Broken Things
And Other Repairs
Alex Blythe
Copyright 2014 Alex Blythe
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
This Is Me
Flowery
Dire Mother
Homeless First Part
Here He Comes
Playing Sports
About Dave
Broken Bottle
Homeless Second Part
Litter Picker
Back Matter
DEDICATION
FOR HELEN,
WHO GIVES ME EVERYTHING,
I GIVE THIS TO YOU
THIS IS ME
Bring out your dead,
they invite me too,
to bring out the hate I have
for you.
Trudge them all out,
chuck them in the cart—
yes, yes, even that blackened,
twisted little heart.
Blame me for the way
that my life went, but I didn’t
choose
to have my parents spent
by social impurity,
psychological dysfunction;
I didn’t place
myself at this junction.
There’s always a spark,
then there’s always a fire,
that ejaculates
an inferno
from its throbbing cock.
Dante
discarded
his manuscript
onto the parched
path that I was set to walk.
Must I be sorry
down to the hardest truth,
that I’ve had painful excitement
to your wasted youth?
I don’t have degrees
unless it’s been
the angle of the path.
This brain still functions:
Self-taught academe.
It’s no concern that you
stand above your station,
in your Christian armour
so quick
for condemnation.
To love your neighbour
makes you physically ill—
long ago I had my fill
of you.
I am who am,
this is me,
like it or lump it, it’s who I’ll be,
long after your God proves
you’re a lie.
FLOWERY
I don’t do flowery,
I’d love to, but—
it
writes
too
slow.
I have to scribble
this drivel
as fast as it flows
or it’s lost
to the crows.
There’s a pipeline
from my bowels
to the hard drive,
feeding the oil, untampered
into words, un-pampered,
from a coffee-coloured
soul.
Yes, I hate, I despise,
I still cry and laugh,
poke fun then crash
back in the circle that keeps
these hands scrawling
whatever the shadows
in my brain are bawling
me to write.
No, I don’t do flowery.
The state of a flower, not my thing,
unless a dog’s pissing on it
acting like the king.
Love, oh love to thee, swimming,
in thy eye—bloodshot;
overtired, saggy eyes,
half blind. Woe to thee,
oh Billy Shakespeare,
forsooth
my tooth
fucking hurts this morning.
No, I can’t, won’t, don’t do flowery.
Too wired for speed,
emotions are greed
that must feed
this insatiable desire to vomit
my thoughts out
into this human-plague-ridden
testicle hurtling
around an arsehole of hot,
spitting gas.
That’s life.
No, I don’t do flowery; but you could.
DIRE MOTHER
You opened goods inward
to receive the new stock.
Nine months down
the production line
I’m stamped: discounted—goods
outward.
What a pleasure
to roll around your insides,
I’ll try to remember
if you could abide
the mere thought of me, or did the thought
of a coat
hanger and steriliser cross your mind?
Earth Date 76,
filling in the Mother Ship Logs,
Social came,
whipped me out of school
because you slipped
your cogs.
Marvellous
opportunity to suffer school
inferiority
on a Mother’s Day
when my hand raises
to say:
“I don’t have a mother, Miss, her reason
blew away.”
“Well, write it
to your Grandma, I’m sure it’s all
the same,” Miss said,
bowing her head,
in a peculiar dust bowl
of pity and shame.
Oh,
to my Grandma,
right,
that makes me feel good,
all I can see is “Dear Mummy,”
“Glad you’re my Mummy,”
plastered on the wall:
Five year old explodes
in Mother’s Day rage—
sheds blood.
Thankfully,
you shut down your factory. I believe you
were taking payment without shipping.
HOMELESS FIRST PART
Isolation,
that gets me the most.
I got the seagulls, sure,
got the breeze off the coast.
Yeah, I’m surrounded
by hundred different folks,
they don’t wanna know
I talk to myself,
just here, in my head,
not aloud, not crazy,
not yet.
I re-enact
things way back, I’m trying
to put them right.
Thing is, no one hear to listen.
Yeah, isolation,
oh, and desperation, yeah, hunger.
Wait till midnight,
go to the wheelie bins side of
M&S,
always throw good shit out.
Dined on prawn sandwiches, sausage rolls
and a couple of out-of-date energy drinks.
Have to watch it
though, counts as theft even
though
they throw
the damn stuff away.
Walk miles, I do, ferretin’ for lost pennies.
Found a quid yesterday, still got it, saving it,
you know, for a rainy day.
Cigarette butt huntin’,
now that’s a bastard
on a rainy day.
HERE HE COMES
Here he comes,
shirt off
swaggering
like an epileptic
praying mantis.
Flexing
his skinny arms
to his girlfriend
who giggles l
ike
he’s just whipped
out his maggot.
He opens his gob,
another albino
thinking he knows
how to act
black
Jamaican.
“Innit, tho blud? Wiv ma woman an’ me crew, like.”
Fucking bag of crud,
seen your statuses
you dyslexic spanner.
Friday night
staggering down the street,
too many Monsters,
and those M&Ms
that you were gullible
enough to believe were Class A.
Skipping school
because you were drug running
Sherbet Dip to Primary
school kids, because some short arsed,
hairy fatty on a Ribena drip said
you could have a career.
There he goes,
shirt off,
skin burning,
you can almost smell
the baby
wipes
his mother cleaned his
arse with.
PLAYING SPORTS
If you don’t like sports you must be gay,
he-he, giggle-giggle, run away.
I didn’t date boys
or girls, makes me
non-sexual.
High school. Peers. If you ain’t one
of them you must be queer. A pansy. A rose
bush on a slant. Enjoying the showers
‘cause no one wears pants.
Half these lads never had a date.
They were too busy trying to masturbate
under the desk
while the Religious Education
teacher tattled about circumcision, sodomy:
Man should not lie with another man—
He’d go home,
bang his boyfriend.
If you don’t like sports, if you ain’t playing
the game, you’re lame.
Limping fag swimming in
your own mouth, dribbling.
One flaw in those peer’s verbal
piddling,
one of “The Lads”
got done
for kiddie fiddling.
ABOUT DAVE
He was born with a hangman’s game,
A light cloud in a blanket of grey,
it’s all the same.
His brother John kept him close,
but you can’t stop the thunder
when the lightning hits.
He was born with noose ready drawn,
just took a nudge;
and those fingers soon budged
April dawn.
Hauled away for hording stolen goods,
planted there by some rival hoods,
John left to mourn.
The hammer came down on two years,
which released Dave’s fears,
and he swung in his cell
drenched in tears down hell.
Hangman’s game complete.
BROKEN BOTTLE
Thrown by the shoulders
of a foul tempered sea,
a broken green bottle tried
hard to flee.
Discarded,
Disregarded,
by nature’s breast,
shoreline to shoreline
it found
no rest.
Abused by a system
of oceanic law,
shackled
to the tide
on the hydrosphere floor.
Limpets of guilt,
barnacles of shame,
pox
of the beaches,
a ‘kick-the-bottle’ game.
Lying spent,
years worth of grime
on the skin,
a hand reached down,
an eye looked within.
Held up to the sunlight,
it heard a voice say:
“Your glass maybe be splintered,
through harsh seas in the winters,
you’re still what you are.
A wreck
snapped your neck,
Rocks pounded your shell,
But these eyes
know you,
and know you well.”
HOMELESS SECOND PART
Bench is damn cold,
wind turned cannibal
chewing at my skin like
it happened to be on offer in
a bargain bin: Out of Date
50 percent off.
Started snowing. Pretty.
Watching the little angels
flutter from the sky
to die
in an instant on some still-ticking
engine.
Hid up here, in a shelter
lean-too, with shadows disagreeing
on present company. See
the hotel where I used to slave my arse
off for a pitiful wage, flamboyant tips.
These days,
I’m flamboyantly
detached from the grid,
any grid. Extinct.
In the cold.
In snow.
Most likely wake up
encased
in ice.
Nice. Have to be better
than this bench.
LITTER PICKER
He’d been doing our street
for a good dirty, thirty years,
that litter picker, picking up
bitter flitting litter from the
oily,
shit stained gutters.
Him and me Granddad
chatted and batted
the manly gossip,
with a hot sip
of coffee in the coastal winters.
Me Gran and him,
wagged the chin,
whined at time, the changing time,
when litter was scarcer
than gritters in winter,
when kids were raised,
praised
for following the sticker
where to drop litter,
so litter picking sticklers
didn’t break their sodding backs.
Like him.
Back Matter
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