Nutcracker
How could T.J.Maxx
sell you for the price
of two pints of lager?
Someone in Eastern Europe
stuck on all your sequins
painted your black mustache
carved your golden crown
the domed silver top
of your timekeeping mace
made your moving jaw
to bite down hard on
the stuff I’m sending you:
Crunch it all, crunch it
to free me from blame.
Swallow, swallow
into your wooden wame:
the abandoned greenhouse
the fruit now someone else’s;
the scent of summer meadows;
the show not seen on Broadway;
the show the critics killed;
the show that fouled a friendship;
the writings in the style
of Reverend Casaubon
and William McGonagall;
the kiss I should have given
Fräulein Müller; the kiss
I didn’t give Jennifer Ann;
my anger with Angharad;
the cruel scorn I used
to break up with Jane;
the STD I got
from Monserrat; my letter
to Leonie when drunk––
the porrones I didn’t get
for Don from Mexico;
my mockery of John E.;
my useless temperament
for flying; my cowardice
when young Sean was killed;
the house I built
and hardly lived in;
the road I should have taken;
the unformed soul
of the child I should have had;
the walks abandoned;
the phone call I forgot
because of my impatience
the day Maisie died;
my torpor over floods,
and hurricanes, and fires;
take all these
as your mace with its beat
keeps time, time, time
in an unrelenting rhyme
and crunch them, crunch,
to free me from shame
swallow them, swallow
into your wooden wame.
Not You
I’m sitting in Drive & Shine
waiting.
They’re valeting our car.
While I wait I think
of the clothes you left on the bathroom floor. Your shell,
your carapace. Not you, but redolent:
the jumper from the Swedish list
with its pattern of stylized daisies, pink
on a buff and sable background,
the corduroy plum-shade trousers with streaks
of raku clay where you wiped your hands,
cream knickers, yellow T-shirt,
the black socks you say I borrow by mistake.
You left this heap so you could come to bed
without disturbing me when I was sleeping.
Yes, one of us has always gone
ahead, and here in Drive & Shine I wonder
which of us will find a pile of clothing
one day soon with no body left to fill them.
Who will have gone ahead into the world of light?
Or dark. Or dark.
And here in the bardo waiting-room I murmur,
“My love, O my love, we must meet again,
shining, valeted.” Beyond the doorway
an enigmatic frame of girders
partly painted orange, with a rack
of unguents and volatiles for cars
and grubby hoses casually draped
has beauty.
Alex Barr’s recent poetry is in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Quagmire Magazine, Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Scintilla, The Dark Horse, Orbis, silverbirchpress.wordpress.com, and culturecultmagazine.wixsite.com. His poetry collections are Letting in the Carnival from Peterloo, Henry’s Bridge from Starborn, and Bedding Plants For My Father from Cerasus. He lives in West Wales, where he organizes poetry workshops and readings.