Loops

it bangs on all day
and we’re shown something similar 
the next night, so familiar
and repetitive is the footage
in the valleys Yugoslavia
as War appals unchanged
that I feel as loose & nowhere
as the displaced peoples leaving 
with their favourite tools
and fork sets, the carpets, their
rolled up children with faces
like lace curtains, dodging tracers 
from the battlements, rounds 
pounding into hillsides, pulled back 
to earth by the curvatures in Time; 
and it comes with a sense of staying on,
I recognise now, the same feeling :
of pantomime. or make-believe
as five or six years old 
I watched the soldiers filmed 
in black & white Vietnam
cigarettes in helmets
deposited by chopper 
adult teens camouflaged 
with the American dream.
M_, now in 1991, comforting her mother 
in Serbian, on the landline 
as bombing starts, is drying 
her tears on a tea towel 
she had over her shoulder 
cooking spiced pork and rice 
wrapped in cabbage leaves
drinking cask red, bare legs 
below a t-shirt; 4 fingers 
of rounded front. soft, tidy 
dark lip’d, and hunted I stand 
behind and take her olive breasts, 
conical shapes, my toe gap
stroking her ankle, bellyfat
coming back, a sore back 
so no more swimming. I run
a finger hip to hip, following
the overhang, lift it with both 
hand and forearm, tightening her front.
she is craving something sweet 
and sends me out, a few minutes 
walk, to buy a bag or two 
of forget yr’self, and we smoke
it past midnight emptying the merlot, 
bladder-fools, more out than in
but the next morning she’s risen
smoothing her dark stockings on 
while I groan around her coffee 
grinds, swollen in tactless 
concentration, happier than average 
because I’ll have the flat and the 
last of the weed and wine dregs
to myself for breakfast when she’s gone to work.

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on Google+ on LinkedIn