ICU

Whilst my Mother was dying

I made half hourly slogs

To the ICU toilet to

slug caps of whiskey;

It seemed the thing to do

 

In that other room,

We stared at the windows and walls.

We stared at each other,

The eyes in headlights and

Red, damp creases of each other.

Particularly stared at a roof ventilator

On the opposite building;

I invested a lot of time in that ventilator;

It’s Screaming Pope maw.

 

In the bed the tube fell

Out of her mouth

And they slid a needle in

And she stared  – one

Could not tell in terror or

In gratitude and

Her hands, for macabre hours

Batted death as if it were a

Dare of moths.

 

I offered my brother slugs of whiskey,

But, he refused.

Families;

What can you do?

 

So it goes ’77

Seeing the Pistols for the first time
A ‘77 re-capper on So it Goes.
A rotten fixed sclerotic eye
Pierces the bulged glass glaze
Of the telly.
A smear of glass as if an internal chamois
Has tried to wipe the phlegm off.

Furiously alive yet pinned to
The curtain of performance.
The world curls its lip.
“I hope you aren’t going to grow up like that!”
My mum says as she lays down the cruet set.
“Oh no! Mum…I think they look awful people”

Somewhere in ‘85.
My hair is down to my nipples.
My leather and cut-off weigh more than me.
My best black jeans are torn apart and stitched back
With blood thread.
My Pistols t-shirt is crisp, inside out, ironed and
Hidden at the bottom of the clothes basket –
a year old but so clean it glows fluorescently, piss yellow.
I’m the cleanest ‘punk’ in town.
Mum can be horrified by the Bollocks
But can never not do the laundry
Nor cast a clout.
Anarchy is an un-pressed pair of socks.

An Elegy of all Parts.

I was asked to repost this, an elegy done for my Mum’s ashes ceremony.

The Elegy of all Parts

 

I become the water,
I become the tree,
I become the clouds louring over thee.
I become the land,
I become the place,
I become the four winds
playing upon your face.

I become the setting sun
And I become the dawn,
I become the dying
and I become the born.

Mine is the voice you hear
And my tales that you may talk.
I become the paths you take
In the footsteps that you walk.

Think of what I have become
when you think of me,
I turn and change and change not at all
I become all memory.

I am blood and earth,
I am heart and bone,
I am the elegy of all parts
And you are not alone.

D.Belton July 2016 in Memoriam of Mrs S Gates r.i.p 29/7/2015

Mum on the Telephone

A working title, but I wrote the bulk of this, except a change final stanza (today), when I last spoke to my Mum on the ‘phone. She herself died, suddenly, 6 weeks afterwards.

Mum on the phone.

She talks about –

Do I remember?

I wouldn’t remember –

Ian and his wife, Bunty.

Of course I remember ,

not Ian, but you’d never forget a Bunty.

There was Bunty the Dog, she says..

and Bunty the Annual I say…

and Bunty….

Well, she’s died,

Mum says.

It was so sad…

Her husband is at a loss

and her ashes are in a box and he talks to the box…

I don’t know what about…

I say, she’s probably saying get me out of the box and

decant me into a nice urn.

…

It’s a nice leather box, Mum says.

But he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

He’s now coming round with excuses to talk about Cricket.

But he talks to his wife in a box.

I hope I never get like that…

I say,

I was thinking after last time I saw you.

You’ve had some awful times…your back is humped

and your toes point sideways,

You’ve suffered the pain of Prometheus,

But you know who you are:

You’ve not changed at all.

She is quiet.

Put it this way, I say,

You can make your body go up and down in the stair-lift,

But you don’t need to make your brain

go up and down in a stair-lift.

I don’t like this conversation,

she says.

And we spend the rest of the telephone call

talking about the

serial murders, arsonists and

domestic abusers

in her favourite

Peter James novels –

a much more airy topic of conversation,

something we can all enjoy.

DB 14/07/15