In the Name of the Other
A roadside offering
Empty space
Marked in red over asphalt
Impossible to unwind the story
The action once made
Is forever
Slew of hard metal into flesh
Replayed by watchers
Over traffic cams
The waiting gunmetal box
Flashed, took a photograph
As he fell
As if they could reach out
Cup him, bring him back
Make a man from the clay
Broken in the road
And lifeless
His portrait, a pixellated
Pattern of data
Machine processed
Endlessly repeated
But narrating an end
Receding lines
Converge, crush possibility
Halt brought to the infinite
The future finished, nothing
Beyond the recording
A burst of static
The jump
Back to the beginning
The narrowed devils’ eyes
Laughing
At elapsed time,
Each dead second
Beckoning
A prayer in
Scattered bright clothes
And the contents
Torn from a rucksack
Gloves, lunchbox, a mobile phone
T-shirt, a pair of jeans
The bike propped upright
Against a lamp-post
By unknown hands
Body lost
Among forgotten territories
Parish lines
Sewers bearing the old Fleet river
Fibre cable, gas mains
Chains slick with the high-tide scum
The rotted timbers
And shattered masonry
Kissed by the draining tide
The crows called
From the stumps of long elided wharves
Animal bones and china shards
The drowned business of yesterday
Heads cocked, watching ghosts
The passing traffic
Aircraft scraping against the sky
A matrix of senseless movement
Vectored, caged into lines
And forced into shape
The same shape, unchanged
A shadowed and circular
Frenzy of destination
Everything before
Happening again
Waiting by the water’s edge
Ancient ground uncovered
Inch by inch
Lost him
The unsorted photographs
The cold space between farewell
And this still form
His voice, never coming back
The hard body, bones like wood
Pushed through slick water
Meat, prepared, presented
Silent, the image
Badly remembered, scrambling
For the hole between words
The empty time
His frozen form
Can never offer up
Jethro Perkins 08/02/2007