Hatched inside
after Goya
Only with heat do they come
weighing their gauzy wings
little more than infants
with compound eyes for a vertical
scaling door-jamb and clothes-horse
chair-leg and children’s shins
in black helmets in hundreds
in their slim-waisted suits
intrepid tar-black angels
every one an exile
driven to flight—baffled
denied their instinct for open air
given only puzzling suns
spots of this interior space
they target them instead
go colliding twisting a slither
on fire-poles reeling sudden
into unforgiving furniture
to materialise on sleeves
where you curse them
these black splinters ash-lumps
micro-devils on horseback
fearing each plop and parachute
roll of landfall to be crushed
systematically undone
every charcoal pilot
each tiny winged hoodlum
drummed to a finish between pairs
of fine opposable thumbs
lovely long white fingers
snatch and twist and sheer
husk rooms dim toward nightfall
with drizzling storms of dry
black busy old testament corn
Valsaintes
On two or three occasions each day
four donkeys in the field below the house
set up such a braying for all to hear
their broadcasting of guttural chest noise
alternating on the in-breath
with such a screech in the throat
and this is the noise of the twisted bolt
to the abandoned cellar beneath the house
its long thin penis-length
of rusted orange-brown worked up and down
in its cradle to reach a squalling pitch
till it can be loosened and drawn
and these are the sounds I hear at dawn
of ageing Yves about the wood-pile
his fleshy shoulders pumping a saw
remote in the silence of a hard-pressed man
the throaty growl of metal on the back stroke
more of a squeal each time he leans in
On Stukeley Street
In passing at the corner I find a pile of rags
that stinks of no-one’s urine
but his own…this ragged man and what
impulse is this to stop and stare
as he scans the map spread before him
as he turns to the hundred and fifth degree
to the Northwest Territories—
to them he raises shrivelled arms
as if to lift and tense an unseen bow
to them he pulls back and still further back
till with a delicate touch
on his blackened ear-lobe suddenly lets go
to Yellowknife to Inuvik
to the Great Bear and the Great Slave
to the Mackenzie river to what his outward eye
has never seen to what he’d bring
crashing down upon this dry street
all the cold the blue the unconditional flood
If you wish to read the poems in page view, the following link will take you to a PDF – Martyn Crucefix Poems
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