There’s no need to be scared, she said:

I’ve slept paralytic in attics under sloughed skins of dust

With other people’s condoms stuck to me

Crawling down to suck warm wine from every vessel

Like venom from the pale dead thighs of dawn

Played for coins so spare and lonely they seemed hand-carved

The first and last of their currency

I’ve brought the driving rain inside with me

And seen their distaste like fog lights in their faces

I’ve limped

As street stall chestnuts, roasting, rippled my oesophagus

From nights of murmuring plumbing back into my own

Frayed dress of my own frayed vaudeville

And I am not scared to be lying here with you

(Rain fell on corrugated iron

Dawn was an indigo dragon

A powderkeg of instant coffee made a silhouette

In their small neat kitchen)

There’s no need to be scared, he thought:

I’ve humoured the meek and spruced, so desperate to belong

That they hang their Sunday Bests over anything I say

As long as I say what they want to hear

My mouth a radio set but not a radio show

They were an audience before they met me

(Whom they do not know)

And as long as the radio works alright

They can stay tuned in, and belong

And I know the Archbishop well enough

To say it all the way he likes it said

I bless their children, their grandchildren

The lumps of loud cells keep on coming

The baptism rite is simply turning on a tap

The swollen fruit of spermatozoa and ovary

Are things on a shopping list, miracles

Their wordless exclamations echoing in the corners

Under cold holy halogen lights

The hunkering perfumed alpha-parishioners

Bustling me and inflating like vicious plants

Boasting about their adult children, no need for salvation

No real humility

And nobody ever asks me how I feel

And I haven’t got a clue about the next world

But I can’t help but think it’s all just a simple resolve

They lay there warm and long burnt clean of fear

As the world formed in doughy Wedgwood blue

Pagan birds calling in the mist

Will Swan

http://willswan.wordpress.com