Lullaby
The woofers, where this neighbourhood deigns to praise you, sing no sweet Delius, but a churlish cumbia. Some northern cur’s gone mauled your sun, seen foaming much too madly these days over your cradle, weighing you against the insects it’s enhancing, curling its lip at the troubled cream of your skin. You chuckle up at a queer carousel of buzzards, expecting food. The water here’s not good. That war trickling in your ears, we worked for weeks to pay for, that it should rill just so: now, nests of anchor-girls infest the patio -- we come and go, a hand in our back pocket. Look! we’re mutants: a volcanic time did this, and now we suffer from tremors; these scarred faces, hangdog with the heavy implications of bacon fetched and lugged daily through thief-rife hillsides, drip over your crib, apologetically hideous. Your brave bones curdle and set as the days fly by, fighting through feeding’s traffic to catch the last wine-dregs and wet sarney-rinds of the party humanity inconsiderately ...