The Blood Of Christ

I am drunk on the blood of Christ and the rain 
is playing a Mississippi swamp trashcan beat 
on this caravan roof.

You would not know me now.  
I am vacant: 
a vagrant drifting through fifteen fictions, 
fifteen different versions of myself.  
Today, I am a desolate Kerouac, 
mouldering away in these northern wastes 
after avoiding a romantic death.

I am: 
my typewriter rusting 
grey clouds of paraffin vapour 
cigarette smoke.  
the cloud soaked sky
a blackbird singing in the sodden pine
the smell of her on my fingers.

The smell of her on my fingers, unwashed 
in the wake of a week of sex:  
my senses have been re-awoken 
and I haven’t got enough fingers 
to plug up all the holes.

Her absence was not felt before.  

I was inured/ insured against all emotional intrusion: 
grey as paraffin vapour, grey as cigarette ash, 
grey as incense smoke... 
free of confusion, 
here, in the ribbon glens that snake through 
these god-the-father, great-spirit mountains.

I finger my holes: 
there is a rawness verging on pain.  

If I poke some more
maybe something red, soft & vulnerable will issue out: 
something sweet and intoxicating 
like the blood of Christ.

Her presence was not felt before.  

In the prowling of our sex 
we explored underworlds: 
the drumbeats of some dark unspoken.  
She was a she-wolf shaman, 
a hybrid of every mythological woman -
she undid me.  

I bathe my fingers in the blood of too many saviours: 
damned by the opening of too many eyes, too many holes.  

The smell of her: 
it lingers on the tips of each of my fingers.  
Mississippi mudflats under each of my nails.  
I was Huckleberry Finn to her Uncle Tom, 
Mister God to her Anna.  

She undid me
and left me pondering over all the broken pieces.

And then there was the war on my radio.  
She said: 
here comes the apocalypse, 
and so I kiss you on the lips.  

When she came, 
a sky of missiles skudded the oil black soil of Iraq.  
When she came, 
Jehovah and a nest of snakes exploded in my head.  

And when she went, I realised 
I had been one of the quietly anxious, 
semi-animated, living dead.

Now, the war is almost over: 
the conclusion, an inevitable anti-climax.  
The world continues sleepwalking and stumbling on, 
drunk on the blood of too many Christs.  

I have no more alibis.  I am undone: 
as empty as a caravan shell on the edge of a bloated loch.  
I wish the rain would wash me away.  

These holes are too tender: 
the grape of this wine, too bitter; 
and the days too long, too wearying without her.