Empty Voices

Empty voices
Squeaking and wailing
Alcoholic troubadours
Serenading nothing
Nothing but the loud-faced world

Hard-voiced women
Wrenching the air
Soused in the fireborn liquor
That makes weak men weep strong tears
Tacking down the paving stones
Heels and tongues a’clacking
tongues a’clacking
tongues a’clack
In boorish celebration
Of the echo of the street

But unseen by them
Within the dry-damp darkness
Of a wind-bit attic room
A painting moults
Shivers its veneer to history
Flakes its identity
In the broken-window breeze
As brown light
Steeps through slow
Reveals the ghost behind the ghost that’s given up by dying paint

Macho jeercalls
Heaving down the road like a weather front gone native
Spewed by dogshit footpads
Streaming out their wisdom
To those who have no need to listen
(No one hears their desiccated pain)

But unknown to them
A paint-flake slaps like a flapping shutter
Breaks free downwards
Poses briefly
Buoyed and lost
Where the parched wind meets the damp

Macho jeercalls
From footworn soldiers lurching in line
From staggered robots shuffling in line
Distorted voices fogging in
Like cataracts within the ear

But unheard by them
Within the self-same room
A broken record circles
Three quarters of a spin a second
A singing voice
Cries for help
Across the crackling universe
A sleeping voice
Snores for deliverance
Dried-out flecks of pigment jetsam
Misted up within his whiskers
Dried-out flecks of vomit-food
Caress his cheeks from rough lapels
And the metal arm lifts, swings, descends
And starts to gouge the old sound out
More more more more

Oh, how are the lowly fallen
And how quick was their transition
Once these bags of scoured-out flesh
Were delicate as parchment
Thin as a broken edge of paint
On a woman’s lightly scraped guitar
In a portrait by Vermeer
But now they're raddled on the streets
With skin like washed-up fingers
Hunchback-walking big-boot-clomping...
Loud in worldly self-disgust
Fleshed-in by their nicotine wrinkles
Thrust home by adrenaline
Past the stretching greened-out refuge
Of the city cemetery

Where unknown to them
An unkempt lump of grave
Lies speckle-strewn with ornaments
Glinting and smouldering in the moonlight
Cigarette butts and twisted beer cans
Mark the final paid respects
Of a murderer
And his mother

Then away to their fragmented homes
Their broken gutters, sinking thresholds
Walking the trail of broken glass
The blaze of mangled wing-mirrors
Noisy as the grave

And unseen by them
A headstone flaunts
Its mutilated alphabet
Letters carved to others
Ems changed to ens
Ps and qs ignored
A chisel tossed aside
Useless now
Rusting already
Ground into the ground-red dirt

A goods train passes
Wheels a clacking
Wheels a clack
A metal snigger on the air to serenade their late arrivals
Home

But unknown to them
An owl takes flight
Takes its time
Takes care and swoops
Kill-takes a rodent in its mouth

And in their homes
The battered fridge doors slam
Like a curtain closing meanly
On one more indifferent night

And a chill wind blows upwards
The owl drops the mouse
The mouse falls, lies inert
Snuggled up next to the rusty chisel
Side by side like sleeping lovers

And in their homes
More bodies stir
A mere four hours later
The battered fridge doors crank out wide
As parents open jam and milk
To start their different silent days
With other empty voices