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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