Oftentimes

the young dash knives at the young and you don’t
hear a siren for hours. I see your home-grown radicals
and raise you our mutual shambles, the stale houses
you’d run from, the fat glee of an angry man; our reaped
youth. You are already afraid; yours is a spoof fear,
budget of gore. You quack your fright like an audience.
Here we come, with our in-house frighteners, ingots
and bling; our false-modest mudbloody women, wailing,
our girls whoring their heather. These headstones argue
permanence, sleek grails where your dead gutter
like scented candles. I’ve seen row upon row of propped
crosses, flimsy as false nails, leaning, yearning, the dirt
air groped. Your heroism is stunt; can’t picture a remedial
blonde in a green ski-mask, fifteen and cropped, croppy,
brunt and gone. Well, did you ever? Those earnest shires
are home, not this, the trudged and commonplace country.
These hills are ours for the vanishing: hills, bones, their stowed
booty. You are afraid, but you don’t know how the young dash
knives at the young, prowl for a piercing, night after night.
That’s what they are. Do I have to teach you your children?
You are aghast at the mauled hearth, empty bed, but look:
here is a boy, decked out in his do nothing deadness.
His brother washed his hatchling face, too big for his body.
Packed like a wineglass in wads of cotton. Couldn’t he be
just any mother’s son?

Freeborn
Into the living sea of waking dreams – John Clare, I Am!

An ugly town, and the darkness sucks
the sound from the bell. I’m running the dumb
breadth of the forest; four o’clock and all is well.
This birdsong treats of tirade. The choppy dirt;
the mincing deer. It quivers once with dainty
cunning, drops a curtsey, disappears.

This world was ours, I told you that; our footfall
tends the frozen fen. And you can’t shrug the creaking
we have come to. It was ours, yes, will be again.

Schubert and the shipping; headphones, the road
where the roof leans loony, boasts of itself
like a crown, and running, and you said frets is radiant
eddies, and the dead man, head thrown back and arms
in the air like a diva holding a high note. Honest John.
And we dug musk and rust and fuck Oliver Cromwell,
his waspy face is a bulbous nest.

How your face, love, slides into an open mouth,
your coppice smile, a lair. I’m running.
The sullen glut of your blue-black hair, a lesser
midnight, wrapping. I count your cuspids
and your pulse. I count your broken fingers. I count
out all the zombie bones of Levellers and Diggers.

Fran Lock is a dog whisperer and author of two poetry collections, Flatrock (Little Episodes, 2011), and The Mystic and the Pig Thief (Salt, 2014). She is the winner of the Ambit Poetry Competition 2014, and her poem Last Exit to Luton came third in the 2014 National Poetry Competition.

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