They turned up at the door dressed all in black,
\nfrom their baseball caps and bomber jackets down
\nto their DM boots, and they hustled in like hitmen
\nor bouncers, or bailiffs, or the Old Bill
\nor some kind of security syndicate,
\nshifting on their feet, in uniform,
\nblack-gloved hands bearing black briefcases.
\nOne of them did the talking, one was silent.<\/p>\n
I told them of the massacred bananas,
\nsavaged in their skins on the kitchen table,
\nand how I\u2019d thought it was the live-in landlord
\ntripping home from a spree whose bitter end
\ninvolved the bananas taking an awful beating.
\nBut seeing the state the place was in next day,
\nhe’d thought the same of me. That\u2019s when we knew
\nthere were some hungry monsters in the kitchen.<\/p>\n
So, casing the joint, the men inhabit the kitchen
\nand fall to all fours, closing on the kill.
\nThe dishwasher gets dragged out, and it’s like
\nlifting the stone on a woodlouse colony.
\nThe wall had been unfolded from the floor
\nlike a turned page; and the cave\u2019s mouth revealed
\nthe shredded remains of the wall, the copper pipes
\nand a burial mound of apple cores and nutshells.<\/p>\n
So then I told them of the landlord\u2019s apples
\ntaken from the bowl and, one by one,
\ncarted up the corridor and left
\nlike the scene of a lynching or line-up execution
\nafter the firing squad had done its work:
\nthe butchered fruit, at two-foot intervals,
\narranged like a sacrificial offering
\nin a ghoulish symmetry of rotting heads.<\/p>\n
And I told them of the unfathomable noise,
\nthat thumping from behind the walls at night
\nlike a house party got out of control
\nsomewhere down the road, or maybe next door,
\nor in the next room. When you went to look
\nno one was there. All you found were the scraps
\nchurned up from the dustbin and flung to the floor
\nas the scratch of claws retreated across the roof.<\/p>\n
Back in Calcutta, Ajit would impale them Here in the kitchen, the men recall the foxes They\u2019d been living on the sixty-seventh floor And to hear him tell it, me and the landlord They turned up at the door dressed all in black, from their baseball caps and bomber jackets down to their DM boots, and they hustled in like hitmen or bouncers, or bailiffs, or the Old Bill or some kind of security syndicate, shifting on their feet, in uniform, black-gloved hands bearing black briefcases. One of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":3132,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,1],"tags":[194],"class_list":["post-3046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","category-uncategorized","tag-2018november"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>on a spear, standing over the manhole
\n<\/em>killing rats like shooting fish in a barrel.
\n<\/em>One time, from behind my bedroom door,
\n<\/em>a writhing hairy thing the size of a hen
\n<\/em>appeared on the end of a prong, under my nose,
\n<\/em>as I drank my rum; and I jumped out of my skin
\n<\/em>as Ajit took off laughing down the hall. <\/em><\/p>\n
\nthey\u2019d stalked this morning halfway to the heavens
\nin the open air at the pinnacle
\nof the latest mile-high plate-glass monolith
\nrising out of the rubble at London Bridge,
\nreaching an impossible perspective
\nseventy storeys upwards, in the grey
\nand swirling skies directly under the flightpath.<\/p>\n
\nof Europe\u2019s tallest tower as it went up,
\nsurviving on the builders’ scraps, said the quiet one.
\nIt\u2019s dark when we clock on. If you miss your step
\nno one would catch you; no one would know you\u2019d gone.
\nThe city was a circuit board, its grid
\nlit up with diodes in the night, then dawn
\nwas spread like a map in pink and grey beneath you.<\/p>\n
\nhang off a cliff, transplanted by vertigo
\ndown to the streets below, looking out through the eyes
\nof animals on the sprawl that, at first light,
\nthe foxes contemplated from the sky:
\nrabbit warren, anthill, molehill, rat run\u2026
\nYou could step out into the atmosphere, he said
\nwith a faraway look, go strolling down the river.<\/p>\n
\nTimur Moon works\u00a0as a psychotherapist at hospitals and clinics\u00a0in London. Formerly a journalist, he worked as a reporter and correspondent based\u00a0in the UK,\u00a0South\u00a0Asia\u00a0and the Persian\u00a0Gulf. He is\u00a0currently\u00a0working on a collection of short stories and continues to write poems.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"