The Soldier

From my stool at the window I notice a marble statue

newly erected, of a fellow from the Lighthorse

resting on his rifle butt, feathered hat doffed

as if to offer his brylcreemed scalp to the wind

bayonet to the citadels built at the heart of the earth.

Near the statue, a toddler chases the midday pigeons

a boy with long red hair and mercurial orders

firing to his upstart vocal chords, to his new arms and legs

then he stops and surveys the world that, rightly, he owns

he’s a pyramid bobbing on its point and he owns every bird

I see them flutter through the treasure-filled secret rooms

of his booby-trapped aleph – I can’t see

his mum or dad but know for sure they’re good. I know

the only thing he knows is all things end behind his eyes

which open wide as rivers when he topples on the grass

And gives everything he has to dandelion gazing.

     Meanwhile

          I see a flurry of

               iridescent feathers on

                     locks of my hair.

·       

It’s the music of jacked-up gas jets and onions dicing

that makes this woebegone pizza shop sound like rain

It’s the music they play here that keeps me returning hungry

and the beautiful waitress with blackheads under her lip –

indoor rain and small talk that perfumes the unwashed floor

Because the basil is shrivelled brown on my margherita

and the skirting boards flake and are painted amateurishly

and the flames on the wood in the ovens are trapped and vicious

and the basil bunches arrive in waxed cardboard and plastic

and the corners of that brand new plinth are crumbling away –

Because polystyrene keeps the Italian tomatoes from bruising

silicone paper the cheap roasting trays from charcoal

chemical bleach the water pipe roaches from sallies

straddling both sides the snakes in my heart from sallies –

and I’m rubbing my temples with fingers covered in garlic oil

Thinking that all the revolutions, all the turns around

of this inexhaustible rotary engine of ours

that roars in the helpless faces of physics and love

have become a single soldier now, an enemy we must kill.

But I, whose generation grew up in the Great Decay

Have also decayed, and so I sit and listen to the quasi-rain

and eat my rubbery pizza and wonder: has he ever tasted basil?

If I can break its limbs into shards like a shattered moon

then maybe he, with standby LED hair and paper legs

can cast the last stone. Then I leave, adfrift but, mercifully, full-bellied.