Above the Town

Time lies stalled in the valley
Mired in a conspiracy
Of smoke and mist and communal sweat
Excreted by
Insided people
Humanity muddled together in the down and below
Factory-farming their breath away
Their frustrations
A gaseous slurry
Thermally fellated upwards
Into jagged drifts
Of thinned-out urban vapours
Man-made and stretching
Stretching like fibres
Snaking to the summit
Marking out the sight-lines
Of escape...
Up upon a no-tree hillock
Rising like a slagheap nose-cone
High above the work-soiled city
Thrusting to the blue-haze desert
Of
The
Sky
Two figures squatting - matched and matchless
Skiving bodies, bared on bare rock
Clothing stuffed in bulging rucksacks
Mountaineering on each other
High and higher high and high
Conjoined, abandoned two-backed beastie
Delving in each other’s skin-deep
Swaying in a rock-bed rhythm
Melting through within each other
Back to front and facing sameways
Front
To
Back
Peering down the chasm’s lips
She sees his feet swing dangling over
Up-draught pummelling beneath her
Feeling fire beneath her kneecaps
Lingered thoughts go drilling downwards
From the rock-bed to the bedrock
Fusing into shin-cut magma
Fusing… Fusing… Fusing… Fusing…
Through osmosis to a dark
Diffusion of imagination
Imagine…
Imagine… Imagine…
This stone turned to liquid…
Imagine the flames...
flames entwine...
…the spark…
flames entwining… twining… twining…
…the singe…
Funnelling upwards through our bodies
…the rant…
Fire we’re fire, we’re liquid granite flow we’re fire we’re fire we’re fire
…the snatch…
We’re the clumps of igneous rumbling underneath
We’re the sulphurous spin and twist and turn:
We’re the smoke bombs in the sky
And we’re the heave and hurl of stone
The spark the singe the rant the snatch
The embers tossed from careless fingers
On this rutting ledge of lava
On that rutting ledge of lava
Lingered thoughts come reaming upwards
From the bedrock to the rock-bed
Cudgelling her brain-cells taut
She dreams her thoughts with eyes wide open
Sees the serried lines of streets
And feels his fingers tracing rivers
On
Her
Back.
She speaks her thoughts through tightened molars
Take it easy take it easy
Smoother, lover, smoother, love!
And on her knees but still ascendant
Twisting fingers into dovetails
Gazing at the square-framed view
Absorbs the city’s exhalations
Plunging in to breathe its stew then
Drifting outwards from his rhythm
Into her natural pulse
Breathing out and drinking in
Toasting the town below
Anchored in solidity
Toasting the working day
Toasting more her liberty
Toasting buildings, smoke and rumble
Signs of persevered-with labour.
Every hour they’re working working
Every thrust he’s working working
Getting up and getting further
Stuck inside a two-beat rut
He shifts, and pulls her pelvis backwards
Calcium talons at her buttocks
Licking salt between her shoulders
Thumbing at her milkfreeze nipples
On this treeless granite burn-out
On this prison rock of mountain
Down there they’re wrapped in chains
While we’re the sulphurous twist and turn
Pumiced to servitude.
While we’re the liquid granite flow
All hope solidified.
But hope is all we're living for
Each day they’re lost to toil
Then they’re salted in the earth
Each week we come up here
Stalking freedom like [a cat]
While they stay stuck inside
Counting out their working lives
But we’re fire... we're the fire... we're fire... we're the fire... we're...
Everybody stuck inside
Except down there, a brash appearance
Matchstick youths on matchbox corners
No-hope hyperactive slackers
Jostling, pushing, kicking, dressed in
Muted browns like autumn leaf-wilt
Tripping up and slouching sideways
Falling over outstretched legs
Combustible and quick to anger
Lighting matches, lugging petrol
Dragging out a ragbag statue [icon?]
Effigy of some hate figure
Double bundle cotton image
Destined for some conflagration
At the hands of this lank tribe
Of matchstick youths on matchbox corners
Throwing burning balls of textile
Matchwood pristine, matchwood pale
Till one of them catches a fire-ball
Till one of them catches fire
Fire…
Fire…
Fire…
Fire…
Fire…
Fire…
Fire…
and the fire breaks...
and the fire breaks erupts from its cover of smoke
and the fire breaks erupts from its cover of smoke flares and shrinks
swells and shrinks
swells and shrinks and swells
and then shrinks back to a reveal...
To a reveal...
Reveals a...
Sudden, shocking shaking slicing
Searing rag of blistered red
A breathing human being turned
To greasy gobs of searing smoke
Unravelling…Unravelling…
Unravelling…
Unravelling…
Untied like rags of shop-soiled silk
Into the gulping distant waste-ground
Of
The
Sky
And time lies congealed
No…………………………………!
The scream is sucked back in her mouth
She struggles like dementia
Slaps aside his restless claws,
and pulls off…
and she pulls off… and he spills…
and she pulls off clear
and he spills…
and she spills away clear
and he Onan-salts the barren ground
She slips
goes falling
Grabbing at the down-air
Missing the solid
Down air grabbing
Missing solid
Free-flow fallout
Outcrop rock
Hand-collision
Lacerating grasp
And she’s dangling
Dangling
Dangling
Dangling in the danger
Of death-security
His fingers entwine
His fingers twining... twining... twining...
Tighten snake-like on her knuckles
Scrape her up the wire wool rock-edge
Pull her safe to face the terror
What’s the matter? What’s the matter?
What’s up? (What’s up… what’s up… what’s up…)
What?
Burn
What’s the matter…
Burn
What?
Burn
What you do that for?
Burn
What’s that what’s that what’s that what’s that?
Burn burn can’t you see can’t you see look
look look look look look look…
Can’t you see – look!
My God my God my God my God…
Quick. Quick!
Panicking down the hill, stone-blade ridges bloodying their feet
Slithering down the high-speed slope in peeling birthday suits
Hacking their bags of clothes behind them
Crackling with incompetence
Pummelled to servitude.
Making a dead, long hash of it.
Trapped by their brainless mobility
Stop!
What?
Stop!
What?
MOBILE MOBILE MOBILE MOBILE!
Quick, you stupid cow, let’s have it!
What the? What the… what the… what the…
MOBILE MOBILE MOBILE PHONE!
She kneels down opens up her rucksack
Wrenches out the slab of plastic
Thrusts it in his waiting grasp
He presses buttons, screams with rage
Her fingers twist and snag
Pulling out binoculars
Clothing gets cast aside
[Free-falls down the precipice
Listening to his speech eruptions
PLEASE HELP PLEASE HELP PLEASE HELP PLEASE HELP
What? Police yes no police no
Fire brigade – no, ambulance!
no all three all three hello hello yes no someone’s on fire down there he’s alight I tell you he’s alight I can still see him now please do something! No, I'm using the mobile I’m on a hill! he's down there it’s someone someone alight I don’t know I don’t know! a firework maybe yes I know it’s summer! Sedgefield, yes, Sedgefield, yes, the main square by the bus station, yes, no, no, that's all I know What’s he doing?
I think he’s still on fire!
Trying hard to put him out
She says he’s still alight!
They're trying to put him out!
Hands clench the focus ring
Humans flapping uselessly
No, not alright - alight!
She says they're trying to put him out! No we’re on top of a hill
No I can’t see
No, we can’t get down in time
No there’s no doubt,.. no doubt… no doubt…
Please.
Please do.
Quick as you can.
Thank… thank… thank you
Muting to a whisper
Dropping the phone on the ground
What do we do?
Nothing.
Nothing?
Nothing. We do
Nothing.
We can’t help. We do
Nothing.
They do
Nothing
And time passes through them
Her fingers
Scraped ripe to rawness
On the ripping focus wheel
Throb with the wait
Each pulse a second
She closes her eyes
She opens her eyes
Her remorseless
Focused
Discarded binoculars
Gaze down at the scene unhindered
She raises them to her eyes again
The ambulances there now –
The police cars, the fire engines,
Metropolitan intruders
Stripes of emergency
Wrapping round each other
Like separate stripes of flavour
In a tooth-sick stick of rock
He's extinguished now
Swaddled away from sight
Wrapped in the self-same blankets
They saw fit to try to burn
Put out and put away now
Away from them all;
The factory-loads of people
Crowding out the main square
She sees them all
Each one a speck of soot
Sees her future
Sees it burst to flames
High upon this brown-nose hill
This desiccated, spent volcano
Dumped above the work-burned town
Two shake like microscopic earthquakes.
She sees the death-stripe motors disappear
And everything stops
And liquefies
And time
Does nothing
She lets her glasses
Fall to nowhere
Lets him wrap himself around her by his shaking hairless arms
Their passion still alight (still alight… still alight… still alight… still alight…)
…but perverted
She lets her legs dangle,
And gazes at her clothes below,
Snagged upon a tree,
Looking like a canker in the woodwork.
She sees her dropped binoculars
Nestling on her rucksack
Snug in its cleft of rock below
She lets her lids drop
And farewells her eyes
She sits and she shivers
Hunching
Backwards
Into the mountain
Waiting to let it
Fold them straight up
Envelope them
Parcel them up
Into
Smoke-drenched darkness
The memories
Swamp around her
The pain
Goes in unto her
And the salt
Of her tears
Silts the ground
While time lies shredded
And a rank collusion
Of terror
And guilt
And shared despair
Sweats out of them
Mingles on the summit
And extrudes
A smoothed-out blizzard snag of fluid
(The leavings of their souls)
Oozing to the valley
Oozing to the valley