“My Lord! I would prefer prison to what these women are calling me to do. If you do not protect me from their treachery, I shall yield to them and do wrong”

Unfortunately for Aasim, this Qur’anic verse proved ineffective in restraining him
from entering The Gaping Jane. Tremendously self-conscious, Aasim felt acutely the momentary attention each customer offered him from their individual positions in the shop’s soft-focus interior, as he entered their dominion. What struck him particularly was that each of the shop’s patrons were white and shared a conspiratorial streak of self-importance in their expressions. In an attempt to try and blend in, Aasim exchanged his fox-in-car-headlights eyes for a strangled haughtiness that he would later come to regard as absurd. In a further act of desperation, he linked both hands behind his lengthy woollen coat, and strode into the aisles with all the presence of the Prophet Himself.

“But towards those who do wrong out of ignorance, and afterwards repent and make amends, your Lord is most forgiving and merciful”

Aasim mouthed this passage silently upon arid lips. He stooped to scrutinise the various DVD titles splayed out upon the shelves. Country Cuties 2: Irrigating Irene…Cherry Delights…Whorish Houris (Aasim blessed himself); he felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material, as well as the alien dictionary of profanity surrounding him. Glancing up at the door, Aasim considered slipping away just as elusively as he had arrived. ‘This is no place for you. You’re humiliating yourself, and God only knows what these white people think.’ But inquisitiveness and temptation are subtle beasts, and they both promptly escorted Aasim’s protestations to a quiet corner of his giddy mind. Subsiding deeper into the womb of The Gaping Jane, Aasim experienced the heat of guilt as the face of his wife Itab hummed into mind. He had been prepared for this disruption, and started to repeat: ‘You’re a man. You’re a man. You’re a man’, in successive chants, to counteract her unwelcome intrusion. It wasn’t so much the fact that he was in this place that bothered Aasim, it was more the matter of the pretence he had to maintain at home in the company of his beloved. The pretence that everything was okay. The smiles. The endless smiles. Allah had brought he and Itab together in His divine wisdom, and if marriage were now a cage for Aasim, then who was he to thrash against the judgement of the Almighty? He had been driving, though it wasn‘t his fault. He was sure. But if Allah saw fit to deny Aasim the blessing of sons, then he should accept the decree of the Book of Fates.

“God is always ready to accept repentance”

‘‘Ey, pssst. Yeah, you. Didn’t think yer type came in ter places like this.’
          ‘I’m sorry?’
          ‘Don’t get any Mussies in ‘ere.’
          Apparently the eighteen-ish stone man leaning toward Aasim was intent on striking up a conversation. A poorly chosen moment to venture a poorly worded attempt too, Aasim thought. He began to sweat a little as several other customers raised their attention to him once again.
          ‘Well, even Muslim men have needs’, Aasim replied in fragments of sound, edging over to his left where a ceiling-mounted speaker, perhaps inappropriately, trickled out the BBC Radio One Drivetime Show.
          ‘‘Uh?’, the man sidestepped over too.
          Aasim glanced back and noticed his enthusiast was clutching, in steak fillet hands, a magazine entitled Lad Love. ‘Oh God. Why me?’, Aasim winced, instinctively clenching his buttocks.
          ‘Y’know, it’s kinda kinky – the thought of a Muslim-’
          ‘Graham. Leave the customers alone, I’ve told you before…’, a young woman admonished from behind a dark counter in the opposite corner.
          ‘Graham’ paused, and with a final protracted glance at Aasim, backed away toward a different section of the shop. Aasim looked blankly at the counter-girl who returned a warm, almost collaborative smile.

“God has the power to do all things.”

Surely this was a sign of Allah’s displeasure. What was the likelihood of walking into a place like this for the first time, only to be approached by a pervert? Aasim’s mind was rapidly sealed up with religious guilt and, once again, it took a great effort of will to keep himself from leaving. To compound the shame, Itab’s image rose like a totem in his mind’s eye for a second time. Aasim remembered various scenes from earlier that day. He saw himself picking Itab out of bed and placing her on the toilet. He saw the shower he had prepared for her, and the clothes he had laid out the previous evening. He saw her moving into the living room in the wheelchair, her hands almost rowing the wheels around. And then finally, he saw himself lying in bed, staring at his wife’s naked back, her face forgotten – the same bedtime posture she had maintained since the accident. Aasim’s guilt faded, like rainfall absorbed by soil. He felt a familiar void. ‘Don’t I deserve any happiness? Just one magazine to ease things. But should I ease things? Is all this just a test? If it is, then I’ve failed. I am alone.’ The cleric at his local mosque had, with apparent surety, confirmed that Itab’s disability was a trial to measure the strength of the couple’s faith in their relationship, but also their faith in Allah. ‘At this rate, I’ll be late for evening prayer…’ He grabbed a magazine at random.

“It is God who creates you weak, then gives you strength”

‘Yeah hi babe…on the train.’
          Aasim slinked past a man in a business suit speaking softly into a mobile phone. He stood in a queue at the counter behind one other person, and steadied his breath as best he could. Aasim was already planning when to pray for Allah’s forgiveness as he handed over a five pound note for his purchase. The girl behind the till seemed to wear a compassionate expression, as though she were an orderly in a nursing home feeling sympathy for the tenants. ‘You’re just a man. You’re just a man.’ Aasim clutched the discreetly bagged magazine under one armpit and strode toward the door. As he surfaced into the turbulence of the high street, he hoped he’d remembered to get the lamb out of the freezer to defrost for cooking that evening. Itab really liked lamb.

(2010)

1. The Blue Hour

It is where and when the rush of rural
ocean-wind melds with distant cars
preserves the peace office blocks
and city inns seem their most human
poised in hibernation far in meditations
yet prone to wake this is the hour my mouth
hangs loose and having been awake all night
my mind aches with lucid thoughts blowing
clam-shell breaths this is not the instant
but the land of knowing traffic-light winks
and lonely strangers going to and fro as mice
on the streets this is the land of religious clock
ticks and the study of red ‘beep-beeps’ that guard
the hours this is the only land where I yell
and the city replies. 

2. The Dawn and the Morning

The sun comes as one thousand gods spilling
into the city on post-box red petrol, dribbling
Serengeti heat. True dawn though is shop shutters
rising, frantic Urdu, and buses back in service.
It is foxes retreating and pigeons gobbling
half-eaten kebabs or shallow springs of vomit.
True dawn is the broken shanti when the sun’s
green flash clicks the world into consciousness.

And now I watch themusme hurry the streets,
some in wildebeest grey suits for a day’s work –
some in polos, kurtas, denims or dashikis.
Sweeping, sweeping like Saharan genes in a khamsin
released at subways, newsagents, train routes,
and mosques.
                     I’m for the high-street,
fusing in pulses with the salt, the Cajun,
the Portuguese woman, the tattoo parlour that opens
at 15.00pm, the Italian barber, the Jerk,
the robes that I once thought were tribal pyjamas,
the 18 only, 40, 50, 60 + pornography,
the crackling phones with ‘gangsta-rap’ stabbing eardrums.
The czardas to Bhangra, the smoking Muslim girl,
the drunken Christian boy. The smell of kielbasa,
the taste of sambar or egg and chips,
the builder’s crack, the battered fish, the Thai love beads
at Madame Messy’s. Early drinkers
at The Admiral Nelson, the feeble approach to a chemist,
the bull snort of buses, gopis – with a seasoned cleavage
and bronze nipples – loyal to front and fashion.
White men living in Allah, Asian men living in God –
prayers offered up like notes through a chimney,
or teeth under a pillow.
                                    Panting, panting in Arabian light.

And then the internet café, a scrapheap of technology
and humanity rusting together.
A cursory nod and 50p opens up the conversation.
Me_2 has signed in. ME has signed in.
The polystyrene scent of cloaked decay.
Me_2: I need to talk. ME: i hvnt seen u here b4
Me_2: First time, never had the courage before.
It’s more a thought process than anything.
The PC whirs with a secret heat,
I’m anchored in my jacket.
ME: ok, wht u wanna tlk bout? whts wrng?
Me_2: …I’m trapped in a bubble, and everyone else
is in another bubble, and we’re all locked together
like frog spawn. And all I can see is a vague image
of everyone around me, because each bubble
is only translucent and the images become warped.
Teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-teh
comes the speech all around me. Qwerty voices
like crumpled towels folding in upon themselves.
ME: ok, i cnt do ne of tht syko-analit bs y’know?
Me_2: It’s fine. I just need someone to listen.
I just need to be heard.
ME: ok den. but u know ur nt rlly alone yh.
tehre r always ppl u can ring, n ur on dis forum
rite now yh?
I did e-mail God with all this whining
but He never replied.
Me_2: I woke up yesterday morning and it actually hurt
to yawn – it had been that long since I’d last
properly used the muscles around my lips.
ME: lol – I hve rpttive strn injry its a fuker.
I look across the road at the newspaper board –
‘SINGLE MAN FOUND KNIFED IN FLAT’
Lucky bastard.
ME: u jst nd a rant. maybe u shld rite bout it?
do a blog, lt it all out
Me_2: Yeah? Another lonely activity, and anyway,
who would bother reading it?
Me_2 has signed out.

Back outside, the sun is liquor. I can’t help but shiver,
I’ve grazed on warmth so long,
leeched it so often that I’m numbed to the wounds.
Then I see him on a bench – a gravitied man,
tattered Ghanaian flag clawing at his kente –
blood, sand, grass and one oily star –
his lips are proud slugs in spasms of salt,
elderberry eyes and flayed nostrils
like a child missing home.
He may have been a prince in Africa, a priest,
a slaver, an arms dealer-
now he is just every old man who ends up alone.
Birth and death are unique but must life be so too?
And there it was, briefly in his face, that disgust,
but that sense of place, that pinion of new shades,
a human current of national froth
and, just for a moment, I know who I am,
thinking back to the blue hour and the inner permanence
of solitude.
I am no England, and he is no Ghana – we are London,
each and all a sacred nation
knotted in sinews,
each tracing our hemispheres
to the same beating
                               heart.

3. Noon and the Afternoon

Past the Istanbul market in Glaswegian grey,
with travel agents winking and road-works ahead.
Alone
         up the hill where schoolgirls squawk in vulturine
prides. Ginger gusts sing through purring Sky dishes
and telephone lines. Stomachs of car-blood steam
in sticky Marmite ponds, fluorescent silvers, golds, reds,
dragonfly blues and druid greens flexing on the surface.
I reach the bus stop at the hill’s crown.
My head rushes in lost paths, like a van accelerating
at targets with the Sat Nav in Welsh or Cantonese.
Below, the city, mathematical in its splayed index,
coughs in browns, pinks, and blacks, accumulating
toward forever.
                         Such distance. Such empty fullness.

Then it comes – the stadium PA grumbling like a bass smoker.
Match day. And I have it: 24N, Arthur Wait, Block 5.
Suddenly the fullness isn’t empty.
I sink back down the hill toward the ground,
each stand climbing over the shoebox terraces in mucky white,
a humbling darshan. The only hajj I know.
Soon there are yellow road-blocks; policemen mounted
on shitting horses; ebbs of rose and brown dots on red and blue bodies;
the away support giving fingers; programme boys
with bored, chilly girlfriends; a bat-like old lady
staggering uphill with heavy shopping.
The turnstiles spin ahead – awkward gateways to a friary.
But first for lunch at the Yi Dao – a modern restaurant,
Ying Ch’ing tiled walls, plastic bamboo shoots yellowed
with cigarette smoke, curling hygiene certificates,
and two mei pings lonely by the door. A family business –
dim sum exchanged for ketchup sachets, Yunnan highlands
traded for suburbia, the Giant Pandas now a Fiat Panda.
I opt for the newspaper wrap of soggy chips,
vinegar and grease lathering headlines and yesterday’s
page 3 tits.  

By 14.50pm I’m in the ground, 17,000 voices knit in worship.
The pale sun above casts obligatory light about our mass.
Each man, woman and child sits or stands with me,
the plastic pews prismatically drooling our warmth
in talk, scarves, or Pukka pies.
The fizzled Tannoys defecate The Jam.
But I belong here. Drifts of English mingle
with Polish and lazy Jamaican tongues,
I am a boy again, and every body in the flock
is my mother holding me
                                     so long ago.
We each applaud in common vibes
as our pantheon walks onto the pitch –
here, for 90 minutes, we better God
with proven faith, a football crest
the only flag.
                     We raise our hymn
above us all: ‘The referee’s a wanker!’

4. The Evening and the Night

19.13pm. From spring onion air to the pub’s glazed ash.
The match was fair but 3-0 down and pissing rain
breeds discontent, two hours on I’m missing
the crowd. My arm is sponged in spilt Tyskie,
hair greasy, I try to catch the barmaid’s eye –
a girl from Slovakia? Poland? Hungary? What’s her story?
Withering in Záborie, echoing streets, and job adverts
like ancient scrolls maybe – picnics on the Váh
with Mum and Dad in radiant July?
But now a crude language, dog-barking nights
by a 20” TV – I hope she at least has Freeview.
‘’Ere, d’ya wan’ so’ m’“E”?’, a lilac-eyed man
whispers to me, his tongue pronging a mauve pair of lips
like a fly trapped behind blinds.
I wave him away, his hand clutching a small sealed pouch.
‘C’mon boss, it’ll ma’ the pussy be’er…’, his imp mouth curling,
coughing whiskey foam. I tell him where to go,
he limps away muttering scurrying curses.
I watch the growing throng of drinkers flowing
in from the streets: flint-voiced Irishmen in rugby jerseys,
Englishmen with gelled hair and psychedelic shirts,
Caribbeans sweating in Hyena laughter
smacking backs, and timidly, behind them all,
a Taiwanese girl with a swollen belly selling DVDs.

I decide to leave.

Outside, the sunlight melts into sticky grey,
dripping from the heavens like gruel from a bowl.
Dusk is a pale sepia in floury water, the city buildings stretching
up toward the dying day – they are children wishing for their hands
to be held.
                 My footsteps slap the silver pavement,
the sound of two oven mitts applauding, the echo stirs vibrations
in window frames, little reflections and ripples
that the buildings sip and share with me. They are friendly,
stooping old men in overcoats, sharing a century’s wisdom,
yet they listen to young voices as though there was so much
more to know.
                      This is Saturday, the witching hours come
when the beast-gut, dragged in mud all day, rears up for air.
Younger troupes of kids – ten, eleven, twelve – with daisy clothes
and coral cheeks scuttle to bus stops, eager for home. Women in hijabs
and black robes dart to tram lines, shaking their heads,
mumbling among their numbers.
                                                 The nocturnal herd
take their first sniff of electric air and trickle
onto streets like an oil spill. The sun deserts its throne,
fuchsia tufts of cloud rise up from unseen barracks
like an unravelled turban. Dog foxes leap on bins,
mouths clotted, eyes deranged. Owls take pedestals
in Victorian buildings, beaks jellied in blood.
Girls in miniskirts and dolly faces even lipstick, cackle,
slyly scratch their groins. Men laugh freely,
checking wallets – one answers a text:
‘We gotta tell him bout us 2nite. Sharon.’
The bloke puts his phone away, looks guiltily at a mate,
and rejoins the chatter.
                                    All the time I’ve stood alone.
And I have no desire to be home, because a rented one-bed
on Gutterbridge Estate has a solvent sharpness to its cold,
emetic smells, and a boiler that is always burning low.
I drift along, peering through the windows of hip-hop clubs, 80s bars,
sour pubs, and people’s homes. I choose one shebeen, the Harlequin,
I’m searched, my prints are checked, my driver’s licence too.
                                                          A night out alone – despicable.

Two beers, one Sambuca shot. 9pm.
Three beers, one vodka shot. 11pm.
Two beers, two tequilas. 1.30am.

Teetering into rougher eyes…There are twice as many here as I’d thought…
The music collapses over me in tiled dumpers…filling…cavity…
There are two of me…to share a bed…to drink…to forget…to remember?
Fluorescent walls throb as intestines of neon juice…
Humming UV moons vomit bladders of black light…my hands are scaled…
The black lad next to me has gone…the Asian girl…the white man…
Phosphorous sweat swimming in their folds of naked meat…I totter forward…
A soucouyant’s laughter screeches…rips at my shirt before moving off…
The ceiling quivers in a thousand voices all the same…some monsters kiss
and their faces suck into one gelatine stump…bilingual blood and skinless rumps.

I look down and I’m alone again. I leave.

Outside, 3am.
I lunge into the drains, heaving out my stomach’s benzene fill.
I crawl and crawl, then walk a while more.
The buildings look down with understanding eyes.
Then I see her.
Standing on the curb, a little way from a line of cabs. A girl – eighteen, nineteen –
alone.
She wears ripped fishnets, Thomas the Tank Engine shorts, and a pink boob tube,
smoking with a shaky hand.
I approach, a sense of warmth invading me, soon I see her pretty face,
blue eyeliner, and Baltic skin. ‘You want price?’, she asks in broken English.
I must have nodded.
‘With condom is 40, without is 80, oral is 20, anal is 60.’
The only numbers she knows. Her worth in multiples of twenty.
She’s witnessed human warmth before.
‘C’mon, you hurry now – you want me yes?’
I want something, yes, but it is lost now. I walk off, head bowed.
‘Well fuck you then, you too good for me, yes?’, her wobbly voice
follows and seems to ask – couldn’t you just let me in?

5. The Blue Hour (Remix)

4am. Again the time, when the ethereal dance
of cohesive chants tries the land of living.
Distant cars return to send their voice
throughout the groggy city, finding patient
hollow pouches where they can sing
their psalm. But the voice finds an emptiness
in me too, adopts my thoughts.
If I were God’s man, this is the hour I am closest
to divinity. If I were Romantic, this is the hour
I am closest to Nature. But I am London,
and this is the hour I share with every manwomanchild,
the single hour we are all at peace,
filled, like the vacant air, with a single spirit,
when even the igneous cloisters of our hearts ignite
and the city tells us all
                                   we’re not alone.

(2009)

                              Jack Straw—David Dimbleby
      Sayeeda Varsi—                                          —Nick Griffin
Chris Huhne—                                                         —Bonnie Greer          

White lights a black drop,
the mic splits Nick’s ‘testing’ into swash
echoes – soon the ticker counts down in hammers.

The crowd murmur:
‘Creaseless white shirt.’
‘D’you reckon he’s nervous?’
‘Mam nadzieję, że zostanie spalony…’
‘There he is – top lad.’
‘Nice comb over! All he needs is the ‘tache!’
‘Ek is verheug om hierdie…’
             – but these are my imaginings.

So here I am, a nation, face to face with the man.
The hero of those ‘indigenous’ to this land!
The pureblood friend of the Ku Klux Klan!

Then the script rolled away.

‘Is it fair the BNP have hijacked Winston Churchill?’
Straw commends the stained obituaries
where light and darker skin canvassed
scores of mortuaries, and draws the toneless
public in to thrash applause (to his glee)
as he unreels virgin words damning
race-related policies.

                                            Nick
barrel-rolls Straw, possessing
Churchill for a jingoist whore.
Warsi colours in the poppy head blanks.
Greer’s science disrupts Nick’s flank.
Huhne adds sound bites to the war.
And objective Dimbleby joins the ranks. 
Here the allies flood the air
with fusillades of banded scorn
the Beeb have surely seized Mein Herr!
No quarter! Raze with Shock and awe!

But, I wonder at their ‘blood sport’,
for they know not what they do.
If Nick could speak white spirit words,
he’d emulsion his own tomb.

Too late.

‘Can the recent success of the BNP be explained by the misguided immigration
policy of the government?’
Nick rattles with monkey smugness –
Dastardly and Muttley rolled into one,
a pin-up evolved in a simmering climate.
Straw divides his words to blurbs on England’s
immigration growth, he limbos under fair reproach,
wilting in the heaving throng of criticising
public eyes. Warsi calls for honesty.
Huhne launches yapping strikes
promoting Lib Dem modesty.

The three fall into squabbling.

So here I am a nation, my hands
are black and white and br- (Ah! What does it matter?)
tonight has re-established
all my nodes because at heart
I’m all the same. But,
tomorrow I will break
                                  apart
in distant little clusters.
I have not grown in a tempered state,
and that is how I know
that where I retreat, still at a loss,
Nick will surely, calmly gain.

(2010)

10.00am in bed is all the time in the world.
Chill blankets close over Him,
scuffing out the sun’s hob-point flame.
Neighbour’s started drilling early,
and the duffled bass of passing cars
maracas bedroom windows.
From somewhere in the house’s guts
a staffy’s bark caesareans
Tezza into consciousness.

‘Oi Tezz, am I gettin’ anything for Charlene this week?
Her napp-’, the voicemail sparks. (7).

10.30am in the dining room is wakelessness.
His stillborn senses
sponge the coffee’s analgesia,
idle feet fray the freckled plaster
shirked by ceiling cornices.
He rummages through grubby papers
sheltered in a faded iron fireplace;
HCBT and 13 week review forms,
‘hearing’ letters, creased ultrasounds.

‘Tezz, you promised us the money this week,
pick up!’. (7).

14.00pm at the tram stop is an empty bowl.
The oyster beeps off 60p,
a Virgin-red ‘No Ifs No Buts’
splays an advert board.
A tram accordions down the track.
Beige clots of old people earn the seats,
their winter pupils plead release.
A mother struggles with a pram,
and hip-hop foils from Tezza’s phone.

‘I barely earn enough to feed myself,
let alo-’. (7).

14.15pm on Dingwall Road is inconvenience.
Slipping past Chlamydia placards,
Tezza bears upon the Job Centre.
He umbilicals to the padded chair,
head bowed, child-voice mumbling
a rehearsal of answers.
The room seems to pant a soggy cloy
of CO2 and chesty coughs.
But soon, Tezza’s out in the cold again.

‘If you care at all about your dau-’. (7).

22.00pm at The Lance and Charge is reward.
‘Tezza – fuckin’ legend!’ ‘Proper geezer!’,
the laughter of his mates entrails over music.
Tezza makes for the pub toilets –
urinals steamed with teeming grime,
sinks – a tourist trap for Lacoste and Lynx.
‘If she smell like trout, kick ‘er out!’
the attendant chants.
Tezza laughs and gives him £2.50.

No new messages.

01.00am at Porcupine’s is the jungle.
Blonde. All alone. Tezza’s mates egg Him on.
She looks like the decent bit of a really bad song.
He buys her VK Blues, lots of shots and other booze.
Electro-RnB fuels his sticky pulse,
no change for ‘johnnies’ – ‘but who cares?’
His tongue and hers curl in sync
as twins inside the womb.
Decent night. And the beer still tastes good.

Contact ‘Tezz’ deleted.

01.00am in bed is all the time in the world.
Chill blankets close over her.
She rocks Charlene on icy breasts,
eyes hot in tulip rings.
Clouded mucus navigates an upper lip.
Only sirens stain her trembling coos
and street lights twist in flimsy sash windows.
She clenches at this insistent night
And succeeds unpromised breaths.

(2010)

Mum and Dad in acid tongues
invade his lagging bedroom.
Floorboards and closed doors
only protest so much.

He trials the craftsmanship
of Cartoon Network action figures
fermenting plastic struggles
seeping from his head.

Outside the fixed window,
hoodies rustle in chuckles
brandishing bikes
in so many privileged corners.

And there is Tuffty
500 grams of chinchilla
compacted suitably
into 1 x 1 metre.

Though her hair is youth-soft
and she coos to caresses,
it provokes the blood more
to see her squirm under needles.

(2010)

On paths of littered glass
where concrete etches
ferret-coat grass
we tugged at each tugged
tugged at lives replete
with giggles and unknowing.

But it all came ‘too easy’
were your big words
how the knife was a story
of something teasing
a cackle from the cradle
through cracks in the flooring.

“Sir, one was Cook the other Pig
and me the Catcher
with the bowl that sips
from the nook in his neck
but sir why the pools of sick?
Why does Pig’s mummy choke?”

And now Cook’s dragged
like carcass flesh fresh
from butcher’s though he sags
on council-man’s legs
and their eyes like spilling kegs
where Pig lies in citrus text.

In the mayoral home Cook
stands with flagelliform men
their faces leather-bound tomes
of aeon strangled misery, he dials
round their heads,
playing with his conscious moans.

The old men lean on lazy
whispers, hold out coins
and one apple – Cook takes
the fruit and laughs his thanks.
I like this game! But later
Pig still won’t move.

(2010)

A wider silence screamed the corridors
slackening in echoes hissed to nothing.
                                                                       But that was after.

It began in routine sacrament
past narrow oak-panelled passages
leading him on to the cloistered dorm.
I was in the kitchen preparing the supper,
more expensive than was proper,
but young Coilin was favoured
so I tenderised the lamb.
Now, I imagine processions
where there were two;
collars faded from habitual washing,
narrow spectacles branding the nose,
awkward smiles masking the urge.
I see the tiny crucifix
impaled to the wall above their reach,
a framed St. Patrick and Maria Goretti
averted to compliant shade.

Soon, with the food, I found them out
with young Coilin, the agape delivered.
My masters sat either side of him,
their censer-swinging nods of calm approval
decreed the thrust of placid caution.
Returning to the kitchen,
I bowed devotion from the coming hours
to the salted water
permeating wheat flour
kneading with my hands
rolling into supple lengths
stencilling the wafer ring
humming out the confines of a tune.
Later, their Agrapha fulfilled,
my masters brought me out the plates
for washing up.

(2010)