THE HANDSTAND

APRIL-MAY2008


POET - JOHN MELLOR

12 hours is too long to spend in the Aerlingus
terminal:

Snow flakes falling gently 
Through holes in the corrugated tube
Outside the world is bright and shiny

We're all inside, farting, clumping, watching
From islands of silence
We've all passed through electric one way doors
Into each others lives

Walk by the openings of the toilets,
There's that familiar ancestral smell
As they line up to shit or pee

Fertility Goddesses grin lasciviously
Lips puled back over blackened buck teeth
Waiting to give virgin birth to more bald men 
Of the ill star whose insufficiency is marked
By the smell of beer from their mouths
And aftershave on their skin

Here, the limitless contempt and stoic intolerance of
a tabloid culture is always  on the lookout for a
headline made flesh. Tabloid spirits guide their eyes
in hopeful suspicion -, 'save the children' - yes,
form them into a wearisome
 reiteration  on the edge of
nothingness and death... 

When the realization that the exact nature of my guilt
can't be easily ascertained, the eyes  and faces
recede back into indifference.
Now it's my turn to smile... 

*****************************************

Friday 


Lamia. Green skinned, slimmed, slithering serpentine
Of un-earthly foulness clamps around an imprisoned Platanus
The demiurge is helpless
Furious cthanonic sisters shriek and dance 'round the tree 
Burning hashish and illuminating Lamia with their mobile phone thrysoi
Texting fiery but impotent curses at her
Babies crawl in the mud, eating worms and soil
Their smiles drive the three sisters deeper
Into rhythms of loathing rebukes
A careless tit visits branch, leaf, and flower of a nearby cherry tree
The dancers take malevolent notice 
And snapping the birds wing in a cloud of feathers
Smear the tit's blood on their lips
Lamia whispers to the sisters with a venomous tongue
Then lets fly a terrible howl and a fetid smell
As the febrile Meaneads dance the dance of destruction
The Demiurge waves his hands in a fit of panic
and tries to lift himself from the bed
But nothing can succeed in this cracked thin membrane of reality
So he can only writhe and twist in the feathers with the broken bird.