What is sad is I have created a new self

What is sad is I have created a new self

Wayne Holloway-Smith

The Honest Ulsterman

October, 2017

     

What is sad is I have created a new self to demonstrate to everybody

my hopeless desire my indelible panic the pictures I can't get rid of at night crows

the meaning made in my body's folding and refolding  he is radiant 

with the unseen things of which to be afraid every afternoon

is a blue note too far right now   he's a thick mess on your street

with perhaps its fish mongers its cut-meat sellers and fruit

he is too much not unlike myself sings Lean on Me (mostly) beneath

your window by which he means please let me lean on you

with my hunkered fear of eating the unhappy coincidence

of my teeth the sunk the guilt of these things staid inside me

I have given him no other instrument

except the arrangement of these things upon each other and the business

of your hair curling his endless chewing on the image it makes

and the knowing that each time you emerge from your doorway

for a moment that part of him between the bones

beneath the skin of his chest goes thunk