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Christopher Barnes
The Prick-Absorber It's a quest of outstanding debt though the landings were rid this morning. She procures them with go-slow hands, the insidious skin-poppers of junkies, infectious puncturers on grey concrete, a falling-off of blood-letting on scuppered walls, spit, ammoniac acid. She walks the mainline through the nerves of this tenement. And now she is a failsafe net, a one-off she can bunker, the nipper of her steady flame, John, John, dead and gone, sarcomas last spring snuffed him out. She was herself a vein zapper, shot up thunder from the heart, whiz warmed up on an unneigbourly candle. The cough's a blue funk and the t-cells overspending. Irked by the tremors more than once she's pipped herself with thrilling little tingles seesawing memories on the highwire. The Ridges Mother She sang trawling shanties, a parlance now gone. Sipped ginshop draughts, the grubby corner of The Wooden Dolly, modest below booming piano. Lingering spice of Tyne upon her, she washed clothes to its waves, stirred pots to its turnings. Some horizons were buoyant, a spot grew larger, becoming her husband, others empty, a returning keel. Winters cracked fingers stinging fish-gut, summers breezed sheets on a line. She could wring the neck of a pigeon, ignore gurgles in a sack of kittens, kiss a scuffed knee making it better. |
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