Saturday 22 March 2014

Portrait 12

    Plait
    her
    hair
  and mackerel clouds thicken

           Her teeth split this skin
     white roof of hand
            with ganglion curls saying   up

             The cup's thrown
                  and the big bent
        jack of so and so

        Her black plastic alice band
                 serrated        
                                           not holy

                  Incisors:
               thumb   tip   cut   out

             alive     alive

                    alive

        like a stab in the eye
                   thieved kiss    
    or bursting a blister

iridescent lid dark wickedness

   Sometimes the fits
           look like laughing

2 comments:

  1. To have a caretaker role in the warehousing of humans must be difficult for a person of ethics and compassion.

    Down through the ages, this sort of segregation-from-the-normals by binning may have been routinely dressed-up as a form of humane consideration.

    But the process may well have always had a more profound purpose, that is, the removal from view of those "different" ones whose presence reminds that things are not as they are said to be, here, in this world of God's creation.

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  2. It's a curious thing, to find yourself on the wrong side of the walls of the Civitas Dei. When we do have our trips out (the phrase is "community engagement"), you should see the faces of the normals from where we're standing.

    Having made them other and shorn them of even the semblance of subjecthood, the trim and tidy world can't have any proper sense of either its hurts or joys.

    Not holy, therefore as holy as G_d knows what.

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