El Bosco

‘Master, cut the stone out – my name is Lubbert Das’

Wire, ‘Madman’s Honey’

Dawn is wrenched by a donkey, braying at the sun
a burro coughing at the stalled haywain on the
feral mountain, shades are roaming unbridled
a flower in a cup will be the cure of folly -
but he refuses to pull; his master, throatless, croaks
a Davros command at the star-blind mammal
sets a scurrying fidget of impossible feet, lizard
kitten, cloven hoofed and snorting, the pursuit
of night, time unboundaried and shiftless, spinning
on a ceiling fan with a million lurid takes on the crime,
the mind a squeezed scintilla, giving good strappado
by the sainted ounce, sleeplessly cured like mountain ham
in smoky bars and melted fats, bleeding from the
right ear, still up for a Palestinian hanging
as infantile footsteps echo the bald dry halls of a once
unimaginable Alhambra; exquisite the pinch
of the red torturer, a garden of delights brought low -
in whose hell is this adoration set?
Behind what vaulted screens and perfect abstract
Patterns, is atomic melancholy to be wrought?
Like Dali I am swept through the enigma without end
And washed up in fistfuls of rag on the tongue of
El Gran Masturbador
and so I glean the pocked canvas for clues
all focus and attention bent to the knee in the balls


I whisper the name of the One Who Can Help
Jeroen Van Aken; of course he ignores me being
dead almost five hundred years, but that doesn’t
mean he can’t hear me -
a knowing look is all I need, St Anthony provides
the eyes, and trials of purification commence
flowing with the wildest pang, the fullest wrench
of orbit, a moon sized scar on the flank of my earth
swung in the soulful weight of a donkey’s lust.
Life mirrored, sensitivity melted in curves
bastardised and mutilated, ruined in gorgeous
feathers of despair, like the arse that breeds pelicans
and the finger with a mouth bent to fellate your dream,
loose and lost in the grip of such cost
nothing can bear the same fruit ever again
the apple is rotten but still you must eat
I squeezed the black oranges myself
and then they squeezed me, pip-smashed
peeled and condemned to love, movements
in nauseous gyroscopic arrays, burnt by
the sun that didn’t die, howling in dust in the lay-by
of longing, choked, holy, deified Beatle
in whom the river finds promises of tomorrow
I cleave the triptych of misery with a sob
And am escorted from the scene


Kh
21.9.06



IMAGE: detail from 'Hell' panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1504) by Hieronymous Bosch