Border

He has a combover and a lollipop lady stopping hand

Do not come over anymore, to this our beautiful land

He knows the Other to be Ham, himself to be Shem

A sham missive, wedding dress with ruby hem where she knelt in her lover’s ichor

Drank what his eye saw, frieze of yestermurder impressed upon round of azure orb.


The stupid and the reductive absorb his rhetoric, they guard their borders with boundaries

Stop and search, hard as birch the would-be ‘merican men at journey’s end

Happily send a cheeky nodder towards a stiff-spined plodder 

The border guard is a vigilante, his self-bought uniform gloried by his wife’s augmentations

Ariadne threads her needle, a red string crosses the manse toward its central evil

A delicate seedful of future, mist-eyed Norn sisters fix their rows like wince-inducing sutures.


Hector would easily brain this hectorer, this fecked-off and feckless Achilles 

He abuses the immigrants for fifteen minutes then says ‘Ach’, waves as he leaves

Defect or disease Hector cannot tell but the man’s face is disgusting

A raw hindpart direly needing butter

A life of tutting and headshaking, of selfish self-sating

Type who fills his belly button after masturbating.


The borderguard’s head seems broader than his shoulder

At men from abroad his fixes baleful gaze, smoulders 

Like the foreman of the copybook factory, he orders them lined

He processes before them like a torch holder, Prometheus as R Crumb would draw him

These men, gestures to his men, are patriots. They’re soldiers

Corners of the shoulder patches their wives had ironed on peel, the binding glue waning in the intense heat

Hector’s mouth drier than the irises of the eyeless, he is used to the heat, unmoved by this heat

He can see that the borderguard’s speech exhausts him, bluster’s tithe, his neck writhes away from his pressing collar

The guard says for the third time the things he will not repeat

He expounds on topics which he describes as self-evident

He turns when the line ends, starts toward the men furthest from Hector

Hector imagines himself an avenging jaguar setting upon him

Letting his blood to propitiate the thirsty sun, the world’s cogs bloodturned

He imagines that borderguard loafed so many times that he thinks he’s surrounded

Imagines his breast decked with cathair-fletched arrows, or bloated and drownded by Hector’s hand

The land’s end is the sea’s beginning, this whole ordeal so far a tease

A trailer for a dream played while I was queueing for popcorn, all anyone will say is que

Guard spits it back, KEH?


Hector stills his head, cannot jeopardise his exodus

Imagines his old blood pinkbrown against golden sand, leached of life by green and pleasant land

Imagines his killer’s corruption-steadied lips unmoved beneath rustlike stubble, slow to think (thoughts are trouble) marking journey’s end with sawdust

The borderguard brandishes a licensed firearm in an unauthorised manner

Before the election, you could count on no hands how many incidents like this they had

Now the desert was alive with columns of new ants, pat pat pat of dad’s army regiments filing in

Don’t tread on me is printed across the outsole

Any asshole I have to stomp gets told.


Tale time old, the bold aghast at new youth’s delicacy wrest control 

They will not relinquish the spear that charters the world’s latitudes

Lassitude and christscourge the flank of bold youth, make it cower rodshadow

Like Charlemagne ahorse in flameless cape, proof that power conscience rapes

Fathers trounce sons behind houses, in Byres, muddy old tractor tyres like leathern ringforts

Make them tougher like their forefathers, make them suffer like heresiarch church fathers

Dragged from pillar to pit, astronomers watching lions fall, Androcles’ treaty ignored

Only when their flesh hangs in wavy draggles like belt garters can Sons be deemed ready for life’s battles.


He produces a two key ring and presses a fob, the rebounding chikookah sound of its doors unlocking, nods to the line of would-be yanks

I am wise to all your pranks!

At his finger’s curl his phalanx out advance, not Lot’s wife they do not avail their vantage

Sky blue pale like frost child’s finger, firmament colour of vintage denim

The line like hanged men freed by heirophants swim in breath 

How close they came to vanquished by vigilantes, their foes vanish 

They rejoice and regroup, talking fast Spanish

Gesticulating wildly, tennis experts serving their words 

Nothing on TV or in the pored-over textbooks prepared them for such vexations

Only writ spoke their strifes, acts, judges, kings and proverbs

Rousing verbs woke anew in them the spirit of will to settle

Their much-tested mettle hardened to a kingly tungsten

Tongue’s tent dry as crap cake, nervous also times ten

Sand and finer sand like spores, skin sore lesion-tatted the plague of Justinian

Bound by shared experience, shared difficulty, twinned by trial, coven at male Trinian’s 

Just then one man noticed an upjutment from the ground of many stones, evenly spaced, protruding like torn out ribs

View-offering zenith, only the brave and plenty-breathed enjoy eyries suchlike

Silent, as on a peak in Darien, peeking out at princely domes, bladelike spires, bridges hung in harp fashion with thick suspending strings, a building ten thousand times larger than the Cathedral in Abaguezello where Hector was confirmed, at its tip a sharp spike.

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