21 THE PRAYER

(for John Tranter)

I've longed to be a measly number
cared you might say to be strewn aside
a stain it is a blessing to be wasted
so screwed down are things pondering
and bearing no confusion in itinerant value
shirking the plural rivers that are the talisman
it is no tale and to be erased in the flame
an absent one & not named in the chasm
ashes I guess and I would thank you for it
below the tallow aisles a product I'd say
low in price shorn of use and debunked
free maybe a ruined one currying favour
with a fat zero so Kid will you join me there
somewheres down the line a soul elided
O perpendicular or certainly rent among vetch
tidily gunked up with a yard or two of stuff
of illness some disquiet too it is a small thing
maybe to ask to be forgotten no papers
no care and rubbished in the main
O vac vac vacuo rescinded out in low fields
but it seems so resilient to be suffered
among tawdry hemp and breeze blocks
it is a cursed thing to be attended to
to be so full a bursting there ain't much
just take the side of each warehouse here
their grey plates and strata a calm prefab
quite meandering across a scuzzy site
poxy houses fenced off almost finished
it is the steel I am truly weathered by & glad
in my heart for such parades in tar piles
a sameness I have yearned for it's exciting
to be here fickle and demure in the hollow
to be the same a wrested thing rinsed out
& shirking yawning amid sameness
in the easy scrubland a penitent whore
settling there tho I couldn't give a monkey's
but am beside myself again scurrying you see
as I say a sheer thing a sheer thing to torch it
& being tender among sodium plateaus
this estate glaring in white lines discarded
with rusty dogs I preach a mild amputation
some ruckus skirting the belly for sure
it's an ending forced in a precious curve
of each gormandizing town was it
just a sheer metal sheer winsome fracas
it came and went poised before slated views
a bareness of fact a puddle neutered in mud
reflecting perhaps fuelling the furze
I may stray beside the bolts & placards
beatifying the regular sort of wreckage
some cables protruding from the earth
banking on stealing a shadow in ruin
for a minute meagre on that juice
one galling entrance in the fly tipped yard
just out of sight a tad lewd & really smashing
with a serviceable & concomitant nightguard
purging the compound in ideal bare takes
indolent in every instance poised shooing
blankly amid utilities & vestigial wire
caught dead to rights there yes that's it
I'd say a desert of elision a foregone thing
and dead plain disclosure gone again
just make your claim and then vamoose
I'm just an ongoing care if nothing else


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