastry from a Pret a Manger croissant, saying you
should take up yoga. Grief is a longing in the body, your
body, the machine-tooled aesthetics of starvation. It's
so uncool, a super-terrestrial emptiness; the acetone-eroded
teeth of your disorder. He will not come again. Sleep will
not come and make an amnesty of bandages, the white
ribbons rendering you prematurely maypole. It will not
wrap you. It will not keep you. It will not launder or
succor you. It will break into your ballerina box, will
chew the jewels from their semiprecious sockets, set
them pulsing in your frontal lobe. Your heart has
a headache. Drink raw egg. Or Dettol. It's up to you.
The sky is pasteurized by thunder ...
...