Chris Guidon-

Shard


Waking, with the ghost of a starling, beating
like a heart in your throat. The dream again,
in which you hack your family to pieces.
                                                         Driving
in devout November darkness, as a figure
steps from your conscience into the road
and dissipates like smoke, before the crack
of bone and sinew.
                                   Your standing on the edge
of something. The compulsion to jump
when jumping would shatter into fragments
the living mirror of your memory. The dreams
return, cold as knives.
                                        Go outside. Sit on the roadside.
Watch the faces
                                         flicker past.
                    Like ribbons falling
                                             from very high buildings.
A precursor to the snow.

Katie's Baby

I was snatching glimpses of her, like a stain on the sofa, pin-eyes;

lost in the chase. I was trying to see that glow people talk about.

I suppose I was just hoping to see a change. No one spoke about

what she was doing. How could we? Perhaps I was the only one troubled

by the thought of something so hopeless from the outset. A bird hatched

into a cage. A nubile shoot sealed in cement, never given a chance. Later

that night she sucked me off whilst Jack gouged-out on the sofa. I asked her

don't you feel like your poisoning something pure?

Don't you feel like that's the only sin there is?

She told me to fuck her. To loom like her father and then hold her

like her mother. She took it mainline afterwards, twisting and

shuddering more than I or Jack or her father could ever make her.   

She Brought the Dog in From Outside

She brought the dog in from outside
and sat back down beside me on the sofa.
It had been whining and yelping
and scratching flakes of gloss from the door.

It crawled up between us and fidgeted.
I pretended to like the thing, became boisterous.
Like a metaphor for life it bit me. Sharp
and wholesome pain. Pain like righteousness,

finding me out. Pain is cleansing. Like sex, or fire,
or a coke-can, shaped and crafted by unsteady hands,
punctured and sacrificed and made new. cup it
to your mouth like some sacred chalice,

inhale the cold white smoke. Feel it seething
and festering inside you. Exhale, watch your life dissipate
into a room. Into a memory half remembered half
imagined. A vague light through the shades

where she once stood; a dog chain in her hand.

Red & White

I watched a priest hit by a car.
                And lay there beside him at the roadside.

His freshly ironed shirt. Starched. Lifeless.
                                  The colour of death and life and of sin.

Blood ran down his face.
                                                   The eyes distant, hollowed-out.

Blood staining the red shirt black.
                 As pigeons broke and clapped in the crisp white air.

               We lay side-by-side, arms stretched like crucifix.
Without panic. Two men -watching doves.

               She took everything when she left I told him.
It's taken till now to wash away

                   the blood.
Red, thinning to nothing in white.