Aka ‘Guido’
One windless, whizzbang
November night set deep in frost, I saw
Guy Fawkes graffiti
yank upwards, fire slang
speckle and evaporate across raw
star fields. The heaped flames ate the effigy.
I wandered back with
others through the smoke, in the afterburn
of old beliefs— light
stubbed to cinders, myth
of rag ash, of man-shaped straw, born
into a spectrum bled to perfect white.
A last firework rose
to catch the moon. The crack of fountain red
reduced our voices
to a stumpy prose
then silence. A distant, nailhead
yapping fixed each word to fading choices.
On the rack, tendons
give way, and the blade’s edge reams the anus,
coaxing A from zed.
The revelations
of halved-and-quartered animus
coagulate below the severed head.
You were calling my
name. Across the Thames a rickety slum
bridged the banks— the King’s
men, the crowd, a cry
belonging to no one. For some,
breath clouds in cold. A cold-snap echo clings.
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