Vignettes of Working Class Exhaustion
by Fran Lock
Malkin
Sacred, not wise, the black cat’s acid
casualty stare, traversing a crumbling
cul-de-sac, under a starlessly inkjet sky.
We cross each other’s path, and she
leans into my unluck, a clot of deeper
dark, unstuck from the rest of the night.
Then she is gone, the quick misshapen
sleek of her; the yellow pellets of her
eyes dissolving into distance. I am
alone on the corner, holding my shoes
in my hand. Her charm unwinds from
around my ankles. The night returns
to bind my wrists.
Breath
In the concrete playground, city kids,
the pigeon-chested victims of chimneys,
wheezing like slow punctures through
gritted teeth and cigarettey breath. I was
young. I remember well, the boy with
a laugh like a chewed-up cassette, hocking
his egg-yolk phlegm at passing girls.
It was exciting then to press my lips to
his, taste and acrid copper shock and run,
uphill, where he could not follow.
My own chest tightens now to think
of it, and his strained white face
like an old balloon.
Everything you think you know about me
At home, in my cradle of copper wire, I spin
the unvaried light into curses. I sleep on a soiled
mattress stuffed with horsehair, lucky heather,
hubcaps, stolen modems, baby’s breath. I devour
men whole, licking the piquant gloss of their
blood from my scrimshawed scramasax blade.
I suck the meat from their fingers, melt
their wedding rings down for ingots of bling,
golden molars. My pit-bull dog is a brute, he’s
a gallowglass with a tactical mouth. In the still
cold pond beyond the site, the babies unfold
like lilies.
You are not your nine to five prison
Monday beings and ends with the need
to numb my own desperate tendency. I keep
catching the loose threads of an old pain
on the jagged edges of the day. London,
like a hardman with hate tattooed
on the knuckles of his right hand,
and hate tattooed on the knuckles
of his left hand. There’s an ant farm
under my skin, and my brain is tuned
to some bumfuck nowhere bandwidth,
all Armageddon and Christian rock.
Between work and hospital visits
I pass the same graffiti every day.
Sometimes I smile in lowercase,
but today its optimism irks me. I think,
in fact, I am the clock. I turn, but in
a circle, chase the self I can’t outrun.
