They buried him with a gunny sack filled with chitlins
on his own farm in his cinderblock mausoleum
that he had painted bright barn red and had pine panelled
inside and where he’d racked his sporting rifles
and stashed his cache of Playboy magazines.

There would have been space to burn and even some left over
but the consensus of his grievous family was
to give that room to his V-8 pickup truck
which meant they did not sacrifice his hounds
and lay them out like hotdogs in crepe buns.

His memory immune
To foreign names
Erases now he lives
Abroad his own.

I visited the place that hatched my dreams.
Although the oaks are older, there’s more sky
than when we leaned against them watching teams
of ants cart insects down the rigid bark
to serve as dinner platters in their nests
down under cedar needles on the lawn.

It’s not my home now; even time has moved.
I say good-bye to silence and retreat
back to my present home where rivers grooved
first settlers’ maps then shrivelled into creeks.
Time’s lines extend the song that’s dreaming me
while the wind skins gravel from untended graves.

There are ginger snaps, and an end game, and a shroud.
We are meant to choose but hesitate, hang back.
You reappear. A stage bow. Thin applause.
The tide continues ebbing. The mud smells.
A gondolier in a lurid, mud-splashed robe
lies on the pier-end, fishhooks in his ears
and above his eyes. We work hard not to notice
the dreadnaught heeling over in the bay.

It is so like a livid dream. In the beginning, words.
Then come the vivid colours. Then the screams.
Our noses press the arena’s hardwood floor.
Birds fly in where concussions blew off roof tiles,
go blind and fall, air-light but still they fall,
air-light as they stack broken on our backs.

I must be practical you say. We need to sleep.
The sun rescinds sea’s power and we stand.
The dried mud leaves our dressing gowns, and dusts
the disappearing slurried hardwood floor
as we brush feathers from each other’s backs.

There are seventeen me’s inside my head this morning:
Three invited, eleven once-friends, nine unknown.
The Venn diagrams of how this works defeat us,
All us me’s, we I’s. We divert ourselves with grammar
In the hopes some of us have of never thinking
About anything momentous. Belfries belch
Black clouds of bats that turn out, on reflection,
To be thoughts thought shredded when we put them down.

Put down to raw experience, or wry
Assumptions on the state or states of things,
These thoughts bat all us wee me’s on the head
Until some think epiphany is nigh
But others claim it’s Stephanie, or films
We’ve seen so often we feel they’re real life.
We are a quorum of disorganised, a choir
Of heebie-jeebies hormones hunkering down

In a hamlet we’ve created from the husks
Of relationships we had once, or imagined.
Some of us leave, their body doubles bound back
Into my head (our head?) and offer wisdom
In the form of bromides we I’s have heard so often
We think it’s us who’re saying them, and nod
In affirmation until, nodding off,
We startle, take strong measures, blink, and scoff.

The dirty girl in the surgically clean bed
reads for news the views the powers promulgate.
She wonders: Are the truth and honour dead?
Are they silenced by the modern state’s dictate?

In the bed next to hers, a mute Phi Beta Kappa
kept catatonic, intravenous tubes
suffusing him with state-mandated grappa,
tries again to die, and failing, mutters cubes

of all the primes from three to five and back
until the girl starts screaming for a nurse.
The minders pour warm ashes on her back
and warn her what will happen should she curse

the powers that protect her from the scares
that they, the powers, make up to convince
the population that their leader cares
for them in spite of all the evidence.

They warn her not to slag the one percent
who own everything and want to have it all
their way, not hers. They tell her she is meant
to be grateful for this bed where she can’t fall

afoul of the cops who hunt rebellious girls.
‘I am not a rebel,’ she says, but she knows,
as the ashes settle and her memory whirls,
that she will be. Her desire for freedom grows.