Folklore

It’s what I call a glass-eye view of Paradise
through the cleanly
                        created hole of a
speeding bullet.
 
                        It’s not always clean but
it’s usually effective.
 
#
 
Of course he feels nothing
                        in this case a boy
shot at close range for the sake of kissing
the book of his faith
caught sucking on an icon and muttering to a wall
which seemed to mutter back.
 
Herr Himmler himself
 
                        felt totally justified in
pulling out his Luger.
 
#
 
On first seeing the Universal Sky City Tower
all lit up
 
white and luminescent
 
the boy tells me it’s not completely what
literature claims it to be
 
                        has claimed for centuries
promulgating the idea of yellow brick roads
a city of impregnable gates and walls a
continuous celebration of
 
party    party    party
 
dressing up gender swapping Utopian trips
 
ascension deals at a certain time and place
 
the
                        Mickey Mouse bacchanalia
at the glug glug of eternal youth.
 
#
 
For the boy
 
                        getting off the grass took time.
There was no instantaneous
 
transformation from one thing to another. He didn’t
suddenly lose his shape
                        drop his epidermis and run
shed 17 years of muscle
 
                        in one exquisite shake.
 
#
 
And the soldier who shot him
he knew
 
who dispatched him in one tickle of a trigger
                        he knew
 
a brother-in-arms who enjoyed the look
of being a warrior.
                        
                        The boy
saw the fraternal smile of his killer’s affection.
 
#
 
It’s not what I expected to happen to him. It’s not
the way he expected his body to be treated
 
on a summer’s day when bright red flowers
had opened to the touch of wild bees
 
a warm wind had dropped down U-shaped valleys
from the Alps. Magpies were at their most raucous.
 
#
 
The boy says living for him isn’t about
junk food brothels and beer any more
but
                        sharing territories with
fish swimming amongst gardens
of coloured fruit
 
                        walking with animals
which slobber and lick listening to
 
languages he thought were extinct
and
 
                        sharing one’s most personal
privacies          before the final absolution.
 
#
 
I hold up the glass eye to a picture of him
advertising himself as a person of
 
no fixed abode a child viewing his Paradise
a man sitting alone in the revolving
restaurant of the Universal Sky City Tower
                        spooning in large mouthfuls
of clouds seeing more clouds
 
thickening swirling rubbing
against windows
 
                        windows which on a fine day
 
have wrap-around panoramas of sea and hills
and islands and massive conurbations of a
new city joined to another joined to another...
ad infinitum.
 
#
 
He tells me
 
in a field where the grass has
grown over the shape of his hole-in-the-heart fall
he much prefers the probing long-beaked birds
 
which know him best which appreciate him
 
for the delicacy he has obviously become.