Easter

On Big J’s big day we stay in and play back-
to-back zombie flicks.

My enjambment with the sofa is severed
only for snacks and the odd piss.

Dead-eyed sheriffs progress, rifles cocked,
arms pulled from sockets by dogs.

Snacks: I eye a mottled salami slice; a bruise
incumbent in my palm.

A mallful of corduroy people are consumed –
when? – the dead seventies? Some time of worse skin.

My arms rise to outwit the cat, blood-pressure blind and deadened
by kibbles, her dilated pupils let slip a red flash.

Convention dictates that they work okay, bar some stiffening
of limbs, eyes, and lateral thought, and they don’t talk.

I roll the meat to a loose clammy sausage and bite down, savouring
the peppered rind, severing its limp resistance,

and white women scream in short skirts
behind cassocks of hair.

Retinas bleeding, ecstatic at ingesting anything
but dry boxed rocks, she bites my finger off.


21/04/04