Flensing whales at a whaling station, Akutan, Alaska, ca 1915
The dreaded rooms of surrendered disarticulation,
The body, de-fleshed, deracinated now, eying the walls.
Where the exhaled tobacco creates a scum patina,
The colour of fingers which scrawled the hieroglyphics,
The coda of our non-being, just not here, anywhere,
And death becomes the cheapest form of obliteration.
The muck sweat of dawn terror but it is sweet,
The doctor says you’re not dying just a carcass flayed,
The blank hypertension tells another story,
A heart rate of miraculous pace considering its splinters.
We fall before pension age, a chancer’s harpoon,
The annihilating skill, now a pneumatic missile.
Strangulated on avoidable dreams of toxic dread,
A fool’s errand at Easter reiterates sacrifice,
The unhinged and a scope for deliverance,
Can’t breathe dust, can’t cope with lung rendered flesh,
The species differential on a slab deck as a blade strips,
A quivering, pulsating, neck of choking fat.
That anger as a structural given in all epoch,
It thrives like tubers in blight or perma-soaked urine clouts,
As skunk wafts through the dismantled markets,
The abandoned rooms greased brown and black,
The emphysemic decades of lung disease and immobility,
Betray scratch marks from ceiling to floor as you gasped.
The trail of human presence to the worn linoleum,
As thin as 35mm film lining the derelict cinema,
Where we watched the epiphany to our inexorable decline,
Slowly going mad in the ledger of loss in the rooms we go to die,
A wreath of the grog blossoms illuminate desolate faces,
If red is danger then these were the dangerous, flensed.
There are constellations in my room oscillating in red and greens,
A smoke detector and a fire alarm will burnish Hell’s warning,
The vulnerable feed on light as the odds diminish exponentially.
There I’ll stay rotting with the parish poor, the indigent boozers,
The woebegone dregs of indifferent memory in rooms of kisses,
The hard done-by passions, bitter love and loss, an annul of prayers.
by James O’Brien
“The Austerity Flensing” is taken from The Role of the Artist under Late Capitalism: the Bread and Roses Poetry Anthology 2024, Culture Matters 2024.
