Saturday, January 05, 2008

My Great Uncle's Felling Hammer

(Jan 05/08)

This waking up to wakefulness is getting to be a chore. I’d much rather stay abed, lard-heavy breasts and prickly-pears dancing mad-footedly in my head. But as this is not to be, for a verily of reasons, I jump to the leeside quay, a cooper’s fist-awl jammed into the corner of my eye.

My great uncle stove cows’ heads in with a swing of his felling-hammer. My dear ma, pigtails swaging, swinging in the tractor tire my great uncle slung over an elm branch then tied-off with a yards’-worth of bailing-wire. This homeless fellow I was talking to said (and I quote) ‘we here live in a Bumstead, not a homestead’. Thinking he had said bedstead I said in passing (quickly) ‘do they have those coin-operated beds that shake like the bejezus? He was none too amused, and turning his shoulders to the fore said, ‘fucking know-it-all, a stick in the eye to the lot of you!’

Swagger haggard braggart do the two-step three times four. For the longest time I thought the potato-man on the Humpty Dumpty chip bag was an exact copy of my brother. I also believed that if I kept my eyes closed tight the monster underneath my bed would leave me alone. I live in the Hampstead’s not the Mannerly Manor Mayhem Maycourt Moyle. My great uncle caved cows’ heads in with the same felling-hammer he chopped our Christmas tree down with. I’m pretty certain they didn’t have such easy access to italics as we do now, not by a long-shot.

No comments:

About Me

My photo
"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
Powered By Blogger

Blog Archive