\n<\/strong>For G Roberts<\/em><\/p>\n
Take the first coin to shiver in the pocket,
\nthe paper clips crawling across the captain’s desk,
\ntake the ammunition rattling in the belt,
\nthe antennae bending in prayer,
\nthe subsonic hum of the vents
\nspeaking in vibrations to the hull.<\/p>\n
We were nine, the other boys ten,
\nand thus a lifetime our senior,
\nwe filed into line as they led the expedition,
\nthe eldest brandishing a cigar of unknown origin,
\nFagin’s gang in the alleys hidden
\nbehind Glasgow and Hawthorn.
\nUnearthing rusting ring-pull tinnies
\nwith crumpled cubist women in swimwear,
\nwondering if they all really looked like that.
\nDiving out onto the Glen Road
\nat the tinnitus blare of \u2018Dixieland’
\nfrom an Uncle Sam ice cream van,
\nclinging to the back of it as it sped away,
\ndangling from the star-spangled hat
\nor grasping white-knuckled
\nto his beard for dear life.<\/p>\n
Q3. Please mark on the graph
\nat what point the forward momentum
\ngives way to the pull.
\n\u201cYou have twenty minutes left.
\nThat’s twenty minutes left.”<\/p>\n
When there was risk
\nthey sent us in first, taking point
\nlike scouts through a minefield,
\nmy friend and I,
\nwe held our breaths stepping lightly
\nthrough the alcos’ house with no front door,
\nthe torched, abandoned squat
\nwhose occupants had signed off their tenancy
\nby setting fire to a gas canister
\nblowing holes full of sky
\nin the roof and floor.<\/p>\n
The third was the house of dread.
\nIt’s owner had died in the fifties
\nand everything remained still in place
\nimpeccably ordered but covered
\nin a funereal shroud of dust,
\na sliding glass cabinet, a flick-light
\nswitch in the bathroom,
\na clothesline spanning the kitchen,
\nafraid to touch anything for fear
\nit would crumble or stir into life,
\nafraid of the ladder that led to the attic,
\nafraid of the dial phone that might
\nsuddenly break it’s silence.<\/p>\n
We were posted outside in the rain
\nas lookouts while the others took to plunder
\nand huddled in the yard
\nunder a wall crowned with broken bottles
\nwe got to talking;
\nwhat we wanted to be when we grew up,
\nwhere we wanted to go,
\noccasionally interrupted
\nby the sound of breaking glass
\nor a muffled whoop of delight
\nor an insult thrown from a row of eyes
\nat some high window.<\/p>\n
In One Thousand and One Nights,
\nthere’s a mountain of lightning-struck lodestone
\nthat wrenches out all the nails
\nof any ship that it drew near
\ndrowning the crew, regardless
\nof rank or privilege,
\nwhere they were going
\nor from where they came.<\/p>\n
I was in Paris, years later,
\nwhen I got a text to say he’d been killed,
\nworking as a chef in the Alps,
\nhe’d taken out a short-cut one night after drink
\nwandering off the straight and narrow
\nand slipped into a ravine and wasn’t found for days,
\nalways destined to end his days there
\neven when we were boys.<\/p>\n
Never grow old, always stay the same,
\nnever imagine what place it is, what date it is;
\nthat event that will always happen
\nthe date you pass every year,
\nuncelebrated, unmarked
\nthat is simply waiting,
\nwith every choice you think you make,
\nfor you to just catch up.<\/p>\n
Take the first coin to shiver in the pocket,
\nthe paper clips crawling across the captain’s desk.
\nThe sailor standing night watch
\nrattles his compass, wondering
\nif he’s been smoking too much.
\nThrough the sea-fog, the night,
\nsomething is looming.
\nThe rivets begin to unwind.<\/p>\n
The clanking of skeletons In Barnum’s Travelling Fair, Tom Thumb Ventriloquism is the bottling of demons, We are downstairs drinking, Within the glass display case is mounted a petrified partially embalmed right hand holding in rigor mortis a blood-spattered ace of spades, the ace of clubs and two black eights. The fifth card remained undealt. It sings its revenge in the hum It’s conspired in damasks and bishop’s lace, Blind and capsuled,
\nWhere we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nas St Brendan is rowing
\nharpooned to the moon, over crest and fall,
\nhere’s to the saints
\nwith no belief in god, to the atheist popes,
\nto the natives who drank smoke
\nand died where they slept.
\nHere’s to the sexual tension of the s \u00e9ance,
\nhere’s to the workers in song.<\/p>\n
\nwas punched in the face by Joice Heth,
\nnursemaid to the child George Washington
\none hundred and sixty one years old if a day,
\nfor drinking her half pint of straight whiskey.
\nWhere I grew up, a Victorian terrace,
\nthe sun set every night behind
\na block of flats like a conjurors trick.
\nI used to imagine the sun capsizing
\nout of sight,
\nnightly boiling into the sea
\noff the shores of Donegal,
\nthe steam-hiss of it
\nsending the birds
\nscattering into trees.<\/p>\n
\nthey lynched polyphonists in their time
\nfrom hanging trees in market towns.
\nYou are talking to the walls again.
\nProjectorless, images gallop full circle
\nin endless repetition, planes taking off,
\nartillery rolling in for the Vivian girls,
\nthe sequence of pi continuing so far it starts
\nto become letters,
\nthe words that appeared,
\non the scorched basement wall
\nof the Ipatiev House
\nwhere the last of the Tsars
\nand his family died,
\njewels sown into their corsets,
\n\u2018Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht
\nVon seinen Knechten umgebracht’
\nThe images still come
\nwhen you close your eyes.
\nThis sick spinning earth accelerates.<\/p>\n
\nsteaming and singing
\nto keep the talk from going dark,
\nto the sound of keening violins
\nreconstituted in the orchestra of memory,
\nmusical notes rising to the ceiling,
\nthought bubbles above our heads.
\nThe child that haunts the house
\nis peering round the door,
\nthe child that in his time
\nsaw ghosts wrestling in the waves
\nand never mentioned it to anyone,
\nwho knew the sound of the screech-owl
\nand how to answer,
\nwho knew how to pick the lock
\nof the lazar-house,
\nwho knows to leave the living well alone
\nas we deliver ourselves lord
\na fuck, a pill, a drink at a time
\nto the world, the flesh and the devil.<\/p>\n
\nFlax<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nBlind and capsuled,
\nthe Flax sleeps.
\nOrphic, it knows
\nwhat is coming;
\nuprooted and winnowed,
\nretted and threshed,
\ndragged through hackles and spun.
\nIt plots a sullen revenge. A mute Iago.
\nTo seep venom into streams and limestone wells,
\nto throttle embalmed pharaohs,
\nto permit swords to pass
\nthrough linothorax and tendon.<\/p>\n
\nof an oscillating bowstring
\nmocking the penitence of St Sebastian
\nand the absence of God
\nin the key of G.<\/p>\n
\nprison uniforms and burial shrouds,
\nrizlas and greenbacks.
\nIt radiated the cambric shine
\non the playing cards
\nthat caught the eye of the finest
\ngentleman-gunslinger in the west
\nWild Bill Hickock
\nhis back to the door
\nof Saloon Number 10, Deadwood,
\nthe Black Hills of Dakota.
\nShot in the back of the skull,
\nladies and gentlemen,
\nby one of the most nefarious
\nrogues to soil God’s good earth
\n\u2018Broken Nose Jack’ McCall,
\nfor the crime of offering
\nto lend the hapless wretch
\na few dollars for breakfast.
\nIt’s the threads of herringbone twill
\nthat drank the wounds of the Turin shroud,
\nit’s the glint in those eyes
\nthat are closed, for now.<\/p>\n
\nthe Flax sleeps.
\nBiding its time.<\/p>\n![\"darrananderson1\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/darrananderson1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/darrananderson-150x150.jpg\")
Ventriloquism is the bottling of demons, they lynched polyphonists in their time from hanging trees in market towns. You are talking to the walls again. Projectorless, images gallop full circle in endless repetition, planes taking off, artillery rolling in for the Vivian girls,