The Poet And His Murderer (Redeemed)
“Her body was found at the bottom of the page. A sentence was rammed up her semi-colon. Question marks littered her paragraph. There was an apostrophe in her full stop; She’d been stabbed forty times by various blunt consonants and both CAPITALS sliced off with a vowel”
The Poet and his Murderer
Danced along the Axis Bold as Soul
In the vicinity of The Crime That Had Not Yet
Been Committed
The Poet thought a Sonnet
Might protect him from a Bullet
But the Murderer wasn’t using arms and ammunition
Instead
The Muse drowned the poet in a sentence so pristinely beautiful but impossibly long that he asphyxiated in his own syntactical strategies.
When we buried the Poet
Two Indian Mynahs
Crapped on the coffin
Poised on the brink of redemption
the poet looks back
calls out hoarsely to his murderer,
she’s dressed in velvety black,
“did you ever love me, tell the truth?”
she sneers, “what’s love?
what’s truth?”
the poet winces
washes his hands in red wine
orders one last round for the both of them
the barman grunts laconically
he’s seen this scene so many times before
the poet can’t be bothered to protest
when his murderer kisses the tallest and most heavily-armed gangster full on the lips
the barman winces, “this one’s on the house”
the dying poet hasn’t got enough bottle left to mutter his thanks
instead he hands the barman a page torn out of his notebook
the page is empty with the exception of a title
which is
“The Redeemed”
When the Poet retired from Poetry
And his Murderer retired from Murdering
The two of them became friends
Then the Poet and his Murderer returned
To the scene of the crime
The corpse of language was covered by a blanket
Of grammatical terrors
The Priest said “These imperfections
Are what makes language Holy”
The Murderer gave a savage dagger thrust into the Poet’s vowels
The music playing was ragga
The time was ninety nine minutes past nine
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