Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Alfred Bishop

print this page

The Deserters

1

A gas station diner - near nowhere.
Kasper, Lazarus, G Boy, Sentena, and me.
Chicano bikers, with big boots, scary tattoos,
Walt Whitman beards, hog the juke box.
(It’s their uniformity that offends.
A guy puts on a black leather jacket
and immediately thinks he’s a rebel).
They pick on G Boy, who’s slim, pretty,
and not carrying a shooter. He blows them
a kiss - which agitates their scatterguns.
(This is really old scores unresolved shit).
It’s crack time. We’re strict revolver types.
We all blast away. Windows smash and scream.
I draw, aim, fire - very smooth and accurate.
Kasper gives one two slugs in the gut.
We send a few to sleep for ever, then walk.


2

We adopt the code of the Old West:
be honest courteous, mind your own business,
but if you must pull your gun, be serious,
and kill the cunt who wants to kill you.
Violence makes the world go round, is our philosophy,
blood fuels it, and we ain’t gonna contribute ours.
Love? Man, that’s for vultures and vampires.
Back in L.A. my talk was mainly nervous energy,
but out here, in panoramic desolation, there is,
mentally and emotionally, a forgetting and an expanding.
You pick things up, not just coke cans and interesting
looking bones, but you learn to read different signs
of human behaviour. Starting with yourself.
I can now stare at my toes for hours - and no one
remarks on it. Priorities, I guess.
Out here, ice cubes ain’t important.

 

Page(s) 133

Back to top