The plaster has a star where your fist made a prayer this town is as ugly as a trucker’s gutful forearms graffiti blue with the thousand-mile stare the surgeon stitched and excised peacock feather sunsets a dead fish nailed to the wall with the silent accusation of failure’s mockful trophy when you fast approach deceleration frenziedly singing as if freedom were just another word all the houses desperately homeless dumped here in sixty-seven in three parts, nail-gunned together with that executioner’s haphazard, abattoir inelegance a monstrous angularity in the canvas, struts and rails of rank and empty perambulators St Anthony’s bloody knuckles when the bluster changes pews filled soon enough the roses by the crooked gate with that scowl and bloodshed hue of the evening opencut gleaming and abandoned the shining, semi-precious stratification of a half a century’s still unhealing wounds
